The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Unstarred films have not been reviewed by our writers.
OPENING TODAY:
Ad Astra—A tortured but calm Brad Pitt traverses the solar system in search of his lost father. Rated PG-13.
Downton Abbey—King George V and Queen Mary pay a visit to the abbey and cause a flurry of activity in this spin-off of the television series. Rated PG.
★★★★ Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins—A longtime leading voice of the liberal left for more than fifty years, journalist Molly Ivins, receives a documentary treatment that puts her barbed humor on display. —Glenn McDonald
ONGOING:
Rambo: Last Blood—The Vietnam War was a long time ago now, but wily veteran Rambo is still out here, this time rescuing a friend’s daughter from a drug cartel. Rated R.
★★½ Angel Has Fallen—Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is back for a third go-around, this time framed for an assassination attempt on POTUS. It’s silly, but not as wretched as London Has Fallen. Seeing Nick Nolte as a grizzled conspiracy theorist living off the grid is almost worth the ticket price. Rated R. —Neil Morris
The Angry Birds Movie 2—Jason Sudekis leads a surprisingly decent animated film based on the iPhone game. Rated PG.
Brittany Runs a Marathon—This comedy mines body image for laughs but does so with uplift rather than cringes, as a woman makes positive changes in her life by running a marathon. Rated R.
★★ Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw—The testosterone-driven repartee between Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham is the only reason to endure this cartoonish, logically and temporally challenged CGI fest. Rated PG-13. —NM
★★★★ The Farewell—A family travels to China to say goodbye to the family matriarch, who is dying of cancer. The twist? They feel that it’s more benevolent to not tell her she’s dying. Rated PG. —Sarah Edwards
The Goldfinch—This ponderous adaptation of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning art-and-grief novel was almost universally hated as soon as it appeared. Rated R.
★★★½ Good Boys—The evolution of coming-of-age comedies is that the subjects keep getting younger. In this Superbad for tweens, a trio of sixth-grade BFFs have misadventures as they try to find the cool-kids party. The profuse profanity is cut by the kids’ infectious charm. Rated R. —NM
Hustlers—The true story (based on New York Magazine reporting) of strippers drugging and stealing from Wall Street stock traders is the stuff think pieces are made of. Rated R.
It Chapter Two—The mixed reviews for the second part of Stephen King’s killer-clown opus mainly agree that it’s just not that scary. Rated R.
★★½ The Lion King—Jon Favreau’s photorealistic palette is the boon and bane of Disney’s “live-action” computer rendering of an animated classic, which goes wrong when the animals start talking. Rated PG. —NM
★★★★ Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice—Wisely, this documentary focuses on the versatility of Ronstadt’s voice, using it as a symbol for everything she represented during her tenure as the Queen of Rock: adaptability, doggedness, a certain moral clarity. Unrated.—Sarah Edwards
★★ Once Upon a Time In Hollywood—Quentin Tarantino portrays the late-sixties Hollywood film industry and vaguely mumbles something about the Manson family in this tedious, irrelevant exercise in bland nostalgia for a bygone era of unaccountable hypermasculinity. Rated R. —Marta Núñez Pouzols
★★★ The Peanut Butter Falcon—This heartwarming Tom-and-Huck tale features a breakout performance by Zack Gottsagen, who has Down Syndrome, and a soulful Shia LaBeouf reminds us why he’s got a career to endanger with off-screen antics. Rated PG-13. —GM
Ready or Not—Samara Weaving plays a new bride drawn into a brutal game of hide-and-seek with her husband’s wealthy family in this class-ragey, genre-blurring horror-comedy-thriller. Rated R.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark—The classic anthology of ghoulish stories for kids (kids who could stand to be truly terrified, anyway) gets mined for incidents in this throwback horror film. Rated PG-13.
★★½ Spider-Man: Far from Home—It’s a bedrock truism that a superhero story is only as good as its villain. Everyone knows this, except, evidently, the screenwriters of Far From Home. Mysterio’s motivations are entirely and conspicuously dumb. Rated PG-13. —GM
★★★ Toy Story 4—A spork’s severe ontological distress and suicidal impulses are a crazy thing to find in this half-daring, half-predictable extension of a beloved animated franchise. Rated G. —NM
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