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Reviews of movies showing in theaters or streaming online
‘AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER’: As with most James Cameron blockbusters, including the first “Avatar,” this film has a way of pulling you in, surrounding you with gorgeous, violent chaos and finishing with a quick rinse to get the remnants of its teeny-tiny plot out of your eyes by the final credits. It’s 10 years later. Sully (Sam Worthington), now blue and 10 feet tall, is full-on Na’vi with a family including his mate, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and three kids. Sigourney Weaver, whose character died in the first “Avatar,” returns in the role of the adopted teenage daughter, Kiri. Death is just a pause for a change of clothes in this universe. Cameron fills three hours of screen time, with another 10 minutes or so for credits, with what feels like a single, extended, not-quite-“real,” not really animated but impressively sustained feat of visual gratification, if you don’t mind the cruelty-to-undersea-creatures parts. 3:10. 3 stars. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
‘BABYLON’: Damien Chazelle is writer-director of “Babylon,” which takes place at the intersection of Hollywood dreams and industry realities in a somewhat harsher realm than his massively popular “La La Land.” All three hours and nine minutes of “Babylon” sings a song that says: Praise the art and pass the degradation. The contrasts of lightness and darkness are stark, blunt and finally wearying. Loosely entwining a halfdozen major characters, though two or three get disappointingly short shrift, “Babylon” thins out all too quickly, settling for a strenuous ode to the dream factory and its victims and exploiters, who occasionally make wondrous things for the screen. 3:09. 2 stars. — Michael Phillips
‘A MAN CALLED OTTO’:
The “Grumpy Old Men” era seems to come for all of our lovable movie stars, including Tom Hanks, who easily slides into this new phase with “A Man Called Otto,” a remake of the Oscar-nominated Swedish film, “A Man Called Ove.” It’s not easy to translate the famously dry and somewhat bleak Scandinavian humor to a sunnier, more optimistic American worldview, but writer David Magee and director Marc Forster manage to maintain the melancholy of the original film, which is based on the book by Swedish author Fredrik Backman. Set in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, “A Man Called Otto” is a story about the loss of human connection in a modernized and rapidly changing world, and the effort it takes to knit a community through the ties that bind: personal ones. It is also a story about the transformative nature of grief, and the beauty and cruelty of life lived in moments both mundane and monumental. 2:06.
2 ½ stars. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
‘M3GAN’: A straightforward horror flick that doesn’t blink while simultaneously jabbing the audience in the ribs, “M3GAN,” more often than not, and indeed, right away, is a comedy before it’s a horror movie. It opens with a guffaw, teasing the audience with a laugh before a jarring smash to violence and trauma. The unique tone is anchored by star Allison Williams, who has surprisingly become one of our best horror leading ladies, bringing her signature brand of eerie camp to such films as “Get
Out,” “The Perfection,” and now “M3GAN.” Williams’ skillful intentional affectlessness renders her characters slippery, difficult to pin down into preordained binaries of good and evil. In “M3GAN,” Williams is a Dr. Frankenstein type, playing Gemma, a toy designer with a savant-like skill for robotics. She’s toiling over a Purrpetual Petz prototype for her demanding boss at Funki Toys, when she receives the call that her sister and brother-inlaw have died in an accident and she’s to assume guardianship of her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). Career-oriented Gemma isn’t quite sure how to connect with a kid, and so she revives her scrapped project, M3GAN (played physically by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) as a sort of pal for her lonely, grieving niece. 1:42. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘THE PALE BLUE EYE’:
Based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name, “The Pale Blue Eye” involves the disturbing murder of a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1830 and the involvement
of a fictionalized version of a young Edgar Allan Poe. Christian Bale portrays Augustus Landor, a local detective with a reputation for favoring a drink who is recruited to investigate the death, which involved the skillful removal of the young man’s heart. To say any more about what unfolds in “The Pale Blue Eye” would be doing a disservice to viewers, but, as you may have guessed, it goes to some strange and dark places. Streaming on Netflix. 2:08. 2 stars. — Mark Meszoros, the Willoughby News-Herald
‘PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH’: Eleven years after the “Shrek 2” spinoff “Puss in Boots,” the sassy Spanish feline voiced by Antonio Banderas has returned for another fairy-tale-busting adventure, directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, and written by Paul Fischer (with a story by Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler). Crawford, Mercado and Fischer all worked on the DreamWorks Animation favorites “Trolls” and “The Croods: A New Age,” and the trio bring a similar “chaotic good” energy to “Puss in
Boots: The Last Wish,” which remixes a new set of familiar nursery rhymes and beloved children’s fables to entertaining ends. 1:40. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘THE WHALE’: In “The Whale,” Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a morbidly obese online writing instructor confined to his apartment in what seems to be a dreary stretch of Idaho. Charlie is suffering from congestive heart failure, and over the course of a week, as his best friend, Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse, implores, demands and shouts at him to seek medical attention, he reckons with some of the unfinished business of his life while committing a slow suicide. He reaches out to his estranged daughter, the prickly Ellie (Sadie Sink), and by extension, her mother, Mary (Samantha Morton). A young missionary, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), keeps stopping by, hoping to save his soul. Fraser, who through the prosthetics, both physical and computer-generated, delivers a performance suffused with warmth, empathy and love that cannot be denied. “Write me something honest,” Charlie demands of his students. “The Whale” may not be as honest as Charlie demands, but Fraser is, and that is the film’s saving grace. 1:57. 2 ½ stars. — Katie Walsh
‘WHITNEY HOUSTON: I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY’: When remembering the iconic life and career of Whitney Houston, there are many defining moments that instantly spring to mind: when she obliterated the “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl, thereby rendering all other versions subpar; her soaring rendition of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard;” or even her concert at Wembley Stadium in honor of Nelson Mandela. In the new biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” those moments are acknowledged, albeit briefly. Instead, writer/ producer Anthony McCarten has chosen to bookend this slog through Houston’s career and all-too-short life with … her performance at the 1994 American Music Awards? Indeed, the 10 minute medley, which is re-created in full, was a virtuosic vocal performance of which only Houston was capable, but this deep cut seems an odd choice to open and close the film. It’s the kind of choice that makes one start to question everything in “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” a film that is not engrossing enough on its own to prevent one’s mind from wandering toward the nagging questions about who made these decisions and why. 2:26. 1 ½ stars.
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.