ECHO IN THE CANYON

YESTERDAY

1/2 PG-13, 116 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic, Madison Art Cinemas. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis’ “Yesterday” requires its viewers to take quite a few leaps of faith. First, you have to wholeheartedly buy into the rule that, categorically, the best songs ever written are by The Beatles. They’re great songs, to be sure. But in “Yesterday,” they are revelatory, tear-jerking, Best Songs Ever, no matter the context or who is singing them. It’s very high stakes, but then again, most everything about “Yesterday” is high stakes. This heightened high-concept magical dramedy presents the idea that a weird electrical blip/solar flare causes electricity all over the world to go out, while simultaneously wiping our collective consciousness clean of all traces of The Beatles. Jack (Himesh Patel), a struggling pub musician and busker, is at that moment hit by a bus (thank goodness he’s wearing a helmet), totaling his teeth and his bike tire. But somehow, his memory of The Beatles remains magically intact. He discovers the quirk when, as a get well gift, his pals get him a guitar. And because “a great guitar deserves a great song,” he plays a few bars of The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” absolutely flooring his friends, who wonder when and how he wrote the tune. Jack’s the only person in the world who remembers the band (or so it seems). And so, through a series of jogs in the rain clutching his forehead, he ultimately decides to capitalize on it, sending his career into overdrive. His trajectory to the top is aided by Ed Sheeran, who is apparently now the world’s best songwriter (in this timeline, Oasis does not exist, but the Rolling Stones do), and his manager, Deborah (Kate McKinnon) hears Jack’s crooning and sees dollar signs. Written by Jack Barth and Richard Curtis, the king of the British rom-com (“Love Actually,” “Four Weddings and Funeral,” “About Time”), “Yesterday” is a love story disguised as a high-concept music film. Jack has friend-zoned his best mate, Ellie (Lily James), and through The Beatles’ music and his journey to global superstardom and back, he learns what’s really important in life. Everything in the film is high: high concept, high pressure, high stakes, and it often feels bizarrely forced. Nothing makes any sense and is never explained. The script wobbles underneath its own weight, but Boyle distracts from the issues with his feverish direction. The songs? Great, of course. The story? Strange at best. The characters and aesthetic? Aces. Everyone on screen is just so likable, especially the earnest, open Patel, in a star-making heartthrob turn featuring his crystal-clear singing voice. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service PG-13, 82 minutes. Starts Friday at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. How did an apparently sincere tribute turn into such a weirdly clueless vanity project? The music scene evoked in the documentary “Echo in the Canyon” remains a chimerical wonder, equal parts bliss and chaos. In the 1960s, a daisy chain of like-minded songwriters and performers moved to the winding-road Eden up and over from Hollywood Boulevard, in the area of Los Angeles known as Laurel Canyon. This was the Shakespearean magical-forest part of LA, green and lush, where you couldn’t really hear the traffic or taste the smog. It was (and is, still, sort of) a peaceful exception to most of the rest of the city, though today, driving north on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, there’s usually a long, slow line of cars driven by respectable-looking residents, or by swivel-head tourists wondering where all the hippies went. As Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash (Neil Young came later) puts it in the movie: With “so much great music floating around,” one group’s influences became another’s inspirations. According to “Echo in the Canyon” everything started with The Beatles. George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker guitar caught the ear of countless fellow musicians, among them Roger McGuinn, who tried “taking an old folk song and souping it up with a Beatle beat.” It didn’t catch on for him in New York or, a little later, in LA. And then it did, with The Byrds. People in Laurel Canyon would drop by all the time, remembers Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas in the documentary, “and pretty soon you were writing a hit.” An 82-minute nonfiction film would be silly to strive for that oxymoronic strategy, the “complete overview.” Here we get a full flowering of hits and separate careers, in bits and pieces. The hook for “Echo in the Canyon” is a 2015 tribute concert featuring Jakob Dylan of The Wallflowers, who conducts the on-camera interviews here with more self-conscious cool than easy insight. Onetime Capitol Records head Andrew Slater, who mounted the concert with Dylan, Fiona Apple and other participants, ended up producing and directing the attendant documentary, tossing an inordinate amount of it in the direction of executive producer Dylan, his old friend and fellow Laurel Canyon aficionado. Dylan’s father, Bob, does not appear here. Then again, neither do all sorts of legends vital to the scene’s fame and reputation. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

ANNABELLE COMES HOME

1/2 R, 106 minutes. Started Wednesday at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. In a summer of sequels, third and fourth films in a series have to prove the worthiness of their existence, and some this season haven’t risen to the top. But while it’s easy to scoff at another killer doll film in The Conjuring Universe, the spooky franchise is stealthily successful, and always steadily consistent. “Annabelle Comes Home,” the third “Annabelle” film, which marks the directorial debut of writer Gary Dauberman, could actually be the best in the trilogy. Dauberman has penned the scripts for all three “Annabelle” movies, as well as screenplays for “The Nun” and the 2017 reboot of “It.” He’s an obvious choice to take on “Annabelle Comes Home,” which dives deep into the case history of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) through an ingenious conceit. While Ed and Lorraine head out on assignment, their daughter, Judy (Mckenna Grace), remains at home with her babysitter, Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman), whose meddling friend Daniela (Katie Sarife) makes her way into the room of cursed and haunted objects the Warrens keep under lock and key. Daniela’s objective is to find closure with the spirit of her dead father, but she’s not ready to face the menacing Annabelle. Although Judy warns her against it, it’s too late. And when Daniela unleashes Annabelle, she unleashes just about every evil spirit contained in the room: a werewolf, a haunted wedding gown, a ferrymen who shepherds spirits to another realm. The cursed room is a smart device to get a glimpse of the Warren’s deep case history. It feels like a tribute to the couple’s long and remarkable career in paranormal investigation, written by Dauberman and original “The Conjuring” director James Wan, who clearly know their work inside and out. The tribute is aptly timed, as the real Lorraine passed away in April. “Annabelle Comes Home” is a torch passing to a new generation, featuring Grace as daughter Judy, gifted with similar clairvoyant powers as her mother. The 13-year-old Grace is an uncommonly mature actor for her age, and the film would not be as compelling without such a strong actor in this role (though the “Annabelle” films have always offered platforms for excellent performances from young actresses). But to call her a “scream queen” would be a misnomer. Grace knows when silence and stillness is far more effective than hysteria, and she portrays Judy as a girl who has seen far more than she should in her young life. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service