nowshowing ELEMENTAL
movies at local cinemas
ABOUT MY FATHER
★ 1/2
PG-13, 89 minutes. Westbrook.
As an actor, Sebastian Maniscalco is a great comedian. And that’s pretty much how “About My Father” goes: As a movie, it never feels like anything more than material that would be better served in one of Maniscalco’s killer stand-up routines.
— Adam Graham, Detroit News
THE BLACKENING
★★ 1/2
R, 96 minutes. Waterford.
Horror-comedy “The Blackening” started as a way to skewer a tired trope: the frequency with which Black characters are killed first in horror movies. Though this cliche has been called out frequently by horror fans and Black audiences, here it serves as the entire premise for a feature film, posing a provocative question: if all the characters in the horror movie are Black, who dies first? A 2018 Comedy Central sketch by the comedy group 3PEAT was the proof of concept for “The Blackening,” and the video, in which a group of friends debate “who’s the Blackest?”
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
THE BOOGEYMAN
★★★
PG-13, 98 minutes. Lisbon.
Things go bump in the night, and then some, in “The Boogeyman,” director Rob Savage’s well-played horror exercise that alternately goes from slow and brooding to loud and booming. It’s a movie that uses trauma as a catch-all, a perhaps too-convenient way to explain away the monsters underneath our beds or lurking behind open closet doors.
— Adam Graham, Detroit News
★★★
PG, 103 minutes. Mystic, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon, Madison, United Westerly.
It’s fairly rare that beloved animation studio Pixar makes a straightforward romantic movie — the films they produce frequently focus on family love and friendship love, but it’s not often to see a swooning love story between two individuals as we do in Peter Sohn’s “Elemental,” a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” riff featuring the forbidden love between two elements that never easily mix: fire and water. “Elemental” is also an immigrant story, about a family forced to leave one homeland to seek a new life in a strange new place.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
FAST X
★★★
PG-13, 141 minutes. Through today only at Lisbon. Fans and critics may disagree over when exactly the “Fast & Furious” franchise jumped the shark, but there is only one correct answer: When the Pontiac Fiero went into space. Weightless and violating every physical law, the floating car — tasked with bumping a satellite in the ninth installment — was the very symbol of how bloated and crazed the once-plucky series had become. “Fast X” is, thankfully, shackled to Earth’s gravity — sometimes tenuously — but it has become almost camp.
— Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
THE FLASH
★★ 1/2
PG-13, 184 minutes. Mystic, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.
“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” went a 1970s commercial catchphrase. But we learn in “The Flash” — the much awaited, long gestated new DC Studios offering — that it’s Father Time one musn’t cross. Because trying to change the past can really mess you up when you get back to the future and realize you’ve inadvertently changed that, too. We learned that from Marty McFly, immortalized by Eric Stoltz in “Back to the Future.” Relax! Of course it was Michael J. Fox, though Stoltz was initially cast in the role. But in “The Flash,” Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) realizes just how badly he’s messed up the space-time continuum when he arrives back from changing the past and learns that in his current world, Fox never replaced Stoltz. “I’ve destroyed the universe,” he frets. If only the whole film felt this breezily clever and entertaining.
— Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3
★★★
PG-13, 159 minutes. Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.
When Peter “Star-Lord” Quill, while inspecting a murky extraterrestrial region, pressed play on Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” in the first “Guardians of the Galaxy,” it would have been hard to imagine that James Gunn’s space opera would ultimately lead to something as sincere, poignant and kinda cornball as the trilogy-ending “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”
— Jake Coyle, Associated Press
THE LITTLE MERMAID
★★
PG, 135 minutes. Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. It’s not Rob Marshall’s fault that Disney’s latest live-action retread doesn’t really sing. “The Little Mermaid,” a somewhat drab undertaking with sparks of bioluminescence, suffers from the same fundamental issues that plagued “The Lion King,” “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast.” Halle Bailey might be a lovely presence and possesses a superb voice that is distinctly different from Jodi Benson’s, but photorealistic fins, animals and environments do not make Disney fairy tales more enchanting on their own. The essential problem is that the live-action films have prioritized nostalgia and familiarity over compelling visual storytelling.
— Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press
SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDERVERSE
★★★ 1/2
PG, 140 minutes. Through today only at Madison, United Westerly. Still playing at Mystic, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.
Good news. We have a good superhero film! Nothing like the not-good ones we see so often. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” looks like a dream. It’s like reading a comic book, or flipping through a dozen of them, at top speed in between glugs of Mountain Dew and Dots. At its best, “Across the Spider-Verse” offers the same fluid, kinetic, eyeblink-quick storytelling that worked so well in the 2018 animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
— Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS
★ 1/2
PG-13, 117 minutes. Through today only at Mystic. Still playing at Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.
The basics are as such: a giant, planet-eating dark god known as Unicron needs a gleaming key that has been hidden by the Maximals (reminder, those are the beastie bots) in order to gobble as many planets as he’d like, Earth included. What does the key do? Honestly, who knows, it’s just the necessary thingamajig over which the primary players can scrabble and fight throughout a two-hour span.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service