ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

R, 161 minutes. Starts Saturday at Waterford. Through today only at Stonington. It’s shocking to say that Quentin Tarantino’s Manson murders film is perhaps his most sedate and self-reflective yet. But maybe that’s because it’s not a Manson murders film. It’s not even a revenge picture. Rather, “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood” is a rumination on stardom and myth-making, a memo on the cult of celebrity and the narratives we use to process the world around us. Can’t movie magic change these stories? The reality we live in? The film is a bit rueful, sentimental even, which is a new mode for the enfant terrible auteur, and it even casts his most operatic historical fantasy revenge pictures in a new light. “Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood” is still very much a Tarantino film, chockablock with his obsessions and peccadilloes. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

PARASITE

R, 132 minutes. Still playing at Madison Art Cinemas. Starts Saturday at Waterford. Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has steadily built a canon of masterpieces over the past two decades, genre-hopping from mystery to monster flicks, dabbling in post-apocalyptic horror and animal rights action movies, switching between Korean- and English-language films, all while maintaining his signature darkly comedic tone. His longtime collaborator, actor Song Kang-ho, first starred in Bong’s epic, hilarious true crime murder mystery “Memories of Murder.” He’s an integral part of Bong’s unique style, walking the tonal tightrope of tragedy and comedy. He’s starred in every film Bong’s made since, including his most recent masterpiece, “Parasite,” a slick, Hitchcockian family thriller and a class warfare cri de coeur. It would be criminal to describe the details of the plot of this deliciously twisty and utterly unpredictable fable. The Kim family, mother (Jang Hye-jin), father (Song), daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) and brother Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), live a precarious existence. One night, Ki-woo’s friend Min (Park Seo-joon) drops by with a gift and a proposition. The gift is a hefty river rock, an imposing charm intended to bring material wealth. The proposition is a job offer: Min wants Ki-woo to take over his gig tutoring the daughter of a wealthy family while he studies abroad. He assumes Ki-woo will be a safe bet around the fetching Da-hye (Jung Ji-so). As Min suggests Ki-woo forge a few diplomas, the lilting, whimsical score by Jung Jaeil kicks in and we see the gears turning in Ki-woo’s head as he considers the scheme. The story tips, then tumbles down a hill like a boulder. Ki-woo begins working for the wealthy Park family, who live in an austere modern home. Once he’s in, it’s not long before his “art therapist” sister is too confidently spouting psychobabble that the sweet, gullible lady of the house (Jo Yeo-jeong), the wife of a tech entrepreneur (Lee Sunkyun), neurotically eats up. She is kind and sweet, “simple” as Min says, and once the scrappy and resourceful Kims understand the cracks in her veneer, they burrow their way deep into their luxurious lifestyle. — Katie Walsh, Tribute News Service

SPIES IN DISGUISE

PG, 102 minutes. Lisbon. To all appearances, the animated comedy “Spies in Disguise” is just another a rollicking sendup of superspy thrillers. As befits a movie about clandestine activity, however, there’s more than meets the eye here. Hidden beneath its parodistic action-comedy exterior is a message, one that doesn’t set out to merely lampoon the genre but to playfully question almost everything about it. “When we fight fire with fire, we all get burned,” says Walter Beckett (voiced by the ever-endearing Tom Holland). Walter is a neurotic gadgets expert tasked with outfitting Lance Sterling (a sufficiently suave Will Smith), the star operative for a U.S. government spy agency known, aptly enough, as the Agency. Within its Washington, D.C., headquarters, built deep beneath the Reflecting Pool, Walter alienates the other members of his tech team by working on contraptions that could only be called ... pacifist. — Tom Floyd, The Washington Post

STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

PG-13, 142 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Not much has caused a disturbance in the “Star Wars” galaxy quite like Rian Johnson’s “The Last Jedi,” an erratic but electric movie that, regardless of how you felt about it, was something worth arguing about. The same can’t be said for J. J. Abrams’ “Rise of Skywalker,” a scattershot, impatiently paced, fan-servicing finale that repurposes so much of what came before that it feels as though someone searching for the hyperspace button accidentally pressed the spin cycle instead. A laundry list of plot points cluster like an asteroid field in “Rise of Skywalker.” It’s a spirited, hectic and ultimately forgettable conclusion of the Skywalker saga begun 42 years ago by George Lucas. It was also surely a lot to ask for. Abrams, having already ably and nimbly resuscitated Lucas’ space opera with the far less cluttered “The Force Awakens,” was brought back (like seemingly everyone is in “Star

Wars,” dead or alive) with the task of not only wrapping up a trilogy but repairing the divides stirred up by “The Last Jedi” and stabilizing the franchise’s revolving door of directors. Abrams here took over for the jettisoned Colin Trevorrow, who retains a “story by” credit. — Jake Coyle, Associated Press

THE TURNING

PG-13, 94 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. At the end of Floria Sigismondi’s “The Turning,” male members of the audience at a press screening were visibly and vocally upset. They were seemingly enraged at the film’s unwillingness to offer up a single definitive answer about the perceived haunting in this take of Henry James’ 1898 novella “The Turn of the Screw,” joining a century’s worth of questioners who have puzzled over the story of a young governess bedeviled by ghosts at her new job. Are these ghosts real, or is she just crazy? It’s an age-old question, but Sigismondi is confident simply not answering it, as frustrating as that may be. Jack Clayton adapted the novella into 1961’s “The Innocents,” and now “The Runaways” helmer and music video director Sigismondi updates the tale to a more modern era, all the moody gothic vibes enhanced by the film’s grunge-era Washington state setting. Mackenzie Davis stars as the young governess, Kate, who leaves behind her life in Seattle out of a desire to help a wealthy young girl, orphaned and abandoned by her last teacher. Flora (Brooklynn Prince) is a charming and delightful child, though the stern British housekeeper (Barbara Marten) is anything but, and Flora’s older brother, Miles (Finn Wolfhard), is entering his teen years angrily and violently. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

UNCUT GEMS

1/2 R, 135 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. The journey is the destination in the Safdie brothers’ new crime thriller “Uncut Gems,” and there’s almost nowhere this film won’t take you. The mines of Ethiopia, the suburbs of Long Island, inside a human body, out into space — by the time it’s all over you’ll feel less like a moviegoer and more like an unmoored spirit wandering through the wide, weird cosmos. And your guide, unlikely as it seems, will be Adam Sandler. In a ferocious, all-out performance, the comedic actor plays a slick-talking, lovably obnoxious and dangerously dysfunctional man named Howard Ratner, a jewelry dealer in Manhattan’s Diamond District. Howard is betting the proverbial farm on something called a black opal — his own Maltese Falcon. — Rafer Guzman, Newsday