Review: 'The Secrets of Dumbledore' moves the Wizarding World forward a bit, but is mostly spinning its wheels

One imagines director David Yates, who with “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” has now helmed seven movies in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy realm — er, Wizarding World™ — with diminishing returns, waking up from a butterbeer hangover and mumbling to himself, like Martin Sheen’s character in “Apocalypse Now,” “I’m still only in Hogwart’s.”

The third installment in the prequel series to Rowling’s “Harry Potter” saga has fixed some of the problems of the terrible second chapter, “The Crimes of Grindelwald” — but still has a way to go to justify its existence beyond a money machine aimed at the fans who will shell out for anything that drops the word “Hufflepuff” in the script occasionally.

The new film picks up pretty much where the last one did, with Gellert Grindelwald amassing his army of wizards and witches, to carry out his plot to give magical folk dominion over the Muggle-centered world. Key to this plan is to groom brooding young Credence (Ezra Miller) for a mission to kill the one wizard Grindelwald cannot act against himself: Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law). 

A note here about the casting of Grindelwald. At the end of the first “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” and through the second film, the villain was played by Johnny Depp. After headlines about Depp’s private life (which people can argue about on their own time), he was replaced by the great Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who brings a pleasantly patrician air to the character’s evil scheming.

Alas, the series is still saddled with Eddie Redmayne, mumbling and stumbling through the role of “magizoologist” Newt Scamander. Newt is again enlisted by Dumbledore, his old Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, to help thwart Grindelwald’s plans. For reasons that are overexplained eventually, a creature that Newt pursues early in the film becomes a significant part of the story.

Joining Newt in Dumbledore’s Army 1.0 are his brother, Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), American charms professor Eulalia “Lally” Hicks (Jessica Williams), Newt’s lovestruck assistant Bunty (Victoria Yeates), French-Senegalese wizard Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), and New York baker — and Newt’s no-maj friend — Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler). Their plan is to have no plan, to attack in as many surprising ways as possible to keep Grindelwald from predicting their next move. 

Complicating their efforts is Grindelwald’s newest minion, telepath Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol) — who is also Jacob’s lost love. (The whereabouts of Queenie’s sister Tina — the American auror played in the first two films by Katherine Waterston — are left a mystery for most of the movie.)

The script — by Rowling, with a severe rewrite by Steve Kloves, who adapted most of the Potter books — works double-time to insert Newt and his animal expertise into the story, though his scenes tend to be goofier than anything else happening. The main story, which deals with Grindelwald’s rise to power, is laden with allusions to current authoritarian politics, while Kloves finally lets Dumbledore make a declaration of love that Rowling never permitted in her books.

The series, though, is still circling when it needs to get to the point. If Warner Bros. lets the franchise wrap up the story according to canon — starting the First Wizarding War, which means the eventual rise of Lord Voldemort — maybe we’ll get movies that are more payoff than set-up.

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‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some fantasy action/violence. Running time: 142 minutes.

Review: 'Better Nate than Ever' is pure Disney cotton candy, with a surprising twist

On one level, the new Disney Channel — I mean, Disney+ — all-ages comedy “Better Nate than Ever” is the sort of low-budget, slapped-together affair the House of Mouse cranks out when it isn’t spending 100 times as much on the next live-action adaptation of one of their animated classics.

On another level, though, “Better Nate than Ever” fits in the Disney mold of fun, uplifting stories about charming underdogs overcoming adversity. But with an important twist: The 13-year-old protagonist, played winningly by newcomer Rueby Wood, is gay.

OK, so Nate Foster never says he’s gay, and no one else calls him that. But what Nate does say leaves no doubt in his or anyone else’s mind. Also, writer-director Tim Federle — who’s the showrunner for “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” — has embedded cultural signifiers that, in another era, would be all that was necessary to spell it out: Nate’s obsession over Broadway musicals, the framed photo of Bernadette Peters on his dresser, the rainbow rabbits foot that dangles from his backpack.

Nate, in middle school in Pittsburgh, desperately wants a lead role in the school play, but barely makes the chorus — where he’ll get to hang out with his best friend, the remarkably zen Libby (Aria Brooks). It’s Libby who discovers an open audition on Broadway for child roles in “Lily & Stitch: The Musical.” (Somewhere in a cubicle in Disney’s corporate offices, some bright bulb is going, “Say, that’s not a bad idea.”)

Nate and Libby hatch a plan to sneak out of their homes and catch a Greyhound to New York, so Nate can audition. The stars align to help them: Obnoxious big brother Anthony (Joshua Bassett, from “HSM:TM:TS”) will be away at a track meet, and their parents, Sherrie and Rex (Michelle Federer and Norbert Leo Butz), are taking an anniversary spa trip. 

Once Nate and Libby hit New York, things so in unexpected directions. (Well, unexpected for them. The audience knows where this is all going.) One unexpected incident is that Nate and Libby run into Nate’s Aunt Heidi (Lisa Kudrow), a constantly striving stage actress and cater waiter. We’re told that Heidi and Sherrie haven’t spoken to each other in years — because Heidi skipped Sherrie and Rex’s wedding because she got a callback.

So the story is as straightforward as can be. What makes it fun is how Federle (who wrote the middle-school-level novel on which this is based) delivers the goods. Nate dreams in musical numbers that show him the best- and worst-case scenarios for how his New York adventure will go. And his audition scenes are bravura turns of stage-kid inventiveness. (My favorite is his monologue, quoted verbatim from an episode of “Designing Women.”)

What makes this all work are the two kid leads, Brooks (who appeared in Nickelodeon’s recent revival of its sketch show “All That”) and especially Wood, making his screen debut. (He’s not completely green, though — he played Charlie in a national tour of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” before the pandemic.) Wood gives Nate the proper levels of gumption, grit and desperation that propel him from Pittsburgh embarrassment to Big Apple hopeful. He makes “Better Nate than Ever” better than it probably deserves to be.

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‘Better Nate than Ever’

★★★

Starts streaming Friday, April 1, on Disney+. Rated PG for thematic elements, a suggestive reference and mild language. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'You Won't Be Alone' is a moody telling of a disturbingly fractured folk tale

As horror movies go, writer-director Goran Stolevski’s feature debut “You Won’t Be Alone” is at once visually disturbing and emotionally tender — a good trick for a movie about a body-changing witch.

The residents of a mountain village in Macedonia, somewhere in the 1800s, are terrified of the stories of a baby-eating witch that stalks the area. The gnarled old witch, Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), thinks she’s found a baby — but the child’s mother makes a bargain for the witch to return when the girl has come of age. 

Nevena’s mom raises the girl in a cave, hoping to keep Maria from finding her. But when Nevena (played as an adult by Sara Klimoska) turns 16, Maria returns to claim her prize. Nevena runs away, but Maria catches her, and starts training her in the art of surviving as a witch. 

Nevena has to pick up the main trick on her own: How to take over the bodies of humans, so as to blend in with them. Nevena bounces from village to village, and from body to body; some of her victims include Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth Salander in the original “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy) and Alice Englert (“The Power of the Dog”).

Stolevski, who is of Australian and Macedonian heritage, is stronger on mood than plot, and he creates some stunning and disturbing visuals, particularly of the bloody body-switching process. He understands that the line between folk legend and fairy tale is a blurry one, and there’s something that’s satisfyingly Grimm in the way the story plays out.

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‘You Won’t Be Alone’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 1, in theaters. Rated R for violence and gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, and sexual assault. Running time: 108 minutes; in Macedonian, with subtitles.

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This review originally appeared on this website on January 23, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Morbius' lets Jared Leto cut loose as a neo-vampire, but then sucks the life out of him with a mishmash of action scenes.

For awhile, the comic-book action movie “Morbius” — a “Spider-Man”-adjacent character in the Sony-controlled part of the Marvel back catalog — is an interesting enough little thriller, with Jared Leto playing a determined but not-evil scientist who gets the thrills and consequences of playing God.

Then, just past the hour mark, director Daniel Espinosa (who made the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring space thriller “Life”) and writers Matt Salaam and Burk Sharpless settle into the toothless series of chaotic fight sequences we all knew was coming.

Leto plays the title character, Dr. Michael Morbius, a brilliant doctor and researcher, specializing in blood-borne diseases like the one that’s left him on crutches since he was a child. He thinks the breakthrough he’s seeking will come by combining the DNA of vampire bats with the human genetic code.

He’s bankrolled on this by his longtime friend Lucien (Matt Smith), who’s super-rich and has the same disease — and whom Morbius calls Milo for reasons randomly explained in a flashback. He’s aided by his brilliant assistant, Dr. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), who’s suggested as a love interest only because pickings are slim in this script.

Sure enough, Morbius tries his DNA experiment on himself, and immediately he’s hale and hearty, off the crutches and sporting washboard abs. Oh, and he wants to feast on human blood, and took out a crew of mercenaries after his first transformation. He manages to hold off on further urges for red blood, thanks to a supply of artificial blood (which he invented, as the script tells us earlier). But the artificial blood’s potency is wearing off faster and faster, a couple of FBI agents (Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal) are nosing around, and Lucien/Milo eagerly wants a taste of what Morbius took.

There are some cool images mixed into the standard action beats — namely, the liquid-like effect that visualizes Morbius’ bat-like echolocation. But the action sequences in the second half are frenzied and random, so much so that a viewer has to wait for characters to stop fighting just so we can see who’s winning.

Odd that playing a man transforming into a vampire feels like a more lived-in, relaxed performance for Leto than his cartoonish Italian fop in “House of Gucci,” but at least he seems to be having fun with it. It’s also enjoyable to watch Smith, the former “Doctor Who” star, sink his teeth (pardon the pun) into a villain role.

Of course, being something with the word “Marvel” in the credits, “Morbius” can’t be satisfied with just being its own thing. Stay through the main credits, as the MCU has trained us to do, and there’s a hint at future franchise movies to come, a beloved actor wasting his talents in armored supervillain garb, and a dull reminder that origin movies like this only exist to set up the next one.

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‘Morbius’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, some frightening images, and brief strong language. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'The Lost City' delivers forgettable fun, but stars Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are charming together

There was a time when a movie like “The Lost City” would arrive, promising good-looking movie stars doing silly things through a wafer-thin plot, and we’d all enjoy ourselves and forget about the experience by the time we got back to our car.

“The Lost City” delivers that same kind of fun, forgettable moviegoing that we used to do — and if that’s not a sign that we’re returning to “normal,” I don’t know what is.

The pretty stars here are Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum — and let’s hear it for a movie that runs the 16-year age gap between its stars in the not-usual direction. Bullock plays Loretta Sage, a former archaeologist turned romance novelist, who hides out in her house to avoid dealing with the world or her widowhood, now going on five years. Tatum plays Alan, the male model who graces the covers of Loretta’s books, who’s really into the role of Loretta’s hero, Dash.

Loretta and Alan don’t get along — though it’s more accurate to say that Loretta doesn’t like Alan; his feelings for her are rather more complicated. So Alan becomes determined to rescue Loretta when the book tour for her latest novel, “The Lost City of D,” is interrupted by a crazed billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) who kidnaps her when she’s wearing a body-hugging sequined magenta jumpsuit that makes her look like a 5-foot-7 bike reflector.

The billionaire — whose name, Abigail Fairfax, is just one of the things for which he’s overcompensating — believes Loretta, because of the archaeological knowledge she embeds in her romances, has the key to discovering the real “Lost City,” on a tropical Atlantic island.

Alan’s plan to rescue Loretta centers on getting her publisher, Beth (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), to hire a savvy tracker, Jack (Brad Pitt), to infiltrate the island and save Loretta. Alan can’t help but tag along, though, which becomes important when — for reasons I don’t want to spoil — the rescue falls on Alan to complete.

The tag-teamed script boasts five credited writers — the last two being the directors, brothers Adam and Aaron Nee — and is a carefree mishmash of “Indiana Jones” adventure and romantic comedy squabbling. It’s that banter, between Bullock’s flinty Loretta and Tatum’s eager-to-please Alan that provides most of the movie’s entertainment value, though a word of praise for Radcliffe’s petulant villain and Randolph’s scene-stealing as Beth, traversing the Atlantic in pursuit of her star author.

“The Lost City” isn’t a big movie, even with its big stars. It’s out to provide audiences with an undemanding good time. It’s a modest goal, but it’s one the movie reaches.

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‘The Lost City’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'Infinite Storm' needs more than Naomi Watts' performance against the elements

The drama “Infinite Storm” gives Naomi Watts the one-against-the-wild showcase that Robert Redford had in “All Is Lost” and Emile Hirsch had in “Into the Wild” — but here, it’s not quite enough to fill the bill.

Watts plays a real-life person, Pam Bales, an experienced hiker and climber who one day, in October 2010, went on a hike up her local peak, Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. Her friend (Denis O’Hare) back at the diner in town warns her of the storm the weather service has predicted is coming, and Pam says she’ll be careful and head back well before the storm hits. Pam’s a veteran of the local search-and-rescue team, so she’s confident she’ll come back down safely.

At the trailhead, Pam notices a car with no apparent owner. She starts her hike, and after a while, the snow and the wind turn harsh. That’s when she seeks sneaker prints in the snow, leading to a guy (Billy Howle) who’s unresponsive and improperly dressed for the surroundings and the weather. He’s barely conscious, and unable to give his name — so Pam calls him John.

The bulk of first-time writer Joshua Rollins’ script involves Pam gutting out a way to get herself and John down from that mountain, through howling winds and freezing temperatures. There’s also a backstory, with flashbacks of Pam playing with her two daughters — who, notably, are nowhere to be seen in the non-flashback scenes.

Polish-born director Malgorzata Szumowska does her best work guiding Watts through the physically grueling performance, braving the elements in New Hampshire (or, really Slovenia, where the movie was filmed). Watts gives her all, physically and psychologically, in depicting Bales’ inner struggles and her grit as she wills herself into saving this stranger from the mountain.

Where “Infinite Storm” falls short are in Szumowska’s and Rollins’ efforts to try to retrofit a larger life lesson onto this simple survival story. It doesn’t help Rollins that Hoyle’s character is a cipher, a blank slate onto which Rollins — and, apparently, Bales — could write whatever narrative they needed to make it home. 

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‘Infinite Storm’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some language and brief nudity. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Compartment No. 6' is a long, cold train ride through Russia, with two engaging traveling companions

Let’s tackle the big Russian elephant in the room first: I’m not sure now is the right time, what with Vladimir Putin sending the Russian army to invade a sovereign democracy, for a movie where a gruff-but-sensitive Russian laborer is one of the main protagonists.

But those are the cards dealt to us in “Compartment No. 6,” last year’s Grand Prix winner (second place) at the Cannes Film Festival, a Russo-Finnish drama about warming hearts in a cold place.

The titular compartment is shared by two passengers on a train from Moscow to the far-north city of Murmansk. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is wide-eyed student from Finland, in Russia to learn the language and curious to see Murmansk’s famous petroglyphs. Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) is a hard-drinking Russian construction worker, headed to Murmansk because there are jobs there.

As the trip starts, Laura pines for Irina (Diner Drukarova), a Moscow intellectual with whom Laura was romantically involved — and who was supposed to accompany her on this train ride. Soon after they part, though, Laura learns a hard truth in a single phone call.

Laura and Ljoha take an immediate dislike to each other. She finds him boorish and sexist, and possibly threatening. He finds her standoffish, more interested in looking at her video camera than interacting with real people, like him.

As the train ride goes on, though, they start to see things in each other that are more appealing. That makes it sound like “Compartment No. 6” is a cut-and-dried romance, and it’s not — because Haarla and Borisov bring some complex shades to the characters, and Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen (who co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Feldmanis, adapting a novel by Rosa Liksom) provides the room during this long train ride to let them explore those shades and take the story down tracks one doesn’t expect.

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‘Compartment No. 6’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for language and some sexual references. Running time: 107 minutes; in Finnish and Russian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Deep Water' is an unhinged erotic thriller where Ben Affleck lurks in fascinating ways

The overheated erotic thriller “Deep Water” confirms something that’s been in the back of my mind for awhile: Ben Affleck is a really good actor who gives some truly weird performances — and his work here is one of the stranger ones.

Affleck stars as Vic Van Allen, a tech genius who’s retired off the obscene wealth he made designing a guidance system for military drones. He spends most of his time cycling through his well-to-do town and the nearby woods, editing a vanity literary magazine, raising snails in his garage, and keeping an eye on his wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas).

What does Melinda do? Nearly every younger man who comes within flirting distance. This often happens at neighborhood parties, in full view of all of the Val Allens’ friends — and of Vic himself. Vic’s friends (Lil Rey Howery and Dash Mihok) tell Vic, for his own good, that they feel embarrassed for him watching Melinda cavorting with other guys.

Vic and Melinda, it appears, have an arrangement in which she can fool around with other guys, as long as she doesn’t abandon Vic and their six-year-old daughter, Trixie (Grace Jenkins). There are limits, though — as one young beau, Joel (Brendan C. Miller) discovers when Vic mentions a friend of Melinda’s who went missing. Vic tells Joel that he murdered this friend — a story that family friends read as a twisted joke, but Joel takes seriously enough to steer clear of Melinda.

Someone else takes the joke seriously. That’s Don Wilson (Tracy Letts), a newcomer to town, a TV writer who fancies himself a detective novelist. Don starts piecing things together — especially after a different guy (Jacob Elordi) drowns at a pool party, when Vic was the last guy to see him alive.

Director Adrian Lyne used to make his bones with sexually charged thrillers like this — his deep resume includes “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal” and 2002’s “Unfaithful,” the last movie he made for 20 years, until now. Lyne’s fastball isn’t what it used to be, but he still knows how to handle the curve, or rather curves, as he captures de Armas (“Knives Out”) as a character with few qualms about getting naked in front of her seemingly unfeeling husband. Lyne also generates some erotic frisson in the scenes between Affleck and de Armas (this was filmed back when the two were dating), whether they’re having sex or avoiding it.

In adapting the novel by Patricia HIghsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”), screenwriters Zach Helm (“Stranger than Fiction”) and Sam Levinson (who created HBO’s “Euphoria”) achieve a certain twisted tension, as Lyne follows Affleck’s Vic through his daily routine — leaving viewers to guess what’s sinister and what’s just mundane. Affleck’s passive facial expressions make the mystery even more inscrutable.

It’s a shame, after all the work at building this strange tension, that the last 10 minutes are bungled in almost comical fashion. What was intensely watchable, through Affleck’s brooding and de Armas’ raw sexuality, becomes unmissable as an example of a movie where the wheels come off in the final chapter.

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‘Deep Water’

★★★

Starts streaming Friday, March 18, 2022, on Hulu. Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language and some violence. Running time: 116 minutes.