PLATTITUDE

In theaters today:

Dear Evan Hansen--Evan himself wrote the letter from which comes the title. Intended as a morale-boosting exercise for the alienated, socially anxious high school kid (Ben Platt), the missive is found on the person of Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a seriously disturbed classmate who has taken his own life. Connor's devastated parents (Amy Adams and Danny Pino) jump to the conclusion that he wrote it to Evan, and that the two were close friends.

Evan plays along with the mistake, initially because he feels sorry for Connor's Mom, and also because it gives him proximity to Connor's sister Zoey (Kaitlyn Dever), on whom he has long had a crush. He continues the charade because the affluent, welcoming Murphys offer him a family dynamic he doesn't get from his always-working single Mom (Julianne Moore). Gradually his supposed friendship with Connor brings him social media celebrity, and things get out of hand.

Directed by Stephen Chbosky, this is an adaptation of the stage musical, which opened on Broadway in 2016. The show was an uneven piece of work, an uneasy combination of farcical plot contrivances and complications mixed with bitterly sad subject matter. The score, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, was also uneven musically; three or four strong songs plus a lot of forgettable warbling.

Most likely what made Dear Evan Hansen a hit in the theatre, above all, was the (Tony Award winning) performance of Ben Platt in the title role. Platt's voice is a marvel, an impossibly angelic falsetto that transcends the technical; there's an idiosyncratic, self-deprecating diffidence to his phrasing that gives it personality and wit. As powerful as songs like "Waving Through a Window" and "For Forever" are, it's Platt's singing--and acting--that elevates them to the level of breathtaking.

Chbosky uses the banal suburban high school settings ingeniously, and screenwriter Steven Levenson, who wrote the book of the musical, does a creditable job of weeding out many of the filler songs and making Platt the focus. Even so, the movie drags a bit in its second half, and its creepy side can't be completely shaken.

I'm told, though, that the biggest objection to the movie is that Platt, now 28, looks too old to play Evan. I have to say that he didn't strike me that way at all; if I was told that the guy we see in the film, with his limp curls and miserable shirts and slumped shoulders, was a sad sack high school senior, I don't think it would occur to me to doubt it.

In any case, even if Platt were balding and gray at the temples and had crow's feet and a paunch, I wouldn't want to hear anyone else perform this music. Dear Evan Hansen has flaws, but the star isn't one of them; he's what makes the movie worth seeing despite its flaws.

LES MS.

Available for purchase and streaming exclusively on Prime Video:

The Glorias--The title characters are all one person: journalist and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, at different stages of her saga. She's played by a couple of excellent child actresses in scenes from her early life, and as a young woman by Alicia Vikander, and in her prime by Julianne Moore. Sometimes the different Steinem vintages interact with each other on the allegorical bus they're riding through life; the script, by Sarah Ruhl and director Julie Taymor, is based on Steinem's 2015 memoir My Life on the Road.

We're shown episodes of her early days in Toledo, Ohio, with her loving, hustling, eternally optimistic screw-up of a father (Timothy Hutton), from whom she inherited a passion for travel, and her ill, long-suffering mother (Enid Graham), who had written newspaper articles under a male pseudonym. We see her post-graduate adventures in India, and her early days as a journalist, undercover as a Bunny in a Playboy Club, or covering the civil rights marches, where she noted that women weren't represented onstage among the speakers; only singers like Mahalia Jackson.

We see her rise to celebrity and the revolting condescension with which she was treated by male editors and interviewers. We see her friendships with Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monae), Florynce Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero) and Bella Abzug (Bette Midler); we see the founding of Ms.

All of this is interesting and at times touching, and the ensemble acting is terrific, although Vikander's Swedish accent peeks out a bit. But this project got away from the enormously talented Taymor, famed for the Broadway version of The Lion King and movies like Titus and Frida; her artsy, theatrical flourishes are a drag on this two and a half hour movie, and add little depth to our understanding of its story or heroine. The Glorias is worth watching, but it isn't as glorious as it could have been.

ASCENT OF A WOMAN

Opening this weekend:

Jupiter Ascending—Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an immigrant from Russia—she was actually born aboard a ship at sea, like Marina in Pericles—now stuck working as a housecleaning drudge in Chicago. Then alien goblins try to kill her, but she’s rescued by a hunky wolf guy (Channing Tatum) who, with the help of an old ally (Sean Bean) spirits her off to space.

There she learns that she’s somehow the heir of a galactic royal family and that, essentially, Earth belongs to her. There’s a creepy, whispering Prince (Eddie Redmayne), however, who wants our planet for nasty commericial purposes and thus wants Jupiter dead. Wild battles and chases ensue, as well as romantic yearning between Jupiter and Wolf Guy.

This sci-fi fairy-tale from The Wachowskis pillages freely out of sources ranging from Cinderella to Barbarella to Star Wars, from Flash Gordon to Brazil to The Wizard of Oz to The Graduate. The movie is long, and the exposition is so dense that I was lost at times. But I liked it anyway (so did The Kid, who remarked when it was over “It was too long, but I wouldn’t change anything,” a first-rate piece of paradoxical movie reviewing). I especially liked the look of it, a sort of Victorian whimsicality with spaceships like dragonflies or Alexander Calder mobiles, and haywire paper-pushing bureaucracies in the midst of space-age cities.

Kunis, whose hard-around-the-edges Eastern European beauty is softened by dark peepers big enough to have been painted by Margaret Keane, goes for as much bemused comedy as she can. I liked how she reacts to her new situation as galactic princess with something like irritability, as if she’d been stuck with a volunteer committee chairmanship when she was out of the room.

Seventh Son—For some reason, according to this movie, the seventh son of a seventh son is likely to show special aptitude for fighting monsters and other forces of darkness. Shaggy old Jeff Bridges is Gregory, one such warrior, referred to as a “Spook.” Having lost his apprentice of ten years, he purchases a new one, Tom (Ben Barnes), from the poor kid’s family, and quickly has him tangling with giants, shape-shifting bear-men, sabre-tooth cheetah women and witches who can change into harpy-like dragons with more ease than most women can change for dinner.

The leader of these nuisances is Julianne Moore, with whom old Gregory has a history—he sealed her in a pit for decades. She’s out now, and it’s fair to say she’s pissed.

This fantasy, based on a book by Joseph Delaney and set in a vague fairy-tale past only a little grungier and more convincing than the one in which Into the Woods took place, seems to be trying for the feel of a Harryhausen-style episodic adventure. To the extent that, for me, this is possible without the idiosyncratic charm of stop-motion animation, Seventh Son succeeds, at least intermittently. The story is boilerplate and the dialogue mostly insipid, and the younger actors don’t exactly bristle with sophistication and chemistry, although the ingénue, the Swedish Alicia Vikander, is quite beautiful.

But the monster scenes are strong, as are the veterans in the cast. Moore is an elegant, flirty menace as the Witch Queen Mother Malkin. Bridges continues to speak in that same pouty-lipped manner that he did in The Giver. Maybe it’s just how he talks now; in any case it makes him sound amusingly petulant.

The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water—The stakes are high in this second feature treatment of the adventures of Stephen Hillenburg’s insistently cheery denizen of the deep—it follows 2004’s The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. The top secret recipe for Krabby Patties vanishes, and it’s revealed that these burgers, which the title character spends his days happily flipping, aren’t just the livelihood of his avaricious boss Mr. Krabs, they’re also the glue that holds Spongebob’s hometown of Bikini Bottom together.

As soon as the town becomes aware of the Krabby Patty shortage, mob rule and apocalyptic violence commence almost immediately. To the extent that Bikini Bottom may be seen as an allegorical Anytown, this movie suggests, not for the first time in the cartoon’s history, a certain skepticism about how durable civility is in human affairs.

Spongebob and the diminutive, cyclopean villain Plankton must team up to recover the recipe, which is now in the hands of a manic pirate captain (Antonio Banderas in a live-action strand). Teaming up is tough on Plankton, to whom the concept of cooperation is so alien that he isn’t even sure how to pronounce the word “team.” The ensuing saga involves time travel, space travel, a dolphin with a clipped British accent and many other aspects.

Too many, perhaps. It’s possible that this sort of relentless, undiluted silliness works best for five to eight minutes at a stretch, and doesn’t sustain well at feature length. In any case, Sponge Out of Water comes off as, of all things, overambitious, and it drags a little. The Kid (who may, admittedly, be getting a bit too cool for this sort of thing) thought the film was too long, and that the climatic live action/CGI confrontation between Spongebob and his pals and Captain Banderas should have been arrived at sooner. I thought that it had plenty of laughs, but I’ll grant that shaving eight to ten minutes from the movie’s length wouldn’t do it any harm. The Sponge could stand to get out of the water a little more quickly.

SON DEVIL

Opening tomorrow is Seventh Son, featuring many vivid monsters, including…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree, this impolite dragon...

 …breathing in the face of star Jeff Bridges.