Regency Theaters Valley Plaza

There are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky-- and, eventually, on earth-- in Jack the Giant Slayer, X-Men director Bryan Singer's big-budget, gently revisionist, 3-D spin on "Jack and the Beanstalk." It's a journey... More »

There are big, tall, terrible, fleshy, bulbous-headed giants in the sky-- and, eventually, on earth-- in Jack the Giant Slayer, X-Men director Bryan Singer's big-budget, gently revisionist, 3-D spin on "Jack and the Beanstalk." It's a journey facilitated by the eponymous Jack (Nicholas Hoult), the naïve farm boy who trades his horse for magic beans that sprout up like some unholy tincture of Miracle-Gro and HGH, putting both Jack and an intrepid princess (newcomer Eleanor Tomlinson) face to face with mankind's potential extinction. The story is hardly original or surprising, but the supremely confident Singer lends Jack an enjoyably old-fashioned showmanship that recalls a time when movie illusions were created by hand rather than by computer. Hoult (Warm Bodies) makes for an appealing lead, with the hesitant milk-fed smile of the young Tom Cruise and an unforced chemistry with Tomlinson. Simply put: Any five minutes of this is preferable to all of The Hobbit. « Less

11:20 AM, 1:55 PM, 7:00 PM

James Franco rivals his calamitous performance as Oscar host in Disney and director Sam Raimi's gargantuan attempt to turn L. Frank Baum's children's novels-- and one of the most beloved of all Hollywood movies-- into a wellspring of fresh... More »

James Franco rivals his calamitous performance as Oscar host in Disney and director Sam Raimi's gargantuan attempt to turn L. Frank Baum's children's novels-- and one of the most beloved of all Hollywood movies-- into a wellspring of fresh product tie-ins and theme-park rides. A wildly inventive, unpredictable actor when he wants to be, Franco is all wrong for the role of a huckster sideshow magician who finds himself somewhere over the rainbow, trying to convince the good people of a besieged kingdom that he's their prophesied savior. Reading his lines with the sneering warble of the young Dennis Hopper and flashing a strained smile that's more disturbing than dashing, Franco may be the least convincing flimflam man in movie history, more young Norman Bates than the man who would be Oz. He's surrounded by a Day-Glo freak-out of special effects and two very resourceful actresses, Rachel Weisz and Michelle Williams, reduced to glowering at each other and unleashing bursts of electromagnetic fury from their fingertips. If only the movie could run off with Mila Kunis's radiant Theodora, a nominal "good” witch whose passions rage louder than most, who gives her heart too willingly and, who, when betrayed, turns positively green with jealousy. She's by far the most dimensional being in this flaccid 3-D affair. « Less

11:00 AM, 1:45 PM, 4:30 PM, 7:20 PM, 10:10 PM

The good news: Here's a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance audiences up against grandeur. Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, based on his own graphic novel, is one of those... More »

The good news: Here's a lavish, serious science-fiction picture, one that on occasion transcends big-budget hit-making convention to glance audiences up against grandeur. Joseph Kosinski's Oblivion, based on his own graphic novel, is one of those futuristic puzzlers whose dramatic energies are most invested in the slow revelation of its own premise. You'll doubt the initial set-up-- it's 2077, and the Earth has been nuked in humanity's defeat of an invading alien force-- the second the hero mentions having recently had his memory wiped and that his wife has been "assigned" to him. Which brings us to Tom Cruise, the not-good news, that plot-moving app producers can download for their blockbusters but is still stuck with the usual bugs. He models sunglasses, races dirt bikes, and runs like a .gif titled "Tom Cruise Running." He's called Jack Harper-- is there a spigot in Hollywood that dispenses action hero names?―and each day he zips down to Earth from his home in the clouds, a Frank Lloyd Wright casserole dish speared atop a Jetsons pole. With the rest of our kind sent off to live on Titan, Harper traverses a ruined U.S. to monitor and repair the patrol drones designed to protect―well, what exactly they're protecting is a third-act revelation you’ll just have to wonder about until Harper finally does so himself. (The Cruise app never thinks more than required.) At its best, as Harper explores a cratered library, Oblivion takes on the immersiveness of video games. Here's your cypher/avatar, picking through a wide-open alien environment, with time given for you to savor the world around you. But then come the twists and explosions. « Less

11:10 AM, 2:00 PM, 4:45 PM, 7:30 PM, 10:15 PM

It's not enough to call this the rare franchise action movie to bring the goods; it's the even rarer one whose creators seem to understand what the goods even are. Your ticket should come with a fight card: squad versus squad, bruiser versus... More »

It's not enough to call this the rare franchise action movie to bring the goods; it's the even rarer one whose creators seem to understand what the goods even are. Your ticket should come with a fight card: squad versus squad, bruiser versus bruiser, ninja versus ninja, second-string ninja versus ancient ninja training lady, jeep-tank versus tank-jeep, bullets versus throwing stars, everyone versus Walton Goggins, dumb pleasures versus your higher brain function. Ninjas swing and zipline through Himalayan peaks, giving dizzier Spider-Man thrills than The Amazing Spider-Man bothered to. A three-soldier escape from deep in a well is more satisfying-- and abbreviated!-- than Bruce Wayne's ponderous pit-climb last summer. Charming Dwayne Johnson declaims Jay-Z as scripture to pump up his Joes before a mission; he's so commanding that nothing pump-uppable in you is likely to languish un-pumped. In short, if you think it's possible you might have a good time at a picture named G.I. Joe: Retaliation, you will almost certainly have a good time, though it's still dumb as catbutt. The script, from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, is touched with absurdist comedy and some of-the-moment wingnuttery. Here's a movie in which gun-toting lugs become convinced the president is an imposter who they have to take out—not really something we should be encouraging so soon after 2016: Obama's America. But director Jon M. Chu comes to dudes-fighting filmmaking from the most welcome of backgrounds: directing dance. When his characters battle, we see the bodies of accomplished physical performers moving together through space, mostly in shots that the eye can actually track. « Less

11:30 AM, 1:50 PM, 4:20 PM, 7:10 PM, 9:45 PM

Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation’s sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save... More »

Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation’s sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save his son. Inspired by a real-life incident detailed in a 1999 episode of Frontline, the film tracks construction-company magnate John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson) as he offers to go undercover to nab drug dealers in exchange for a reduced prison sentence for his estranged 18-year-old son, Jason (Rafi Gavron). The teenager, still apparently smarting over his parents’ divorce, faces 10 years in jail for accepting a package filled with Ecstasy and refuses to concoct evidence against a friend to lessen his time behind bars. In order to assuage the hurt he’s caused his firstborn, John, after reading the Wikipedia entry for “drug cartel,” first has closed-door meetings with a federal prosecutor (Susan Sarandon)—her villainy signaled by both her childlessness and a snide remark about gay weddings—then drives 1,000 miles in a semi containing mountains of coke secreted in cement bags. As the plot grows more and more absurd—Benjamin Bratt shows up as a drug kingpin named “El Topo”—Snitch reveals another kind of political agenda. After telling his co-conspirator in the blow setup that “there’s no way I’m going to let either side dictate our fates,” John stands in a gun shop, coolly assessing the arsenal that’s his for the taking. « Less

4:25 PM, 9:40 PM

The first of this year’s dueling Die Hard in the White House opuses (to be followed in June by Roland “Independence Day” Emmerich’s White House Down) begins with a slo-mo Old Glory and the first horns and snare drums of composer Trevor Morris’s... More »

The first of this year’s dueling Die Hard in the White House opuses (to be followed in June by Roland “Independence Day” Emmerich’s White House Down) begins with a slo-mo Old Glory and the first horns and snare drums of composer Trevor Morris’s John-Williams-on-steroids score—and, well, things get a lot more “America! Fuck yeah!” from there. Directed at a jingoistic fever pitch by Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua, Olympus Has Fallen quickly hurtles through the bare minimum of exposition—a square-jawed, newly widowed POTUS (Aaron Eckhart); a brooding ex–Secret Service hotshot (Gerard Butler) who blames himself for the First Lady’s death—before unleashing a small army of North Korean baddies on Pennsylvania Avenue’s most desirable address. What follows is an all-you-can-eat buffet of shlock, from the retro, Robocop-era visual effects to the Delta Force–worthy parade of Oscar winners and nominees in peril (Secretary of State Melissa Leo, Speaker of the House Morgan Freeman, Secret Service Director Angela Bassett, Army Chief of Staff Robert Forster) to the utterly shameless 9/11 imagery (including Beltway tourists crushed by chunks of an imploding Washington Monument). A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce. « Less

11:50 AM, 2:20 PM, 4:50 PM, 7:50 PM, 10:20 PM

WWE Studios, the film production arm of World Wrestling Entertainment, breaks from its usual target audience of guys who like films about shirtless, muscley men with The Call, a suspense thriller starring adequate actress and Academy Award... More »

WWE Studios, the film production arm of World Wrestling Entertainment, breaks from its usual target audience of guys who like films about shirtless, muscley men with The Call, a suspense thriller starring adequate actress and Academy Award recipient Halle Berry as an overcommitted, hotshot 911 emergency operator. When she makes a rookie-level error that costs a teenage girl her life, she opts to hang up her call center headset—until the girl’s killer kidnaps another teen victim. Locked in a car trunk with a prepaid cellphone, she calls 911. The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes in which the girl, guided by Berry, deploys the contents of the trunk (screwdriver, paint roller handle, cans of white matte finish) to make her kidnapper’s vehicle more conspicuous while Berry presses her for details she can relate to the police. In a nod to the studio’s usual demographic, two-time WWE tag-team champion David Otunga plays officer Jake Devans, though fans hoping for spinning headlock elbow drops or backflip kicks will be disappointed. When the emergency call ends, Berry drives out to the crime scene the cops traced down and goes all Clarice Starling inside the spooky cabin where the bad guy keeps his Saw basement, which has to be seen as a departure from the film’s thin blue line of realism, or the workaday reality that WWE became known for when the Undertaker defeated Kane with his signature Tombstone piledriver at Wrestlemania XX. « Less

12:20 PM, 2:40 PM, 5:10 PM, 7:40 PM, 9:50 PM