With more than two dozen movies releasing a week — the vast majority of them still straight to streaming — we’re narrowing the focus of our curation somewhat, spotlighting those of sufficiently high profile or merit. Here’s a rundown of those films opening this week.
New Releases in Theaters
“Kajillionaire”
In select theaters now
With “Kajillionaire,” July devises a fresh strategy to offer an outsider’s perspective, focusing on 26-years-young Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), the oddly named daughter in a family of scammers — a dysfunctional “scamily,” if ever there was one. A metaphor for homeschooling gone horribly wrong, Old Dolio has been raised so far outside the acceptable mold of American parenting that it was all bound to backfire one day. Now, over the course of two eventful weeks, Old Dolio slow-motion short-circuits, finally expressing the desire to experience all that she’s been denied
“The Trial of the Chicago 7?
In select theaters now, with streaming release to follow on Oct. 16.
“The Trial of the Chicago 7? is the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful and authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today. Aaron Sorkin doesn’t just re-stage the infamous trial, in which a motley crew of anti-war leaders were charged with plotting to stir up violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He jumps into the trial, goes outside the trial, cuts back to the demonstrations, and leads us into the combustible clash of personalities that was going on behind the scenes. He wants to hash it all out, to let the animating passions of the ’60s make their case … and it adds up to something that could scarcely be more relevant.
New Releases on Demand and in Select Theaters
“Ava”
Available in select theaters and on demand
Tate Taylor’s female-starring shoot-’em-up “Ava” is the third film bearing that title to crop up in as many years. It, too, has the air of something that may once have been unusual in conception only to emerge as rather generic. Built around Jessica Chastain as an ice-cool, globe-trotting assassin facing a tangle of personal and professional challenges when she returns home to Boston, the film provides an adequate showcase for its producer-star’s unexpected prowess as an action hero — yet Matthew Newton’s skimpy, dial-a-cliché script makes the whole enterprise feel more like a mid-range series pilot than a major star vehicle.
“Misbehaviour”
Available in theaters and on demand, including Amazon
Revisiting the protest-blighted 1970 Miss World contest from the alternating perspective of participants and opposing activists, it’s cheery, easy comfort viewing, but for all its gaudy, kitschtastic period trappings, there’s little nostalgia underpinning it. Instead, “Misbehaviour” says good riddance to a bad era in the brightest, politest way possible. This is an unabashedly commercial crowdpleaser [although] “Misbehaviour” does point up the difficulties of being a formula film about fighting the power: Effervescent and eager to please, even when handling tricky intersectional politics of gender, race and class, the film could stand to act out just a little bit more.
“Oliver Sacks: His Own Life”
Select a virtual cinema to support
Sacks wrote about people in extreme states — of sensory and neurological damage, of awareness and sheer being. And this is a portrait at once tender and thrilling, a movie that presents us with a man who led an eccentrically defiant, at times reckless existence that was the furthest thing from cunningly planned. He was a wanderer in the body of a clinician, like Jack Kerouac crossed with Jonas Salk. He was that rare if not unique thing, a scientific navigator of the soul. What’s most moving is that Sacks, whose extreme love of existence was there in every sentence he wrote, could embrace death because it would be the most out-there adventure of his life.
Exclusive to Netflix
“Enola Holmes”
The puzzles in “Enola Holmes” are not especially difficult, but they’re enough to stump the great Sherlock Holmes (Henry Cavill). To solve this particular mystery — which involves the disappearance of the detective’s mother (Helena Bonham Carter) — will require an even sharper intellect than Sherlock’s, which we find in the form of his spunky younger sister, Enola (Millie Bobby Brown). “Enola Holmes” modernizes the Victorian world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, enlisting “Fleabag” director Harry Bradbeer to offer a different kind of feminism from that game-changing show, based in the conviction that men have bossed around long enough, and it’s time to make room for other people.
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