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      ‘The Boss Baby: Family Business’ Review: Pacifier Be With You

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      It’s more of the same in this sequel to the 2017 comedy featuring the voice of Alec Baldwin.Grab your briefcases: The boss baby has returned in “The Boss Baby: Family Business,” directed by Tom McGrath, another infant adventure that hits the same notes as the original, and has little to show for it.The former boss baby, Ted (Alec Baldwin), is now a rich businessman in a big-boy suit. His brother, Tim (James Marsden), has his own family, though he worries about his daughter Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt), an A-type who opts for handshakes over hugs. Tim gets recruited for a mission by his younger daughter, Tina (Amy Sedaris), another boss baby. With the help of some new magical baby formula, Ted and Tim transform back into their younger selves and go undercover in a school for gifted children that has an evil secret.At some point Tim asks Tabitha if she wants to hear the story about how he and baby Ted saved the world again, but she passes. “It was a good story, wasn’t it?” Tim tries, but she says, “Well, it didn’t really make a lot of sense.” “The jokes were good, right?” Tim asks. Tabitha makes a noncommittal noise.At least the film is self-aware? Aside from that, the imaginative but nonsensical narrative threads leave a minefield of plot holes in their wake. There are some good laughs throughout, though none feel particularly novel. And the continued attempts to make corporate culture into something cute and funny by adding a pacifier seems out of touch with how harshly we criticize toxic workplaces now.A baby in a suit? Always cute. Recycled gags? Not so much — this “Boss Baby” just didn’t get the memo.The Boss Baby: Family BusinessRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      ‘Long Story Short’ Review: Fast Forward to the End

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      After his wedding night, a workaholic gets cursed with previewing how his life will turn out, one year at a time.The British TV comedy “Spaced” had a recurring bit where Simon Pegg would half-apologetically remind his chatty friend to hurry up her story: “Skip to the end?” The same urge came to mind while watching the Australian romantic comedy “Long Story Short,” which is like a recurring bit at feature length.It’s a what-if story: Teddy (Rafe Spall), a workaholic, gets cursed with previewing how his life will turn out, one year at a time. The fast-forwarding starts after his wedding night. He wakes up to find his wife, Leanne (Zahra Newman), pregnant and their house fully furnished. Baffled, he asks surprised questions and gets surprised responses. Soon he’s leaping to another year, and another, and another. The baby becomes a toddler; Leanne’s frustrations with Teddy worsen; separation, an old flame, and a robust bearded period for Teddy follow.Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor (written and directed by Josh Lawson, who’s also in the movie), and it doesn’t help that the wanly drawn Leanne could use her own movie to snap out of her own character’s malaise independently.The dangers of going through life on autopilot are clear early on, though the movie gives Teddy’s buddy Sam (Ronny Chieng) cancer to drive the lesson home. It’s a bit of a torturous premise for Teddy — one long I-told-you-so — and even though Lawson shows mercy by the end, I began to wish the bliss of total day-to-day oblivion for the guy.Long Story ShortRated R. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The One and Only Dick Gregory’ Review: A Peek at a Comic Legend

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      The documentary examines the many lives of the stand-up and activist who inspired a generation of performers.In a remarkable article from October 1960, Ebony magazine asked why there were no Black stars in comedy, blaming racist double standards held by audiences and television bookers as well as a new sensitivity (the term “politically correct” had not been coined) that wouldn’t tolerate performers trafficking in stereotypes from the minstrel era. Three months later, Dick Gregory, mentioned briefly as a “newcomer,” made the question irrelevant in one night.When the manager at the Playboy Club in Chicago discovered the crowd was made up of white Southern businessmen in town for a convention, he suggested that Gregory postpone. The comedian refused, went onstage and killed. He did so well, his contract there was extended, and led to national press and an appearance on “The Tonight Show.” Gregory became a crossover star, a pioneering comedic social critic who inspired a generation of stand-ups.“The One and Only Dick Gregory,” an aptly titled new documentary, does justice to this fabled performance, setting the scene and the stakes. But what stands out most about this revolutionary moment in comedy is what a small role it plays in the overall portrait here. Gregory, who died in 2017, lived so many lives that he presents a challenge for anyone trying to document them. The director Andre Gaines tries to capture as many as possible, to a fault. By covering so much ground, it doesn’t have room to dig too deep. But along with some very funny footage of a master of his craft, it offers a convincing argument that while Gregory became famous for his comedy, what made him such a riveting cultural figure is what he did after he left it behind.Gaines recruits a talent-rich cast of comics (Wanda Sykes, Dave Chappelle) to describe the performer. Chris Rock is particularly insightful and blunt, comparing Gregory’s relaxed, patient, cigarette-wielding delivery with that of Chappelle. Gregory was ahead of his time in his material on police brutality and racism, but just as he became a star, his activism heated up. A demonstration for voting rights in Mississippi was a turning point, and the movie covers his work and relationships with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the N.A.A.C.P. leader Medgar Evers. By the 1980s, Gregory had stopped playing clubs and became an early health and wellness guru while still waging a broad array of political fights, going on fasts and long runs to earn attention for causes like fighting hunger and obesity.There’s clearly a price to pay for living as active a life as Dick Gregory did. He was rarely home to see his family (his kids are astute talking heads), and toward the end of his life, legal troubles led to financial collapse and the loss of his home. The last half-hour is jarringly downbeat if slightly underexamined, with Gregory returning to clubs and appearing in a Rob Schneider movie, “The Hot Chick,” that allows him to get much-needed health care coverage.The legend of Dick Gregory gives way to a peek of him as a more complex man, albeit one much funnier than most everyone else. On the reboot of his talk show, Arsenio Hall asked him what drove him. Gregory retorted: “My bills.”The One and Only Dick GregoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘Let Us In’ Review: The Eyes Have It

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      Disappearing teens and mysterious strangers fuel this generic blend of urban legend and science fiction.“Let Us In,” a kids-fighting-evil movie in the vein of “The Goonies” (1985) and Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” is creepy-cute and cheerfully corny. Directed by Craig Moss and inspired by an urban legend, the story (by Moss and JW Callero) plunks us down in a fictitious small town where teenagers have been mysteriously vanishing.The first pair we meet clearly didn’t get the memo that necking in the woods after dark is asking for trouble. And when a group of foul-smelling, dark-eyed adolescents menacingly materializes — the leader asking, “Will you let us in?” — the resulting attack is soon followed by others. While parents and law enforcement remain oblivious or skeptical, 12-year-old Emily (Makenzie Moss) and her friend, Christopher (O’Neill Monahan), begin sleuthing.Reaching back fondly to the 1980s and 90s, Moss seeds his movie with familiar faces (Tobin Bell is, of course, the town weirdo), generic setups (though one eerie scene makes the most of an after-hours coffee shop) and silly science fiction. Yet the film’s derivativeness — residents literally fight darkness with light — is countered by strong acting from the two leads and a director who just might be having the time of his life.That apparent delight seeps into almost every frame, giving the film a guileless warmth that drew my good will. (Though Moss already had that when he cast Judy Geeson — a stalwart of notable dramas and lurid thrillers since the 1960s — as Emily’s grandmother.) The villains of “Let Us In” don’t do much besides lurk and pounce, but, for their director, that seems to be enough.Let Us InNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Till Death’ Review: My Relationship is Dragging Me Down

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      Megan Fox leads this straightforward, but gleefully chaotic thriller about a woman handcuffed to the corpse of her husband.In “Till Death,” Megan Fox plays Emma, a glamorous woman who got hitched at an age when she simply didn’t know any better. That’s partly why she’s been having an affair, though she breaks it off in an attempt to make things right.Tough luck with that creepy hubbie of hers, Mark (Eoin Macken), an unnervingly intense figure whose romantic gestures contain an air of menace; like when he blindfolds Emma and drives her to their off-the-grid vacation home for a night of sexual bliss. The next morning, however, Emma wakes up to find herself handcuffed to Mark. And in the first of the film’s many gleefully chaotic rug-pulls, he shoots himself dead.Sure, Emma could crush Mark’s hand and wriggle it out of the cuff, but these kinds of over-the-top horror-thrillers are best served with a heavy helping of suspended disbelief.With a blood-splattered visage, Emma is forced to lug around her husband’s corpse as she tries to escape, which becomes all the more urgent when a hulking assassin — the same one that assaulted her years earlier — comes on the scene. Naturally, this oaf is no match for the tough-girl cool of Fox, who emerges from each bloody tussle and snowy brawl with her makeup perfectly intact: such is her legend.In his feature directing debut, S.K. Dale orchestrates a tense cat-and-mouse game that, refreshingly, doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are no profound psychological struggles, high-concept theatrics; no groundbreaking subversions of formula. Instead, this straightforward romp focuses its attention on its cunning and no-nonsense scream queen. And what Fox lacks in dramatic prowess, she makes up for in pure, wicked magnetism.Till DeathRated R. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Forever Purge’ Review: Anarchy Ever After

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      This newest installment in the dystopian franchise, set in a Texan town, pits white supremacists against immigrants and their allies.James DeMonaco’s scripts for “The Purge” play out like drafts from the edgiest guy in your Intro to Creative Writing class. He asks us to imagine America at its hypothetical worst: The government has instituted an annual daylong crime spree called the Purge, and protagonists must fight their way through the waves of rabid murderers they once called neighbors. They’re the sort of plots that only hold up if you buy the misanthropic thesis of something like “Joker,” but DeMonaco likes to throw a few hot political topics into each script to keep things fresh. “The Forever Purge,” directed by Everardo Valerio Gout, tries to criticize American racism against Mexicans.Adela (Ana de la Reguera) and Juan (Tenoch Huerta) are new immigrants to the United States settling in for their first ever Purge. Juan works on a ranch for the wealthy, white Tucker family, where he must weather harassment from his boss’s petty son, Dylan (Josh Lucas). But once droves of rogue Americans rise up to continue the Purge for all time, the Tuckers, Adela and Juan (who notably are not given last names) must learn to fight together.“The Forever Purge” tries for political relevance by introducing immigrant protagonists, but it easily excuses racism from the other leads. (After all, Dylan doesn’t seem so bad compared with the bands of white supremacists stalking the film.) Words like “colonialism” and “the American dream” are thrown around, to little avail. This movie ultimately cares more about monotonous shootouts than making points about border relations.The Forever PurgeRated R for endless gun violence and a smattering of gore. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Phantom’ Review: The Death Penalty for a Doppelgänger

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      This documentary examines the circumstances of a 1983 killing in Texas, for which it contends the wrong man was convicted and executed.“The Phantom,” a documentary from Patrick Forbes, examines a case that in recent years has been cited as an example of a likely wrongful conviction that ended in the death penalty. Carlos DeLuna was executed in Texas in 1989 for the murder of a Corpus Christi gas station convenience store clerk. At his trial, he implicated another man, Carlos Hernandez. The prosecution dismissed Hernandez as a phantom.But the movie, based on an account by a Columbia law school professor, James Liebman, and his researchers, amasses evidence that Hernandez, who died in 1999, was no apparition. It indicates that he had a history of violence and that the investigation was hasty. The film’s most damning suggestion is that the conviction didn’t simply involve mistaken identity — two men named Carlos, who knew and resembled each other and were both in the area of the crime, getting mixed up — but, in the film’s argument, required an almost willful insistence on turning a blind eye to what was known.Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic. Shooting in glossy wide-screen, he uses an effective blend of reconstructions and interviewees to take viewers through the night of the killing. Earlier in the film, he has people involved in the original trial, like a witness, Kevan Baker, and a prosecutor, Steve Schiwetz, discuss details of the case in a courtroom, and even playact versions of their words from the proceedings (the dialogue isn’t verbatim, judging from the trial transcript). A bow-tied, suspendered, haunted-looking medical examiner contributes to the ghostly ambience.The PhantomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More