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    7 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

    Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.Critic’s PickA hot-button movie people are arguing over.Kirsten Dunst plays a war photographer in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” A24, via Associated Press‘Civil War’Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is set in a near-future when the United States is at war with itself and something called the Western Front, made up of Texas and California, is fighting the federal government.From our review:It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickThe rare reboot that gets it right.Donielle Hansley Jr. and Simone Joy Jones in “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.”2024 Fence 2021 Films LLC‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’After the babysitter hired to watch them for the summer keels over, a 17-year-old slacker named Tanya (Simone Joy Jones) is forced to support her even lazier younger siblings.From our review:Don’t tell helicopter parents, but the gleefully transgressive flicks that entertained a generation of latchkey wildlings are coming back in style. Wade Allain-Marcus’s rollicking update of the 1991 cult favorite keeps the plot … and amps up the immoral humor. It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA deceptive horror film where the good guys aren’t so good.Ramesha Nawal in “In Flames.”Game Theory Films‘In Flames’In Pakistan, 20-something Mariam, her widowed mother, Fariha, and her younger brother are struggling when Uncle Nasir suddenly becomes very interested in the relatives he had been neglecting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Omen’ Review: Life in a Different Space-Time Continuum

    This trippy ensemble drama set in Kinshasa explores Congolese society through magical realism.Halfway through “Omen,” a trippy ensemble drama set in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tshala (Eliane Umuhire) tries to reason with Alice (Lucie Debay), the white fiancé of her big brother Koffi (Marc Zinga). Alice, who lives with Koffi in Belgium, is justifiably overwhelmed: Her future in-laws refuse to acknowledge her existence, and, after Koffi accidentally bleeds from his nose onto an infant relative, he is nailed into a wooden mask as punishment.“We’re in a different space-time continuum,” Tshala explains.The director, Bajoli (a multidisciplinary artist and rapper whose name means “sorcerer” in Swahili), runs with this idea: that Congolese society, highly superstitious as it is, operates on another — frenzied, magical, gender-bending — wavelength.The film fills out this wild world by navigating four loosely connected stories. There’s Koffi, who receives a bitter homecoming. Tshala is in a polyamorous relationship. Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), a menacing matriarch, is upended by her husband’s death. Finally, there’s Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), an orphan who leads a gang of tutu-wearing street kids — this thread, the most chaotic of the four, plays like a Grimms’ fairy tale about shantytown residents.To say “Omen” is ambitious feels like an understatement. The film begins with a mystical interlude in which a woman pours her breast milk into a river, and sustains this vivid symbolism throughout, making details with natural explanations (a birthmark, a seizure) take on an otherworldly heft.In its best moments, a quiet element of absurdity grounds the spectacle. We sense the fatigue and — because family is inescapable — weirdly amused resignation, such as when Tshala, giving a goblin’s smirk, assuages Alice. Otherwise, the film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.OmenNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More