OK, now it’s summer. The Minions are back in the house.
“Despicable Me 3” and other new movies
OK, now it’s summer. Minions are back in the house.
Supervillain Gru turned good guy in “Despicable Me 2” — much to the disappointment of his Twinkie-shaped, gibberish-spouting sidekicks — but it doesn’t last too long in “Despicable Me 3,” when he and his soulmate Lucy are fired after they fail to catch a bad guy named Balthazar Bratt, a former 1980s child TV star who has never left the decade that made him famous.
Gru then discovers his long-lost twin brother Dru (both are voiced by Steve Carell), who tries to persuade him to return to the family supervillain business.
Kristen Wiig is back as the voice of Lucy, as are Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier and Nev Scharrel as Gru’s daughters. Jenny Slate voices Gru’s boss, with Trey Parker as Bratt and Julie Andrews as Gru and Dru’s mother.
Critics are loving “Me 3” so far. “It’s an if-itain’t-broke-then-don’tfix-it approach that works just fine if you’re simply looking to take another ride on the rollercoaster,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer wrote, calling the movie’s Minions scenes its “piece de resistance.”
“Despicable Me 3” is rated PG for some rude humor. It runs for 90 minutes.
‘The Beguiled’
Clint Eastwood and Sofia Coppola aren’t the likeliest of movie couples, but most of the reviews — and the Cannes Film Festival — suggest otherwise.
For “The Beguiled,” a remake of the 1971 period drama starring Eastwood and directed by his collaborator, Don Siegel, Coppola took home bestdirector honors at Cannes this year.
And the movie, in which a Southern girls’ boarding school during the Civil War is turned upside down when they take in an injured Northern soldier, is getting solid reviews so far.
As the denizens of the school — led by Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst, and including Elle Fanning — try to do the right thing, the soldier’s (Colin Farrell) presence and the sexual tension it fosters turn an act of charity into something very different indeed.
Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt gave “The Beguiled” a B-plus, calling the shots “a visual symphony” if sometimes a little remote.
“The Beguiled” is rated R for some sexuality. It runs for 94 minutes.
‘The House’
So they’ve turned all the jokes about gambles and bets to pay for college into a movie.
In “The House,” Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler play parents whose college-bound daughter’s scholarship — which they’d been counting on to pay for school — doesn’t come through.
So naturally, they decide to help their neighbor (Jason Mantzoukas) open an underground casino in their suburban neighborhood, with everything from blackjack to a strip club.
This can’t turn out well. Or, can it?
“The House” is rated R for pervasive language, drug use, some violence and brief nudity. It runs for 88 minutes.
‘The Hero’
It’s tempting to say that veteran actor Sam Elliott is having something of a comeback, except that he never really left — and never really stopped being terrific.
After a career that began in the late 1960s and early ’70s with TV dramas and lower-budget movies (including the 1972 eco-horror classic “Frogs”), Elliott settled into character roles in the 1980s and ’90s as diverse as a general in “Gettysburg” and The Stranger in “The Big Lebowski.”
After getting solid reviews in Brett Haley’s 2015 late-in-life romance “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” Elliott reunited with Haley for “The Hero,” in which he plays an aging, ailing movie star coming to terms with his past, including his estranged daughter (Krysten Ritter) and his exwife (Katharine Ross, his wife in real life), and his future, with a woman (Laura Prepon) interested in his present.
Elliott “creates through hushed moments of lacerating distress feelings that overwrought proclamations of agony would ruin,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune critic Colin Covert wrote in his 3-star review. “Even in scenes of him watching the Malibu surf and silently pondering his past and future, he’s sublime.”
“The Hero” is rated R for drug use, language and some sexual content. It runs for 97 minutes.