R, 1:44, horror
At this point in 2018, a movie featuring three generations of victimized women squaring off against a predatory male is destined to find an audience. The new “Halloween” couldn’t miss even if it were set on Arbor Day. And there’s Jamie Lee Curtis, revisiting the role of baby sitter Laurie Strode. Laurie has lived with the traumatic baggage of the “baby sitter murders” through failed marriages and a drinking problem. Her grown daughter (Judy Greer), semi-estranged, doesn’t get why mom can’t just move on. Curtis is a tough, terse, authentic presence, and the big finish delivers.
R, 2:15, drama
The new “Star Is Born” with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper is a shamelessly effective pathos machine. Cooper’s Jackson Maine is a roots-rock singer-songwriter battling chemical demons and a restless emptiness. We first meet Jackson on tour. Waitress Ally (Gaga) with that certain special something enters Jackson’s wobbly orbit soon enough. Two bars into Ally’s drag-bar rendition of “La Vie en Rose,” the man is hooked. Ally’s loving, devoted father believes in her talent more than she does. Gaga’s easy, offhanded command of the screen matches up well with Cooper’s sincere, straight-ahead portrayal of a decent man undermining his own talent, at times cruelly.
PG-13, 1:52, action
Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, San Francisco investigative reporter and unwilling host body for alien Symbiote Venom. The film’s first half is a character study, juxtaposing the freewheeling but principled reporter Eddie with nemesis Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), a shady biotech entrepreneur who would rather inhabit outer space than try to disrupt climate change and who has a shocking disregard for human life. After receiving a tip from Dr. Skirth (Jenny Slate), Eddie breaks into a lab hoping to collect evidence that Drake has been abusing and killing homeless people for Symbiote trials. Venom inhabits Eddie’s body and turns him into an unlikely killing machine.
PG, 1:30, comedy
The 2015 adaptation of R.L. Stine’s popular “Goosebumps” book series was way better than it had any right to be. But this follow-up is a serious disappointment. 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. The plot is of little consequence. All that matters is once Slappy’s out of the box, he wants to make some mischief. It’s a shame “Goosebumps 2” misses the mark so badly, when the original was such a hoot.
R, 2:01, thriller
The movie that puts the “so?” in “sonar,” “Hunter Killer,” based on the 2012 novel “Firing Point,” is less a submarine picture and more a noisy, oddly structured mashup of Russian military coup and Navy SEALs rescue operation. Gerard Butler plays Joe Glass, a clever, uncompromising, newly promoted commander in a pickle. A U.S. sub has been lost in the Arctic. A Russian sub, meanwhile, has been seriously damaged, sabotaged from within. “Hunter Killer” gets lost in digital effects and jumpy editing and Glass flipping his lucky coin, over and over, like an underwater George Raft.
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