40 Acres **
Somewhere buried in the genre components of co-writer/director R.T. Thorne’s post-apocalyptic thriller is intriguing thematic material, but he knows neither how to develop those themes or exploit the genre material. Set more than a decade after a fungal pandemic has crippled the world’s food supply, the owners of a Canadian farm—Army veteran Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), her son Emanuel (Kateem O’Connor), her husband Galen (Michael Grayeyes) and the other children in their blended family—try to protect themselves and their property from outside threats, including a band of cannibals. “Cannibal post-apocalypse” sounds like a formula for some down-and-dirty thrills, and Thorne occasionally does deliver the goods despite not fully developing the people-eating threat. It still might have worked had the screenplay dug more deeply into the question of individual survival vs. embracing community—manifested when a young woman named Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas) becomes an interloper—or the tensions between Hailey and Emanuel over allowing him personal freedom, or even the legacy of enslaved people seeking freedom and self-determination, as suggested by the title. Deadwyler brings her usual intensity to give the proceedings a boost, but this is ultimately a fairly frustrating, low-energy exercise in not being able to decide whether it’s a cannibal post-apocalypse story that’s actually a metaphor for other things, or just a cannibal post-apocalypse story. Available July 2 in theaters. (R)

Familiar Touch ***1/2
Writer/director Sarah Friedland’s drama is hardly the first movie to focus on the challenges facing an older person dealing with memory issues, but it’s one of the richest and most restrained simply because it treats the issue, however heartbreaking, as a simple fact of life made easier by people who approach it with compassion. It opens with 80-something Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant) being moved into an assisted-living facility by her son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin)—a son she doesn’t recognize—and trying to adapt to her new circumstances. Appropriate to the subject matter, Friedland approaches the story less as a narrative arc than as a series of moments, and many of them are wonderful: a pool therapy session where the sound becomes that of the beach, letting us in as Ruth slips backward in time; Ruth breaking down in the shower over a brief recollection of her son’s name; Ruth putting her skills as a former line cook to work in the facility’s kitchen. Chalfant’s lovely performance captures the complexity of Ruth’s condition, as she grabs on to the things she can remember, like the names of foods and recipes in which she can use them, as a kind of mantra to prove that she’s still herself. There are few moments of grand drama in Familiar Touch, but that’s largely because it’s full of supporting characters who understand how to do the right thing for the people in their care, calmly and simply. Available July 2 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Heads of State **1/2
Some of us are old enough to remember a time when buddy-action fare like this was a staple of theatrical movie-going; now, it’s just another thing to feed the streaming content machine, content to be the kind of background noise that will inspire someone to say, “That was fine,” despite only paying to attention to about 60 percent of it. As high concepts go, it’s not a terrible one, casting John Cena as action-movie star-turned-popular U.S. President Will Derringer and Idris Elba as politically-troubled U.K. Prime Minister Sam Clarke, thrown together when they survive the hijacking of Air Force 1 by a Russian arms dealer (Paddy Considine). Cena again makes use of his puppy-dog eagerness, Elba provides counterpoint as the slow-burn straight man, and there’s even one kind of inspired idea in turning a couple of “hey, how did you manage to survive that?” moments into rapid-fire montages. But the chemistry isn’t strong enough to boost an overly-convoluted story that tries to make hay out of tensions between the NATO countries—kinda hard to sell that one to the meat-and-potatoes crowd as an existential threat—and Clarke’s difficult romantic history. And it suffers from not knowing quite how much to treat Derringer as a cocky wannabe who doesn’t really know how to fire a gun, and how much to make him a real action hero. Cars go fast, things go boom, and it’s all perfectly fine—at least 60 percent of it, anyway. Available July 2 via Prime Video. (PG-13)

Jurassic World: Rebirth ***
Screenwriter David Koepp, who adapted the original 1993 Jurassic Park, opens this latest entry with nervy conceit that after 32 years, people have kinda gotten bored with dinosaurs—which could have blown up in his face had this movie not offered something at least a little bit fresh. It doesn’t look promising at the outset, with a couple nudging references to the original movie as we set up the premise of a pharmaceutical executive (Rupert Friend) hiring a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and a paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey) to secure dino DNA for potentially revolutionary medicines. And Koepp certainly feels like his own formula works: a nod to rapacious capitalism; a rescued family that allows him to continue providing a child in peril; half-hearted emotional motivations the adult characters like Johansson and her boat-captain colleague (Mahershala Ali). It’s an inspired choice to turn not to Jurassic Park but to Jaws for the foundation of the seafaring opening act, and that’s only the start for director Gareth Edwards (the 2014 Godzilla) offering up several terrific action sequences, including the family’s showdown with a T. rex on a river. Maybe we’ll never again have the awestruck reactions we see from Bailey’s scientist, but if you can crank up the echoes of summer adventure, you at least get an effective evocation of when dinosaurs ruled the box office. Available July 2 in theaters. (PG-13)

The Old Guard 2 **
In the COVID summer of 2020, Netflix’s adaptation of the Greg Rucka/Leandro Fernandez graphic novel series The Old Guard offered one of those reminders of the blockbuster cinema we were all missing; five years later, its sequel is just a reminder of what’s missing from these movies. It picks up from the end credits tag sequence in the original, as the team of immortal protectors of humanity—led by millennia-old Andromache (Charlize Theron), who has now become mortal—deals with the return of Andromache’s old partner Quynh (Veronica Ngo), as well as a new immortal threat named Discord (Uma Thurman). As was true of the first feature, there’s a lot of material here about the existential burdens of never dying, which only really finds juice when Andromache and Quynh have their 500-years-delayed reunion, with other character beats getting just token moments. Otherwise, it fusses with a notion of super-powered people splitting over the question of whether to help or punish the ordinary humans who fear them, which was exhausted by the X-Men series long ago. As simple action, it’s fairly competent, but still feels built for the small screen, which just doesn’t make as much sense as it did during that particular moment in 2020. It all builds to a cliffhanger that promises yet another entry in the series, which provides a different kind of reminder: that movie franchises truly are the one thing that can never die. Available July 2 via Netflix. (R)