FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD

PG-13, 134 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. “Bunty, the baby nifflers are loose again.” And with that, the hero of “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” signals to his housekeeper — and to the audience, really — that this new chapter in the adventures of magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, as mumbly and bumbly as ever) will have at least one antic chase scene featuring CGI critters. (Nifflers, which resemble platypuses, are the ewoks of the 21st century. Every appearance by a niffler in this film was met by a chorus of “awws” at a screening, and that was from grown-ups. Keep your eyes on them, though, and not just because they’re cute. One of them plays a significant role.) But there’s something — or, rather, someone — far less adorable that has also escaped in this Harry Potter prequel, which takes a turn for the dark side that will satisfy the franchise’s adult fans even more. As the film opens, in a bravura, wham-bam prologue that combines action with shivery terror, the title character, an evil wizard played by Johnny Depp, is seen escaping from detention while being transferred from a New York prison to face punishment for unspecified crimes in Europe. What crimes? Possibly his haircut: a peroxide-blond brush cut that makes Depp look like a scoutmaster for the local chapter of the Hitler Youth. More seriously, he wants power. Once Grindelwald lands in Paris, Newt — a glorified dogcatcher, clearly out of his league — is dispatched to go after the fugitive wizard by his former Hogwarts teacher, Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law, looking not a bit like he could ever grow old enough to turn into Michael Gambon). Why doesn’t Dumbledore, one of the most powerful wizards who ever lived, go after Grindelwald himself? Ahh, you’ll just have to wait to find out. Newt is aided in this mission by sidekicks returning from the 2016 “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”: baker Jacob Kowalski and magical sisters Queenie and Porpentina — known as Tina — Goldstein (Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol and Katherine Waterston). J.K Rowling, who wrote this surprise-filled screenplay for veteran Potter director David Yates, has a real knack for names. The film’s other key character, also returning from the previous film, is a young man named Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller). As we learned in the previous installment, Credence is an Obscurial (a wizard who has repressed his magical abilities, which, in his case, have manifested themselves in the form of an Obscurus: a dark, uncontrollably destructive entity). Rowling is also quite clever with subtext, the Obscurus being a wonderful metaphor for the unhealthy neurosis that can develop when you deny your true self. There are also political overtones here — as there have been in every other Potter book and film — in the hostility and persecution that exists between Wizards and the non-magical Muggles, also known as No-Majs. — Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

BOY ERASED

R, 114 minutes. Starts Friday at Madison Art Cinemas. For much of “Boy Erased,” we are watching the face of 19-year-old Jared Eamons as he takes in his surroundings. It’s a handsome, intelligent face — it belongs to the actor Lucas Hedges — and its range of expressions subtly distills the drama of this somber, coolly appalled and appalling movie. You note Jared’s dutiful attentiveness as his father preaches a sermon, his furtive downward glance in the company of a boy he likes and his quiet anguish when he finally approaches his parents and disgorges the long-held secret of his homosexuality. Some time later — or perhaps earlier, given writer-director Joel Edgerton’s deft shuffling of time frames — Jared will find himself with a group of people, mostly young men, dressed in white button-up shirts that suggest a declaration of collective purity. At times he scans the room to see if anyone else shares his skepticism, despair and growing alarm, but those who enter the Christian ex-gay program known as Love in Action are generally advised to keep their eyes off each other and on the program’s strict director, Victor Sykes (Edgerton). Hedges’ silent scream of a performance, more internalized than his excellent work in “Manchester by the Sea” and the recent “Mid90s,” both complements and counters the soul-smothering heaviness of Sykes’ agenda. “Boy Erased” is based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir about his experience as an Arkansas teenager, when his Baptist parents sent him to Memphis for gay conversion therapy. The movie’s moral position on Love in Action is clear enough, but to its credit, it seeks to articulate that position without cheap histrionics or easy condemnations, to summon restraint in depicting an ideological campaign that has no particular use for nuance. Edgerton, always a superb actor, is also a shrewd and attentive filmmaker, as he showed in his underappreciated 2015 psychological thriller, “The Gift.” His knack for evoking domestic tension especially animates the tense, difficult scenes of Jared’s home life after he is outed as gay to his parents by someone he thought was a friend, under circumstances that constitute their own cruel form of violation. Jared’s parents, Marshall and Nancy, are played by Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, and like Edgerton the two actors have closeted their native Australianness in service of a well textured and reasonably convincing snapshot of Southern suburbia. Kidman’s steely grace illuminates the plight of the doting, sympathetic Nancy, who responds to her son’s admission by sadly closing her eyes but not, crucially, her mind or heart. Crowe, meanwhile, conveys Marshall’s natural affection for his son but also his instinctive willingness to suppress it, to bark orders and demand answers in lieu of listening. — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

WIDOWS

1/2 R, 129 minutes. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Steve McQueen wants to make you look. His achingly long takes in “Twelve Years a Slave” forced viewers to confront the harsh realities of slavery; his gaze teased and tortured us in equal measure in the sex-addiction drama “Shame.” With “Widows,” a masterfully made female-driven heist film, McQueen’s camera both directs and distracts the eye, connecting characters with long takes while lulling viewers into a trance before an explosion of violence. In this genre exercise, McQueen seems to be saying look again, look harder, because underneath the roiling tension of big money heists and the crunching of political gears is an examination about the ugly machinations of power, money and patriarchy. McQueen has teamed up with “Gone Girl” and “Sharp Objects” writer Gillian Flynn to adapt the 1980s British TV crime series written by Lynda La Plante for the big screen. Flynn’s story trademarks are in place: flinty yet vulnerable women, story twists galore. Fused with McQueen’s unflinching eye, the pulpy political thriller is elevated to high art, while the bold, brash criminal capers inject a shot of adrenaline into the British auteur’s style. A heart-stopping opening heist sequence toggles between extreme violence and intimate sensuality, laying the blueprint for the pattern that repeats throughout the film. The widows in question are Veronica (Viola Davis), Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Amanda (Carrie Coon). Their husbands are killed during a slop-

py, bloody run from the police after stealing $2 million, leaving their women adrift, penniless and with no means of generating their own income. Linda’s dress shop is repossessed by the loan sharks collecting on her husband’s gambling debts, and Alice has never worked a day in her life. Veronica starts to feel the pressure from the campaign of Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), running to be the first black alderman of Chicago’s 18th ward against the established, corrupt white candidate Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell). Jamal claims the $2 million came from his war chest and expects it back. His terrifying brother, Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), isn’t afraid to shed blood for it either. Harry (Liam Neeson), Veronica’s late husband, has left her a ledger with notes for his next heist, so she assembles her team of hapless wives and mothers. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

A PRIVATE WAR

1/2 R, 117 minutes. Starts Friday at Lisbon. In 2015, filmmaker Matthew Heineman embedded himself with a Mexican drug cartel for his visceral documentary “Cartel Land.” His follow-up, “City of Ghosts,” documented the bloody struggle of Syrian journalists to share information and images from their home, besieged by ISIS. So it’s no surprise Heineman’s first narrative feature would be the biopic “A Private War,” about the life and work of Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in Syria in 2012, exploring the burden on journalists to bear witness. Arash Amel adapts Marie Brenner’s posthumous Vanity Fair profile of Colvin, and Rosamund Pike, a character actor in the form of Grace Kelly, has modified her voice, face and posture to embody the grizzled reporter. She’s a boilerplate hard-charging lady journalist — heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, competitive and tougher than any man. She charms dictators, fights to write about the effect of war on civilians, and with her black eye patch (the result of a grenade in Sri Lanka), cuts a striking figure. Enabled by her editor, Sean (Tom Hollander), the brash American reporter in London returns to the thrill of the chase, the high of the scoop, the adrenaline rush of the war theater like an addict returns to their drug of choice. Despite the accolades, the work takes a searing toll on Marie’s life. An early scene illustrates what we need to know about the Marie of the film. Recovering in a Sri Lankan hospital bed, her left eye destroyed, she fights off a nurse and scrambles for her recorder and notebook. There are stories to tell and copy to file, even soaked in her own blood. The unrelenting Marie and her photographer, Paul (Jamie Dornan), are less fully-realized characters than they are vehicles for the thesis of the film. We only get the quick hits of their backgrounds, because it’s not necessarily about who they are as people, but what they have adopted as their purpose — seeing, recording, transcribing, telling. “Let me tell your story” is Marie’s constant refrain. “A Private War” is her story, bedeviled by the question of why she returns to the thing that destroys her body and psyche with bombs, booze and bloody imagery. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

INSTANT FAMILY

1/2 PG-13, 118 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Director/co-writer Sean Anders really takes the “instant” part of his new family dramedy “Instant Family” to heart. The film drops us right into the lives of Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne) with little fanfare, as if to say to the audience, “Catch up guys, we’ve got a lot of story to tell.” It’s not too difficult to pick up what Anders is putting down, as Pete and Ellie are the kind of nice, upper-middle class, fast-talking, attractive white couple who frequently populate this kind of film. They’re missing one thing: kids. As business partners who flip run-down houses, they’ve never met a challenge they couldn’t tackle, so off to foster parenting class they go. They just don’t know just how big of a challenge they’re in for. Anders, who is known for the “Daddy’s Home” movies and other broad comedies, drew largely from his own experiences as an adoptive parent for the script, which he co-wrote with writing partner John Morris. He and his wife adopted a set of siblings, and that’s exactly what Pete and Ellie do after cautiously approaching a group of teenagers at an adoption fair. The sassy, defiant Lizzy (Isabela Moner) makes an impression, and it turns out she comes with two incredibly cute and incredibly difficult younger siblings, Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and Lita (Julianna Gamiz). Anders smartly punctures any representational issues in the tightly packed script. When Pete worries about looking like a “white savior” to kids of color, the sardonic social workers Karen (Octavia Spencer) and Sharon (Tig Notaro) sarcastically offer to write “whites only” on their file, much to the couple’s chagrin. And yet, it does end up being a white savior story in a way — the married, well-off white couple does end up being more equipped to handle raising three kids than their mother, Carla (Joselin Reyes), who struggles with addiction and incarceration and doesn’t feel ready to take on the kids, no matter how much Lizzy wants to be reunited with her. While the pace of “Instant Family” can be relentless, with the supporting cast and a whole lot of genuine authenticity, Anders hits that sweet-spot of hilarious and heartwarming, where the sweetness and tears are well-deserved, and earned. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service