Barbie's crushing on the Creature, Juliette Lewis is communing with her inner chair, and an animated goat's yearning to be the G.O.A.T. in an undeniably intriguing week at the multiplex. They join scares including the Send Help, Iron Lung, and a new one — Cold Storage — this Friday the 13th, kicking off Valentine's weekend.
Here's what we're watching.
"Wuthering Heights"
In theaters Friday
Writer/director Emerald Fennell makes movies that drive the discourse: Promising Young Woman, Saltburn and now "Wuthering Heights" — those quotation marks are part of it. Fennell is steering into the lush fever-dream of Emily Brontë's only novel with a cast led by young Hollywood royalty. Cathy is an impetuous young woman who lives in a decaying manor house, played as an adult by Margot Robbie. One day her father brings home a young brooding urchin whom Cathy adopts as her plaything, at first. That's Heathcliff — played as an adult by Jacob Elordi.
You know the plot: the two young people love and hate each other, separated by class, Cathy's ambitions and Heathcliff's seething jealousy. They treat each other horribly until they start treating each other very, very well, in a fun sexy way, but society — in the form of Cathy's marriage to a wealthy neighbor — intervenes. There's love and lust, hatred and revenge, and lots of lusty looks in the soaking rain — the whole factory-installed Gothic bundle, really. It's all breathlessly overheated (intentionally!), styled to the gods, and it looks great. If the film never quite reaches escape velocity, any scene featuring Alison Oliver's bookish, hilariously intense Isabella (the sister of that wealthy neighbor) easily achieves, and maintains, cruising altitude. — Glen Weldon
GOAT
In theaters Friday
Basketball star (and now film producer) Stephen Curry — who was repeatedly told at the start of his career that he was too small to play pro ball — offers an anthropomorphized comeback in this speedy, snazzily animated sports flick. It centers on Will (voiced by Stranger Things' Caleb McLaughlin), a hard-working, sensitive goat who's determined to play roarball, a fiercer, more dangerous version of basketball with environmental hazards — a tangle of roots, falling stalactites, cracking ice floes, molten lava — built into each stadium. But Will's a "small," where roar players have all, thus far, been "bigs," as in rhinos, horses, giraffes, bears and the like, so it takes a publicity stunt going viral to land him a spot on the Vineland Thorns, the worst team in the league.
Jett (Gabrielle Union), an egotistical panther — the team's fading star player — nearly eats him before he gets a chance to shoot, but this being an underdog (undergoat?) story, persistence and a moral lesson about teamwork will carry the day. Director Tyree Dillihay knows the story and jokes are aimed mostly at kids, but he offers their elders breath-catchingly gorgeous visuals in what's becoming a sort of house style for Sony Pictures Imageworks. Not the hard-edged digital surfaces of Disney's Pixar, nor the stylized hand-drawn, watercolor aesthetics of Studio Ghibli, but the shape-shifting, stutter-y action, painterly environments, and depth for days that have made KPop Demon Hunters and the Spider-Verse movies such a joy to watch. The film's world — filled with vines, dappled light and shimmering mists — looks so great, it almost doesn't matter when the plot turns routine in the final moments. Greatest of All Time? … maybe not. But playful, casually inclusive (Jett's being a female panther isn't so much as referenced), and with a heroic young goat who'll be inspiring to "kids" of all ages. — Bob Mondello
By Design
In limited theaters Friday
A bent plywood chair in a very expensive shop is an object of desire for Camille (Juliette Lewis), a single woman in her 40s whose oft-repeated motto is, "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die." She wants the chair so desperately that when it's sold to a woman who gifts it to the heartbroken lover she's leaving — pianist Olivier (Mamoudou Athie) — Camille magically becomes it. Her body remains her own, to be taken home by friends, but her soul inhabits the chair. And Olivier is thrilled to receive it. He strips down to a t-shirt and boxers before unwrapping it, then falls asleep in it and dreams. And dreams.
Camille's friends and mom stop by to see her body, and when it doesn't react to them ("you've become a really good listener," mom says, "as you've gotten older"), each assumes her silence is a personal rebuke. Then she's kidnapped by a tap dancer. Olivier, meanwhile, takes the chair with him to parties where it becomes a coveted object and Camille's spirit is gratified to be sought after. If this all sounds weird, I'm only scratching the surface. Writer and director Amanda Kramer uses interpretive dance and exquisite art direction to create a work that's off-putting, peculiar and inviting all at once — as much performance art as film, and definitely something to sit with. — Bob Mondello
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