Review: 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' reboots with 'Mutant Mayhem,' where the stunning animation outpaces a chaotic story

It’s fair to say “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is a matter of style over substance — but when you’ve got this much style going on, it’s difficult for the substance to keep up.

This animated tale is the latest attempt to make movies off of the cult-favorite comic book — by my count, this is the third movie reboot, after the movie series that started in 1990 and the one that started in 2014 (and that’s not counting all the TV cartoon versions). This one is different in that it’s not attempting to be live-action. This one is animated, in every sense of the word.

The animation is computer generated, but the turtles and other characters are largely made to look like stop-motion clay figures (think Wallace & Gromit), but with lines frequently added to give a sketchbook quality, like something out of a comic book. The effect is eye-popping, and easily the most visually arresting animation in a movie this year that doesn’t have “Spider-Verse” in the title.

The animation is so dynamic that the story, as frenetic as it is, can’t keep up. At heart, it’s the origin story of the Turtle family — how four baby turtles were washed down the sewer and covered in a mysterious ooze that gave them mutant superpowers. The ooze also affected a rat, named Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan), who became the Turtles’ adopted father, protector and martial arts trainer.

As teens, the four — Leonardo (voiced by Nicolas Cantu), Donatello (voiced by Micah Abbey), Raphael (voiced by Brady Noon) and Michelangelo (voiced by Shamon Brown Jr.) — yearn to get out of the sewers and experience life as normal human teenagers. Splinter, however, forbids them from interacting with humans, and he has the flashback memories of threatening human behavior to bolster his suspicion.

Once, on a rooftop, they encounter April O’Neil (voiced by Ayo Edebiri, from “The Bear”), a high school student and aspiring journalist. After some initial trepidation, she befriends the foursome, and enlists them to help find the master criminal who’s been terrorizing New York — known only as Superfly.

The movie takes a drastic turn when the Turtles learn that Superfly is actually a fly — a mutant, like them, with a collection of other mutant creatures in his entourage. (The voice casting for these mutants is impressive, including Ice Cube as Superfly, plus John Cena, Seth Rogen, Rose Byrne, Paul Rudd, Natasia Demetriou, Hannibal Buress and Post Malone.) The Turtles also learn that Superfly’s heists are aimed at a larger goal: A device that will turn New York’s animal population into mutants who will dominate the city’s humans.

Director Jeff Rowe (who co-directed “The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) keeps the movie moving, even if the tag-teamed script — credited to five writers, including Rogen — gets bogged down in too many characters to follow and too much mayhem (as the title promises) to track.

Still, the action is brisk, and the animation shows Leo, Donnie, Ralph and Mike as genuine teenagers, even in their masked, shell-covered hero poses. (Casting actual teens to voice the roles was a smart move on the filmmakers’ part.) “Mutant Mayhem” launches this incarnation of the Turtles well, and will certainly spawn sequels to keep the story going.

——

‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, August 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for sequences of violence and action, language and impolite material. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Barbie' brings the plastic doll, and a smartly funny meta-analysis of her, to the big screen

Director Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” manages a juggling act I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a movie before: It celebrates a corporate symbol of plastic packaged conformity while also being a subversive, proudly feminist critique of that symbol.

What’s equally surprising is that it’s really funny and, at times, heart-warming.

Gerwig, writing with her regular partner (in screenplays and in life) Noah Baumbach, starts with some history, of how in 1959 the company Mattel Inc. introduced the Barbie doll, a 12-inch plastic paragon with long legs, big breasts and no genitals. In an age when dolls were almost always babies, and playing with them required girls to behave like mothers, an adult figurine who could hold down a job and own a house was revolutionary. (Gerwig breaks out the “Also Sprach Zarathustra” to illustrate this change, “2001”-style. It was released months ago, in the movie’s first trailer.)

Barbieland, as Gerwig shows it, is a fantasia of pink, where all the Barbies do all the important jobs — president (Issa Rae), physicist (Emma Mackey), and so on — and still get together at the dream house of Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) for a well-choreographed dance party.

Also attending the dance party are all the Kens, adjuncts to the Barbies. As the narrator (Helen Mirren) explains, Barbie is always happy, but Ken — the lead one is played by Ryan Gosling — is only happy “when Barbie looks at him.”

But is Stereotypical Barbie really happy? In the middle of the dance party, she asks out loud, “Do any of you guys think about dying?” This stray thought freaks out our Barbie, as does the discovery that her feet — previously contoured to fit into her high heels — have literally gone flat. Barbie consults the wisest of the Barbies: Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who has uneven hair, is always doing the splits and “smells like basement,” because of being played with too roughly.

For Stereotypical Barbie to figure out what’s happening to her, Weird Barbie says, she must travel to the Real World. She barely gets out of Barbieland when she finds Gosling’s Ken is hiding in the back seat of her pink Corvette, tagging along for the ride.

In the Real World, Barbie makes the harsh discovery that most women don’t think of Barbie as empowering to women. She learns this by meeting Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), a surly middle-schooler, and her frazzled mom, Gloria (America Ferrara) — who works at Mattel, whose CEO (Will Ferrell) and yes-men (and they are all men) are freaking out that a Barbie has gotten loose. (Ferrell’s performance is perhaps the one sour note in the movie, too much like his Lord Business character from “The LEGO Movie.”)

Ken, meanwhile, makes a discovery of his own: Something called “patriarchy.” The results are potentially catastrophic, both to Barbieland and Mattel.

Gerwig and Baumbach take some deep dives into the more controversial parts of the discontinued Barbie product line (do you remember Video Girl Barbie? Earring Magic Ken? Ken’s friend Allan? Barbie’s pregnant friend Midge?) and some of the unanswered mysteries of the franchise — like, where does Ken live when Barbie is alone in her Malibu DreamHouse?

The movie also wrestles with Barbie’s place in women’s lives, and how the contradictions of Barbie — an adult aimed at children, sending mixed messages about feminine beauty and health, and so on — are echoes of the micro- and macro-battles real women wage every day. Ferrara delivers a deliciously sharp monologue about this, in a moment that should evoke as much applause as laughter.

Robbie gives what’s perhaps the best performance of her career — funnier than Harley Quinn, more touching than Tonya Harding in “I, Tonya,” more alluringly innocent than Sharon Tate in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” She takes this amorphous idea of the Barbie doll and finds her heart and soul, and makes her a fully realized woman.

And I’ll be damned if the guy doesn’t nearly steal the movie from her. Gosling’s portrayal of Ken is an astonishing comic performance, capturing the fragility of Ken’s ego and the unearned bravado that his embrace of his newly discovered machismo provides. Gosling does something very few Barbie-playing girls (or boys) have ever done before: He makes Ken necessary.

“Barbie” is also a movie that will reward repeat viewings, as the layers of jokes and references are thick enough that you probably missed a few of them. (I haven’t even mentioned the musical numbers.) Robbie’s Barbie and Gosling’s Ken turn out to be fun company on this offbeat road trip.

——

‘Barbie’

★★★1/2

Opened Friday, July 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Oppenheimer,' anchored by Cillian Murphy's brilliant performance, captures the contradictions of the man behind the atomic bomb

With “Oppenheimer,” writer-director Christopher Nolan may have finally found a subject — a prickly genius who managed to compartmentalize his life so that unlocking the whole man and his world-shattering contribution to history requires some mental gymnastics — that fits perfectly with his puzzle-box style of filmmaking.

Nolan’s subject is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who after 1945 was called “the father of the atomic bomb.” Before 1945, Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) was a theoretical physicist who traveled across Europe in order to learn from the experts in the field — including Danish physicist Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) and the German Werner Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer), before settling into positions at Cal-Berkeley and CalTech, to delve into a new field called quantum mechanics. 

Oppenheimer understands the theory, and it’s up to others to find the practical applications. One of those others is his next-door colleague, Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), who is building what will be known as a cyclotron — colloquially, an atom smasher.

After the Germans invade Poland in 1939, Oppenheimer and his colleagues discuss the horrific possibility that splitting the atom could lead to a weapon of war, an atomic bomb. In 1942, Col. (and later General) Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) is seeking out scientists to start developing such a bomb, saying that the Nazis are 12 months ahead in their research. Oppenheimer tells Groves it’s 18 months — because the Nazis have Heisenberg on their side — and agrees to lead the organization of a secret lab. Oppenheimer chooses a site he knows, where he and his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold), have some ranch property, in New Mexico. He names the facility Los Alamos.

Nolan’s script tells Oppenheimer’s story largely in flashback, and structures the narrative around two hearings, one private, one public. The private hearing, in 1954, was to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, over his past associations with Communists and socialists (including an effort to unionize research staff at Cal-Berkeley). The public hearing, in 1959, is of a U.S. Senate committee questioning Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, whose confirmation for a cabinet post is hung up over Strauss’ connections to Oppenheimer — whom Strauss offered the job as director of the Institute of Advance Study at Princeton, whose emeritus professors included Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), depicted here as a mentor and moral compass for Oppenheimer.

Among the many boxes in Oppenheimer’s compartmentalized life — along with scientist, theorist, activist, wartime hero and post-war advocate against developing the hydrogen bomb — an important one depicted here is lover. As a Cal-Berkeley professor, he has a torrid love affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a psychology professor, but they break up in 1939. The same year, he meets Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt), who at the time is on her third marriage, to a physician — but she divorces him to marry Oppenheimer after becoming pregnant. 

Downey’s Strauss (pronounced “straws”) leads a deep bench of supporting roles in this sprawling, three-hour biography. Besides Blunt, Hartnett, Conti and Damon, totable cast members are Alden Ehrenreich as a Senate aide advising Strauss during his confirmation, Jason Clarke and Macon Blair as lawyers on opposite sides in Oppenheimer’s security hearing, David Dastmalchian as an FBI snitch, Dane DeHaan as Groves’ squirrelly aide, and Rami Malek as another scientist. Perhaps the most intriguing side player is Benny Safdie as Oppenheimer’s fellow physicist Edward Teller, with whom Oppenheimer argues about the next step in the development of atomic weapons: A hydrogen bomb, the power of which Oppenheimer believes may be more than any country should possess.

Murphy’s central performance is extraordinary, his angularity embodying the either-or binary of Oppenheimer’s thought processes. All of the troubles of his world — the Nazis winning the war, the Soviets getting the bomb, the Americans destroying themselves through fear and paranoia, the scandals threatening to wreck his career and marriage — play out on Murphy’s face, each one like a math problem he’s determined to solve.

Nolan deploys a range of visual devices — shooting in 70mm IMAX and 35mm film, with the Strauss hearings in crisp black and white and other events in vivid color — to keep the narrative threads straight. The look is luminous, with Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography, Ruth De Jong’s period-perfect production design and Ellen Mirojnick’s gorgeous costume design all contributing. As always with Nolan, the sound design is propulsive and overwhelming, particularly in the re-creation of the first atomic test blast.

Some have criticized “Oppenheimer” for giving short shrift to the countless victims that resulted from Oppenheimer’s work — notably, the Indigenous people of New Mexico affected by atomic fallout and the Japanese people on whom atomic bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those are touched on briefly, though it’s valid to argue that more could be said, even in a three-hour movie. The broader message Nolan conveys brilliantly is that the atomic bomb, no matter how it was justified during World War II and the Cold War, has given the world the horrible ability to destroy ourselves in a matter of minutes.

——

‘Oppenheimer’

★★★★

Opened Friday, July 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 180 minutes.

Review: 'The Miracle Club' has really good acting, but that can't save a painfully sentimental script

There are some good performances and large dollops of Irish treacle in “The Miracle Club,” a drama about four women dealing with faith and forgiveness. 

It’s 1967 in the small Irish village of Ballygar, and Lily Fox (played by Dame Maggie Smith) still goes down to the shore to put flowers on the small memorial to her son, Declan, who died at sea 40 years earlier, when he was 19. Then Lily heads home to get ready for the talent night at church, where she performs in a “girl” group with two other women in the parish: Eileen Dunne (Kathy Bates), a mother of six who Lily has known since girlhood, and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), a young mother of two.

The surprise at talent night comes when Chrissie Ahearn (Laura Linney) arrives in town, just missing the memorial service for her mother, Maureen — who was Lily’s oldest friend. Chrissie hasn’t been back to Ballygar in 40 years, when she was 17, and she’s not happy to be seeing Lily or Eileen, once her best friend.

As we learn through the painfully earnest script — by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne — Chrissie was the young love of Declan before she left Ballygar for America, and both Lily and Eileen remain angry over her leaving. Chrissie’s memory of her departure is quite different: “I was banished,” she says.

The top prize in the parish’s talent contest is two tickets on the church’s charter bus to Lourdes, the French shrine where — according to legend and Catholic doctrine — young Bernadette saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. Eileen hopes to win so she can get a miracle, to remove the lump in her breast. Dolly wants the trip to help her young son, Daniel, who’s 7 years old and mute. Lily is mostly along for the ride.

Director Thaddeus O’Sullivan draws some broad comedy from the complaints of the women’s husbands about being left alone for a few days. Eileen bickers constantly with her husband, Frank (Stephen Rea), while Dolly gets grief from her husband George (Mark McKenna), who’s ill-equipped to handle their toddler daughter alone.

As the bus is about to depart, one more passenger joins the pilgrimage: Chrissie, using her late mother’s ticket. 

The movie saves its heavy drama for the Lourdes trip, mostly tied up in various characters’ guilt over past actions. Lily and Eileen are confronted with how they treated Chrissie as a young woman, Dolly must overcome her guilt over what happened when she was pregnant with Daniel, and Chrissie opens up about an incident when she first arrived in America. Irish director Thaddeus O’Sullivan, a veteran of British TV, lays on the Catholic guilt and melodramatic flourishes with a trowel.

Even with such heavy-handed treatment, though, it’s impossible not to appreciate Dame Maggie and Linney for their no-nonsense portrayals of women who have come to realize they have no time for old grudges. O’Casey, an Irish actor making her feature debut, is a real discovery, playing the guilt-ridden Dolly with tenderness. Bates, unfortunately, feels miscast here, though she tries to make the best of things as Eileen is forced to face decades of bitterness and resentment.

“The Miracle Club” sometimes bathes the cast in its maudlin dialogue — one example is when the parish priest, Father Dermot (Mark O’Halloran), tells someone, “You don’t come to Lourdes for a miracle. You come to Lourdes for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.” Smith, Linney and O’Casey find the strength to emerge above the cliches.

———

‘The Miracle Club’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 14, at some theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and some language. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Joy Ride' is unabashedly raunchy, uproariously funny and unexpectedly sweet — and Ashley Park is your next comedy star

If you have a high tolerance for raunchy humor, “Joy Ride” will put that tolerance to the test — and, if you find the hard-edged sexual jokes funny, you’ll last long enough to enjoy the sweet, heartfelt message of friendship, feminine empowerment and Asian-American identity underneath.

Audrey Sullivan (played by Ashley Park) has always struggled with her identity — as a Chinese-born woman adopted as a baby by white American parents (Annie Mumolo and David Denman). Luckily, when she was 5, her parents found a Chinese couple whose little girl, Lolo, soon became her best friend (played as an adult by comedian Sherry Cola).

Audrey is now a successful lawyer, on the verge of becoming a partner — if she can land a lucrative client on a business trip to Beijing. Lolo is along for the ride, as is her cousin (Sabrina Wu), nicknamed Deadeye for being expressionless to the point of catatonia. While in Beijing, Audrey plans to meet up with her college roommate, Kat (Stephanie Hsu, from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), an actress who’s starring in a Chinese soap opera alongside her fiancé, Clarence (Desmond Chiam), who thinks Kat is a virginal Christian and doesn’t know about her numerous sexual exploits in college.

Lolo urges Audrey to call up the adoption agency that sent her to America, to see if she can find her birth mother. The search takes Audrey away from her client (played by comic Ronny Chieng), and onto a road trip in the country — where the misadventures for our four friends include an encounter with an American drug courier (Meredith Hagner), balloons of cocaine going into various orifices, a sexually charged meet-up with a basketball team, an attempt to board an airplane masquerading as a K-pop quartet, and revelations that upend Kat’s wedding plans and deepen Audrey’s identity crisis even further.

First-time director Adele Lim (who co-wrote “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Raya and the Last Dragon”), who shares story credit with writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao (who worked together on “Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens”), works on the idea that anything guys can do in a sex comedy, these four women can do, as the saying goes, backwards and in heels. Much of the humor is based on burning down Asian-American stereotypes, and showing these characters — particularly Lolo and Cat — as sex-positive adults who aren’t afraid to show their wild side.

The four actresses make a tight ensemble, squeezing maximum laughter out of the premise, and also showing a tender side in the brief moments the story turns serious. Of the four, though, Park (familiar to fans of “Emily in Paris” and “Girls5Eva”) is the standout, giving a leading lady-level performance that is by turns hilarious and heartwarming.

“Joy Ride” — what a generic title for such a character-specific situation comedy — has only enough of a filter to stay, barely, in the confines of an R rating, so if you’re easily offended, don’t bother buying a ticket. The rest of us will be in the theater, laughing our asses off.

——

‘Joy Ride’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 7, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong and crude sexual content, language throughout, drug content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'The Night of the 12th' is a bleak police procedural where the focus is on the cops as much as the crime

Police procedural dramas don’t get as raw, as honest or as bleak as “The Night of the 12th,” a fictionalized account of the real-life workings of a detective squad in the French Alps.

Director Dominik Moll begins this movie, adapted from a book by Pauline Guéna that followed a French police unit for a year, with the statistic that of the 800 investigations French police conduct during a year, some 20% remain unsolved. So Moll and his co-screenwriter, Gilles Marchand, are letting us know early that this movie is not likely to have a satisfying conclusion.

Moll introduces the squad, based in Grenoble, on the evening of October 12, 2016, throwing a retirement party for their leader, Capt. Tourancheau (Nicolas Jouhet). The old chief is giving over command to a younger detective, Capt. Yohan Vivès (Bastien Bouillon).

About 70 miles away, in a mountain town, at 3:17 a.m., a young woman named Clara Royer (Lula Cotton-Frapier) is walking home from the house of her best friend, Stéphanie “Nanie” Béguin (Pauline Serieys). Before getting home, a shadowy figure in a hoodie calls Clara’s name, throws some flammable liquid on her, and lights her on fire. She’s found dead nearby in the morning.

Vivès and his team are called in to investigate; the suggestion is that the small-town gendarmes can’t handle the case, so the big-city cops from Grenoble should take it. They go over the crime scene, look at the photos of Clara’s charred body, and see the last video she made on her phone — a loving message to Nanie.

The detectives work the case diligently, and attempt to be dispassionate — no easy task with a crime this horrific. Vivès interviews Nanie several times, and soon figures out that the friend is withholding some important information about Clara, and about the men with whom she had casual sex. In the eyes of the cops, each of those men is a potential suspect.

The story is as much about the cops as the crime. Vivès lives alone, and his only activity outside of work is  pedaling his bicycle through laps on a racing track. His closest friend in the squad, Marceau (Bouli Lanners), tells Vivès that his wife has asked for a divorce — and is carrying her lover’s baby, after she and Marceau tried for years unsuccessfully to start a family.

Moll investigates the emotional states of the cops as doggedly as those cops investigate Clara’s death. His investigation is more fruitful, as the movie maps out the frustrations, the burnout and the stresses these police detectives endure as a part of their jobs. “The Night of the 12th” may be a fictionalized account of police work, but it has the feel of the real thing.

——

‘The Night of the 12th’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence, sexual content and language. Running time: 115 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

Review: With 'Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One,' the action franchise hits all the right buttons

For a franchise I didn’t particularly like when it started, I must admit that the “Mission: Impossible” films have become the most reliably thrilling blockbusters out there — the latest, with the subtitle “Dead Reckoning, Part One,” among them, and it’s all because of star Tom Cruise’s willingness to risk life and limb for a good stunt.

I disliked the first “Mission: Impossible” movie, back in 1996, because director Brian de Palma let his cinematic ego get in the way of the excitement — and because, as a fan of the ‘60s TV series, I was torqued that they made the old show’s main character a villain. (Sorry, it’s been 27 years, and there’s a statute of limitations on spoiler alerts.)

After experimenting with a slew of hot-shot A-list directors — John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird — who each put their spin on things, the franchise settled down with Christopher McQuarrie, who has been steadily building something spectacular. Think of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise as the thinking person’s “Fast & Furious.”

This time out, Ethan Hunt has been given a mission by the new CIA boss, Eugene Kittridge — played by Henry Czerny, returning to the franchise for the first time since the original in ’96. The mission is to find and steal two halves of a cross-shaped key. What it unlocks, Kittridge doesn’t say. He also doesn’t say much about who else may be looking for it.

Ethan and his stalwart Impossible Missions Force colleagues — tech wizards Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) — start their search at the airport in Dubai. They find someone with a part of the key, but they also find a clever pickpocket, Grace (Hayley Atwell), pinching it before Ethan gets to it. Ethan also finds two American intelligence agents (Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis) on his trail, and a shadowy figure, Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has a dark connection to Ethan’s past.

After a few minutes — which are spent dealing with a nuclear bomb scare and the return of Ethan’s past associate, the former MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) — we start to understand a few things about Gabriel. One is that he has an assassin on his payroll named Paris (played by Pom Klementieff, in a role miles away from her comical Mantis in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films). The other is that he’s working at the behest of a vast digital network called The Entity, and that the destruction of The Entity is now Ethan’s top priority — thus showing that McQuarrie and co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen were way ahead of the Writers Guild of America in warning about the dangers of an out-of-control AI.

It’s a weird coincidence that two of this movie’s biggest set pieces echo scenes from this summer’s other blockbusters — a car chase on Rome’s Spanish Steps (which they did in “Fast X”) and a train heading for a bridge about to explode (as seen in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”). It speaks to McQuarrie’s skill as an action director that both stunts, particularly the gravity-defying train sequence, work much better here.

The emotional heart of the movie, though, is Ethan’s byplay with his team, particularly the women. Ethan and Faust (who was featured in “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout,” the last two “M:I” movie) are veterans of this spy game, each knowing the sacrifices they have made for their work — and that the ultimate sacrifice, their lives, may be around the corner. And Ethan’s interactions with Grace, and the suggestion that he could be recruiting her to become the newest member of the IMF, are a fascinating mirror for Ethan’s psyche, as Gabriel’s appearance makes him think back to his origin story.

It’s also to Cruise’s credit that the marketing for this installment is up front about it being the first of a two-part story — something ticket buyers for “Dune” only learned when the movie started, and fans of “Fast X” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” didn’t discover until the credits rolled. It will be a year before “Dead Reckoning, Part Two” arrives, and all indications from this chapter indicate it will be worth the wait.

——

‘Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material. Running time: 163 minutes.

Review: 'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' is a trip back in time, reliving some of the franchise's glory

You may have heard that time travel factors into “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” the fifth — and, considering the lead actor’s advanced age, probably final — movie in the series.

Really, though, all of this series — starring Harrison Ford as the archaeologist, adventurer and Nazi puncher of the title — has been an exercise in time travel. They were movies made in the 1980s (or later), mostly set in the 1930s, with occasional flashbacks to even earlier eras. (Remember River Phoenix as Indy as a Boy Scout, touring Arches National Park?) The series had the magical gift of transporting the audience to those times, and to make us feel like kids watching Indy’s death-defying exploits, no matter how old Indy or Ford got.

That same magic is harder to achieve in this installment — not because Ford is 80 years old, not because he’s largely surrounded by much younger actors, but because so many of us who grew up with Indy have now grown old with him, too. But the magic is still there, in fits and sparks, and when it happens, it’s glorious.

The prologue takes us to 1944, with a young-ish Indy (played by Ford with de-aging technology) trying to get on a Nazi train carrying stolen loot. The commandant, Col. Weber (Thomas Kretschmann), is eager to transport one artifact to Der Führer — but both Indy and Weber’s science adviser, a physicist named Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), know the artifact is a fake. Voller is far more interested in a different artifact, the Antikychera, a circular mechanism from Ancient Greece that’s known as “Archimedes’ dial,” which he thinks can yield unlimited power to the person who possesses it.

This brass-plated MacGuffin goes from Voller to Indy, and later to Indy’s British archaeological colleague, Basil Shaw (Toby Jones). Shaw, we learn later, became obsessed with the dial, to the point of madness.

Flash-forward to 1969, and Indy is living in New York, a professor at a small college about to his retirement. But his quiet, solitary life — we see separation papers, filed by his old love Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) — is disrupted by the return of Basil’s daughter, and Indy’s goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Helena is looking for the dial, and suspects Indy has it.

There’s also a CIA agent (Shaunette Renée Wilson) on Helena’s trail, and that operative is working what appears to be an uneasy alliance with some shadowy operatives (Boyd Holbrook and Olivier Richters). These operatives are working for a German rocket scientist named Schmidt, but we recognize quickly that it’s Voller, still looking for the dial.

The bulk of the movie puts the crotchety Indy and the scheming Helena in an uneasy alliance, hopping to Morocco and Italy and Greece on the trail of the dial and the artifacts needed to work it. They run into some old friends — like John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah — and some new ones (no spoilers here), and enlist Helena’s teen accomplice Teddy (Ethann Isidore), who’s as agile a thief as Helena.

Director James Mangold (“Logan,” “Ford vs. Ferrari”) manages to keep the convoluted script — on which he is one of the four credited writers — reasonably coherent, though the mood swings are pronounced. It’s a little slow in the middle, but that’s made up for with a grand finale that’s fast-moving and borderline insane (in a good way).

The magic, and the time travel, is saved for the absolute end of the movie — a scene that references one of the signature scenes of “Raiders in the Lost Ark.” One might dismiss it as fan service, tapping into a nostalgia the movie hasn’t earned. But I enjoyed it, because it delivered the old-fashioned thrill and romanticism that the series delivered at its best.

One more thing: Indiana Jones gets to punch Nazis again. Some movie joys are timeless — even if, unfortunately, they’re also timely.

——

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking. Running time: 153 minutes.