DIAL, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS ACHING

Opening this weekend:

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny--The first sound we hear is the ticking of a clock. Thus the fifth and valedictory entry in the series about Harrison Ford's globetrotting, whip-cracking archaeologist establishes Time, and its persistent shadow, Mortality, as the theme.

The movie starts with a lengthy and rather splendid act set in France in 1944, with Ford made young via some impressive CGI alchemy. Indy and a brilliant sidekick (Toby Jones) are snooping around a mountain stronghold, trying to filch back some artifacts from the plunder of retreating Nazis, among them a coldly businesslike SS Colonel (Thomas Kretschman) and a reptilian physicist (Mads Mikkelsen) who identifies the title gadget, a clockwork contraption built by Archimedes himself that supposedly can be used for time travel.

From here we fast forward to New York in the late '60s, where Indy is a grumpy and bereaved old man on the verge of retirement from teaching, separated from his beloved Marion, annoyed by the Beatles blasting from the hippie pad neighboring his cluttered apartment. His goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who he affectionately refers to as "Wombat," pulls him into one more adventure, chasing the Dial from Tangiers to the floor of the Mediterranean to Sicily. The unrepentant Nazi prof, who went on to help NASA get to the moon, is looking for the Dial too, with his murderous goons.

The first Indy flick, 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a favorite of mine; tight and witty and curiously modest, it genuinely felt like a Republic serial of the '40s, maybe directed by William Witney. It was also built around a terrific Jewish joke, with its Nazis arrogantly supposing they could co-opt cosmic Jewish power unscathed. The lavish, overstuffed sequels were enjoyable enough, but all of them fell far short, for me, of that snappy, surefooted original.

Dial of Destiny falls short of the original too, but even so it may be the best of the sequels. It's the first that Steven Spielberg didn't direct; the duties here went to the always proficient James Mangold, who was also among the many screenwriters. And for the first half--the 1944 scenes, and the stuff in '60s-era New York, with Indy on the run against the backdrop of war protestors and astronaut ticker-tape parades--it's sensational.

The trouble is that, like so many contemporary blockbusters, it's outrageously overlong, at least thirty or forty minutes longer than it really needs to be. As MacGuffins go, the Dial doesn't have the same stirring imaginative power and poetry as the Ark, and its implications get the narrative in a little over its head in the later acts. For a story that starts with urgent ticking, the movie manages time very poorly.

Still, there's a lot to like here. Ford is wonderfully on point. He seems to have grown into the curmudgeonly manner that's always been part of his persona, but he's also emotionally present to a surprising degree, truly connecting with the other characters. Mikkelsen is a top-notch, quietly megalomaniacal villain, and Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas and John Rhys-Davies could all have warranted more screen time as Indy's allies, as could Shaunette Renée Wilson as an exasperated U.S. intelligence agent. Ethann Isidore is likable as Helena's street urchin pal.

Maybe best of all is Waller-Bridge's Helena--headlong, fearless, smiling, eyes full of self-delighted mischief. She even shows a hint or two of lewdness, welcome in this largely asexual series. It would be okay with me if they gave her more movies.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken--At the very least, one must admit that this is a take on teen angst we haven't seen before. Ruby and her family are Krakens, the fearsome tentacled sea creatures of Nordic lore, but they're passing themselves off as humans; Ruby's Mom has a good career as a realtor in a seaside town. Ruby is under orders never to get wet in the ocean, lest her giant Kraken-ness be revealed to her classmates. This means she's forbidden to go to prom, as it's being held on a boat.

Soon enough Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) learns that her Mom (Toni Collette) and her Grandma (Jane Fonda) are giant Kraken as well, and their backstory includes a feud with the mermaids. Indeed, the story is sort of The Little Mermaid in reverse, with many of the same psychological and sexual subtexts at work. And like an earlier DreamWorks Animation effort, Shrek, the snarky shots at Disney are amusing, in an inside-baseball way.

This movie has a glitzy, primary-color sensibility, like a fever dream after bingeing on My Little Pony and Powerpuff Girls and eating too much cioppino. And it feels about that ephemeral. But it's a sweet-natured fish tale, and undeniably original.

TOMEGIRLS

 Opening in theaters this weekend:

Book Club: The Next Chapter--"Best friend tough love."

Several times throughout this sequel to the 2018 comedy, one of the characters uses this phrase before offering a critique, usually not terribly tough, of one of the other three. In that spirit, I'm tempted to offer the returning quartet of leading ladies--Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen--some unsolicited movie critic tough love: cranking out this sort of girls-night-out fluff shouldn't be all they do in the valedictory stretch of their careers.

But I can't do it. These four women are all great stars, first-rate actors and classic screen beauties. In some cases they won their chops gradually--Bergen had a pretty rough start, for instance, but eventually developed killer comic timing--while others, like Keaton, seemed to find a one-of-a-kind persona early on. Each of them, however, has a splendid body of work to be proud of, and if now they want to make money doing relatively harmless, undemanding fare like this, they've earned the right.

That said, this one is really fluffy. But so what? There's a sense in which movies like this are critic-proof. As with 80 for Brady, another emeritus chick flick from earlier this year (also featuring Fonda), the stars here are such good company that the feeble plotting and rambling dialogue and platitudes about pursuing your dreams at any age become a shared smirk between them and the audience.

You may recall the line up, lifelong friends who stay in touch through a book club: Keaton's character, conveniently named Diane, is a reserved widow who defaults to finding reasons not to have adventures and has never scattered her husband's ashes. Fonda plays Vivian, a successful hotel magnate who has never married. Part One linked Vivian up with Arthur (Don Johnson) and Diane up with Mitchell (Andy Garcia).

Steenburgen plays Carol, a married chef; here her husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson) has had a heart attack and she's policing his bacon intake. Bergen rounds out the quartet as Sharon, the long-divorced and still single retired federal judge.

Last time around the ladies were reading Fifty Shades of Grey, which rather embarrassingly stirred them up erotically. This time, after a long COVID lockdown, their selection is Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, which helps inspire them to go on a trip, a bachelorette party for Vivian, who has at last agreed to marry Arthur. So the four of them tour Italy; first Rome, then Venice, then Tuscany.

You can imagine the results, again directed by Bill Holderman from a script he co-wrote, again, with Erin Simms. The ladies cavort, from montage to montage, making low-hanging-fruit lewd jokes about classical sculptures, or trying on wedding dresses. They get robbed, and the case is handled without much urgency by a venerable and impressively unformed officer of the polizia (played by Seven Beauties himself, Giancarlo Giannini). They flirt with guys, although Sharon being the only fully unattached one, she's the only one that gets to fully cut loose in this way. And through it all, they drink wine. Lots and lots of wine.

Like many other directors, Holderman leans hard on the Italian locations, and the movie looks great. It sounds great, too; the soundtrack has Bette Midler singing "Mambo Italiano" and Italian-language versions of pop hits from The Monkees to Hall and Oates. And it's hard to completely dismiss any movie that features Hugh Quarshie singing "Gloria," in Italian, accompanied by Mary Steenburgen on the accordion.

TOMFOOLERY

In theaters this weekend:

80 for Brady--It's a testament to the star power of the four leading ladies in this movie that I didn't resent that their characters were Tom Brady fans. Not that much, anyway. I didn't even resent that the film amounts to a feature-length commercial for the NFL; it's being released the weekend before Super Bowl Sunday, almost as if the league is trying to offer its own counterprogramming.

Who cares? At this point in their careers, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno could pretty much read grocery lists and it would carry a certain pop-culture gravitas. The script, by Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern and inspired by a real-life circle of elderly Boston-based fans of Tommy Boy and the Patriots, doesn't really offer them much more to work with than a grocery list would, and they still come off all right.

Tomlin, a cancer survivor, is the outspoken instigator who insists that she and her friends must go watch Brady play in the 2017 Big Game. Fonda is a flirt given to romantically leaping before she looks; she's also successful writer of erotic fiction about Rob Gronkowski. Field is an academic weary of her dependent, literally absent-minded professor husband (Bob Balaban) and Moreno yearns to break free of assisted living despite a fellow resident (Glynn Turman) who likes her.

The quartet ends up in Houston having wacky adventures at the Super Bowl Experience and at parties and poker games and chicken wing eating contests and such. All does not, it need hardly be said, go smoothly. They're befriended by the choreographer of the half-time show (Billy Porter) and if you think they don't end up dancing to get past security, think again.

With her blunt, urgent delivery, Tomlin somehow emerges as the team captain of the ensemble. But all four are infectiously energetic and seem to enjoy goofing around with the supporting players shoved in their paths, like Porter, or Harry Hamlin as a love interest for Fonda, or Sara Gilbert as Tomlin's daughter, or Andy Richter as a high roller in a skybox, or Alex Moffat and Rob Corrddry as a dyspeptic sports-talk team, and of course Brady and Gronk and Guy Fieri and others as themselves. Even the bit players include the likes of Patton Oswalt and Sally Kirkland.

80 for Brady starts slow, but it should be said that as it progresses, and gets broader and sillier, it also gets better; both livelier and more heartfelt. By the end these women had me absurdly emotionally invested. This is, possibly, the lamest and most ridiculous film that has ever brought tears to my eyes.