PG, 2:10, musical
This chaotic, pushy remake of Disney's 1991 screen musical “Beauty and the Beast” stresses the challenges of adapting a success in one form (animation) for another (live-action). The high points of director Bill Condon's resume suggest he was the right person for this big-budget remake. But his new movie is a disappointment, despite its best supporting turns, human and animatronic. Emma Watson makes for a genial, bland-ish Belle, the outsider in her provincial French village. Underneath the digital fur and digital roars, Dan Stevens as the Beast, the transformed prince working on a rose-petaled deadline to become human again, locates some moments of pathos that stick.
PG-13, 2:00, action/adventure
“Kong: Skull Island” is better, lighter on its feet (digital feet and human feet) and more fun than its reported $190 million production budget would suggest. I don't know what you'd call it: a franchise reboot? A sequel to Peter Jackson's 2005 “King Kong,” which I admired, but didn't enjoy like this one? Any movie with the sense, the wit and the visual instincts to introduce Kong the way this one does is fine with me. Booooom, the mighty paw slams down on the top of a cliff as Skull Island's landlord rises up to check out the first humans we see on screen. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts' film zips along and treats the Kong mythology seriously without getting balled up in the storytelling.
R, 2:17, action/adventure
Director James Mangold's picture is the most solemn, sentimental and relentlessly violent of the nine films featuring Hugh Jackman, either in the lead or in a cameo, as the furry mutant with the blood-stained blades of glory. It's set in 2029, when the specially gifted mutant population has been decimated. Laura, played by a first-rate scowler named Dafne Keen, is a mini-Wolverine cloned from our hero's blood. She is being pursued by security goon Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and his “Mad Max”-interns posse. “Logan” is deadly serious, and while its gamer-style killing sprees are meant to be excitingly brutal, I found them numbing and, in the climax, borderline offensive.
R, 1:44, horror
Writer-director Jordan Peele's satirically shrewd, bracingly effective thriller opens with a young African-American man walking along a dark suburban street. Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, has been dating Rose, an easygoing sort portrayed by Allison Williams, for several months. It's time, she determines, to meet her parents. “Get Out” offers some choice comic details in its main character's journey into the land beyond the pale. The film is a little of everything: unnerving; funny in just the right way and at the right times; and serious about its observations and perspectives on racial animus.
PG-13, 2:12, drama
If Octavia Spencer is God, then Lord, take me to church. A folksy Spencer serving up homemade baked goods is the vision of the divine in “The Shack,” Stuart Hazeldine's faith-based drama, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by William P. Young. Mack Phillips (Sam Worthington) is a wayward soul who's been dealt a few bad cards in life. Mack receives a mysterious invitation in the mail: a note asking him to a weekend getaway at the shack where his daughter was likely killed. There he's greeted not by a child killer, but by a trio of groovy spiritual teachers in a tropical wooded paradise.
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