Black Adam **
Warner Bros. has spent the past decade playing catch-up with Marvel, trying to build the cinematic profile of its DC Comics characters beyond Superman and Batman; here, it feels like they’re trying to do it all at once. The main story involves the awakening of the title character (Dwayne Johnson), a supernaturally-powered warrior known as Teth-Adam 5000 years ago in an ancient Middle Eastern kingdom, and now seeming not particularly interested in serving as the hero-protector of his homeland. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and the screenwriting team need to spend a lot of prologue time introducing Adam’s backstory, which makes it a questionable-at-best choice that they also introduce the members of the Justice Society—Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo)—leaving virtually no time to figure out who they are and why we should care about their friendships and/or petty antagonisms. That’s on top of some vague hand-waving at a subtext involving opposing colonizing forces that never amounts to much, and an attempt to make Adam a tormented soul that really doesn’t fit in Johnson’s acting wheelhouse. The superhero smash-’em-up stuff is all handled with satisfying energy, but by the time you get to a big fight in an adolescent bedroom covered with posters and action figures of other DC characters, it’s pretty clear that the frantic need for brand extension trumps all else. Available Oct. 21 in theaters. (PG-13)

Descendant ***1/2
If someone created this as a fictional story, to serve as an allegory for recent red-state efforts to erase history that can be lumped under “critical race theory,” it would probably be criticized for being too on-the-nose. Yet it’s the real deal, and here we are. Director Margaret Brown explores the legacy of Mobile, Alabama’s “Africatown” neighborhood, including many residents who are direct descendants of Africans transported in 1859-1860 on the slave ship Clotilda, more than 50 years after the transatlantic slave trade was criminalized. The film mostly covers 2018 – 2019’s accelerated search efforts for the wreckage of the Clotilda, which had been intentionally burned and sunk by the ship’s owner to cover their tracks—and that specific attempt to bury unpleasant truths becomes the narrative’s backbone. Brown addresses how residents of Africatown passed along the Clotilda tale as oral history in the absence of official acknowledgement that it happened, along with the long-delayed publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s oral history of the last survivor of the Clotilda. Descendant also touches on other connected issues, including the location of heavy industry near predominantly-Black neighborhoods and the question of reparations from those families that benefitted financially from the slave trade, and it does get a bit cumbersome. Ultimately, though, Descendant makes a powerful case for allowing Black voices their place in the whole truth of American history, and refusing to let the history that make us uncomfortable remain submerged. Available Oct. 21 via Netflix. (NR)

Raymond & Ray **1/2
Rodrigo García’s messy, often schematic, still occasionally affecting family drama is the kind of movie where I’m not sure if I actually liked it, or I’m just going to like thinking about it. Half-brothers Raymond (Ewan McGregor) and Ray (Ethan Hawke) grew up together, but as middle-aged adults now mostly share their antagonism toward their physically and emotionally abusive father. After Dad’s death, the two travel together for his funeral, where they discover that the Old Man’s final wish was for them to dig his grave. Plenty of complexities and discoveries ensue, many of them on the predictable side, as the two men interact, respectively, with their father’s former lover (Maribel Verdú) and nurse (Sophie Okonedo). It’s easy enough to anticipate the arc of two damaged men figuring out how to make peace with the person who did them so much harm, but García finds an edgy energy in something as simple as how you respond to “sorry for your loss” when you don’t actually feel a loss. And while McGregor always feels a little bit off when doing his uptight American accent, Hawke in particular effectively conveys how hard it is to wrestle with the idea that someone who was awful to you can be the same person others speak of with fondness. There’s at least some complexity in making the villain in these characters’ lives something more than a villain, even if the heroes’ journey is a fairly obvious one. Available Oct. 21 via AppleTV+. (R)

Tár ***1/2
See feature review. Available Oct. 21 in theaters. (R)

Ticket to Paradise ***
Remember movie stars? Those people whose sheer on-screen charisma could carry a movie even if everything going on around them wasn’t particularly interesting? We get a glimpse in this romantic comedy in which George Clooney and Julia Roberts play David and Georgia—perpetually-feuding, 20-years-divorced exes who find rare common ground when their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) announces she’s marrying Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a man she met in Bali just two months earlier, and the parents plot to stop the wedding. As he did with Mama Mia! Here We Go Again and the two Best Exotic Marigold Hotels, director Ol Parker makes optimum use of beautiful locations, providing the kind of filmmaking you curl up in like a cozy blanket. And while the bickering dynamic is nowhere near as sharp and playful as it was in The Lost City earlier this year, there’s a similar pleasure in watching two attractive people make us care about them through the force of their personality. It would have been nice if the jokes were 20 percent funnier, and if Lily and Gede had become interesting characters on their own rather than mere plot devices. For now, I’ll settle for a story where we want two people to end up happy mostly because watching them makes us happy. Available Oct. 21 in theaters. (PG-13)

Triangle of Sadness **
The social satires of writer/director Ruben Östlund have been hit (Force Majeure) and miss (The Square); his latest effort feels weirdly scattershot in its upending of the social order. The primary characters are Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), a pair of fashion models and romantic partners who find themselves on a luxury cruise—a freebie thanks to Yaya’s influencer status—with plenty of ultra-wealthy guests. As has been the case in Östlund’s other features, the filmmaker opts for a wide range of comedic styles, from an opening passive-aggressive argument between Carl and Yaya regarding paying for a restaurant dinner that feels like a Seinfeld outtake, to an over-the-top extended sequence on the cruise ship involving a fancy dinner, choppy seas and plentiful projectile vomiting. Yet while it’s clear Östlund wants to say something about who runs the world and why—emphasized by an intriguing third-act shift to a new location—there’s too much wandering about in episodic bits without exploring distinctions like the models’ position as temporary tourists in the world of luxury vs. that of their capitalist shipmates. Grotesqueries and cheap ironies, while good for the occasional chuckle, feel as simplistic in approaching the class struggle as the quotation duel between the ship’s socialist captain (Woody Harrelson) and a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Buric). It sometimes feels as though Östlund didn’t think hard enough beyond realizing that his title could refer both to a spot between the model’s eyebrows, and the wealth pyramid he wants to tip onto its point. Available Oct. 21 in theaters. (R)