Movie Reviews

What’s cooking in “The Kitchen” (Warner Bros.)? A morally muddled stew of fatal feminism.

Dramas of the falsely accused fighting against a broken legal system are reliably inspiring. With the sports star formula additionally worked in, “Brian Banks” (Bleecker Street) might seem to ace it.

Classic horror motifs are given fresh life in the fun chiller “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” (Lionsgate). However, while the film is essentially a bloodless affair, other elements make it best for grownups.

Teenage and grown viewers will find much to cheer about in “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” (Paramount). As for younger fans of its source material, the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series “Dora the Explorer,” however, parents may need to exercise just a bit of caution.

In keeping with a tested formula, barbs are traded, vehicles are raced and both fists and bullets fly in “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” (Universal), director David Leitch’s stand-alone addition to the popular action franchise that started in 2001.

Any film linking the names of writer-director Quentin Tarantino and infamous cult leader Charles Manson is unlikely to be a peaceable affair. And this eventually proves true for the auteur’s ruefully affectionate look back at 1969 Tinseltown, “Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood” (Columbia).

Advances in moviemaking technology allow a story that could only previously be told as a cartoon to be enacted, so to speak, by animals. And so we get “The Lion King” (Disney).

What Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” did for sharks, director Alexandre Aja’s deliberately claustrophobic chiller “Crawl” (Paramount) sets out to do for alligators.