NOW IN THEATERS
ABOMINABLE
This is an exceptionally watchable and amiable animated tale written and directed by Jill Culton, about a large four-legged creature with snow-white fur, gorgeous sky-blue eyes, and a goofy grin. The creature, who gets nicknamed Everest (after the place where it wants to return), parks on the roof of a small apartment building in China and sees a billboard of his home. There he is discovered by Yi (voiced by Chloe Bennet), a plucky tween who’s saving money to embark on a journey that her late father had envisioned for his family. Once she establishes a bond with Everest, she learns of the shady interests that had been keeping him caged. Along with her young friends, Yi gets swept up by Everest on an epic, colorful journey home. Animated family film, rated PG, 97 minutes, screens in 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Glenn Kenny/The New York Times)
AD ASTRA
In a mesmerizing performance, Brad Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction movies by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre. Fans of First Man will appreciate its rattling opening sequence, when Space Command major Roy McBride (Pitt) hurtles through near-space while building the world’s largest antenna. Anyone familiar with Apocalypse
Now will recognize the artistic DNA of Roy’s journey when he is assigned to travel to Neptune to retrieve a rogue astronaut (Tommy Lee Jones), who happens to be his father. Admirers of such meditations as Gravity will understand Roy’s somber reflections on grief. With so many references swirling around its atmosphere, Ad Astra skirts close to being derivative. But in the hands of writer-director James Gray, it becomes its own unflashy example of speculative filmmaking that is less
interested in special effects and otherworldly creatures than in enduring philosophical questions about what we take with us — or heedlessly throw away — on the technological and existential journeys we call progress. Science fiction, rated PG-13, 122 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Ann Hornaday/The Washington Post)
THE ADDAMS FAMILY
In 2019, even the creepiest and kookiest movie characters must have origin stories. The new animated version of The Addams Family begins with the wedding of Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) before they are chased off by angry villagers. Refugees, they wind up in New Jersey and make their home in an abandoned asylum where Thing gives Lurch tips on tickling the ivories. The movie is the diversion you would expect, getting laughs from the disparity between the Addams’ congenital gloominess and the planned community, called Assimilation, that’s being developed near their mansion. Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) nervously prepares for his mazurka, which resembles a bar mitzvah with a saber instead of a Torah portion, while Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) experiences pangs of teenage rebellion, which means adding the “gateway color” pink to her wardrobe. If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honor its source material. Animated comedy, rated PG, 105 minutes, screens in 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Ben Kenigsberg/New York Times)
BECOMING NOBODY
The former Harvard psychologist Richard Alpert, through a series of galvanizing influences beginning with the psilocybin he discovered with Timothy Leary in the early ‘60s, transformed himself into Baba Ram Dass (“Servant of God”): spiritual seeker, Eastern philosopher, and guru. Ram Dass describes our physical equipment as a “spacesuit” into which we’re stuffed at birth, something separate from the inner person that we really are. Toward the end of the film, as he focuses more on the end of life, Ram Dass uses a different metaphor: death, he suggests, is like “taking off a tight shoe.” From birth, he says, we’re subjected to “somebody training” to form our personalities, and it’s as a reaction against this that he is working on “becoming nobody.” It’s a concept that might seem a bit disingenuous from a celebrity lecturer and the subject of a documentary. You don’t have to believe all of his insights, and he probably wouldn’t want you to, but it’s engaging and sometimes inspiring to listen to them. Drama, not rated, 81 minutes, Center for Contemporary Arts. (Jonathan Richards)
DOWNTON ABBEY
Set in the 1910s and 1920s at a fictional English estate, the TV show Downton Abbey centered on the esteemed Crawley family and their domestic servants, as they all attempt to keep the massive estate afloat and shipshape in a rapidly modernizing England. Now, the movie arrives as a feature-length coda to the series. The extraordinary ensemble cast — along with the steady hand of creator and writer Julian Fellowes — almost entirely return for the film, which finds the characters in 1927, with the events of the series finale receding into the past. The quotidian life on the estate continues as usual, until the family receives a letter informing them that the royal family is stopping in for an overnight visit. This news has everyone in a tizzy, although the staffers downstairs are affected far more profoundly than the family upstairs, since they are the ones who must cook, clean, and organize. That is the extent of the central plot, and the movie is well-served by its simplicity; Fellowes devotes himself to sprinkling the story with small moments that are delightful, letting each character warm the hearts of everyone who spent years getting to know them. Drama, rated PG, 122 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)
GEMINI MAN
Ang Lee directs this science fiction action film in which an assassin for a CIA-like organization named Henry (Will Smith) is on the cusp of retirement when it’s decided that he knows too much. A military-industrial biotech tycoon named Clay (Clive Owen) has the perfect weapon to send against Henry: a clone of Henry’s younger self (also Smith, using de-aging technology). Soon, Henry is caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with experience — as well as compatriots played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Benedict Wong — on his side. Science fiction, rated PG-13, 117 minutes, screens in 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
HUSTLERS
In a year of spectacular comebacks, none is as purely, sensationally pleasurable as Jennifer Lopez’s commanding lead performance in this sexually charged caper flick that bumps, grinds, and pays giddy homage to sisterhood and shameless venality with equally admiring brio. She plays Ramona, a dancer at a Manhattan strip club who in 2007 takes a newbie named Destiny (Constance Wu) under her protective wing. Ramona not only tutors her charge in how to perform a proper pole dance but, eventually, in how to fleece privileged white guys whose impunity and vanity make them as vulnerable as the most naïve rubes from the sticks. Adapted by writer-director Lorene Scafaria from a New York magazine article about a similar scam perpetrated by a group of dancers at the New York club Scores, Hustlers is a funny, naughty, enormously entertaining kick in the pants, promising to be an East Coast
Showgirls, only to wind up a girls-rule Goodfellas. Drama, rated R, 109 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Ann Hornaday/The Washington Post)
IT: CHAPTER TWO
Director Andy Muschietti attempts to honor everyone involved, including Stephen King, author of the 1986 novel It, so the movie is like a game of musical chairs that runs too long. And since Muschietti has few scare tactics at his disposal, the film loses its capacity to frighten. You will recall that in the first film, the Losers Club defeated Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), a demonic spirit that can take many forms but prefers that of a demented clown. Twenty-seven years later, in 2016, only Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) remembers what happened. The rest of the members barely recall that period in their young lives. But Pennywise is on the prowl again, hunting children and other vulnerable people, and Mike contacts the rest of the Losers and asks them to return to Derry, Maine. There are fewer lessons for them to learn, so Chapter Two takes them back to a childlike state. Shared grief arrives with less gravitas. The cumulative effect is downright maudlin, which is not what you might expect from a film with gallons of blood and other bodily fluids. Horror, rated R, 169 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Alan Zilberman/The Washington Post)
JEXI
Adam Devine plays Phil, an ordinary tech dude in San Francisco who installs the latest operating system on his phone only to discover its personality, named Jexi (voiced by Rose Byrne), completely upends his life. First, it senses his loneliness and forces him to ask out a local woman named Cate (Alexandra Shipp). Then it gets jealous of Cate and tries to sabotage the relationship. Michael Peña and Wanda Sykes also star. Comedy, rated R, 84 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
JOKER
In Joker, director Todd Phillips takes a grim, shallow, and distractingly derivative homage to 1970s movies to an even more grisly, nihilistic level, throwing out nods to Martin Scorsese’s filmography. Arthur Fleck is an aspiring standup comedian whose day job is working as a clown. Portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in a florid, Pagliacci-like turn as sad-clownturned-mad-clown, Fleck is a pathetic man-child who lives with his mother (Frances Conroy) and nursing a deluded ambition to appear on a late-night show hosted by a comic named Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). The fact that Franklin is played by De Niro is just one of many nods to Scorsese, in this case to the brilliant King of Comedy (1982). Joker is so monotonously grandiose and full of its own pretensions that it winds up feeling puny and predictable. Like the antihero at its center, it’s a movie trying so
hard to be capital-b Big that it can’t help looking small. Action, rated R, 121 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Ann Hornaday/The Washington Post)
JUDY
In Judy, Renée Zellweger plays a few variations on Judy Garland near the end of her life: worried mother, needy lover, disaster, legend. The woman who remains out of sight, though, is the sadder, scarier Judy who threw a butcher knife at one of her children and threatened to jump out a window in front of another. Even so, Zellweger is solid in a movie that derives its force from its central mythic figure and your own Yellow Brick Road memories. Judy is based on Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow, which had a well-received Broadway run in 2012 and skitters between late-career Judy ripping her heart out in a London hotel and at the theater where she will become the talk of the town. The movie, directed by Rupert Goold, is a gentler, squarer mash note to the Great Woman that’s part maternal melodrama, part martyr story. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is cautious and too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away. Biopic, rated PG-13, 118 minutes, Violet Crown. (Manohla Dargis/The New York Times)
LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE
With the recent announcement that Linda Ronstadt would be a 2019 Kennedy Center honoree, this affectionate documentary makes for a timely opportunity to recall why the 73-year-old singer (who retired from performing in 2009 because of Parkinson’s disease) is getting the award, as evidenced by the many performance clips and the expected parade of laudatory reminiscences from the likes of Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Bonnie Raitt, and J.D. Souther. The film also reminds us how outspoken Ronstadt was, and is, about her liberal views. If there’s one drawback to The
Sound of My Voice, it’s that Ronstadt herself declined to sit down with the film’s directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, for interviews that might have showcased more of such frank talk. Instead, she merely narrates the film, delivering a somewhat unspontaneous sounding, disembodied voice-over that carries us from her childhood in Tucson to her stellar career in Los Angeles. Documentary, rated PG-13, 95 minutes, The Screen. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL
Disney’s revisionist Maleficent took the Sleeping Beauty story that inspired the studio’s own 1959 animated classic and turned it upside down. In that live-action retelling, the evil sorceress Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) became both hero and villain. Jolie delivered a deliciously complex, even sympathetic portrait of a fairy scorned so badly by a faithless lover that the betrayal twisted her morals. Maleficent: Mistress of
Evil picks up where the first film left off: in the land known as the Moors, a CGI paradise now ruled by the former Sleeping Beauty, Aurora (Elle Fanning), and overrun with mythical critters straight out of Tolkien Lite. Aurora’s love interest (Harris Dickinson) is still in the picture, and, as the film opens, this anodyne Prince has just proposed marriage to Aurora. Later, the nuptials entail a meeting of the in-laws over dinner, a social requirement attended by Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) and King John (Robert Lindsay) and Maleficent, who virtually raised Aurora. It’s a big and busy film, characterized by a focus on fighting and weaponry. But the worse sin is that it’s boring; unlike the first film, there’s no one to care about.
Fantasy action, rated PG, 118 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
MEMORY: THE ORIGIN OF ALIEN
In 2017, filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe broke down the murder in Psycho with the documentary 78/52: Hitchcock’s
Shower Scene. Now, he trains his lens on another classic thriller, Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, using the same approach as both fan and expert. In particular, he hones in on the movie’s influences, which include mythology, comics, and the work of artists such as Francis Bacon and H. R. Giger. Documentary, not rated, 95 minutes, Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Not reviewed)
ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD
The most nuanced movie in Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood finds the filmmaker utilizing exceptional art direction and sketching crisscrossing stories across 1969-era Tinseltown. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Rick Dalton, a past-his-prime actor who spirals through decreasingly attractive job opportunities in search of his mojo. Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, his stunt double, a man content to be a sidekick. This delightful depiction of male friendship finds conflict when Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) move next door to Dalton, drawing the cult led by Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) near. Unlike many Tarantino films, there is no heist to score, no villain to vanquish, and the relaxed nature of the plot suits the director, who is allowed to invest himself deeply in the individual scenes and subvert expectations at every turn. Drama, rated R, 161 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Robert Ker)
RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS
This documentary takes a thorough, if traditional, look at the Texas-born, Smith College-educated writer Molly Ivins’ life and career and includes interviews with her siblings, colleagues, friends, and such media celebrities as Dan Rather and Rachel Maddow. But it is when Ivins herself opens her mouth that the film is at its best. Whenever the movie presents archival clips from old interviews and lectures, Ivins, who died in 2007 from breast cancer, comes alive. It’s easy to understand how the politicians she covered, on both sides of the aisle, liked to spend time with her. It’s not hard to see why we might need to be reminded of a voice like Ivins’ again. With free speech under attack, and truth-telling seemingly in short supply, Raise
Hell offers an entertaining and bracing look at one of journalism’s least punch-pulling practitioners. Documentary, not rated, 93 minutes, Center for Contemporary Arts. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK
This adaption of the children’s horror book series centers on a small town in 1968 and the kids who live there. One young girl in particular (Kathleen Pollard) has an axe to grind. She writes a book of scary stories that soon manifest themselves as creepy scarecrows, bloated hospital patients, and similarly sinister forces, which become unleashed on the locals. Horror, rated PG-13, 111 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP
Has it really been an entire decade since Zombieland, in which Woody Harrelson joined forces with Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin to crack wise while the skulls of the undead exploded around them? Apparently it has, though part of the charm of this undemanding sequel (directed, like the first one, by Ruben Fleischer) is that it treats 10 years like 10 minutes. In the postapocalyptic world, there’s no history, and the filmmakers wisely refrain from calibrating too many jokes to the present-day world beyond the screen. Like the first episode, but even more so, this chapter is aware that zombies are a pop-culture cliché and is content to goof on that fact. There’s nothing here to rival the thing with Bill Murray in Zombieland, but the performers commit to the silliness in a spirit of well-compensated affability. The film doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely brain-dead either. Comedy, rated R, 99 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (A.O. Scott/New York Times)