BAD BOYS FOR LIFE
R, 123 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Will Smith and Martin Lawrence return to their “Bad Boys” roles. A review wasn’t available by deadline.
DOLITTLE
PG, 106 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Robert Downey Jr. plays the physician who discovers that he can talk to animals. A review wasn’t available by deadline.
FORD V FERRARI
1/2 PG-13, 152 minutes. Starts Friday at Lisbon. Still playing at Westbrook. Cops might do well to position their speed traps near movie theaters wherever the new film “Ford v Ferrari” is playing. They might fund their whole year’s budget busting speeders peeling out of the parking lots. This infectious and engrossing story of the 1966 showdown on a French racetrack between car giants Ford and Ferrari is a high-octane ride that will make you instinctively stomp on a ghostly gas pedal from your movie seat. But you don’t need to be a motorhead to enjoy Matt Damon and Christian Bale as a pair of rebels risking it all for purity and glory. Yes, director James Mangold takes you down onto the raceway, with cameras low to the ground and care to show the crack of gear shifts and feet on pedals. Yet he’s not created a “Fast and Furious” film — this is more a drama about a pair of visionaries who fight against a smarmy bureaucracy. That vision happens to be on a track. The first three-quarters of “Ford v Ferrari “sets the stage for the furious 40-minute restaging of the exhausting Le Mans race — a 3,000-mile, 24-hour slalom through country roads. — Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
FROZEN 2
PG, 103 minutes. Through today only at Waterford. Still playing at Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Sequels are tough! Especially with musicals. The good-enough success of “Frozen 2,” then, deserves medium thanks and your allotted Disney money. The story pulls Elsa the Snow Queen and her less magical but nonetheless charismatic younger sister, Anna, into a murky web of Shakespearean political intrigue, with a large dose of Scandinavian pagan mythology; late-’80s/early-’90s-style power ballads from songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez; and just enough Olaf (snowman) and Sven (reindeer) to please younger viewers who, for years, after the first “Frozen” conquered the world in 2013, went to bed and then woke up signing “Let It Go.” In one surefire comic interlude, at top speed Olaf recaps the narrative events of the first “Frozen.” And the lightning-quick “Let It Go” reference proves that the Lopez duo hasn’t lost its comic instinct. That said, “Frozen 2” is more of a hairy quest deal, and knottier emotionally than the first. All’s well in the kingdom of Arendelle long enough for a generic happy-townsfolk number. Then Elsa (voiced and belted by Idina Menzel) starts hearing a siren-song female vocalist emanating from somewhere up north, beckoning, waiting to reveal the truth behind her magical snow-sculpture powers, and the sisters’ parents’ death by shipwreck (another Shakespearean flourish). With Anna (Kristen Bell), Anna’s amiable, supportive b.f. Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), and Olaf (Josh Gad) in tow, Elsa discovers a mist-shrouded land and a new set of human characters. One of many intriguing notions in “Frozen 2” deals with the memory properties of water, so that water, in various forms, manifests a series of visual clues to the sisters’ fraught childhood. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
THE GRUDGE
R, 93 minutes. Through today only at Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. A house is cursed by a vengeful ghost that dooms those who enter it with a violent death. Stars Betty Gilpin, Andrea Riseborough, William Sadler, and John Cho. A review wasn’t available.
JOJO RABBIT
1/2 PG-13, 108 minutes. Starts Friday at Lisbon. Viewers familiar with the antic wit of Taika Waititi — from such comedies as “What We Do in the Shadows,” “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” and “Thor: Ragnarok” — might wonder what he’ll next pull out of his hat. The answer, “Jojo Rabbit,” might be a trick for the ages. A sprightly, attractively composed coming-of-age comedy set in World War II Germany, “Jojo Rabbit” is an audacious high-wire act: a satire in which a buffoonish Adolf Hitler delivers some of the funniest moments; a wrenchingly tender portrait of a mother’s love for her son; a lampoon of the most destructive ideological forces that still threaten society and, perhaps most powerfully, an improbably affecting chronicle of moral evolution. Refracted through the childlike perspective of its alternately sweet and appalling 10-year-old protagonist, the horrors of Germany under Hitler’s Reich aren’t defanged as much as defenestrated: They go flying out the windows of Waititi’s dollhouse world as quickly and decisively as the film’s copious sight gags, punchlines and Mel Brooksian “Heil, Hitler” bits. — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL
1/2 PG-13, 123 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. In 2017, director Jake Kasdan rebooted the 1990s family adventure film “Jumanji” by plunking John Hughes-style teen characters into a wilderness-set video game. “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” was a critical and commercial success, anchored by the charms of megastars Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan and Jack Black, and the unique pleasure of watching them all play against type. Kasdan and company (including co-writers Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg) know a good formula when they see it. So the sequel simply offers more and more of it: There’s more jaw-droppingly crazy video game hijinks, and especially, more stars playing personas vastly different from theirs. The video game setting allowed a motley crew of teens (Alex Wolff, Madison Iseman, Morgan Turner and Ser’Darius Blain) to choose their own avatars and see what happens to them when they get to be someone else for a little while. Self-effacing nerd Spencer (Wolff) learned his own strengths as the muscle-bound Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Johnson), but it was also hilarious to watch Johnson play the insecure and jumpy Spencer. However, the breakout player of the “Welcome to the Jungle” ensemble was most definitely Jack Black, who perfectly inhabited teen queen Bethany (Iseman) in his portly cartographer’s bod. In “The Next Level,” Kasdan doubles, even triples down on this conceit, to rather hilarious returns. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
JUST MERCY
1/2 PG-13, 136 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook. The stirring, stylish legal drama “Just Mercy” feels familiar on several levels. The story of a wrongly accused man sent to death row, it joins such films as “Dead Man Walking” and the more recent “Clemency” as an affecting examination of how justice is confused with inhumane retribution. Based on factual events, “Just Mercy” is the story of Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian, who in 1987 was arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, but who was railroaded by a racist and incompetent legal system in Alabama — a story that is as old as the rugged cross itself.
McMillian’s case became famous by way of a “60 Minutes” episode and the memoir of Bryan Stevenson, a brilliant, Harvard-educated attorney who came to his defense and has gone on to become a visionary leader in criminal justice reform. Both on a macro and micro level then, “Just Mercy” — which takes its title from Stevenson’s book — might feel like something we’ve seen before. But in the judicious hands of director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton, it feels not new exactly, but fresh and urgent and more timely than ever. Largely, that’s because Cretton, best known for his exceptionally assured 2013 breakthrough “Short Term 12,” knows exactly when to get out of the way and let Stevenson and McMilllian’s story simply unfold. “Just Mercy” begins in 1987, when McMillian — played in an astonishing comeback performance by Jamie Foxx — is in a forest outside Monroeville, where he works as a pulpwood contractor. Arrested for the murder of a white dry cleaning clerk back in town, McMillian insists he couldn’t have committed the crime (he was at a church fish fry that day along with several witnesses). Still, he winds up on death row, the result of countless assaults on his human and constitutional rights that will continue once he’s there. McMillian would have been just another statistic of structural racism and irrational fear and revenge, had Stevenson not decided to move from the Northeast to Monroeville, where upon his arrival he’s encouraged to visit the “To Kill a Mockingbird” museum and to stand “right where Atticus Finch once stood.” In “Just Mercy,” the painful and infuriating gaps between myth and reality of the contemporary South aren’t underlined as much as opened up and revealed, allowing audience members to come to conclusions that will range from wincing discomfort to outrage. Played by Michael B. Jordan with his usual combination of composure and submerged fire, Stevenson is the main protagonist in “Just Mercy,” but this isn’t a biopic. As much as viewers come to admire him for his courage and dedication, they don’t necessarily come to feel they know him. But Cretton keeps the narrative on course, leading the audience through the stakes and specifics of Stevenson’s quest with welcome clarity. — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
KNIVES OUT
1/2 PG, 130 minutes. Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. It’s hard to imagine having more fun at the movies than with Rian Johnson’s delectable murder mystery “Knives Out,” a sparklingly wordy delight of fascinating faces, cozy sweaters, fireplaces and a delectably depraved wealthy family fighting over