THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD
of a film, does just that. The camera dives into the iris of a brown eye and into another world, where a fishing boat traverses turquoise blue waters. “Serenity” takes place on a bizarre island known as “Plymouth.” The people speak English speckled with French; the landscape is tropical but epic in scope. The hero, Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), is on a mission to catch a very large tuna he’s dubbed Justice. Every day, he tries to catch the fish, doesn’t, and recalibrates his strategy. Baker dutifully pursuing his quest, until a femme fatale (Anne Hathaway) walks out of his past and into the bar, asking him to kill her husband. — Katie Walsh, Tribune New Service
SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE
PG, 117 minutes. Waterford, Stonington. Also Sunday at Garde. “Spider-Man” is the superhero franchise that may suffer the most from reboot fatigue. In the past 16 years, there have been six Spider-Man movies starring three different actors as Peter Parker, with another on the way. Animated feature “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” is here to prove new life can be injected into the franchise by reminding us all where Spider-Man comes from: the comic books. “Spider-Verse,” directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, with a screenplay by Phil Lord, reveals itself to be a different animal, unlike any other superhero or animated film that has come before. The animation style is like watching a comic book come to life. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
STAN & OLLIE
1/2 PG, 97 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. Still playing at Madison Art Cinemas. Whatever your tastes, “Stan & Ollie” ranks as one of the best showbiz biopics of recent years, not because it “explains” the what and why of Laurel & Hardy, but because it’s a touching, gently sentimental evocation of a tricky decades-long working friendship. The casting’s terrific. Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly play the “boys,” Stan and Ollie aka “Babe,” and they’re wonderful enough to make you forget the (very good) prosthetic makeup and allow you to concentrate on the human feeling. These are two comedy lions in winter, near the end of their eternally entwined careers, when they were down but not out. Scottish director Jon S. Baird’s fleet-footed picture begins in 1937, at the zenith of the duo’s film career. It’s a modest film, but a very good one. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune R, 99 minutes. Starts Friday at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Peter Jackson’s documentary about the thrills and horrors of World War I, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” uses stateof-the-art technology to bring history to life so vividly that it feels almost supernatural. Using digital restoration techniques, Jackson turns black-andwhite, century-old footage of longdead soldiers into richly colored images that brim with expressive energy. The overall effect is both wonderful and spooky, like an unexpectedly successful seance. Why is Jackson, best known for his fantastical “Lord of the Rings” films, making a historical documentary? The New Zealand-born director was commissioned by Britain’s Imperial War Museum and the U.K. arts program 1418 NOW (formed to celebrate the Great War’s centenary) to create this film. His only brief was to use the museum’s archives, a treasure trove of 23,000 hours of moving images and 33,000 sound recordings. Jackson took an unorthodox approach when putting his material together: no reenactments, no talking-head interviews, no historians or experts — just real war-time footage accompanied by first-person audio accounts. The narrators are never seen or even identified. As a result, the movie has a kind of storybook feel, as though the voices we’re hearing are producing the images in our heads. — Rafer Guzman, Newsday
THE UPSIDE
PG-13, 125 minutes. Niantic, Waterford, Westbrook. Kevin Hart’s transition from brattily charming comic persona to serious dramatic cinematic presence isn’t going quite as planned. His extracurricular controversies notwithstanding, the comedian’s first turn in a more serious role in “The Upside” — a remake of the French hit “The Intouchables,” across from Bryan Cranston and Nicole Kidman — should have been a slam dunk. Yet, “Upside” is missing some crucial elements. It’s a struggle to find the bright side to this rather hackneyed film. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
VICE
1/2 R, 110 minutes. Saturday at Garde. The idea of making a film based on the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney resonates with all the excitement of a documentary on the history of paint drying. But director/ writer Adam McKay’s “Vice” ignores the potentially boring elements to examine the rise of Cheney (Christian Bale) from a political second banana to a man so in love with power he convinces George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) to give him more authority than any VP has known. —