BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE

R, 141 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook, Lisbon. Still playing at Stonington. Even though “Bad Times at the El Royale” is only the second film he’s directed, writer and director Drew Goddard is already an auteur. He made his name as a TV writer on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Lost,” and wrote scripts for such films as “Cloverfield” and “The Martian.” But with his 2012 directorial debut, the devilishly clever horror flick “The Cabin in the Woods,” Goddard proved what really makes him tick: the meta genre exercise. The contained hotel mystery “Bad Times” is another exercise in genre play. This time, it’s the retro crime thriller. Set over one night in the late 1960s, a group of misfits check into the deserted El Royale hotel in Lake Tahoe, which straddles the border of California and Nevada, a state line running right down the middle. Priest Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges), singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), vacuum salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm) and a grumpy young hippie (Dakota Johnson) retire to their rooms, where all their secrets come out to play. Money, murder and mayhem ensue, and the pulpy, twisty story and swinging ‘60s style make “Bad Times” feel like an episode of “Mad Men” with a Tarantino twist. With its stars playing shady characters with murky pasts, one character in the film stands out: the El Royale itself, a sparkling midcentury gem of a set production designer Martin Whist built in Vancouver. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

COLETTE

R, 111 minutes. Playing at Niantic. Starts Friday at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Visually delightful, deliciously funny and delectably bawdy, “Colette” earns Keira Knightley official status as queen of the period film. Her radiant performance as Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), the mercurial French novelist, actress and sexual adventurer, gives that passionate life and storied career a distinctly individual reading. Not many could pull off a role as a great writer with a cultish fan base who is also an authentic feminist hero, yet Knightley est magnifique. Her story begins as a young girl being courted by a prosperous older gentleman, even though he is basically the last man on Earth she would ever want to marry. Nevertheless, they fall deeply, mutually in erotically charged love. It’s a setup Knightley played expertly opposite Matthew Macfadyen in 2005’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and here she does it equally well with Dominic West. Her unlikely husband to be is Henry Gauthier-Villara, a Parisian toff and small-scale publishing entrepreneur who matches her sharp, fast wit like an ideal fencing partner. He commands a tiny crew of writers to ghostwrite stories from ideas he flings their way, printing them under his pen name, Willy. While Willy’s apartment and business headquarters is palatial compared with her family’s rural home, and his friends are upper-crust, his finances ride the razor’s edge of disaster. When his hired hands can’t produce new copy fast enough to meet his luxury bills and gambling debts, he recruits his silver-tongued new bride to turn her memories of country life into a slim novel. Drawing observations from her own life, she effectively reinvents the novel and becomes the most important woman in France’s literary history. — Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

CRAZY RICH ASIANS

1/2 PG-13, 120 minutes. Westbrook. “Crazy Rich Asians,” a fairy-tale rom-com with a Chinese-Singaporean twist, begins with a story of racism, elitism and tables turned. In a flashback, Eleanor Young, played by the regal Michelle Yeoh, walks into an exclusive London hotel with her children. Turned away by the sneering concierge, Eleanor goes outside to make a phone call. When she returns, she’s the hotel’s new owner. It doesn’t ring true, but it’s a delicious fantasy — and that pretty much describes the entirety of “Crazy Rich Asians,” based on Kevin Kwan’s novel. It’s the peasant-to-princess story of Rachel Chu, a Chinese-American economics professor at NYU (Constance Wu), whose boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding, a Malaysian-born Hugh Grant), turns out to be the wealthiest and most eligible bachelor in Singapore. Their visit to his homeland, for an old friend’s wedding, pulls back the curtain on a world of fantastic Eastern wealth that Rachel never knew existed. As in any fairy tale, there’s an evil matriarch — the imperious and elitist Eleanor — who will prove a stumbling block to Rachel’s dreams of happily-ever-after. — Rafer Guzmán, Newsday

FIRST MAN

PG-13, 141 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The most captivating sequence in “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s heart-stirring, nerve-jangling new movie about Neil Armstrong’s voyage to the moon, is in some ways the least surprising. If you were glued to a TV screen on July 20, 1969, you will be watching a truncated version of history replay itself: After the Eagle lands, Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) plants one foot on the lunar surface and utters a line that no screenwriter could improve upon. But you will also find yourself transported anew by a scene whose technical ingenuity and emotional force reminded me of nothing so much as Dorothy opening her front door to Oz for the first time. The door, in this case, is attached to the Apollo 11’s lunar module, and on the other side is not a Technicolor wonderland but rather a vast, monochrome blankness. The visuals are majestic, but the most arresting effect might be the sound, which briefly drops out entirely: In space, no one can hear you gasp. The sheer sublimity of this sequence stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the movie, which is framed with almost defiant inelegance. “First Man” is a viscerally, sometimes maddeningly idiosyncratic piece of filmmaking. Adapted from James R. Hansen’s 2012 Armstrong biography, the movie has been shot and structured as a series of ruptures — physical and emotional, individual and collective — that eventually give birth to a rare, serene moment of triumph. Some in the audience may look back on that triumph and see an inevitability, a logical culmination of manifest destiny. But “First Man,” shunning the temptations of revisionism, unfolds in a jagged, immediate present tense in which uncertainty is the only certainty. Gosling invests his Armstrong with taciturn grace and an artfully dimmed version of the movie-star charm that animated “La La Land.” — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

GOOSEBUMPS 2: HAUNTED HALLOWEEN

PG-13. Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The 2015 adaptation of R.L. Stine’s popular “Goosebumps” book series was way better than it had any right to be. Starring Jack Black as a freewheeling version of the author, the film was a kid-friendly Halloween spookfest that examined the way we use horror as a coping mechanism in everyday life. It was smart and silly and scary, anchored by the inimitable Black. But the follow-up, “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween,” is a serious disappointment, starting with how Black is barely in it. Less Black, less ‘bumps, as it turns out. It’s not just the lack of Black that has a detrimental effect. There’s a changeover of writing and directing teams, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and director Rob Letterman replaced by writer Rob Lieber and director Ari Sandel. Darren Lemke stays on as co-writer, but no holdovers from the original cast, either. Turning it into an anthology franchise, there’s a new group of kids in a new town, Wardenclyffe, N.Y., who are taken in by the evil machinations of ventriloquist dummy Slappy. Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and his friend Sam (Caleel Harris) pick up Slappy at an old creepy house while doing a junk run. Of course they promptly recite the incantation found in his pocket, as one does when one happens upon a terrifying puppet, and bring him home. Slappy, who apparently longs for a family, is happy to ingratiate himself with Sonny’s sister, Sarah (Madison Ives), a senior struggling with a scummy boyfriend and college applications, and their harried, snarky mom, Kathy (Wendi McLendon-Covey). The plot is of little consequence. All that matters is once Slappy’s out of the box, he wants to make some mischief, and mischief he makes, with the assistance of all the creatures he brings into existence. But instead of raising R.L. Stine’s monsters from the page, Slappy merely animates every Halloween decoration in sight. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

HALLOWEEN

R, 106 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. With hollow eyes and sagging cheeks, the flabby white mask of Michael Myers is horror’s great blank slate. Project your fears here, it says. Myers doesn’t speak. His movements never rise beyond a deliberate gait (well, aside from all the stabbing and strangling). Even his name is purposefully bland. Decades after John Carpenter’s slasher landmark, David Gordon Green has resurrected the faceless Boogeyman of “Halloween” and set him loose on another Halloween night, 40 years later. Time has done little for Michael’s personality. He is still a poor conversationalist. (He hasn’t uttered a word in the intervening decades, says a doctor at the sanatorium that holds him.) He is still handy with a knife. There are no roman numerals in the title of Green’s film, nor any of those dopey subtitles like 1998’s “Halloween H20,” which presumably delved into the very real fears of dehydration. As if to draw closer to the original (and to ignore the nine sequels and reboots in between), this “Halloween” has simply taken Carpenter’s 1978 title. And with gliding cameras, Carpenter’s score and original cast members Jamie Lee Curtis and Nick Castle (the man under the mask), it has tried very hard to take much more, too. But while Green’s “Halloween,” which he penned with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, has faithfully adopted much of what so resonated in Carpenter’s genre-creating film — the stoic killer, the gruesome executions, the suburban nightmares — what makes his “Halloween” such a thrill is how it deviates from its long-ago predecessor. Setting the template for countless slashers to follow, Carpenter’s film often reserved its most painful endings for more promiscuous girls or drug-using teens. As a grim reaper carrying out a metaphorical reckoning, Michael had questionable biases. But what Carpenter did do was equate sex with violence, a connection that Green has elaborated on with a more feminist streak. Having survived the “Babysitter Murders” of 40 years ago, Laurie Strode (a fabulously fierce Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising the role that was her film debut) is now a self-described “twice-divorced basket case” living in a run-down house on the outskirts of the fictional Haddonfield, Illinois. She has turned her home into a training ground

and domestic fortification for the second coming of Michael she’s always been sure will happen. — Jake Coyle, Associated Press

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