9 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

‘Power Ballad’

Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas star as a washed-up wedding singer and a former boy band member who fight over a song.

From our review:

There are some promising themes in “Power Ballad” — the soulful joys of collaboration, the precarity of celebrity, the evils of the music industry — but the movie never develops them. Instead, the director John Carney, who wrote the script with Peter McDonald, keeps everything nice and insistently light, gesturing at complexities rather than delving into them.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘Backrooms’

This horror film directed by Kane Parsons sees a furniture salesman (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his therapist (Renate Reinsve) fall into an endless maze of sinister rooms.

From our review:

Ambiguity is key to this style of horror, where space and atmosphere do most of the heavy lifting, and though the story isn’t over-explained, mind you, it’s filled out enough to break its own uncanny spell.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘Pressure’

Meteorologists (Andrew Scott and Irving Krick) give Gen. Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) dueling forecasts for D-Day in this atypical World War II movie directed by Anthony Maras.

From our review:

As the general and the meteorologists go around in circles about data and dates, it all amounts to an empty idea masquerading as a prestige war film that a sturdy cast can’t save. Fraser, though, is a glaring miscast.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘Propeller One-Way Night Coach’

Directed by John Travolta, this coming-of-age story follows an airplane-obsessed boy on a cross-country flight with his mother during the golden age of aviation.

From our review:

Some viewers may find “Propeller” a tad affected. But the wistfulness of this memory film is precisely what charms, because it’s steeped in a fondness for a bygone moment that’s so palpably personal to Travolta.

Watch on Apple TV. Read the full review.

‘The Currents’

Lina (Isabel Aimé Gonzalez Sola), a fashion stylist, struggles to recover after a traumatic incident leaves her terrified of water in this drama directed by Milagros Mumenthaler.

From our review:

While alluding to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” the movie remains faithful to Lina’s embodied experience, closer to Virginia Woolf and Lucrecia Martel. Its bravura filmmaking is all in the service of letting us travel alongside Lina as she feels her way to self-understanding.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘Forastera’

Set on the island of Mallorca, this drama directed by Lucía Aleñar Iglesias centers on a teenager who begins adopting aspects of her late grandmother.

From our review:

Iglesias’s use of feminine doubling naturally calls to mind “Persona,” but the film also evokes another artful puzzler: Lucrecia Martel’s “The Headless Woman.” Like that antecedent, “Forastera” is an exquisitely deconstructed ghost story, a muted mystery that beguiles while remaining deeply grounded in its evocative setting.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘The Breadwinner’

Starring Nate Bargatze (who is also one of the screenwriters), this comedy follows an inept stay-at-home dad.

From our review:

Bargatze proves himself a savvy writer and performer here; he doesn’t hog all the laugh lines for himself, but instead often plays straight man to his three daughters … Colin Jost and Will Forte provide absurdist neighborly “support,” but it’s the girls who ultimately make this comedy sing.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘The Last Viking’

An ex-convict (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) hunts for treasure alongside his brother (Mads Mikkelsen), who has dissociative identity disorder and believes he is John Lennon in this oddball film directed by Anders Thomas Jensen.

From our review:

It combines scenes of torture and the trauma of child abuse with gags about Abba and IKEA. Do we laugh? Wince? Both at the same time? There’s no uncertainty about Mikkelsen, however: He gives a career-best performance here.

In theaters. Read the full review.

‘Miss You, Love You’

After her husband dies, Diane (Allison Janney) gets another shock when her son sends his assistant (Andrew Rannells) to help with the arrangements in this dramedy from Jim Rash.

From our review:

In the strained dramedy “Miss You, Love You,” Allison Janney goes to some intensely emotional places for an obvious reason: Her character, Diane, is newly widowed. But Janney veers from fury to reflection to tearfulness so vigorously it’s as if she knows that heavy lifting is required to take this story off the page.

Watch on HBO Max. Read the full review.

Compiled by Kellina Moore.