6/4 A MADEA FAMILY FUNERAL COMEDY $75 MILL BO 3178 SCREENS PG-13 100 MINUTES DVD/COMBO DIGITAL COPY WITH THE COMBO Tyler Perry (NOBODY’S FOOL, VICE, GONE GIRL, MADEA GETS A JOB, GOOD DEEDS, MADEA’S FAMILY REUNION) We open on a houseful of characters we’ve never seen before and will only barely get to know, planning a 40th anniversary party for their parents Vianne (Jen Harper, “Greenleaf”) and Anthony (Derek Morgan, “Joan of Arcadia”). Traveling to the party are Madea, Joe, Bam and Hattie, driven by Joe’s upright-attorney son Brian (Perry again, sans latex). As the out-of-towners arrive at their hotel, they discover that Anthony has had a heart attack while having sex with family friend Renee (Quin Walters, “The Haves and the Have Nots”), which puts a crimp in the anniversary party plans but does allow them all to be around for the impending funeral. Whether or not Vianne will learn the circumstances of her husband’s death, and what the repercussions will be about Vianne’s older son sleeping with his younger brother’s fiancée, is about all the plot that the movie can muster. But the real draw is Madea, of course, and she gets to be unleashed onto both a family of two-timers and hypocrites and the black funeral itself, a ritual that the movie parodies as overdone and taxingly long. Perry is clearly having a blast in all that effects makeup: “A Madea Family Funeral” gives him a third older character to play, a leg-less lech named Heathrow who speaks through an electrolarynx; the (often improvised) scenes involving this trio give the film genuine comic spark and energy. And while Perry’s Brian character is a perpetual straight man, the movie finally finds something funny for him to do in a traffic-stop scene in which he insists on compliance while his elders show justifiable concern about dealing with the police. This will rent as well as ESCAPE ROOM, HOLMES AND WATSON, BLACKKKLANSMAN, SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, SPY WHO DUMPED ME and TRAFFICK. 6/4 THE KID DRAMA $3 MILL B O 645 SCREENS R 140 MINUTES DVD/BLU RAY DIGITAL COPY WITH THE BLU RAY Chris Pratt (JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 2, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, DELIVERY MAN, HER) The characters in Vincent D’Onofrio’s The Kid never just converse with one another. They shout and scream, deliver long-winded monologues, glower at each other, and occasionally drop faux-meaningful pearls of wisdom like, “It doesn’t matter what’s true. It matters the story they tell when you’re gone.” An overheated riff on the legend of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the film is little more than a procession of shouty—not to mention shoot-y—confrontations between grizzled, morally compromised men. Caught in the middle of all this violence is Rio (Jake Schur), a doe-eyed young boy who slays his father after witnessing him beat his mother to death, thereby incurring the wrath of his villainous uncle, Grant Cutler (Chris Pratt). Rio and his sister (Leila George) go on the lam, running into the notorious outlaw William Bonney (Dane DeHaan), and just in time to see him get picked up by grouchy, self-serious lawman Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke). D’Onofrio’s film attempts to position Pat and Billy as moral opposites. Will Rio follow the straight and narrow path of the sheriff, or will he succumb to the alluring amorality of the outlaw? The choice is a potentially tantalizing one, but Andrew Lanham’s screenplay is too muddled to draw out this quandary with any clarity. The Kid is at once too heavy-handed in establishing the parallel between Pat and Billy—having each one tell Rio detailed stories about the first time they ever killed a man—and too confused about what exact distinction between these two men it wants to draw. Pat may solemnly intone that “a man’s wrongs matter,” and Billy may recount his many sordid past deeds with an unrepentant yellow-toothed grin on his face. This will rent as well as A PRIVATE WAR, BAD TIMES AT EL MONTE, SISTERS AND BROTHERS, WIDOWS, OLD MAN AND THE GUN and PAPILLON. 6/11 CAPTAIN MARVEL FANTASY/ACTION $388 MILL BO 4376 SCREENS PG-13 123 MINUTES DVD/COMBO DIGITAL COPY WITH THE COMBO Brie Larson (TRAINWRECK, THE GAMBLER, KONG: SKULL ISLAND, 21 JUMP STREET, DON JON) “Captain Marvel” tells the origin story of U.S. Air Force Pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), a woman who becomes one of the most powerful heroes in the universe after she crash-lands an experimental aircraft. After being taken captive by aliens, she becomes tangled in the middle of a war between two alien races and escapes to Earth. When a happenstance meeting between Carol and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the pair begin to discover shocking things about her past. This is an important movie at an important time, and it was equally important that Hollywood get it right. You could say they gave it a good effort, for the most part. There’s a seamless diversity in the characters and cast, and certain aspects of the film are likely to inspire a passionate tenacity in women of all ages the world over. The girl power themes are at play, like one of the very best scenes when Captain Marvel overcomes the voices in her head spewing from the “stronger” man (Jude Law) telling her that she’s worthless and weak. Instead of staying down, she finds the inner courage to cast aside her doubts and embrace her impressive, near-invincible powers. Sounds great, and it is, but what a pity it’s preceded by scene after scene of Carol being Captain Marvel may be super powerful, but she’s a boring character. It’s not Larson’s fault, as she’s more than capable at handling the material and physicality of the role. Her rapport with Jackson is relaxed and natural, but he provides most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the comic relief. The women characters are all whip-smart and strong-willed, from the youngest (Akira Akbar) to the most mature (Annette Bening). Carol’s relationship with best friend Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) is extremely effective, but isn’t given enough screen time. I can just hear those patronizing studio suits now: “ flyover comic book audiences want more CGI fighting, not human connection through an actual story .” Captain Marvel is an extraordinary woman who’s presented as ordinary, with a flat, undeveloped personality. She’s nearly emotionless to the point where I’d believe she (and this boring MCU stumble) was created by a Hollywood think-tank who feared giving her too much fire would rock the boat. This will be a monster renter like WONDER WOMAN, BUMBLEBEE, CREED 2, RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: FALLOUT, CRAZY RICH ASIANS, and ANT MAN AND THE WASP. 6/11 CAPTIVE STATE DRAMA $6 MILL BO 1276 SCREENS PG-13 109 MINUTES John Goodman (10 CLOVERFIELD LANE, HANGOVER III, ARGO, FLIGHT, THE BIG LEBOWSKI, O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?, BORN YESTERDAY) If you told most Chicagoans that their current mayor was actually an agent of monstrous, anthropomorphic porcupine-like aliens, they would probably accept that as true. Under Rahm Emanuel, dozens of public schools have been closed in communities of color, his administration was caught covering up the police shooting of Laquan Macdonald, and the police department was found to have been operating a secret torture site. Rupert Wyatt’s Captive State takes the ills that plague Chicago—from police corruption to racial segregation—and remixes them into a sci-fi allegory in which, in established alien-invasion dystopic fashion, the meaning of any given metaphor is never that far from the surface. The film opens on the day of the humans’ capitulation to the aliens, with a black CPD detective and his family attempting to flee the city as authorities lock it down, a flight that fails in a tragic manner evoking recent police shootings. After an excessively expository credits sequence in which Matrix -style computer text essentially pitches the film to us, the story picks up nine years later with the detective’s son, Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), still planning his escape from the city. The aliens have co-opted human governments, constructing a totalitarian surveillance state operated jointly with their collaborators. Gabriel lives in the Pilsen neighborhood and works in one of the aliens’ data-retrieval-and-destruction factories, extracting data stored on confiscated phones and destroying the memory cards. The aliens, who resemble human-shaped Brillo pads and are amusingly referred to in the film’s refracted version of our world as “legislators,” have an enmity toward digital communication that forces humans to fall back on landlines, payphones, carrier pigeons, and even newspaper classifieds as means of communication, clandestine and otherwise. It’s one of the film’s better ideas, as both Gabriel’s brother Rafe’s (Jonathan Majors) resistance movement and the police officer tracking them down, William Mulligan (John Goodman), have to rely on networks cobbled together from non-parallel technologies. In the hands of Rafe’s Phoenix organization, the organic technologies the aliens use to dominate life on Earth become a powerful tool of rebellion: In a truly suspenseful sequence, one resistance cell uses an invisible organic gel-bomb to attack a pro-alien rally at Soldier Field. This movie will rent as well as VICE, FAVOURITE, FIRST MAN, BLINDSPOTTING, TRUTH OR DARE, and BAD TIMES AT EL MONTE.