NOW PLAYING
Reviews of movies showing in theaters or streaming online
‘DOCTOR STRANGE’: This latest Marvel Cinematic Universe bid to keep the MCU going until we’re all moldering underground is not business as usual. It is a paradox: a glumly playful experiment in testing the story limits of multiverse travel, while dramatizing all the wrong ways of dealing with grief, guilt and a broken heart (Doctor Strange’s and the Scarlet Witch’s). The script’s a messy sort of mess. There are also clear signs of a nervy director at work. We begin with a bittersweet wedding. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who nearly destroyed our world in order to save it from Thanos, attends the nuptials of his one true love (Rachel McAdams), who is marrying another. All of a CGI sudden, a one-eyed giant octopus from another dimension appears on the Manhattan streets below, in violent pursuit of a new character, young America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez). This teenager is blessed/ cursed with the ability to move in and out of other universes. And this makes her valuable to Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen, whose grief has turned to monomaniacal rage). In “Doc Strange 2” Wanda has lost touch with her better instincts, having availed herself of the “Darkhold,” which sounds like something Baron von Raschke used to try in the wrestling ring. The antidote to the Darkhold is the hallowed Book of the Vishanti, which is the very thing Strange and America are after in the nightmare vision of the prologue. All this determines the fate of the multiverse, while factoring into an audience’s enjoyment of the movie not much at all. 2:06. 2 ½ stars. — Michael
Phillips, Chicago Tribune
‘DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA’: The new “Downton Abbey” film proclaims that it’s “A New Era,” but in actuality, it’s a real throwback. It’s not just that “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is a shiny replication of a world that’s nearly a century old, but it’s also a reminder of the world that we lived in when we loved “Downton Abbey,” those heady days of the 2010s when we gulped down seasons of the wildly popular, award-winning historical TV drama created by Julian Fellowes. Watching it feels like double escapism: to early 20th-century England, as well as to a pre-pandemic time. “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is a chaste, mannered soap opera that feels like a relic of another time in more ways than one, but perhaps, that’s the entire appeal. 2:05. 2 ½ stars.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Services
‘HAPPENING’: Audrey Diwan’s masterly second feature, “Happening,” is the story of a young woman trying to save her own life; a harrowing, tense and utterly riveting survival story. The question of whether or not our young hero, Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), racing against the clock, will make it out with her future intact is the urgently dramatic question at hand. “Happening” is the story of an abortion, one that the French writer Annie Ernaux underwent in her early 20s as a college student, in 1960s France, when abortion was illegal there. It was an experience that she documented in her 2000 memoir “L’événement,” which Diwan and Marcia Romano adapted for the screen. “Happening,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, is a powerful argument for life: for Anne’s life, in fact, and her right to live hers how she chooses. In French with English subtitles. 1:39. 4 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘HATCHING’: In the fantastical Finnish horror fairytale “Hatching,” the directorial debut of Hannah Bergholm, a young girl hatches a murderous bird monster out of an egg that she secretly nests in her bed, and that’s not even the scariest part — her perfectionist mommy blogger mother strikes the truest terror in the film. Like many great monster movies, “Hatching” uses a monster as a metaphor for repressed emotion, and the creature at the center of this film is one of the most uniquely grotesque creations seen on screen in a long time. In Finnish with English subtitles. 1:27. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘THE INNOCENTS’: The babes in the woods of Eskil Vogt’s “The Innocents” are some of the scariest kids you’ll see on movie screens this year. Bored over the summer holidays and living in a large Norwegian housing development, they while away the long summer hours inflicting a kind of casual cruelty on animals and other children, motivated by childish curiosity, subconscious trauma and newly discovered psychic abilities. With a careful economy of storytelling, Vogt lays out how and why these kids end up trapped in this destructive cycle. In Norwegian with English subtitles. Available via video on demand. 1:57. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh ‘MEN’: “Visionary” is liberally used to describe directors these days, but if any filmmaker has earned the title, it’s writer/director Alex Garland, whose work has pushed forward some of the major trends in horror and sci-fi filmmaking over the past two decades. He penned the screenplays for “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine,” and directed the coolly intelligent “Ex Machina,” as well as the feverishly hallucinatory “Annihilation.” Garland uses genre to explore the nature of human existence, and the ways in which human beings struggle to connect across planes of being, both organic and mechanic. In his latest film, “Men,” Garland turns toward the domestic, finding the horror within the confines of the home, and ripping it out from within. With “Men,” Garland remains rooted in the natural world, but in this folk horror riff, the events that unfold are so entirely unnatural that some images and concepts are impossible to unsee or forget. Garland challenges the natural order in order to examine the many monstrous forms that emotional abuse and trauma can take on a human being’s psyche, and he does so in a Grand Guignol of grotesquerie. Yet after all that blood and gore, too much remains mysterious about “Men,” as Garland poses big questions that remain unanswered. 1:40. 3 stars.
— Katie Walsh
‘ON THE COUNT OF THREE’:
Comedian Jerrod Carmichael is officially a triple threat. The writer and performer can now add director to his bio, making his debut with the pitchblack suicide comedy “On the Count of Three,” in which he co-stars opposite Christopher Abbott. The film, which Carmichael directed from a script written by “The Carmichael Show” writer Ari Katcher, who co-wrote with Ryan Welch, premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The film opens in medias res, with lifelong best friends Kevin (Abbott) and Val (Carmichael) about to shoot each other in the head outside of a strip club at 10 in the morning. Rewinding a few hours, we come to find out how these best friends found themselves there, which begins with Val getting a promotion at the Feed & Seed shop where he works, and attempting to hang himself in the bathroom while his co-worker sings Travis Tritt’s “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” at the urinal. Val’s failure leads him to break Kevin out of the psychiatric hospital where he has been committed for attempting suicide himself, because Val thinks the only way to get it right is for the best friends to do it together. However, Kevin, a newly freed man,
blanches. He wants one last day. 1:26. 3 stars. Available via video on demand. — Katie Walsh
‘OPERATION MINCEMEAT’: With any war movie, the safe audience bet typically favors the immediate, graphic horrors of battle. That way, when you see a title such as “Hacksaw Ridge,” you know a director will be operating with a cinematic license to slaughter. Espionage makes for subtler, trickier storytelling. “Operation Mincemeat” takes as its subject a singular feat of deception cooked up by British intelligence in
1943. How decisively the operation turned the Allied tide against Nazi Germany is up for historical debate. But the men and women of MI5 assuredly helped make the invasion of Sicily a key Allied military success. Streaming on Netflix. 2:08. 3 stars.
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.