‘The Boss Baby’
With Alec Baldwin as the title character, it’s probably worth noting that he was cast as “The Boss Baby” nearly a year before the other person he plays a lot these days had announced he was running for president — even though reviews are going to draw parallels between the two personas.
In “The Boss Baby,” Baldwin voices an infant who’s really an undercover agent on behalf of babies everywhere, out to find out why infants are losing market share (of love, anyway) to puppies. The suited-up toddler talks his new big brother (voiced by Miles Bakshi) into helping him find the answer. Adventure, mayhem and potty jokes follow.
The early reviews are mixed. Owen Gleiberman, Variety’s chief film critic, called the movie “a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.”
“The Boss Baby” is rated PG for some rude humor. It runs for 97 minutes.
‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’
World War II had many heroes, some of whom not enough of us know about. “The Zookeeper’s Wife” is a story about one of those.
In 1939, Antonina and Jan Zabinski (played by Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh) together run the Warsaw Zoo. But after the zoo and life as they knew it is halted by the Nazi invasion of Poland, the couple, now forced to report to a Nazi boss (Daniel Brühl) with his own ideas about zoology, decide to turn the zoo’s underground cages and tunnels into a hiding place for Jews threatened by the invaders and their plans for the Warsaw Ghetto.
The movie, directed by Niki Caro (”Whale Rider”), is drawn from Antonina’s diaries of life during wartime.
Despite the story’s inspirational roots — in real life the couple saved about 300 people during the war — reviews for the movie are mixed so far. Entertainment Weekly critic Leah Greenblatt gave “The Zookeeper’s Wife” a B-minus: “The movie is nicely shot and sympathetically acted, but there’s an odd lack of stakes and urgency, considering their mission. … Even at its most engaging (those cubs!), ‘Zookeeper’ can’t help evoking the dozens of films that have told these stories before, and better.”
‘The Blackcoat’s Daughter’
Worst. Midterm break. Ever.
In “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” Kiernan Shipka (Don Draper’s daughter on “Mad Men”) is at an isolated, all-girls Catholic boarding school, waiting for her parents to pick her up for the break. When they don’t show, she’s put together with another girl waiting for her overdue parents (Lucy Boynton), who suggests that the school nurses, still there for break, might be part of a satanic cult.
Emma Roberts, James Remar and Lauren Holly also co-star in this atmospheric horror story by actor-turned-director Osgood Perkins.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Leslie Felperin liked it when she saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015, when it was shown under the title “February,” calling it a “remarkable debut.”