PARASITE

very best 1969 duds. He wants to show it off, each poster, tchotchke and perfectly designed beer can. The nearly three-hour film has a lively (enough) pace because Tarantino can’t stop showing off each detail, the radio and records crackling, the TV blaring, offering a constant blanket of background white noise. We are in Hollywood after all, where it all happens, where the movie stars are your neighbors. Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio in fine and funny form) is a movie star teetering on oblivion. He’s now a TV heavy, chauffeured to set by his friend and stunt double (a soulful Brad Pitt). — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

PAIN AND GLORY

1/2 R, 113 minutes. Thursday only at Garde. Through today only at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. There are layers of intertextual storytelling of the self in Pedro Almodóvar’s meta memoir “Pain and Glory.” The actor synonymous with Almodóvar, Antonio Banderas, portrays a character that is some version of Almodóvar himself as a wild-haired Spanish film director, Salvador Mallo. It’s a film about reconciling every version of oneself, and the ways in which life has a magical way of forcing that to happen. “Pain and Glory” is about emotional pain, but physical pain too, the fears and anxieties that manifest physically and the fear and anxiety pain brings up. Beset with back pain, the ailing Salvador hasn’t directed a film in years while recovering from a lumbar fusion surgery and the loss of his beloved mother. But as a legend in Spanish cinema, he’s fêted at screenings of his older films. One such film, “Sabor,” occasions the kickoff of his trip down memory lane. After running into an old actress friend (Cecilia Roth) over coffee, he decides to look up the star of “Sabor,” Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), from whom he has long been estranged. The coffee date is the first domino to fall in the cascade of events that leads Salvador face to face with the ghosts of his past. From old collaborators to old lovers and long-forgotten versions of himself, the random, inherent magic of coincidence reveals itself as the inevitability of fate in this fable about how we learn who we are, again and again. Salvador struggles to control his own body in the present, gripped with a mysterious choking ailment as well as chronic pain that Alberto teaches him to relieve with heroin. The opiate haze allows him, for a moment, to surrender to the whims of the world, but he has to the kick the stuff to start to be present for what life presents him: an old lover (Leonardo Sbaraglia) seeking a final moment together, or a token from childhood that makes its way back to him. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

R, 132 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas, Waterford. Also Friday only at Garde. Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has steadily built a canon of masterpieces over the past two decades, genre-hopping from mystery to monster flicks, dabbling in post-apocalyptic horror and animal rights action movies, switching between Korean- and English-language films, all while maintaining his signature darkly comedic tone. His longtime collaborator, actor Song Kang-ho, first starred in Bong’s epic, hilarious true crime murder mystery “Memories of Murder.” He’s an integral part of Bong’s unique style, walking the tonal tightrope of tragedy and comedy. He’s starred in every film Bong’s made since, including his most recent masterpiece, “Parasite,” a slick, Hitchcockian family thriller and a class warfare cri de coeur. It would be criminal to describe the details of the plot of this deliciously twisty and utterly unpredictable fable. The Kim family, mother (Jang Hye-jin), father (Song), daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) and brother Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), live a precarious existence in a damp basement, taking odd jobs to make enough money to get their cellphones turned back on. Ki-woo’s friend Min (Park Seo-joon) drops by with a gift and a proposition. The gift is a hefty river rock, an imposing charm intended to bring material wealth. The proposition is a job offer: Min wants Ki-woo to take over his gig tutoring the daughter of a wealthy family while he studies abroad. He assumes Ki-woo will be a safe bet around the fetching Da-hye (Jung Ji-so). Min suggests Ki-woo forge a few diplomas, and we see the gears turning in Ki-woo’s head as he considers the scheme. This is the last time we’ll see any real pondering in a film about choices made out of desperation and their consequences. The characters in Bong’s films are action-oriented: They act, and as audience members, we have to retroactively fill in their thought processes. Song is an especially instinctual actor: his wide, placid face obfuscating his inner thoughts, his body moving through space seemingly by inertia. Bong deliberately edits out the thinking, planning and decision-making in a morally complex and soulful exploration of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. The story tips, then tumbles down a hill like a boulder. Ki-woo begins working for the wealthy Park family. Once he’s in, it’s not long before his “art therapist” sister is spouting psychobabble that the gullible lady of the house (Jo Yeo-jeong), neurotically eats up. Once the scrappy and resourceful Kims understand the cracks in her veneer, they burrow their way deep into their luxurious lifestyle. — Katie Walsh, Tribute News Service

THE RHYTHM SECTION

1/2 R, 109 minutes. Niantic, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Award-winning director and cinematographer Reed Morano has tackled dystopian futures in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the end of the world in “I Think We’re Alone Now” and devastating grief in “Meadowland.” Her third feature film, “The Rhythm Section,” combines a bit of all these themes, though it has a bit more kick to it than her prior indies. Starring Blake Lively as Stephanie Patrick, “The Rhythm Section” is adapted from the series of thriller novels by Mark Burnell, with a screenplay by Burnell himself. If Jason Bourne were a grieving trauma survivor, you’d end up with Stephanie, and the film serves as her gritty origin story. Lively has severely de-glammed herself in this edgy role, and when we first meet Stephanie, she’s a heroin-smoking London sex worker with a shaggy bowl cut. When a reporter (Raza Jaffrey) contracts her services to talk about the plane crash that killed her family, Stephanie’s rock bottom existence is thrown into chaos. With the knowledge that a bomb on board caused the crash, she sets out to attain revenge. She just has to kick the smack first. There’s something rather enjoyable about watching such a wastoid try and turn herself into “La Femme Nikita,” with the help (or harm) of a former MI-6 agent, B (Jude Law), who has valuable intel about the terrorist organization Stephanie’s seeking. He whips her into shape, and the first half of “The Rhythm Section” is essentially an exercise in body horror as Lively subjects her battered body to opiate detox, freezing lake water, clumsy fisticuffs and lots and lots of jogging. When B sends Stephanie into the field on a few wild goose chases, posing as a dead assassin named Petra, wow, is she ever bad, and it’s honestly refreshing. Morano focuses intensely on Stephanie’s subjective experience, using many hazy and handheld extreme close-ups on her face in the fight and action scenes, placing us inside Stephanie’s head, or at least as close as possible to her experience. It’s a fascinating exercise in shooting action and combat as something experiential and subjective. While it works sometimes, there are times when it doesn’t. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

PG-13, 142 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Not much has caused a disturbance in the “Star Wars” galaxy quite like Rian Johnson’s “The Last Jedi,” an erratic but electric movie that, regardless of how you felt about it, was something worth arguing about. The same can’t be said for

J. J. Abrams’ “Rise of Skywalker,” a scattershot, impatiently paced, fan-servicing finale that repurposes so much of what came before that it feels as though someone searching for the hyperspace button accidentally pressed the spin cycle instead. A laundry list of plot points cluster like an asteroid field in “Rise of Skywalker.” It’s a spirited, hectic and ultimately forgettable conclusion of the Skywalker saga begun 42 years ago by George Lucas. It was also surely a lot to ask for. Abrams, having already ably and nimbly resuscitated Lucas’ space opera with the far less cluttered “The Force Awakens,” was brought back (like seemingly everyone is in “Star Wars,” dead or alive) with the task of not only wrapping up a trilogy but repairing the divides stirred up by “The Last Jedi” and stabilizing the franchise’s revolving door of directors. Abrams here took over for the jettisoned Colin Trevorrow, who retains a “story by” credit. More significantly, “The Last Jedi” had to solve the underlying existential crisis in “Star Wars,” a franchise in search of a reason beyond nostalgia (and, cough, billions of dollars) for continuing. The film, for sure, tries its damnedest to come up with something. It is one busy, hardworking movie. But if anything has been proven by the many attempts to rekindle the magic of the original trilogy, it’s that Lucas’ cosmic amalgamation of Flash Gordon and Akira Kurosawa isn’t so easily refabricated. — Jake Coyle, Associated Press

THE TURNING

PG-13, 94 minutes. Through today only at Waterford, Westbrook. Still playing at Stonington. At the end of Floria Sigismondi’s “The Turning,” after all the credits had rolled, male members of the audience at a press screening were visibly and vocally upset. They were seemingly enraged at the film’s unwillingness to offer up a single definitive answer about the perceived haunting in this take of Henry James’ 1898 novella “The Turn of the Screw,” joining a century’s worth of questioners who have puzzled over the story of a young governess bedeviled by ghosts at her new job. Are these ghosts real, or is she just crazy? It’s an age-old question, but Sigismondi is confident simply not answering it, as frustrating as that may be. Jack Clayton adapted the novella into 1961’s “The Innocents,” starring Deborah Kerr, and now “The Runaways” helmer and music video director Sigismondi updates the tale to a more modern era, all the moody gothic vibes enhanced by the film’s grunge-era Washington state setting. Mackenzie Davis stars as the young governess, Kate, who leaves behind her life in Seattle out of a desire to help a wealthy young girl, orphaned and abandoned by her last teacher. Flora (Brooklynn Prince) is indeed a charming and delightful child, though the stern British housekeeper Mrs. Grose (Barbara Marten) is anything but, and Flora’s older brother, Miles (Finn Wolfhard), is entering his teen years angrily and violently. The crisp Kate intends to shape the privileged “thoroughbreds” right up, if only she can get through the night in this sprawling, creepy manor, packed with huge old paintings of dead ancestors, overstuffed Baroque furniture, a forbidden East Wing, terrifying mannequins and the journal of Miss Jessel, the prior governess who just up and vanished from her post. The script, by “The Conjuring” screenwriters Carey W. Hayes and Chad Hayes, does not hold the viewer’s hand. Explanation and speculation around the mysterious events is jettisoned for tone and atmosphere, which “The Turning” has in spades, thanks to the lush production design by Paki Smith and spectral cinematography by David Ungaro. “The Turning” builds to a deeply disturbing crescendo, then pulls the rug right out from under the audience in a way that seemingly undercuts what came before, an uncovering of dark, violent secrets that offer a new spin on “The Turn of the Screw.” The enigmatic ending doubles down on the ambiguity with which the film has already toyed. It’s less about answers and more about evoking a richly rendered gothic horror vibe while intuition bitterly battles reason. It may not work for everyone, but those for whom it works will find much to savor and puzzle over in “The Turning.” — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

UNCUT GEMS

1/2 R, 135 minutes. Starts Friday at Westbrook. Also Saturday only at Garde. The journey is the destination in the Safdie brothers’ new crime thriller “Uncut Gems,” and there’s almost nowhere this film won’t take you. The mines of Ethiopia, the suburbs of Long Island, inside a human body, out into space — by the time it’s all over you’ll feel less like a moviegoer and more like an unmoored spirit wandering through the wide, weird cosmos. And your guide, unlikely as it seems, will be Adam Sandler. In a ferocious, all-out performance, the comedic actor plays a slick-talking, lovably obnoxious and dangerously dysfunctional man named Howard Ratner, a jewelry dealer in Manhattan’s Diamond District. Howard is betting the proverbial farm on something called a black opal — his own Maltese Falcon. As Howard turns everything in his life into a long-shot bet or a straight-up con, Sandler radiates a heart-pounding desperation and despair that can turn into bliss. — Rafer Guzman, Newsday