OPENING THIS WEEK:
Annabelle: Creation When the legendary voice-over artist June Foray passed away recently, many obits noted that she had performed the dialogue for The Twilight Zone's murderous doll, Talky Tina. Few recognized that she had also supplied the voice of Chatty Cathy, the actual real-world toy of which that Zone episode was a send-up. It's difficult now to envision a time so free from brand protectionism; if the guy who does the voice of Teddy Ruxpin appeared on an episode of Westworld as a robot bear with a hard-on for homicide, the lawsuits would fly like guided missiles. Which brings us to Annabelle, this generation's most commercially resilient Doll That Wants to Rack Your Ass Up. Introduced in the Conjuring series, she's now the star of her own successful spin-off franchise. Installment No. 2, Creation, is actually a prequel that means to establish exactly where and how Annabelle came into being in the first place. Our avatars in this process of discovery are a Catholic nun and some displaced convent girls, who arrive at the home of a bereaved toymaker and discover that there's something very, very wrong with a wooden doll he keeps in the bedroom of his deceased daughter. How wrong? Well, try this salutation on for size: "I'm Satan, and I don't like you very much." (I swear, when you can hear me do it, it sounds just like June Foray.) (R)
The Glass Castle To hear her tell it, memoirist Jeannette Walls had a hell of a childhood. Intense poverty, an alcoholic father, a sexually predatory grandmother – basically, everything you didn't see on the Full House reboot. But Walls persevered, her belief that she was made for better things enabling her to surmount her personal suffering and find her true and noble calling as ... a gossip columnist for msnbc.com. (Jeez, it makes Nelson Mandela look like an underachiever.) Walls told her rags-to-superfluousness tale in The Glass Castle, which spent 261 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list under the category Nonfiction: People Who Trash Their Family for Money. Now the story is being told as a movie, with Brie Larson as Walls and Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as her parents. If the picture doesn't satisfy your jones for learning the dysfunctional history of journalistic vultures, check out next year's Diddled: The Harvey Levin Story. (PG-13)
Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature In this animated sequel, Surly Squirrel (Will Arnett) and his animal pals fight to prevent their pastoral Liberty Park from being replaced by a poorly designed amusement park that poses a clear and present danger to the community. So, where are you gonna see it ... CityWalk or Disney Springs? (PG)
Also playing:
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power This follow-up to the landmark global-warming doc An Inconvenient Truth was meant to show the triumph of science over corporate interest, culminating in the signing of the historic Paris Climate Agreement. But then Trump refused to put his "x" on the dotted line, forcing the filmmakers to do some fairly extensive re-editing. Seriously, guys, you really needed to retcon this? We'll remember that the next time Al Gore tries to lecture us about disasters we didn't see coming. (PG)
Jab Harry Met Sejal Yes, the title translates directly into English as When Harry Met Sejal, but star Shah Rukh Khan swears this Indian rom-com about a guy and a girl who get to know each other on a long trip has "no similarity" to anything that might ever have happened between Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. Riiiiight. So what's with that scene of a call-center operator teaching a housewife in Tulsa how to fake an orgasm? (NR)
The Lion King While we wait for the live-action remake of the Disney classic, the animated original has returned to theaters for a limited engagement in advance of its rerelease on Blu-ray and DVD. There are even separate bookings for standard and sing-along versions. But really, isn't every movie screening a sing-along if you just put your mind to it? That's what I tried to tell everybody at The Human Centipede, anyway. (G)
Security Can you imagine Antonio Banderas as an American ex-Marine who finds work as a mall cop? Me neither, and that's why nobody has heard of this movie. (R)
