It takes place in the mid-1960s, albeit a sleekly otherworldly jet age streamlining of that time. Result? Extras in fedoras share crowd scenes with a Manhattan skyline dotted with familiar landmarks like the Chrysler Building, alongside some casually wondrous “Jetsons”-esque skyscrapers and design flourishes. Typically a production designer working in the Marvel movie universe doesn’t stand a chance against the digital compositing and effects work and the general wash of green-screenery. “The Fantastic Four” is different. Production designer Kasra Farahani’s amusing visual swagger complements the film’s dueling interests: A little fun over here, the usual threats of global extinction over there.

In contrast to the current James Gunn “Superman,” worthwhile despite its neurotic mood swings and from-here-to-eternity action beats, director Matt Shakman’s handling of “The Fantastic Four” takes it easier on the audience. Having returned from their space mission with “cosmically compromised DNA,” Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm adapt to their Earthbound lives with some new bullet points for their collective resumé. Richards, big-time-stretchy-bendy, goes by Mister Fantastic, able to out-Gumby Gumby. One Storm’s alter ego is Invisible Woman, while the other Storm is the flying Human Torch. Grimm returns to Earth as a mobile rockpile, aka The Thing.

So what’s it all about? It’s about a really hungry tourist just looking for one last meal before he “may finally rest.” So says Galactus, devourer of worlds, for whom noshing involves planets, and whose herald is Silver Surfer. Galactus wants Sue Storm’s soon-to-be-newborn baby in exchange for not devouring Earth. How the Fantastic Four go about dealing with Galactus culminates in an evacuated Manhattan, in the vicinity of Times Square, while the New York throngs hide away in the underground lair of Harvey Elder, the infamous Moleman.

One of the buoying aspects of Shakman’s film is its avoidance of antagonist overexposure. You get just enough of Paul Walter Hauser’s witty embodiment of auxiliary more-misunderstood-than-bad Moleman, for example, to want more. And Galactus, a hulking metallic entity, is such that a little of him is plenty, actually.

The Fantastic Four run the show here. Not everyone will love the generous, relaxed amount of hangout time director Shakman’s film spends setting up and illustrating family dynamics and medium-grade banter. Others will take it as a welcome change from the 10-megaton solemnity of some of the recent Marvels, hits as well as flops.

While Pedro Pascal, aka Mister Ubiquitous, makes for a solid, sensitive ringleader as the ever-murmuring Mister Fantastic, the emotional weight tips slightly toward Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm, as she weathers the travails of imminent parenthood, wondering along with her husband whether the child of DNA-scrambled superheroic parents will be OK. I wish Ebon Moss-Bachrach had better material as The Thing, but he’s ingratiating company; same goes for Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm, a boyish horndog once he sets his sights on the metallic flip of the screen’s first female Silver Surfer (Julia Garner).

Michael Giacchino’s excellent and subtly rangy musical score is a big plus. The costumes by Alexandra Byrne are less so. This is where indefensible personal taste comes in. There’s no question that Byrne’s designs fit snugly into the overall retro-futurist frame of “The Fantastic Four.” But holy moly, the palette dominating the clothes, and picked up by numerous production design elements, is really, really, really blue. Really blue. The movie works bluer than Buddy Hackett at a ’64 midnight show in Vegas.

Few will share my aversion to the no-doubt carefully varied shades of French blue prevalent here, but what can I do? I can do this: be grateful this film’s just serious enough, tonally, for its family matters and knotty world-saving ethical dilemmas to hold together. It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

“The Fantastic 4: First Steps” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense action, and some suggestive content)

Running time: 2:05

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 24

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic. 

This summer, in 2025, history can barely contain each new 24-hour blurt. It feels less like we’re in history and more like we’re choking on it. So we remember Shakespeare’s perfect three syllables to describe dark political machinations. “Out of joint,” Hamlet says of his country and his time. Like a dislocated shoulder.

Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is not Shakespeare, and isn’t trying, and half the time it can’t be said to know what it’s doing, or how to dramatize what it’s going for. But I’ve seen it twice for the good stuff, and for the riddle-solving of why whole, frustrating chunks of this two-and-a-half-hour American fable compete with the rest of it.

Aster has taken on one of the toughest challenges a writer-director can attempt: extremely recent history, out of joint and somehow present, not past. “Eddington” is set in May 2020, three months into the COVID-19 pandemic, in a part of the world where personal freedoms trump the common good — which is another way of saying there’s a lot of unmasked transmitters around town.

Joaquin Phoenix takes the role of Joe Cross, sheriff of the (fictional) New Mexico town of Eddington. Part blunt-force satire, part topical, state-of-the-nation drama, “Eddington” is also a Western, an early COVID-era Western at that, with the sheriff — a foolish mediocrity and the son-in-law of the previous sheriff, now deceased — squaring off against the town’s mayor Ted Garcia, a crafty operator played by Pedro Pascal.

Garcia, running for re-election, backs a controversial “data center” construction project, which threatens to cripple the region’s already drought-prone water supply. The First Nation tribal residents of this corner of New Mexico are fighting this development. Even without it, Sheriff Cross has unrelated and unresolvable issues with Mayor Garcia; years earlier Garcia may have had some sort of relationship with Louise (Emma Stone, underused, to say the least), now the sheriff’s wife. The sexual trauma in Louise’s past, and her present, rickety state, is something her husband does not have the emotional resources to confront.

Both Eddington and “Eddington” trade in soap opera-y secrets and subterranean conspiracies involving dirty law enforcement, incest, male sexual jealousy, good lawmen getting shafted, a small clutch Eddington’s young Black Lives Matter protesters spouting newly acquired racial reckoning verbiage they barely comprehend, and so much more. In the immediate wake of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis, things are getting hot all over. Eddington does not know how to deal with its present historical moment.

Unhelpfully for “Eddington,” the movie, Aster responds to the question of “how to wrap this thing up?” with a wildly florid action climax. This pits the sheriff against anonymous killers, Eastwood style, but with pesky drones and shadowy corporate interests raising the stakes. The last 30 minutes of the film feel almost completely misjudged, and absurd, but not satirically effective; it’s just a dive into adolescent Tarantino ultraviolence.

But getting there, “Eddington” is none of those things. It’s particularly astute in Aster’s little details and flurries of early COVID. Sheriff Cross isn’t really having the whole masking thing, and Phoenix wisely keeps the character’s bullheadedness realistic, not exaggerated. When the story begins, COVID has yet to officially arrive in Eddington. The pandemic is like the Black Lives Matter protests and the national violence so often flashed on TV screens and laptops; it’s “not a ‘here’ problem,” Cross says, partly to reassuring his own crumbling confidence.

The filmmaker gave us the punishing family nightmare “Hereditary,” the “Wicker Man” riff “Midsommar” and the half-wondrous, half-exasperating dreamlike odyssey “Beau is Afraid.” With “Eddington,” Aster has made a distinct period piece, nailing many woeful details about where we were five years ago. And where we are now. Too few American movies, ever, have caught current history successfully. And as London-based critic Damon Wise wrote about “Eddington” in its Cannes Film Festival premiere earlier this year: “How do you make a satirical movie about modern America when the news that comes out of there every day is quite literally beyond a joke?”

This is the peculiar thing about “Eddington”: At Cannes, it apparently played like sledgehammer satire of both idiot conservatives and ridiculous, self-loathing liberals, and it still does, I suppose. Yet it’s hitting differently now. When Aster lays off the easy comic despair in favor of more ambiguous and dimensional feelings, interactions and moments, “Eddington” becomes the movie he wanted. His script has a million problems with clarity, coincidence and the nagging drag of a protagonist set up for a long, grisly comeuppance, yet “Eddington” is probably Aster’s strongest film visually, with cinematographer Darius Khondji creating the light and shadow for some sweeping, gently ironic evocations of Old West and Old Hollywood myth-making.

The myths this time are not reassuring. “Eddington” will probably age rather well — even, and perhaps especially, if Aster’s explicit anticipation of martial law as America’s next great experiment proves accurate.

“Eddington” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong violence, some grisly images, language, and graphic nudity)

Running time: 2:25

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 18

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

“Sorry, Baby” is so, so much better than that. Eva Victor’s first feature as writer-director, and star, feels like a lived experience, examined, cross-examined, ruminated over, carefully shaped and considered.

Its tone is unexpected, predominantly but not cynically comic. The movie doesn’t settle for “write what you know.” Victor followed a tougher, more challenging internal directive: Write what you need to find out about what you know.

The story deals with a college sexual assault, without being “about” that, or only about that. “Sorry, Baby” concerns how Agnes, the sharp-witted protagonist played by Victor, makes sense of her present tense, several years after she was mentored, then raped, by her favorite professor, with the bad thing now in the past but hardly out of sight, or mind.

Victor arranges the telling non-chronologically, which keeps this liquid notion of past and present flowing as a complicated emotional state. When “Sorry, Baby” begins, Agnes is thriving as an English literature professor at the same tiny New England college she attended as a graduate student. She now lives near campus with her cat in a somewhat remote old house, crammed with books. Lydie, Agnes’s good friend from grad school played by the superb Naomi Ackie, has come for a visit, and the magical rightness of the interplay between Victor and Ackie gives the film a warm, energizing hum.

At one point, Lydie asks her if she leaves the house much. Agnes responds verbally, but her body language, her evasive eyes and other “tells” have their own say. Lydie’s question lingers in the air, just before we’re taken back to Agnes and Lydie’s grad school years for the film’s next chapter.

Here we see Agnes on the cusp of her future, surrounded by ideas and novels and opinions, as well as an envious fellow student (Kelly McCormack, a touch broad as written and played in the film’s one tonal misjudgment). Agnes’ writing has attracted the attention of the campus conversation topic Decker (Louis Cancelmi), a faculty member with a faulty marriage and a barely-read but undeniably published novel Agnes admires. The admiration is mutual, even if the power dynamic is not.

At the last minute, the teacher reschedules his meeting with Agnes to take place at his house near campus. We see Agnes arrive, be greeted at the door and go inside. The camera stays outside, down the steps and by the sidewalk, for an unusually long time. Finally she tumbles, more or less, back out on the porch; it’s getting dark by this time; Decker appears in the doorway, trying to apologize, sort of? Kind of?  And the scene is over.

Only later do we learn some unnerving particulars of what happened to Agnes, once she is ready, finally, to talk about it with Lydie. “Sorry, Baby,” as Victor said in one post-screening discussion, began with the notion of how to film the assault — meaning, what not to show. “In real life,” the filmmaker said, “we don’t get to be behind the door. We hear what happened and we believe people. (And) we don’t need to be inside to know.”

From there, “Sorry, Baby” continues its flow back and forth, in the years in between what happened and where Agnes is now. There’s an eccentric neighbor (Lucas Hedges, unerring) who initially appears to be call-the-police material, but it doesn’t work out that way at all. Lifelines can come from anywhere, Agnes learns, and expressing oneself honestly and directly is easier said than done.

Throughout this precisely written film, we see and hear Agnes caught in weird language-built labyrinths as she squares off with the college’s HR department while attempting to file a report against the professor, or — much later — Agnes at jury duty selection for an unrelated matter, explaining the incident in her past to her questioner in weirdly funny ways. Victor’s a tightrope-walker in these scenes; “Sorry, Baby” is as much about everyone around Agnes, performing their understanding, or concern, regarding the Bad Thing in her past.

Some of the more overt bits of bleak comedy are better finessed than others, and you wouldn’t mind another five or 10 minutes of hangout time, complementing the well-paced overall structure. But even that’s a sign of success. How many standout movies have you seen this year that made you think, you know, that actually could’ve been a little longer? Clear-eyed, disarming and, yes, plainly semi-autobiographical, “Sorry, Baby” takes every right turn in making Agnes far more than a tragic yet wisecracking victim, with a smiling-through-tears ending waiting around the bend. She’s just living her full, up-and-down-and-up life, acknowledging the weight of that life without solving or dissolving the bad thing.

This is Victor’s achievement, too, of course. Already, this quietly spectacular first-time filmmaker’s promise has been fulfilled.

“Sorry, Baby” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content and language)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 4

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

The tension in those images comes from two places. The unfortunate place: When the comic banter or monologuing strains for laughs, or goes sideways, it sometimes dies an extra, tiny, momentary death because of the arch, extreme formality of the presentation.

The more fortunate source of tension is where the actors live. In Anderson’s lavishly talented ensembles, the majority of the performers fulfill the basic requirements of being in a Wes Anderson movie, which can involve spitting out long reams of dialogue quickly, directly, without a lot of sauce. It also involves the task of portraying a human in a specific realm of unreality and in a kind of permanent repose, even in motion.

But hitting the marks and holding the pose isn’t enough. There’s movement, of course, in every Anderson comedy, and in the best ones, the movement and the sight gags are funnier because of the stillness surrounding that movement. Whatever you want to call Anderson’s universe — I’ll go with Deadpandia — it’s not easy to activate as a performer. When the right actor wriggles free of the constraints and finds a rhythm, a heartbeat and a human spark, it’s magic.

Benicio Del Toro is the star of “The Phoenician Scheme,” Anderson’s 12th and latest. But the ringer is Michael Cera, as Norwegian tutor Bjørn Lund, employed as an all-purpose factotum by the shady, swaggering, death-defying entrepreneur played by Del Toro.

In one go, Cera joins the top tier of Anderson alums, which includes Ralph Fiennes (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar”) and, from Anderson’s earlier, looser years, Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston (“The Royal Tenenbaums”) and, of course, Bill Murray in everything (he has a brief cameo here, as God). Cera is terrifically subtle in everything he does, from pricelessly cheap dialect humor to sudden bursts of jealousy. He’s delightful, even if “The Phoenician Scheme” is only occasionally that.

The movie’s largely about other characters. A frequent target of assassins, forever surviving plane crashes in between business deals, Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda (Del Toro) embarks on the riskiest development project of his life, indicated by Anderson’s title. It consists of a dam, tunnels, a canal and a general colonialist ravaging of a desert region (fictional, but with plenty of real-world Middle Eastern inspirations). Funding this beast means negotiating with several investors, among them a French nightclub owner (Mathieu Amalric), a pair of American industrialists (Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston) and, above all, Korda’s estranged daughter, Liesl, a cynical novitiate and Korda’s intended heiress, played by Mia Threapleton.

“The Phoenician Scheme” is a tale of what money can buy, and what money can’t. Stringing episodes together, screenwriter Anderson (working from a story co-created by Roman Coppola) treats Korda as a cocky survivor of fabulous riches. Through his adventures in fundraising, and realization that he won’t last forever, Korda learns from Liesl a little about what makes a legacy important. Meantime, he negotiates family matters with his 10 young sons and his scowling brother, Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who may be Liesl’s father, and whose massive woodcut of a beard comes straight from Orson Welles’ billionaire in “Mr. Arkadin.”

The overall vibe of fishy exoticism owes something to “Mr. Arkadin” as well. Anderson works here with a cinematographer new to him, the excellent Bruno Delbonnel, shooting on 35mm film. Anderson regulars Adam Stockhausen (production design, first-rate) and Milena Canonero (costume design, brilliant and vibrant as always) evoke a dreamlike 1950s setting in every soundstage-bound detail.

And the story? Well, it has a little problem with over-elaboration. “The Phoenician Scheme” follows a relatively straightforward narrative line, ticking off chapters as Korda addresses each of his prized (and literal) shoeboxes of research and minutiae regarding the massively disruptive, slave labor-dependent construction project. It’s easier to parse what’s going on here compared to the hyperlinking and layering of “The French Dispatch” and “Asteroid City.” But the protagonist is a bit of a bore. And somehow, right now, on planet Earth in 2025, a movie about a craven oligarch on a spree hits a mixed chord, let’s say.

It is, however, striking to see what happens in the epilogue of this up-and-down Anderson film, when Del Toro — who looks splendid but struggles to locate a lightness of touch the material could use — finally gets a few moments of on-screen relaxation in the epilogue. That’s by design: He is not the same person at the end of his story. But I wonder if Anderson erred in maintaining such a tight hold on Del Toro and Threapleton en route to the story destination.

A beautiful mixed bag, let’s say, all told. But I’ll see “The Phoenician Scheme” a second time sometime for Cera, who will surely return to the Anderson fold.

“The Phoenician Scheme” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for violent content, bloody images, some sexual material, nude images, and smoking throughout)

Running time: 1:45

How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 6

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

There’s a third reminder, too: One person’s eyeroll is another’s shattering and beautiful reminder that life is beautiful, maybe harsh and sometimes lonely and full of wrong turns with a possible apocalypse looming. But beautiful.

This latest Stephen King screen adaptation is written and directed by Mike Flanagan, best known for “The Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix, along with “Oculus,” “Before I Wake,” “Doctor Sleep” and other features. Elements of all this find a home somewhere in the running time of “The Life of Chuck,” told in three reverse-chronological chapters. It begins with an ending — the planet’s — and ends with the adolescence, first crush and tender heart of an orphaned boy, shadowed by ghosts, headed for life as an accountant. It’s what his wizened, grieving accountant grandfather (played by Mark Hamill) wanted for him all along, right or wrong.

Narrated throughout by Nick Offerman, the first and most intriguing chapter focuses on a teacher, Marty, played by the excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor. He is at his wit’s end, dealing with hopeless students and even more hopeless parents. Their reasons for despair are beyond anyone’s control.

The world has had it. It’s quitting time. We learn some details on the fly, from news reports and townsfolk mutterings, about whole chunks of California tumbling in the ocean, wildfires, earthquakes, satellite communication gone awry, wifi and the internet itself dying minute by minute. The center isn’t holding.

The weirdest thing of all is the most darling. Around town, Marty and others notice a proliferation of billboards and signage congratulating someone named Charles Krantz on “39 great years!” Meantime Marty and his ex-wife Felicia (Karen Gillan), on good terms, commiserate by phone about the latest roster of calamities. Director Flanagan handles the escalating insanity with suggestive ambiguity, nothing too bombastic for as long as the story allows.

Later, at night, on every window on every house within view, a satellite (or celestial?) video image of Chuck appears, long after power has been lost. Marty and Felicia stare at the stars in Felicia’s backyard. Maybe the love they knew once remains intact, unlike everything around them. And maybe they’ll have to settle for wondering.

Part 2 is Chuck’s story, at least a piece of it, taking place prior to the first chapter. Tom Hiddleston portrays this everyman accountant, married with a daughter. Chuck has traveled to a new town for a convention. Between conferences he’s outside, strolling, and drawn to the drumming skills of a sidewalk busker (Taylor Gordon). Catching the eye of a young woman (Annalise Basso), recently dumped and not happy about it, he asks for her hand while the drummer does her thing. This is not just the movie’s crucial scene; it’s meant as a life-is-worth-living demonstration, precision-choreographed and flashy beyond all conventional notions of accountancy.

Where did Chuck get the moves? The answers come right on schedule in the concluding chapter, after we’ve learned the adult Chuck’s full circumstances and fate. The childhood versions of this everyman archetype (he’s not really a character) are played by Benjamin Pajak and, in adolescence, Jacob Tremblay (of “Room”). Chuck endures a difficult, grief-laden childhood after the tragic death of his parents. He finds love and solace under the loving care of his grandparents, played by Hamill and Mia Sara. Here, King’s material, adapted by Flanagan, inches into small-town horror behind closed doors, with the off-limits storage room in Chuck’s grandparents’ house containing something wicked. Or at least not of this world.

Clearly “The Life of Chuck” works for many. It snagged the coveted audience award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a frequent harbinger of the best picture winner at the Oscars. Well, maybe. This may be one of those movies, like “The Shawshank Redemption” (another King story), that comes and goes at the theaters and then becomes one of those beloved films that makes people tear up just saying the title.

It is, however, mighty gooey stuff, sanctimonious and faux-humble in its embrace of ordinary lives and, in the end, a weirdly scaled expansion of a familiar idea borrowed from Walt Whitman (name-checked in the movie) and his line in “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We all are, and do. But setting a genial if frustrated accountant’s life against the universe’s curtain call is a little too, you know, too-too.

A final word about the visual landscape of the film. Maybe it’s just me, but when Chuck dances like he’s never danced before, the town square (most of the film was shot in various Alabama locations) has been made to resemble one of those eerie Hallmark Channel Christmas specials, but in July. You keep waiting for the big reveal: The town’s “The Truman Show”! It can’t be real! But the reveal never comes. It’s not a documentary or anything, but the best Stephen King stories on screen keep one foot in a world we recognize, so that we can step off into another world, and explore. After the persuasively strange first chapter’s over, “The Life of Chuck” is a duller kind of strange.

“The Life of Chuck’ — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:51

How to watch: Premieres in theaters  June 6

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Fifty years ago, a certain film franchise hadn’t yet asked audiences those questions, in so many words. “Jaws” the first, and by several hundred thousand miles the best, opened in 1975; three years later “Jaws 2” arrived, dangling the marketing tagline “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” That first sequel wasn’t much, but people went. That’s what moviegoers did then, reliably. They went to the movies, in a time just before sequels clogged an entire popular culture’s plumbing system.

It’s different now. “Star Wars” and then Marvel Studios, among others, have ensured our risk of franchise fatigue, and a rickety industry’s default reliance on a few big familiar name brands. So why am I cautiously optimistic — hope springs occasional, as they say — about the summer season, a time when all the franchisees come out to play and take you away from the sun?

My reasoning is simple.

A few weeks ago, “Thunderbolts” — the 36th title in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and yes, that’s too many — turned out pretty well. More recently, “Final Destination Bloodlines,” the sixth in the “Final Destination” killing spree, was fresh enough, in its blithe smackdowns between humans and Death, to remind us: You never know when one of these franchise entries will pay off, even modestly.

“Mission: Impossible — the Final Reckoning,” already in theaters, will soon be joined by dinosaurs, superheroes, naked guns and men in capes, all familiar, most having endured earlier big-screen adventures somewhere between bleh and much, much better than bleh. If many can’t help but favor the forthcoming releases promising something new, or -ish, well, the ones that succeed have a way of ensuring the industry’s future. And every time a standalone of populist distinction like this year’s “Sinners” finds an audience, an angel gets its wings.

Here’s a list of 10 summer offerings, five franchisees, five originals. Release dates subject to change.

“Materialists” (June 13): Writer-director Celine Song’s second feature, after the quiet triumph of “Past Lives,” stars Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal, aka the Man Who Is Everywhere, in a romantic comedy about a high-end matchmaker’s triangular conundrum. Song knows the value of a triangle; in an apparently glossier vein, her “Past Lives” follow-up should make it crystal clear and, with luck, a winner.

“28 Years Later” (June 20): Ralph Fiennes brings nice, crisp final consonants to a ravaged near-future in director Danny Boyle’s return to speedy, menacing rage-virus junkies, with a script from franchise-starter Alex Garland. This is my kind of continuation; the first two films, “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later,” both worked, in interestingly different ways. Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson co-star.

“Elio” (June 20): Pixar’s back, which historically and statistically means good news more often than not. This one’s about an 11-year-old accidentally but not unpleasantly beamed into outer space’s “Communiverse” after making contact on Earth with aliens. Can Elio save the galaxy while representing his home planet well and truly? The directors of “Elio” are Madeline Sharafian (who made the Pixar short “Burro”), Domee Shi (“Bao,” “Turning Red”) and Adrian Molina (“Coco”).

“Sorry, Baby” (June 27): I’ve seen this one, and it’s really good. The story hinges on a maddeningly common incident of sexual assault, this one rewiring the life of a future college English department professor. But “Sorry, Baby” is not a movie about rape; it’s about the days, weeks and years afterward. Writer-director-star Eva Victor (who played Rian on “Billions”), here making a sharp-witted feature directorial debut, proves herself a triple threat with a wide-open future.

“F1” (June 27): “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski returns for what sounds a little like “Top Gun: Maverick: This Time on Wheels, and the Ground.” Brad Pitt plays a former Formula 1 superstar, now mentoring a reckless hotshot either to victory and wisdom, or defeat and a tragic embrace of his character flaws. Damson Idris, Javier Bardem and Kerry Condon co-star.

“Jurassic World Rebirth” (July 2): The latest in a hardy multi-decade franchise that has known triumph as well as “Jurassic World Dominion.” Heartening news on the director front: Gareth Edwards, who did so well by Godzilla in the 2014 “Godzilla,” wrangles the new storyline, with Scarlett Johansson leading an ensemble of potential snacks (humans, that is) in and out of digital harm’s way on a secret research facility island fulla’ trouble.

“Superman” (July 11): The whole double-life thing has gotten to the Kryptonian strongman by now, and in director James Gunn’s take on the “Superman” myth, he’s determined to resolve his Smallville upbringing and Clark Kent newspapering with the wider galaxy’s perilous demands. David Corenswet leaps into the title role; his co-stars include Rachel Brosnahan (Lois Lane) and Nicholas Hoult (Lex Luthor).

“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” (July 25): Despite two of the least grabby words ever to fill the right-hand side of a movie title’s colon, “First Steps” already has stoked the enthusiasm of millions with a pretty zingy trailer, which of course automatically means the film is a classic. (Kidding.) We’ll see! The motley yet stylish quartet, led by Pedro “Everywhere, All the Time” Pascal, squares off with the ravenously evil Galactus and Galactus’ flying factotum, the Silver Surfer.

“The Naked Gun” (Aug. 1): First there was “Police Squad!”, the one-season 1982 wonder that introduced America’s most serenely confident law enforcement know-nothing, Frank Drebin, originated by the magically right Leslie Nielsen. Then came the “Naked Gun” movies. Now Liam Neeson takes over in this reboot, with a cast including Pamela Anderson and Paul Walter Hauser.

“Caught Stealing” (Aug. 29): In director Darren Aronofsky’s 1990s-set NYC thriller, a former pro baseball player (Austin Butler) attempts the larceny equivalent of stealing home once he’s entangled in the criminal underworld. This one boasts an A-grade cast, with Zoë Kravitz, Liev Schreiber, Regina King and Vincent D’Onofrio taking care of goods and bads alike.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Stitch and Lilo are now in a live-action movie. The new “Lilo & Stitch” constitutes adequate if wearying fan service at best, and at worst, a new reason to check in with your dentist about a mouth guard for apparent teeth-grinding.

The movie makes me wonder: If you don’t grow up with the animated versions of whatever Disney has sent through the de-animator this time, is it a matter of coming to it with the wrong expectations, or just expecting too much? There’s charm here, and a periodic human pulse, even as the remake fights with its own frenetic shrillness to the bitter end, in an adaptation by screenwriters Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes sticking closely to the animated version, while adding 23 more minutes.

For newbies: Orphaned after the death of their parents, 6-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha), ostracized at school, is being raised by her devoted but harried teenage sister Nani (Sydney Agudong), nearing the age of adult guardianship. Nani has shelved her college dreams (already she has been accepted by the University of California-San Diego, a long way from Lilo and Hawaii) to become a marine biologist.

It’s a somewhat wrenching family scenario, as was the animated feature a generation ago, with conflict introduced by the sisters’ wary interactions with a skeptical social worker (Tia Carrere, who voiced Nani in the earlier version). The larger conflict is interstellar. Later nicknamed Stitch by Lilo, once he crash-lands his getaway spaceship near the sisters’ house, the small blue maniac from somewhere Out There is an “illegal genetic experiment” gone haywire, lab-created by scientist Jumba on a distant planet. The scientist, more hapless than mad, must retrieve Stitch in the name of the United Galactic Federation (Hannah Waddingham voices the imperious leader).

The live-action redo imagines Jumba and his cohort, the dippy Earth expert Pleakley, as aliens far more frequently depicted in human form, as played by Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen. The former appears somewhat flummoxed by his material, guessing as to what kind of comic energy or tone would work. Meanwhile, Magnussen mugs hard enough to turn the audience into mugging victims, though as staged and edited, the ramshackle physical comedy dominating “Lilo & Stitch” is more obstacle than answer.

Even with director Dean Fleischer Camp coming off the terrific and hilarious and moving “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” feature, based on the lovely Marcel short films, his handling of this material feels thwarted. It’s a prefabricated commodity, and those are not easy to activate. The main problem? Violent physical comedy can succeed or fail a million different ways in the realms of animation, least well, probably, in photorealistic animation. Tellingly, the 2002 Disney movie was not photorealistic; its animated watercolor palette and more traditional, storybook visual approach let Lilo and Stitch be themselves, in a frenzy or in heartfelt reflection, and that approach worked.

But in live-action? Well, it’s different, even if the story is the same. Watching people getting clobbered with mops, or Stitch making messes and starting fires at the open-air beach resort where Nani works — the funny’s diminished in live-action. It’s more bombastic, and more realistic. And those two qualities don’t improve anything. Every action beat, and even the simplest dialogue exchanges, feel aggressively rushed and pushy here.

The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters’ sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors. “Lilo & Stitch” always was a nutty collision of any number of films and stories, from “Frankenstein” to “E.T.” to any prior Disney project featuring two characters who might plausibly sing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” to each other. That song, of course, belongs to “Toy Story,” but you get the idea.

While Disney has no financial imperative to modify a business plan centered on what they’ve already made  — and for the record, the recent “Snow White” was far from the worst of its recent remakes — they do have a creative imperative. They have an obligation to their own future, and to the film medium’s. It can’t be lost on the creative artists involved with each new Disney drag-and-drop, including “Lilo & Stitch”: Live-action recycling makes characters you know and love more “real.” And too often, that realism comes with only trace elements of real charm, or magic.

“Lilo & Stitch” — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for action, peril, and thematic elements)

Running time: 1:48

How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 22

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

With its adorable little asterisk in the title, “Thunderbolts*” goes further than most Marvels in its focus on psychological torment, mental health and, more broadly, a shared search for self-worth among a half-dozen also-rans who learn what it takes to be an A-team. Their sense of shame isn’t played for laughs, though there are some. Mostly it’s sincere. And it’s more effective that way.

“A” stands for Avengers, among other things, and with the legendary Avengers AWOL for now (hence the asterisk in the title), there’s a vacuum in need of filling.  Targeted for elimination, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus returning for duty as U.S. intelligence weasel Valentina, the combatants of the title have their work cut out for them. Who can they trust? If not Valentina, taking a more central role this time, then who?

Joining forces are Yelena/Black Widow (top-billed Florence Pugh); her gone-to-seed father Alexei/Red Guardian (David Harbour); the tetchy John Walker/Captain America (Wyatt Russell); Antonia/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko); the quicksilver invisible Ava/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen); and the Winter Soldier himself, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), whose entry into the “Thunderbolts*” storyline is most welcome. Their mission: To neutralize as well as rehabilitate the all-too-human lab experiment known as Bob, aka The Sentry, aka The Void, played by Robert Pullman. He’s Valentina’s little project, more dangerous than anyone knows.

The misfits scenario guiding “Thunderbolts*” is nothing new. “Suicide Squad” did it, “Guardians of the Galaxy” does it, and this motley crew keeps the tradition alive. It works, even when the material’s routine, because Pugh’s forceful yet subtle characterization of a heavy-hearted killing machine with an awful childhood feels like something’s at stake. She and the reliably witty Harbour work well together, and while there’s a certain generic-ness at work in the character roster — these insecure egotists are meant to be placeholders, with something to prove to themselves and the world — the actors keep the movie reasonably engaging before the effects take over.

Even those are better than usual, for the record. That sounds weird when you’re dealing with another $200 million production budget commodity. Shouldn’t they all look good, preferably in wildly different ways?

It’s a matter of simplicity and selectivity, not assault tactics. The poor, tormented newbie Bob has a superhero guise (The Sentry, fearsomely powerful, essentially all Avengers packed into one fella). but SuperBob has a dark side. When The Void takes over, it’s insidious psychological warfare, with The Void’s victims suddenly, quieting disappearing into a massive black handprint. His targets must relive the worst guilt and shame they have known, whoever they are, wherever that shadow of anguish and rage may lead them.

Sounds heavy, and it is. But at its best, the visualization of this part of “Thunderbolts*” feels like something relatively new and vivid. And there you have it. The 36th MCU movie, if you’re interested. It’s the most pretty-good one in a while.

“Thunderbolts*” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violence, language, thematic elements, and some suggestive and drug references)

Running time: 2:06

How to watch: Premiered in theaters May 1

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

It’s also a movie made for movie theaters. Shooting in 65mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70, Coogler hands his steady collaborator Michael B. Jordan an extra-wide showcase for what old-school Hollywood ballyhoo used to call “a demanding dual role.” In beautiful Depression-era hats and threads courtesy of Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter, Jordan plays twin brothers nicknamed Smoke and Stack, Chicago gangsters formerly affiliated with Al Capone.

Carrying scads of cash and a load of bootleg beer, they’ve returned home to segregated Clarksdale, Mississippi, to open a juke joint in an old sawmill. The white man making the sale, the twins assume, is fully vested in the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, despite the man’s grinning assurance that “the Klan don’t exist no more.”

“Sinners” actually opens with another set of twins, Fore and Shadow. In a prologue, the badly scarred and limping preacher’s son Sammie (Miles Caton) hobbles up to the front door of his father’s chapel mid-sermon, clutching the snapped neck of his precious guitar. There’s a story there. In eyeblink flashes of screams, flames and red-eyed demons, Coogler foreshadows the genre mashup to come by hinting at what has transpired over the last few hours.

Much of “Sinners” follows Smoke and Stack’s preparations for an opening night to remember. They enlist some old acquaintances for the job, including wizened harmonica ace Delta Slim, played exquisitely by Delroy Lindo. His specially tailored gravel speaking voice alone is worth Oscar consideration.

At the train station where Delta Slim performs, the rapscallion Stack reunites, uneasily, with old flame Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who has been waiting a little too long for the charming dog who ditched her. Biracial and essentially passing for white, Mary eyes Stack with a look that says if looks could kill. Yet her bitterness is tangled up with longing, and a loveless marriage to an Arkansas man isn’t much protection from her rekindled desire.

Smoke, meantime, braces himself for his own bittersweet reunion. Seven years ago, he left behind a Hoodoo conjure woman named Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he had a tragically short-lived son. This plantation laborer has been on the spiritual lookout for Smoke’s safety ever since he and Stack fought in the Great War and then went north to Chicago. “I heard they ain’t got Jim Crow up there,” Sammie says to his gangster cousins en route to the juke joint. The twins know better; Chicago may have “tall buildings instead of plantations,” one says, but the raw deal for Black America remains roughly the same.

We meet many others in this willfully overpacked character roster, among them the Chinese immigrant grocers Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), who help get the joint ready for jumping. When the sun goes down and the doors open, Sammie, guitar in hand, lights the place on fire musically with the blues rouser “I Lied to You,” written by the film’s composer Ludwig Göransson and Raphael Saadiq. Coogler expands the moment here to embrace his central idea of deep-rooted music “so true,” it pierces the veil between the real and the supernatural, connecting the past with the future.

Visually, this means the dance floor is joined by emissaries from this outer ancestral realm, with West African tribal members, Peking opera figures, First Nation warriors and pre-colonial Irish sharing space with blues-based guitarists from the future and DJs working the turntable. Miraculously, the scene works; Coogler tests the limits of what “Sinners” can do, while setting up the shift into “Lovecraft Country”-style horror.

By this point, Coogler has already introduced a mysterious traveler named Remmick, portrayed with wily menace by Jack O’Connell, who has, we learn, clashed with some Choctaw tribesmen. (Describing this movie makes it sound wilder than it is, really.) After Remmick and his accomplices pay a visit, “Sinners” borrows a page or three from one of Coogler’s acknowledged influences, the Robert Rodriguez pulp thriller “From Dusk Till Dawn,” setting up a vampires vs. humans melee.

Parts of that story transformation work, some less well. Coogler can let his characters’ verbosity get the better of story momentum. The hallucinatory scene of a maniacally step-dancing Remmick, hosting a bonfire-lit dance party for his latest undead victims, feels off, and arguably not quite crazy or delirious enough. Elsewhere, more prosaically, there are passages where the narrative cross-cutting and overall rhythm get a little heavy on its feet.

These are not deal breakers, though. The movie’s alive, and the actors seize the day, from Mosaku’s grave and beautifully modulated Annie to Steinfeld’s note-perfect embodiment of a femme fatale who’s fatale in unusual ways. Coogler makes the chief non-human antagonist, Remmick, more than just a pair of fangs waiting to happen. In varying degrees of subtlety and bluntness, “Sinners” establishes a through-line between the Jim Crow deep South, America’s longstanding tradition of white appropriation and outright theft of Black culture, and things a crafty white vampire might say to the juke joint’s multicultural crew to gain their trust. “Can we just once all be family?” he pleads, waiting for the invitation he needs to commence the bloodshed.

“White folks like the blues just fine,” Delta Slim tells Sammie earlier that same day. “They just don’t like the folks who make it.” The vision of 1932 Mississippi in “Sinners” may be idealized — the downtown Clarksdale sequences depict an easy intermingling of white, Black and Asian residents, which is a stretch — but this is, after all, folklore territory, with top-flight work from all the design departments and from cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw.

Coogler adds telling flourishes here and there, things not found in your average gangster movie, or vampire movie, or Delta blues fairytale. Stack, the more brutal of the two twins finessed with confidence by Jordan, gives a local girl he’s paying to watch his automobile a 30-second tutorial in how to negotiate for better pay. Coogler may well have drawn from memories of his own “Black Panther” contract negotiations here. And “Sinners” takes a straightforward interest in carnal desire, which is rarer than it sounds. More than once, the dialogue makes space for Sammie learning about female pleasure from his worldly gangster cousin. If that recurring element of this percolating stewpot of a movie connects with even a handful of paying customers, “Sinners” might just qualify for sex-positive sainthood.

“Sinners” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language)

Running time: 2:17

How to watch: Premieres in theaters April 17

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

For those who don’t live in the area, Joliet is a 45-minute or so drive southwest of Chicago, depending on traffic. “A Working Man” imagines an insidious sex trafficking network run by Russian mobsters in very silly tracksuits, whose owners clearly are just asking for it. What is “it”? “It” is Statham. Based on the book “Levon’s Trade,” the first of 12 Chuck Dixon novels, this overripe exercise in vigilante slaughter casts Stathan as Royal Marines veteran Levon Cade, now working as a construction foreman for a family-run company.

Levon is up against it, life-wise. He’s fighting to retain co-parenting custody of his daughter, he’s sleeping in his car and he’s struggling to keep a lid on his most violent impulses, without which, of course, there would be no movie.

In the line of duty, he has killed plenty; his American wife committed suicide prior to the film’s timeline, while he was away. It’s a lot for one person to shoulder, but in this realm of action fantasy, there’s only so much emotional realism allowed. In “A Working Man,” when someone encourages Levon to work through his probable post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s practically a laugh line and treated as dismissible woke nonsense.

The screenplay adaptation comes from Sylvester Stallone and director David Ayer, and it has a sure sense of what Statham’s audience wants and doesn’t want. In the previous Ayer/Statham meetup “The Beekeeper,” the star took on online scam artists and massive political corruption; in “A Working Man,” it’s sex trafficking. When the daughter (Arianna Rivas) of Statham’s weak, indulgent boss (Michael Peña) is abducted, it’s up to Levon, his scowl and his dazzling combat skills to save this surrogate daughter, while securing his relationship with his own daughter (Isla Gie).

Once abducted, the Rivas character falls out of the movie for a long while. There’s too much killing to do to accommodate her. Stabbing, impaling, shooting and neck-snapping his way from Chicago to Joliet, Levon leaves 50-plus bodies (of Russians and Latinos, mostly) strewn all over the Land of Lincoln as he uncovers the sorry depths of Russian mob corruption.

This includes cops on the take and a Joliet roadhouse drug dealer (Chidi Ajufo) who livens things up. Levon goes undercover as a meth customer as part of his rescue mission. During Statham’s entertaining initial scene with Ajufo — the movie has its moments, and a few diverting blurs of fast-cut mayhem — we get the line we’ve been waiting for, delivered by Ajufo’s Mr. Big, a man who outfits his German biker helmet with enormous stag horns. In the bar, he regards Levon, who one of the baddies suspects is undercover law enforcement. Looking at Statham’s mitts, Ajufo says: “You ain’t a cop.” (Pause, camera zips in for a close-up.) “You’re a working man.“

Director Ayer may have hit the bloody sweet spot more engagingly in “The Beekeeper,” but you can’t say he’s not trying things here. Visually, “A Working Man” flips from absurd stylization (love that Joliet roadhouse, which looks gaudy enough for Caligula) to handheld faux-realism and back again. Several points in the climax have a comically enormous full moon serving as backdrop. As arguments for vigilante justice go, this one appears likely to lead to a sequel or three — and unless the filmmakers are dolts, they’ll jolly well bring back Gunny, the blind combat vet with a devotion to archery, so drolly underplayed by David Harbour.

“A Working Man” — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong violence, language throughout and drug content)

Running time: 1:56

How to watch: Premieres in theaters March 28

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.