Enola Holmes is back, and if it ain’t broke . . . don’t fix it! Enola Holmes 2 has everything you loved about the first film: a fun, adventurous YA mystery, Millie Bobby Brown (as Enola) regularly breaking the fourth wall to quip to the camera, hilarious hijinx, dangerous fight scenes, well-rounded supporting characters, and lots of girl power. 

The film opens with Enola starting a detective agency—but of course she can’t compete with her famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill, dressed in baggy period clothing to hide his super physique). She is investigating a missing girl and winds up infiltrating a match factory staffed entirely by girls and young women. (The central struggle of the film was based on an event called the “matchgirls’ strike” of 1888.) Luckily, their cases wind up being connected, so we get plenty of wonderful scenes of them working together as detectives as well as getting in scrapes. 

These unsanitized films aren’t afraid to put their young leads in danger, and Enola takes more than a few hard hits (and delivers some too). Louis Partridge is back as Lord Tewkesbury and their relationship heats up, though Enola still makes it clear she doesn’t need a man to be successful. And both Susan Wokoma and Helena Bonham Carter are back to provide some much needed ass-kicking and explosions. Newcomers to the series include the deliciously devilish David Thewlis, who plays a terrifyingly violent police inspector, Grail; and Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Mira Troy, who does a great job coaxing and coaching Enola toward realizing her love for Tewkesbury. While much of writer Jack Thorne’s screenplay copies tropes from the previous film, the additional Sherlock Holmes lore that is expanded in this film, and the return of the characters we love, make this adventure well worth taking. PG-13, 129 min.

Netflix

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This isn’t your normal biopic. Pretty much every single aspect of it is exaggerated. The comedy singer-songwriter explodes into a sex symbol, becomes the greatest musician in history, all while having a relationship with Madonna and writing “Eat It” before Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

That’s exactly what audiences would want from a Weird Al Yankovic biopic, though. 

The film’s playful parody of the genre is delightfully in tune with the legendary musician’s own work. It’s helped by a tremendous leading turn from Daniel Radcliffe, who very much looks the part as Yankovic. As he’s repeatedly shown since finishing Harry Potter, Radcliffe thrives when both his character and the film are odd and outlandish, and Weird gives him plenty to have fun with. Whenever the film threatens to deflate, it’s helped by an avalanche of cameos that immediately bring it to life again. Jack Black, Conan O’Brien, and Yankovic himself are particularly hysterical. At the same time, Evan Rachel Wood’s spot-on Madonna and Rainn Wilson’s avuncular Dr. Demento performances stop Weird from ever feeling too one-note. Unfortunately, it’s never as side-splittingly hilarious as it threatens to be. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story still provides a steady stream of consistent laughs that mean it’s constantly enjoyable, while also being the perfect homage to its wonderfully bizarre and sweet inspiration. TV-14, 108 min.

Streaming free on the Roku Channel

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A thoughtful and mature exploration of communal grief in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a fitting tribute to the legacy of Chadwick Boseman. The opening scenes thrust viewers directly into the open wound of that loss through the eyes of Shuri (played by Letitia Wright, whose career miraculously survived anti-vax conspiracies), princess of Wakanda and sister to T’Challa. The people of Wakanda and the story are led by the grieving Queen Ramonda, played by a flawless Angela Bassett, anchoring the sprawling story with her gravitas and acting chops.

The first two-thirds of the movie are excellent storytelling, doubling down on the franchise’s commitment to grappling with consequences of colonialism, coupled with futuristic fantasies of untouched civilizations. It introduces the highly anticipated Namor (a perfectly cast Tenoch Huerta) using gorgeous Mayan and Aztec details to burnish his backstory as the most newly-minted mutant. The underwater sequences are beautiful and haunting, accurately reflecting the awesome hush of diving into the deep. 

The last third of the film devolves into a predictable CGI battle where Wakanda makes outlandish tactical errors for no logical reason other than to push the story along, and there’s an unfortunate lack of well-choreographed hand-to-hand combat. But hey, there arethere’s plenty of cool water bombs and action sequences to make it worth your while! Despite this, old favorites like M’Baku (Winston Duke), Okoye (Danai Gurira), Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), and token colonizer Everett K. Ross (Martin Freeman) successfully bring back the excitement of the original film, and it becomes clear that the charm of Wakanda truly is forever. PG-13 161 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Every Thursday night Bendición Dry Bar and Bottle Shop (2540 W. Division), a place for alcohol-free spirits and mocktails, hosts a game night for those looking for a sober community. Cards and games are available at the shop, though you’re welcome to bring your own! Game nights run from 5-8 PM. (MC)

Cat McKay’s play Plaid as Hell continues tonight at 8 PM in a Babes With Blades production hosted at Factory Theater (1623 W. Howard). Reader theater and dance editor Kerry Reid wrote about the presentation for last Friday’s Agenda; check out her words here. Christina Casano directs, with fight and intimacy choreography by Maureen Yasko. Plaid as Hell runs through 11/19 , Wed-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; tickets are $35 ($28 seniors and students) and proof of vax is required. Recommended for 18+. Information and reservations at babeswithblades.org. (SCJ)

Choreographer and visual artist Ginger Krebs presented a work-in-progress excerpt of All We Can See From Here outdoors this past June. Tonight at 8 PM, Krebs unveils the full-length version of this “ritual of interdependence” involving four dancers (Krebs, Kennedy Alexandria, Lauren Kunath, and Andy Slavin) as part of Steppenwolf’s LookOut series (1650 N. Halsted). The quartet creates a succession of symmetrical interlocking shapes with their bodies. The catch is that “a geometric diagram on the floor designates the performance’s zone of operations, where resources are equally distributed and everyone has committed to stay and ‘work it out,’” requiring real-time recalibration. The performance also includes drone videography by Justin Lynk, sound by Joseph Kramer, and costumes by Sky Cubabub of Rebirth Garments. The performance continues Fri-Sat 8 PM; tickets are $20 at steppenwolf.org. (KR)

Tonight’s for the punks! At 8:30 PM, two touring bands will share the stage at One City Tap (3115 S. Archer): bratty skate punks Twompsax and DIY-supergroup-posing-as-basement punks Dollhouse. Opening for them are an ESG cover band and local queer punks Private Life, who debuted at Don’t Panic Records’s anniversary party at Subterranean in September. This show will definitely get your feet stomping. You must be 21 or older, and it’s $10-$15 at the door. (MC)

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Ten minutes into Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence is crying. The slow ambient soundtrack, composed by old Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers, hums with an ominous and wounded optimism best described as Profoundcore. It’s Oscar season, Apple TV+ is hungry for glory, and it’s that kind of movie. Next, Lawrence has to travel back home, after completing brutal physiotherapy following a service term in Afghanistan. The nurse who helps her, played with awesome warmth by Jayne Houdyshell, is a short-lived early highlight of this dim product.

Buzzy novelist Ottessa Moshfegh cowrote the script; her signature blend of the wry and the grotesque is nowhere to be found in over 90 minutes of humorless naturalism (unless you count a grim, tasteless use of CGI to portray a tragically severed limb). The formidable Brian Tyree Henry emerges as Lawrence’s new/old hometown best pal, but there’s not much for him to work with. It’s a shame seeing his powers of pathos put to such rangeless use. A dour, paint-by-numbers contemplation on trauma and dislocation unfolds, and we see two actors capable of tremendous expression stuck in a place that won’t allow it—instead they are given gray crayons with which to scrawl on gray paper.

As is the case with much of what’s produced by Apple’s partner in this endeavor, A24, it still looks like a spiritually meaningful movie. Sometime after the studio’s vastly superior, landmark entry Moonlight, a mimicking style of photography and corresponding collection of austerity hues became the visual skeleton key to prevailing notions of cinematic weight. And no one’s been better at exploiting this formula than the outfit that started it. If Causeway achieves anything, hopefully it will be the acceleration of this increasingly stale new prestige style’s end. R, 92 min.

Apple TV+

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Aftersun, as a product, is meant to soothe. One uses it after a sunburn to avoid peeling. Aftersun, as a film, doesn’t have the same intention. Instead, it works to softly peel back the layers of childhood memories, once merry, now more melancholy. Despite it being Charlotte Wells’s debut film, Aftersun feels as lived in as the fading vacation resort its protagonists, 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), pass through. While Sophie begins the familiar dance of adolescence, Calum, who is young enough to be mistaken for her older brother, is also coming of age, albeit under the stress of adulthood. The cracks of Calum’s struggles are plain to viewers, like when he goes dancing, and Sophie is left to sleep alone in the hotel lobby, interrupting an otherwise very sweet, if slightly strained, father-daughter relationship. Now, 20 years later, hindsight reveals those murkier moments to Sophie more clearly, and she grapples to reconcile them with the happier ones, like when she and her dad played pool and pulled pranks. Who was he then and who is she now? True to life, the answers remain elusive, but thanks to Wells’s evident confidence, this story, constructed slowly and focused on small moments, is more mesmerizing than most. R, 98 min.

Music Box Theatre, wide release on VOD

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Queens, New York, 1980: on Paul Graff’s first day of sixth grade he gets in trouble for drawing a caricature of the teacher and makes friends with fellow screwup Johnny, a Black kid who’s been held back and is a frequent target of the teacher’s abuse. The two boys bond over their outcast status. Johnny wants to be an astronaut, while Paul dreams of becoming a famous artist. Alarmed at his acting out and afraid he’ll fall behind, Paul’s American Jewish family makes him transfer to a private school where Maryanne Trump and her father, Fred, are guiding lights. Johnny has no such alternative option and instead goes truant, sometimes hiding out in Paul’s backyard clubhouse to evade authorities.

Reportedly based on director James Gray’s own childhood, the film traffics in broad-stroke ideas about racism, anti-Semitism, and class struggle. Lost in this After-School Special is a standout performance by Jeremy Strong as Paul’s low-status, frustrated father, who lashes out at his family with his words and fists but always feels like a disrespected laughingstock. Gray makes sure we know his people had the “right” politics by having them mock Reagan not once but twice when he appears on their TV set. But just like having members of the Trump family hover over the evil private school, this feels like stacking the deck. It’s not profound to say that Reagan’s America led to Trump’s or that Black people get a raw deal in both; these are truisms that don’t make for a compelling narrative. It’s not for nothing that early on Paul shows his beloved grandfather (a bafflingly miscast Anthony Hopkins) a drawing of a superhero he made up. His coming of age feels more like something out of the Marvel Universe than the childhood of a real living boy. R, 115 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Enola Holmes is back, and if it ain’t broke . . . don’t fix it! Enola Holmes 2 has everything you loved about the first film: a fun, adventurous YA mystery, Millie Bobby Brown (as Enola) regularly breaking the fourth wall to quip to the camera, hilarious hijinx, dangerous fight scenes, well-rounded supporting characters, and lots of girl power. 

The film opens with Enola starting a detective agency—but of course she can’t compete with her famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill, dressed in baggy period clothing to hide his super physique). She is investigating a missing girl and winds up infiltrating a match factory staffed entirely by girls and young women. (The central struggle of the film was based on an event called the “matchgirls’ strike” of 1888.) Luckily, their cases wind up being connected, so we get plenty of wonderful scenes of them working together as detectives as well as getting in scrapes. 

These unsanitized films aren’t afraid to put their young leads in danger, and Enola takes more than a few hard hits (and delivers some too). Louis Partridge is back as Lord Tewkesbury and their relationship heats up, though Enola still makes it clear she doesn’t need a man to be successful. And both Susan Wokoma and Helena Bonham Carter are back to provide some much needed ass-kicking and explosions. Newcomers to the series include the deliciously devilish David Thewlis, who plays a terrifyingly violent police inspector, Grail; and Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Mira Troy, who does a great job coaxing and coaching Enola toward realizing her love for Tewkesbury. While much of writer Jack Thorne’s screenplay copies tropes from the previous film, the additional Sherlock Holmes lore that is expanded in this film, and the return of the characters we love, make this adventure well worth taking. PG-13, 129 min.

Netflix

Read More

This isn’t your normal biopic. Pretty much every single aspect of it is exaggerated. The comedy singer-songwriter explodes into a sex symbol, becomes the greatest musician in history, all while having a relationship with Madonna and writing “Eat It” before Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

That’s exactly what audiences would want from a Weird Al Yankovic biopic, though. 

The film’s playful parody of the genre is delightfully in tune with the legendary musician’s own work. It’s helped by a tremendous leading turn from Daniel Radcliffe, who very much looks the part as Yankovic. As he’s repeatedly shown since finishing Harry Potter, Radcliffe thrives when both his character and the film are odd and outlandish, and Weird gives him plenty to have fun with. Whenever the film threatens to deflate, it’s helped by an avalanche of cameos that immediately bring it to life again. Jack Black, Conan O’Brien, and Yankovic himself are particularly hysterical. At the same time, Evan Rachel Wood’s spot-on Madonna and Rainn Wilson’s avuncular Dr. Demento performances stop Weird from ever feeling too one-note. Unfortunately, it’s never as side-splittingly hilarious as it threatens to be. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story still provides a steady stream of consistent laughs that mean it’s constantly enjoyable, while also being the perfect homage to its wonderfully bizarre and sweet inspiration. TV-14, 108 min.

Streaming free on the Roku Channel

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