STAN & OLLIE
R, 90 minutes. Stonington, Lisbon, Westbrook. Are demon children making a comeback at the movies? They were all the rage right after the 1960s — “The Exorcist,” “The Omen” and “The Other” were nothing if not allegories for a generation of youth gone wild. The genre faded over subsequent decades, but it seems to be burbling up again in such recent movies as “Hereditary,” “The Witch” and the new release “The Prodigy.” As always in these stories, a supernatural force takes over a child, but there’s a growing sense that the parents might share the blame. In “The Prodigy,” Taylor Schilling (Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black”) plays Sarah Blume, a quintessential modern mom: Young, pretty, once hip, now living in the quiet suburbs of Philadelphia with her fashionably bearded husband, John (Peter Mooney), and their only son, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott). Miles is an unusual kid, with one brown eye and one blue (“like David Bowie,” says an admiring woman). When the infant Miles startles his pediatrician by talking, Sarah stocks up on books like “A Gifted Life” and “Nurturing Genius.” We suspect she’s nurturing something else. Miles has a sweet, sensitive nature, but also a propensity toward violence. He beats a fellow student with a pipe wrench and does something awful to the family pet, but claims to remember none of it. We know something Sarah doesn’t — that Miles has some kind of connection to a killer. Only slowly do we realize what that connection is, and where it will lead both Miles and his too-willing mother. — Rafer Guzmán, Newsday
1/2 PG, 97 minutes. 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 R, 99 minutes. Mystic Luxury Cinemas. PG-13, 125 minutes. Stonington, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. 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, Sunday and Tuesday only at Waterford. 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