Chile Pages,
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 liveaction retelling, the evil sorceress Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) became both hero and villain. 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. 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. 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, 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
MIDWAY
In this vividly choreographed and mostly historically accurate telling of the 1942 Battle of Midway — a pivotal Naval battle precipitated by Japan’s attack, just six months earlier, on Pearl Harbor — the violence is strictly PG-13 level. But the action, particularly the aerial combat, is impressively choreographed. And the Japanese, while clearly the enemy, are shown to be capable of great bravery as well as cruelty. Director Roland Emmerich opens his tale with a focus on Naval intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson), who argued that Japan’s next secret target, after Pearl Harbor and the Coral Sea, would not be the South Pacific, but a tiny, previously insignificant atoll in the North Pacific. There are so many featured players and marquee names (Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore) that many of the film’s human elements are given short shrift. It tells a story that’s vividly and viscerally rendered, with all the entertainment value of a big, old-fashioned war movie, cutting back and forth between the home front and front line. But the kiss-kiss never really registers with quite the same impact as the bang-bang. Drama, rated PG-13, 138 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
PAIN AND GLORY
As he grows older, Pedro Almodovar grows more reflective. Pain and Glory is not strictly autobiographical, but it is strewn with deeply personal breadcrumbs to lead us through passages of the great director’s life. The central character is Salvador Mallo, a famous Spanish filmmaker played by Antonio Banderas, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance. As if to emphasize the artifice of his construction, Almodovar has built his story around two time periods and three major coincidences. The time frame shifts between memories of his character’s childhood, where his mother is portrayed by Penelope Cruz, and the present, when Julieta Serrano takes over the role. If the mood is more somber than in earlier Almodovar classics, the color scheme is as riotously rich as ever. The screen is drenched in glorious primary hues which provide a rich contrast to the complexity of the story structure. As he casts an eye back over his life and career, the septuagenarian director may have lost some of his youthful exuberance, but he hasn’t lost his touch. Drama, rated R, 113 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts and Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
PARASITE
Director Bong Joon Ho creates specific spaces and faces that are in service to universal ideas about human dignity, class, and life itself. That’s a good way of telegraphing the larger catastrophe represented by the cramped, gloomy, and altogether disordered basement apartment where Kim Ki-taek (the great Song Kang Ho) benignly reigns. A sedentary lump, Ki-taek doesn’t have a lot obviously going for him. Fortunes change after the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), lands a lucrative job as an Englishlanguage tutor for the teenage daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), of the wealthy Park family. The other Kims soon secure their positions as art tutor, housekeeper, and chauffeur. The Parks make it easy (no background checks). Yet they’re not gullible, as Ki-taek believes, but are instead defined by cultivated helplessness, the near-infantilization that money affords. In outsourcing their lives, all the cooking and cleaning and caring for their children, the Parks are as parasitical as their humorously opportunistic interlopers. The cost of that comfort and those pretty rooms comes at a terrible price. Drama, rated R, 132 minutes, in Korean with subtitles, Violet Crown. (Manohla Dargis/The New York Times)
PLAYING WITH FIRE
John Cena heads a cast that includes Keegan-Michael Key and John Leguizamo in this comedy set in the world of wildlands firefighting. The three men play rugged, if buffoonish, firefighters who are in over their heads when tasked with rescuing and taking care of a trio of boisterous young kids. Comedy, rated PG, 96 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
QUEEN & SLIM
Drama, rated R, 132 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. See review, Page 45.
TERMINATOR: DARK FATE
James Cameron, creator of the Terminator franchise, contributes to his first film in the series since the 1991 installment
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, co-writing and producing while Tim Miller directs. Linda Hamilton, the heroine of the first two films, also returns to the series for the first time since 1991. She once more plays Sarah Connor, who must join forces with the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a cyborg named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) to protect a young girl (Natalia Reyes) from a highly advanced robot (Gabriel Luna). Science fiction, rated R, 128 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
21 BRIDGES
Chadwick Boseman portrays NYPD detective Andre “Dre” Davis in this overly schematic but reasonably watchable film, which has the erroneous assumption that it’s the role of the police to not just enforce the law but to mete out harsh justice for those who break it. Dre, of course, doesn’t really believe that, but people think he does. When eight cops and a civilian are killed in the robbery of a wine store with a freezer full of 300 kilos of cocaine, Dre’s presumptive trigger-happiness is what gets him assigned to the case by the precinct captain (J.K. Simmons) whose officers were gunned down. Dre, it is assumed, will find the perps and save us all the headache of endless appeals and plea bargains with a strategic bullet or two. He convinces the police brass and the FBI, who convince the mayor, to shut down Manhattan while he uses almost superhuman deductive skills to tighten the noose around the perps. Boseman is satisfying to watch, even when he has little to do except the right thing. He’s not guilt-ridden, seeking redemption, or complicated. It might be a teeny bit more interesting if he were. Action, rated R, 99 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
WHERE’S MY ROY COHN?
The first thing you notice are the dead eyes. They’re the eyes of a psychopath, hooded eyes that observe and measure untroubled by any glimmer of empathy. They’re the eyes of Roy Cohn, who spearheaded the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, served as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting reign of terror, trampled professional standards until he was finally disbarred for unethical conduct, and denied to his last breath his homosexuality and the AIDS virus that was gnawing away his life. Director Matt Tyrnauer uses interviews and clips of old newsreels and television appearances to paint a damning picture of the man, and to draw an implicit line between his two most famous creatures: McCarthy, and the man who now occupies the Oval Office, Donald J. Trump. The film’s title is drawn from Trump’s plaintive outburst when his then-attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation. But the Trump-Cohn relationship, while its implications permeate the film, doesn’t dominate its narrative. Tyrnauer marshals his sources to assemble a picture of a brilliant man without a conscience for whom winning, by any means, was all that mattered. Documentary, rated PG-13, 97 minutes, Center for Contemporary Arts. (Jonathan Richards)
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 post-apocalyptic 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. The film doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely braindead either. Comedy, rated R, 99 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (A.O. Scott/The New York Times)