If it was good enough for the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, it’s surely good enough for the movies. Kill off a parent (too many stories to count), threaten a flapper with sexual assault (early 1930s Boop), quash a young protagonist’s confidence before restoring it (every animated everything, ever): It’s nerve-wracking just thinking about the real-life doubts, fears, crises, all resolved — we hope — just in time.

Pixar’s “Inside Out” (2015) leaned into old, turbulent emotions in a new way, all the way. The story dealt with 11-year-old Riley, a Minnesota girl into hockey, who relocated, uneasily, with her parents to San Francisco. A big move means big challenges for any kid — and any parent. Director Pete Docter and the “Inside Out” screenplay acknowledged Riley’s depression while underscoring her ability to manage it, and flourish. The emotions depicted in the control room of her mind — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust — navigated their increasingly tricky human charge, as well as their own clashing personalities. And people went; it was a hit.

I hope the same for “Inside Out 2,” the engaging sequel that pits the now 13-year-old Riley against new challenges and a tangle of new insecurities. It’s chaotic, sometimes very funny, occasionally wrenching, and at 96 minutes, exactly one minute longer than “Inside Out.”

The human storyline is simple and sure-footed. Riley hits puberty, which hits back as puberty does. She and her besties at school are invited to a summer hockey camp, which bodes well for their self-esteem and their social futures together.

But there are new kids in town, in her mind. Emotion management center honcho Joy (Amy Poehler providing the can-do, no-problem vocal inflections once again) must accommodate these new emotions led, anxiously, by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), along with Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and the très French and consistently witty embodiment of Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos, plumbing heretofore unplumbed depths of disaffected disengagement). Nostalgia pops in for a couple of appearances; June Squibb voices her, unerringly.

Riley piles up a stack of rapidly accumulated wince-worthy memories along with many good ones as she ingratiates herself with the cool older girls at the camp. She feels as if she cannot win this phase of her life. How to reconcile one established friend group with a longed-for new and cooler and slightly older one? Gradually, Riley’s innate good-heartedness gets sidelined while new, edgier, arguably meaner personality traits muscle in on the action. Anxiety becomes a huge presence in her summer of emotional riddles, just as it dominates the screenplay by Meg LeFauve (who co-wrote the first “Inside Out”) and Dave Holstein.

Anxiety’s on-screen presence is a lot. Too much? Maybe. How to vary these escalating scenes focused on a character, a feeling, who’s not quite an antagonist, but not a hero? These challenges have been acknowledged by the film’s creatives.

They didn’t solve everything, to be sure. Like most sequels to Pixar’s very good or great films, this one’s sometimes busy to a fault, and little monomaniacal in its pacing. But we’re are a long way here from the mechanical likes of “Monsters University” or “Cars 2.” “Inside Out 2” still feels human-made, and genuinely concerned about how Riley deals with this chapter of her life. The wordplay remains tiptop, as when Joy and company face a dangerous river crossing (memory bubbles substituting for water) known as the Sar-Chasm, which renders everyone’s expressed thoughts, sincere or not, in a jaded, “as if!” tone of adolescent dismissal.

Crucially, Phyllis Smith returns as the measured, morose voice of Sadness, alongside some new voices for familiar characters (Tony Hale in for Bill Hader as Fear; Liza Lapira in for Mindy Kaling as Disgust; Kensington Tallman replacing Kaitlyn Dias as Riley). The new emotions come from the first film’s developmental long list of possibilities. I love how Pixar, at its corporately owned peak, invested millions of dollars in figuring out how to wrangle some peculiar, hard-to-market narratives into workable shape. Even if “Inside Out 2” sometimes favors speed over, well, everything else, it’s gratifying to see an ordinary and, yes, anxious 13-year-old’s life, like millions and millions of lives right now, treated as plenty for a good, solid sequel, and without the dubious dramatics of the first movie’s climax.

What’s happening on the inside can be enough.

“Inside Out 2” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for some thematic elements)

Running time: 1:36

How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 13

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

They’re not attributes at all, really. They’re more like placeholders for the seats you wish they had. In a word: tough. They’re tough on the hindquarters. Noisy, too. You even think about shifting your weight during a screening, and the seat intuits your intentions and commences to squeaking before you actually make a move.

But changes are coming, all 740 of them.

Following the Aug. 11 presentation of the Lakeview theater’s final 70 MM Film Festival attraction, the theater’s main venue closes its grand, slightly careworn doors for a $750,000 renovation including new seats, new carpeting, new lighting and replastering, repair and general spiffing-up of the proscenium arch framing the screen. (The smaller one will remain open.)

Reopening is scheduled to reopen on Sept. 6 in time for the annual Noir City festival, hosted by Eddie Muller of Turner Classic Movies and the nonprofit Film Noir Foundation.

Here’s some intel on what’s coming soon.

THE SEATS: “Yes, I sat in them,” Music Box general manager Ryan Oestreich told me. “The Irwin Seating Company of Walker, Michigan, sent us a sample. What people want is support, and a nice, level seat that folds up without making noise. And cup holders! Now we’ll have cupholders. It’s ridiculous we’ve gone this long without them.” All but 34 of the 740 new seats will have them.

 THE ARMRESTS: “Wooden armrests, really nice wood. We’re trying to maintain the historic atmosphere of the room, and we picked out seats that do that.” Plus you can …

SPONSOR A SEAT: If your ego’s telling you “put your name, someone’s else’s name” on a nice shiny tiny metal plate on a nice new armrest on a nice new Music Box Theatre seat, you can do it. Name of a business, your movie-loving grandparents, whatever. It’s $750 for one seat, $1,400 for a pair; more at revive.musicboxtheatre.com

UNDER YOUR FEET: This summer’s renovations include patching the problematic areas of the theater’s concrete floor with a new epoxy coating. “Paint doesn’t work,” Oestreich says. “When you paint floors you get a five-, maybe 10-year lifespan on the job. We’re applying this industrial grade epoxy with a 25-year life. Grippier surface, too, which is better for safety and easier to clean.” New carpet, too; design to be determined (the staff is still assessing samples), but if the Music Box Theatre is essentially a period picture unto itself, the carpet, Oestreich says, needs to complement the period.

THE ARCH: The proscenium arch framing the Music Box stage, and the screen dominating it, needs new plaster, which means scaffolding, which is a big reason for the nearly month-long shutdown of the big venue. Plus a sponge-cleaning once the plaster work is done.

THE RATIONALE: “Each year since 2016,” Oestreich says, “we’ve invested anywhere from $250,000 to $300,000 back into the building. The bathrooms, the marquee (replaced in 2017, originally estimated at $250,000, eventually costing $400,000), new roof, new AC unit for the main theater, all of it. It’s expensive. And it’s a risk, closing down the main theater for a month. It’s our main revenue generator.” And that, Oestreich says, is why they’re finding ways to get Music Box loyalists to pitch in and get something for it.

SEATS FOR SALE: The theater’s working with the nonprofit Rebuild Exchange to yank out, lovingly, the current, variously worn, uneven, slightly lumpy seats, some aisle seats equipped with remnants of the original 1929 brass accents. They’re selling them to general public, in sets of two or four. Details to come. There are other ways to give back go the venue and its makeover. Donate $100 or more and you get the movie poster of your choice, from the Music Box’s 22-year-old archive.

“We’re able to make these renovations because of the community built around this place,” Oestreich says. “And we have a supportive owner. Without those two components, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

A long-distance parrot delivery takes her (and parrot) to the Connemara region in western Ireland, through a scenic, oddly unmapped patch of forest where The Watchers reside. These creatures, barely glimpsed at first, move quickly, are prone to unsettling shrieks and, as the film proceeds, require more and more expository interludes for the four humans trapped in those woods. For now, they’re protected by a sleek concrete and glass bunker. Fanning’s character, Mina, is the fourth and latest visitor/prisoner, and the most determined to scoot.

The script follows the book’s story beats quite faithfully. The leader of the human survivors, Madeline (snow-haired beauty Olwen Fouéré, whose unblinking intensity makes every utterance stick), has been trapped in the magical forest — magical in a not-fun way — the longest. Ciara, whose husband has gone missing-presumed-dead in the woods, is played by Georgina Campbell (also good, though the role feels thin). Twitchy, slightly off Daniel (Oliver Finnegan) makes the best of things and follows all the rules for survival, dutifully.

The Watchers come out of their subterranean tunnels when the sun sets, and (no spoilers here) appear to have a great interest in simply studying the humans behind the thick but not impenetrable windows of the bunker. How’d that bunker get there? What do these Watchers look like? What do they want? What past tragedy haunts Mina? As in the novel, the answers emerge in due course.

The most insinuating elements of this debut feature (Shyamalan’s filmmaker father, M. Night Shyamalan, served as one of the producers) point to a filmmaker of legitimate promise and a knack for slow builds. The movie isn’t gory (strike one in 2024) or innately sadistic (strike two). It’s also a little sludgy in the writing. There are times in “The Watchers” when Madeline, a sometime educator, we’re told, turns into a de facto adjunct professor specializing in expository restatement.

Time and the next feature will tell if Shyamalan can further develop her visual assurance while realizing not every story turn benefits from a verbal recap or footnote. Even with its drawbacks, I found “The Watchers” worth watching, even with its odd (and perhaps too faithful to the book) final 15 minutes. The director works well with cinematographer Eli Arenson to envelop the chamber-sized ensemble in various shades of dread, or comfort.

This tale of supernatural riddles wouldn’t work at all if we couldn’t invest in Mina’s psychic burden. Fanning doesn’t have to stress it; she knows how to let it come through in small matters of body language, and in the eyes. That makes acting sound easy, which it is not. Neither is adapting a story involving a dense underlay of folklore, in this case to imperfect but absorbing results.

“The Watchers” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for violence, terror and some thematic elements)

Running time: 1:42

How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 7

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

O’Sullivan told me this the other morning in the living room of the fourth-floor Rogers Park walk-up she shares with director and screenwriter Alex Thompson. They’re partners, with a 6-month-old son, Milo. And they just co-directed a movie together.

Sounds like trouble, Thompson concurs with a smile. “Which is why we waited a year or two into our relationship to make a film together.”

That 2019 Chicago-made film, “Saint Frances,” starred O’Sullivan, well-known and respected for her work on many stages around town, as a 34-year-old nanny navigating a series of relational crossroads with her newfound employers, their little girl and her own ambitions.

Five years later, they’re back in strong form, this time as co-directors of O’Sullivan’s “Ghostlight.” It’s a tender comedy-drama starring Keith Kupferer, a veteran Chicago stage actor as well as a regular TV and sometime film presence, in a rare leading role as construction worker Dan, a tightly clenched man clouded by the family tragedy O’Sullivan’s screenplay gradually reveals.

Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Keith Kupferer’s real-life daughter, ignites the role of Dan’s daughter, whip-smart, touchy, grieving in disharmony with both her parents. Her mother, Sharon, is played movingly by another Chicago stage veteran, Tara Mallen, married to Keith and mother to Katherine. The family feeling is everywhere in “Ghostlight,” its title referring to the single-bulb lamp traditionally left illuminated on a theater stage when all else goes dark.

Avoiding his daughter’s therapy session one day, Dan meets a cast member of a no-budget storefront theater production of “Romeo and Juliet” by accident. This woman, Rita, smoking and bitter but sneakily big-hearted, is portrayed by Filipino actor Dolly de Leon, a 2022 Golden Globe nominee for the black comedy “Triangle of Sadness.” In a blink, Dan is thrown into rehearsals (they’re short one actor and he’s the first available human to wander by). In another blink, Dan moves into the role of teenaged Romeo, opposite Rita’s Juliet, likewise middle-aged and unconventionally cast in Shakespeare’s tragedy of enraptured young love.

The theatrics afoot in “Ghostlight” suggest a situation comedy, or at least a comic situation. The feelings underneath suggest otherwise. Its world premiere screenings had audiences in tears at the January 2024 Sundance Film Festival. This spring’s Chicago Critics Film Festival “Ghostlight” screening at the Music Box Theatre: different crowd, same tears —though that time, some assuredly were tears of joy at the sight of Lincolnwood’s beloved Novelty Golf and the adjoining Bunny Hutch.

IFC Films picked it up for theatrical distribution (100-plus U.S. screens) straight out of Sundance. Filmed in Waukegan and Chicago neighborhoods, the film opens commercially here and in New York on June 14, other U.S. markets June 21.

As for the relationship-killing part of co-directing: So far, so good. “We figured out it’s a lot like parenting together,” O’Sullivan says. “Co-directing, parenting — very similar.”

She and Thompson shot “Ghostlight” last September. At one point, O’Sullivan, eight months pregnant and dealing with COVID, co-directed in temporary isolation via monitor and walkie-talkie, communicating with Thompson on set.

That sounds stressful, yet nine months hence the key actors still talk about how not-stressful the filming days were. Ever. They talk about how Thompson’s visual and technical skills and comforting vibe complemented the actor-whisperer acumen of O’Sullivan, already well known to the Kupferers from their overlapping work on many Chicago stages.

“She knows how to talk to actors the way actors want to be talked to,” Kupferer says. “Kelly doesn’t prescribe notes to people; she draws stuff out of you.” Kupferer’s previous screen work, he says, meant the basics: “hit your mark and say your line and don’t screw up the shot. You’re only there for a day, maybe two.”

This project was different, besides being Kupferer’s first lead in a movie. In one tricky scene, when Dan enters a rehearsal as the new, deeply reluctant Romeo, utterly at sea. The actor couldn’t quite locate the angle he wanted after a couple of takes.

“And then Alex came over and said, ‘Look. You can take as much time as you want. We can take all day.’ That was something new for me. It was liberating. I’m tell you, together, he and Kelly are just terrific.”

Mallen notes the “the mutual respect they bring to a room. Any room, any situation. There was Kelly, eight months pregnant with COVID, and Alex would say ‘Hey! Kelly has a note!'” They worked smoothly through walkie-talkies. “No panic, no rushing. Just so much grace and kindness and mutual respect.”

And clarity, says Katherine Mallen Kupferer, who, like her parents, responded strongly to the filmmakers’ earlier “Saint Frances.” The direction she got, she says, was “just so simple, and so clear. That was really helpful for me.” Her performance confirms it. Coming off the Sundance premiere, both Keith and Katherine Mallen Kupferer signed with Fusion Entertainment’s Adam Kersh, already managing O’Sullivan and Thompson.

It has been a fine few months for all concerned. Also a little strange, having your two feature film collaborations coincide with a pandemic and an uncertain future for theatrical exhibition, streaming acquisition and movies approximate size, for example, of “Ghostlight.”

“Saint Frances,” distributed by Oscilloscope, enjoyed an auspicious film festival run in 2019. Then its March 2020 theatrical debut hit the pandemic wall. Many discovered director Thompson’s film later, via virtual screenings and then broader online streaming.

Then came a logical but worrying development, O’Sullivan says. “I think what’s happening to cinema is also what’s happening to live theater. People have gotten out of the habit of going. I saw way more plays (pre-COVID) than I see now, and not just because of our baby, but because I’m out of the habit.”

“Saint Frances” was filmed for $75,000. Post production, including sound recorded at Skywalker Sound, brought it to $130,000. “We cut so many corners in production,” Thompson told me. “We shot so fast. And it was a cicada summer. A lot of complaints from our sound design team that summer.”

The financing came from the back room of a Panera. At the time, Thompson ran a movie club for seniors in Bannockburn, near Highland Park, with monthly meetups at a Panera Bakery and Cafe. Each month he assigned his class two new movies on a similar theme, one new, one older, for discussion purposes. He asked his students if they knew anybody interested in making movies. The answer was yes; some turned out to be in the class, and others were contacted. And then a few others.

Separately, there was the matter of seed money, “which I learned is very useful, just so you can say ‘We have seed money,'” explains Thompson. “It might be $5,000. Or $100,000. Or just a thousand. But you need it to prove that somebody believes in you, other than you.” Chicago-based investor Ian Keiser and Dallas-based Pierce Cravens, who’ve backed Thompson since 2012, seeded “Saint Frances.”

Thompson then directed a feature he also co-wrote, “Rounding,” a low-budget mystery yet to be released. That cost just under $500,000. “Ghostlight” came in at just under $500,000 as well. Thompson and O’Sullivan’s next project, “Mouse,” a high school story scripted by O’Sullivan and co-directed by O’Sullivan and Thompson, begins filming this September near where Arkansas native O’Sullivan grew up. Budget: just under $3 million, roughly 23 times that of “Saint Frances.”

More money, more pressure, says O’Sullivan. Some sample dialogue from their Rogers Park living room the other day includes O’Sullivan’s use of the word “Sisyphean” to describe how she’s feeling about her newest script, only recently begun.

“Sisyphean?” asks Thompson, skeptical but easygoing. “Is it?”

“Maybe not to you, but …”

“Doesn’t feel that way to me.”

“Maybe it’s about me having just had a baby. And trying to write in a way so that people will want to make the movie.”

Thompson, smiling; they’re both smiling, thereby proving the importance of love, respect and tone modulation in any important relationship: “But you don’t have to convince anyone to make it.”

“Yeah, I do!”

“Well, I mean, it’s gotta be good …”

O’Sullivan: “Yeah! I’m trying to make it good! But the first draft is always garbage. Well, not garbage, but it needs a lot of work. I was talking to some aspiring writers the other day and I said (low, defeatist murmur): ‘I hate writing.’ And they were like, ‘You do?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! I hate being confronted by by my own mediocrity, again and again and again. (pause) I wonder if that ever goes away.”

Thompson has had his own doubts. “You come into directing,” he says, “thinking that being a director means calling the shots and having the answer to everything. In other words, an absence of curiosity. Everyone else gets to be curious, but you’re the one ‘on mission.’ But when we made ‘Saint Frances,’ because it dealt with abortion and Kelly wrote a personal story, I had a really intense sensitivity, I guess, about how it felt for me to direct that story. I found out I just had to defer to Kelly’s script. I remember (cinematographer Nate Hurtsellers) saying: ‘We just have to get out of the way. Get out of the way of what’s working.’ And I started to see that directing is about collaboration, and curiosity.”

Their best-known actor in “Ghostlight,” de Leon, is currently in Munich filming Season 2 of “Nine Perfect Strangers.” O’Sullivan and Thompson mailed her manager the script and, de Leon tells me, along with “a really sweet note, saying they’d watched ‘Triangle of Sadness’ and this and that. A lot of really nice things. I’m a sucker for people like that.”

“Have you met them?” she asks me. Yes, just yesterday. “They’re just wonderful people, with such good hearts,” she says. “I don’t know if I should say this, but initially they (talked to me) about the role of Sharon. But I just resonated more with Rita. I loved her. I’m a theater person like she is. So Adam (Kersh) asked them if they were open to me playing Rita, and they were, so I did it. And it’s a beautiful script.”

On a first read, de Leon found some of the “Ghostlight” plotting to be “a little convenient, a little too coincidental,” with Dan’s private anguish directly mirroring the events of “Romeo and Juliet.” She talked with O’Sullivan, who said, “‘I think if we show this in the most realistic way possible, it’s going to work.” De Leon adds, “And sure enough, it does.”

“With Kelly and Alex,” she says, “everything comes from the heart. The film wears its heart on its sleeve, but it’s not sappy. Watching it, it feels authentic and true. That’s what’s special about them, and the atmosphere they create on set. I’ll be honest with you, it was the best working experience of my entire life.”

She’s quiet for a second. “Do you know the expression ‘as above, so below’? It means if the people leading you are leading you in a certain way, the followers adopt that behavior. That’s Kelly and Alex. Leading by example.”

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Chris Rock is nowhere in sight in this movie. But at that moment, the footage spinning in the audience’s mind alongside what they’re watching is a flashback to the wallopalooza at the 2022 Oscars, when Smith over-avenged a “G.I. Jane” joke emcee Rock made at Jada Pinkett Smith’s expense.

The “Bad Boys” franchise is all about righteous payback, so when Lawrence triple-slaps Smith it’s the two-years-later comeuppance the audience knew would come someday, somehow. If the movie’s about anything other than franchise maintenance in a dark time, it’s about karma. (Lawrence’s character, Marcus Burnett, undergoes a near-death experience and can’t shut up about past lives.) If those slaps are photographed and edited with the artless blunt force and cramped, cellphone-screen-friendly framing of nearly everything else in “Ride or Die,” too bad. Those are matters of technique and finesse, neither of which matters here.

Millions remain loyal to the “Bad Boys” vehicles. They enjoy watching Smith and Lawrence do their thing. I enjoy watching them do their thing. But this time, the thing comes with a little extra strain, sloppier mood swings, a grimmer, more numbing array of slaughter. I wish more of “Ride or Die” were like its final 90 seconds, in which three characters are arguing about who’s going to use the grill. Funny, extraneous, nothing much, but a recent preview screening audience seemed especially grateful for the laughs on the way out. Getting there in a genre mashup this mashed-up — a killer giant-sized albino alligator? Sure, fine — is considerably less than half the fun.

Despite its initially rosy box office projections, now downgraded, “Ride or Die” feels about right for this frankly shaken moment in 2024 moviegoing. Habitual multiplex attendance has been eroded by uneasily merged companies formerly in the business of making movies. Now they’re in the business of figuring out streaming platform survival tactics first, and what to throw in the stream second. The fate of theatrical exhibition runs a distant third.

Still, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” constitutes an old-fashioned distribution model, the way “Bad Boys 3” did in early 2020, just before the pandemic. Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah return for duty. The script pits our bad men (Smith and Lawrence are a combined 114 years old now; I’m calling them men) against their corrupt Miami law enforcement ranks, mobbed up with drug cartels. Lowrey marries his physical therapist, Christine (Melanie Liburd, who spends much of the film as a battered, anguished hostage); Tasha Smith replaces Theresa Randle as Burnett’s wife, Theresa.

Returning players include Vanessa Hudgens as good cop Kelly, Joe Pantoliano as the late, dream-sequences edition of Capt. Howard; and Jacob Scipio as Lowrey’s son, whose beef with his dad periodically surfaces after Lowrey and Burnett are framed for murder, pursued by every bounty-hunting gang member with a weapon in Florida.

The script constitutes a string of bush-league errors we’re not supposed to care about, starting with the audience getting way, way out ahead of the characters regarding who’s hiding what. Do we go to franchise items like this, or put up with them on the couch, simply for the white-noise reassurance of gunfire, fireballs, trash talk and periodic reminders that, like the “Fast and Furious” movies, it’s all about family? I wonder.

There are other ways to approach a movie like this. How about making it funny when it’s trying to be? “Ride or Die” makes you pathetically grateful for any comic impulse, such as Lowrey and Burnett running into a Confederate flag-waving enclave of yahoo racists and improvising a Reba McEntire song at gunpoint. Smile, cringe, whatever, it provides a break from the generic, arrhythmic action beats, the witless raunch (Tiffany Haddish, wasted in a one-scene cameo), the clinically alluring gun porn.

Directors such as El Arbi and Fallah, who try everything and nothing matches, might want to check out some ’80s titles for visual and tonal inspiration, starting with Walter Hill’s “48 Hrs.” and Martin Brest’s “Beverly Hills Cop.” Those movies worked, and work still, even if they spun off terrible, heartless sequels. The originals remain super-solid examples of how substantially different action comedies can do justice to both action and comedy. There are more recent examples, but since the nervous 2024 screen economy is stuck in a perpetual time loop with whatever worked before, whether the new script works or not, these two Eddie Murphy ringers are a good place to start.

We can talk plenty about the visual aggravations of “Ride or Die.” But everything has a chance to go fundamentally wrong with a movie long before the first day of filming. If a movie doesn’t care enough about its selling points, aka the stars, to give them decent lines more than twice per hour, the “bad” in “Bad Boys” ends up being the wrong kind of bad. And, in a truly sad way, its own review.

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong violence, language throughout and some sexual references)

Running time: 1:55

How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 6

Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Four films from the January 2024 edition of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, will be screened at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts in Hyde Park and at the Davis Theater in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Two are documentaries: “Luther: Never Too Much,” director Dawn Porter’s documentary on the late R&B powerhouse Luther Vandross; and “Sugarcane,” directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, an account of cyclical abuse perpetuated in the Canadian Indian residential school system.

The other two are feature films: Aaron Schimberg’s dark comedy “A Different Man,” addressing themes of ableism, disability, identity and body horror; and director Caroline Lindy’s “Your Monster,” described by Sundance programmer Ana Souza as “a welcome re-steering of the rom-com into darker realms” starring Melissa Barrera.

The Sundance x Chicago weekend’s five panel discussions range from the screenwriter and filmmaker-centric “Playing for Keeps: How development labs could be the investment that leads to local artistic sustainability,” i.e., how the Sundance Institute’s projects might be adapted to other cities such as Chicago, to “Stronger Together: How festivals, art houses, and independent exhibitors are working together to revive and reinvent the theatrical experience in the post-pandemic era.”

Sundance Film Festival director and Indiewire co-founder and former editor Eugene Hernandez and Facets executive director Karen Cardarelli lead the “Stronger Together” panel.

Tickets for the films go for $20; the panels are free but require reservations and seating is limited. The late June project also features community events and master classes, with details to come. Much of the activity will take place in the downtown Chicago Cultural Center.

Sundance Institute x Chicago runs June 28-30 at Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St.; Davis Theater, 614 N. Lincoln Ave.; Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St. For more information go to SundanceInstitutexChicago.com.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

In 1926, 20-year-old Gertrude Ederle, raised in a German immigrant household in New York City, swam the English Channel in 14 hours and 31 minutes. She bested the previous record-holder, a male, by two hours and became the first female athlete to make the crossing.

Two million people turned out for her ticker-tape parade. President Calvin Coolidge called her “America’s best girl.” After decades and centuries of patriarchal whining about women, swimming and the galling impropriety of the words “women” and “swimming” in close proximity, Ederle’s feat changed the course of athletics.

The movie tidies things up for its tour of Ederle’s life, focused by screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (“Catch Me If You Can,” the forthcoming “Lion King” prequel “Mufasa”) on 15 or so of the subject’s first 20 years. Trudy, as Gertrude was called by some, initially was not the most talented swimmer in the family; her older sister, Meg, was. That shifted soon enough; by the early 1920s, and Trudy’s late teens, she was the most famous female athlete in America, winning gold and bronze medals in the 1924 Paris Olympics. An initial go at the Channel crossing proved unsuccessful, and (some say) actively sabotaged by Ederle’s coach, Jabez Wolffe, who’d himself attempted the crossing 22 times to no avail.

“Young Woman and the Sea” plays around with various degrees of truth and fiction, because it’s not a documentary and, you know, welcome to the concept of movies based on true stories. None of them, not a one, tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It’s not their job. In the film, Ederle’s Olympic triumphs (she won gold and bronze medals) become invisible, rewritten instead as a general part of a general failure and a huge setback for women’s sports. In the film, her second, successful Channel attempt comes mere hours after the first, not a year later.

These things don’t necessarily matter (to me, at least) when a movie’s working as drama. This happens just often enough — and by the precision-tooled setback/triumph/setback/triumph pacing of the climax, just rousingly enough — to take care of business.

Throughout, director Joachim Ronning, next in line for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, manages a fairly pleasing blend of practical 1920s-era recreations, digital effects (plentiful but rarely completely fraudulent-looking) and shamelessly effective melodrama. Every sexist, misogynist resistance point to Ederle’s mission, feels not unlikely (it wasn’t; it was assuredly omnipresent a century ago) but boiled down to reductive, pencil-sketched character traits. Man A is a good man because treats Trudy as an equal, with respect; Men B, C, D, E and F-Z are not good men because they snigger and sneer at her, and all women.

And is too much to have the sniveling Scots swim coach (Christopher Eccleston) actually heave a radio through the nearest window pane at a key moment? Maybe, but who cares? The preview screening crowd was well and truly into the swim of things by that point. While never getting the material she needs to match her skills, Ridley creates a heroine both storybook-vibrant and human-scaled.

It’s not the creative license part of sports biopics that bugs me. It’s the screenwriters’ avoidance of how people actually talked, and behaved, in the time and place of the storyline. In this instance we have a German immigrant family, with good actors (led by Jeanette Hain and Kim Bodnia as Gertud and Henry Ederle) at the helm, yet there’s no attempt at even mentioning the anti-German sentiment of the mid- and post-World War I era. Sometimes it’s not what’s in a movie that weakens it, but what isn’t.

Yet this is sheer irrelevance by the end. Trudy Ederle’s paradoxically exhilarating ordeal amid the choppy waters, threatening skies, jellyfish and sheer physical punishment of the Channel was made for the screen. Not even the most generic film score in recent memory can keep “Young Woman and the Sea,” its title pulling a real-life variation from Hemingway’s old man and his sea, from reaching its destination.

“Young Woman and the Sea” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for thematic elements, some language and partial nudity)

Running time: 2:08

How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 31

Phillips is a Tribune critic.

The answers to those questions are encouraging. I doubt that would’ve been the case four or five years or seven or eight films ago. In the highly engaging “Hit Man,” now in a few theaters and heading to Netflix June 7, Powell reunites with his fellow Texan, director and screenwriter Richard Linklater, for a romantic comedy with a few nicely plotted turns and storytelling priorities, including little to no interest in jacking up narrative stakes the usual way, i.e., people getting pistol-whipped or shot up for laughs, or kicks.

“Hit Man” takes it easier. It comes from Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly feature about a Houston undercover master of deception, Gary Johnson, who at the time worked for the Harris County district attorney’s office. His job: Faking like he was a professional killer for hire in sting operations. Lots of them. Successful ones. “Although plenty of cops have pretended to be hit men in undercover murder-for-hire investigations,” Hollandsworth wrote, “Johnson is the Laurence Olivier of the field.”

The script by Linklater and Powell takes the premise and goes its own way, resetting things in Louisiana. This version of Johnson is a sweet, divorced, cat-loving philosophy professor at the University of New Orleans, who moonlights for the police doing office-based tech work. When a weaselly undercover cop runs into ethical trouble, a nervous Johnson gets thrown into the real action, reluctantly, “playing” a hit man in a pre-arranged, wired-up meetup with a potential client. Turns out he has a knack for improv under pressure. The mild-mannered, temperamentally cautious Johnson, the philosophy wonk preoccupied with the id, the superego and questions of identity, vanishes altogether. A cooler, meaner, more charismatic Johnson comes out to play.

Powell’s romantic costar in “Hit Man” is Adria Arjona as flight attendant Madison, a hungry-eyed woman trapped in an abusive marriage. She enters the story first as a woman looking for a sympathetic ear and a potential hit-man lover, then in a more pragmatic, solution-oriented way. The narrative isn’t built on big reveals or massive twists; rather, it takes artfully logical detours that work even when credulity is strained a bit, using the simple device of Johnson’s philosophy classroom lectures as bullet points for what the teacher is learning outside the classroom. (When he dons a jet-black wig and studious Slavic dialect impersonating a hit man of indeterminate Eastern European origin, Powell goes for the full Tommy Wiseau “The Room” vibe.)

If “Hit Man” is about anything beyond its own blithe, eccentric comic assurance, it’s about finding new oxygen for your next chapter in life. Ethics? Well, Johnson doesn’t teach ethics, so that’s someone else’s story. Not since “Out of Sight” has a sort-of-crime-thriller, sort-of-romantic-comedy led with its sensual interests over its violent ones. That’s my idea of a good trade, and Powell is more relaxed and easygoing on screen here than ever before.

His undercover police force cohorts are played by Retta (very dry, very amusing) and Sanjay Rao (nicely energized, even in straight-up expository bits). The ensemble ringer? Austin Amelio as the NOPD weasel on administrative leave, for a time, jealous of Johnson’s success. Sometimes the best thing an actor can do is keep the audience guessing as to how dumb or how smart his character might be in any given situation. That’s Amelio’s strength throughout “Hit Man.”

Like Steven Soderbergh and precious few other American filmmakers of huge talent and some commercial instincts, Linklater believes in the modestly budgeted genre exercise, especially when he can turn genres on a dime, within one story. Netflix may have preferred “Hit Man” to ditch the comedy and lean into the recreational slaughter for a climax, in the style of the literal hundreds and hundreds of millions Netflix spent on junk like “The Gray Man.” With a less ridiculous budget but similarly soul-crushing results, David Fincher took on “The Killer” and made precisely the sort of supercool hired-assassin adventure the world did not need.

The world, in other words, did not need one more hit man fantasy played straight. “Hit Man” is the hit man movie for the rest of us. The irony? It ends up playing its love story for more than decoration. Linklater got solid, committed supporting work from Powell in their 1980s college comedy “Everybody Wants Some!” Here, the star gets all the leeway and screen time he needs, as both character actor and leading man, to make his mark without just hitting his marks.

“Hit Man” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, sexual content and some violence)

Running time: 1:55

How to watch: Now in some theaters; Netflix streaming premiere June 7

Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Forty-six years of rough road later, here we are at the fifth “Mad Max” movie. Now 79, Miller remains an action fantasist of the highest order and has become the spiritual if very-much-alive cousin of the eulogized character in his first smash hit. (Its budget was $350,000, roughly $1.5 million in 2024 dollars.) “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is a prequel to 2015’s lavishly nutty “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and is the work of a director full of living, albeit guided by an ever-darker vision of humankind barreling toward the cliff. He has run the franchise on it.

I’ll try to explain why I’m all over the highway on “Furiosa,” even as I’m recommending it. The best of it is spectacular, tapping into so many different ways to create and assemble images in contemporary big-budget filmmaking, you can barely keep track.

The story belongs to Furiosa, who we meet as a young girl played by Alyla Browne. In the barely human patriarchies of this parched post-apocalypse desert land, only the Vuvalini, aka the Tribe of Many Mothers, living in the Edenic paradise known as the Green Place, point to a better way.

The optimism lasts about 45 seconds in movie terms. Right off, Furiosa is abducted by the snarling, drooling Biker Horde, ruled by Dr. Dementus. This is the major new character; he’s played by Chris Hemsworth, who has most of the screenplay’s verbiage for better or worse. Visually, the character borrows Charlton Heston’s nose, Heston’s “Ben-Hur” chariot (pulled here by three tricked-up motorcycles; the vehicles in the “Mad Max” universe remain unbeatably weird and fantastically convincing), and Heston’s “Ten Commandments” beard.

“Furiosa” is actually pretty light on narrative, as written by director Miller and “Fury Road” co-writer Nick Lathouris. The crafty survival machine of the title meets a series of grueling, generally sadistic circumstances. Both Dementus, a nattering, twisted father figure of a psycho, and his sometime enemy, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, taking over for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne) have uses for Furiosa. She knows the location of the Green Place, though the miseries she has survived, painfully, and the rage in her heart, renders her mute for years. Even as a young adult, once Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role an hour into the picture, Furiosa has little use for words.

There’s world-building aplenty. One fiefdom, The Citadel, resembles a sand-swept Middle-earth, or the Tower of Babel’s ambitious new condo development. Dementus cuts a deal with his enemy and gains control of nearby Gastown. The realms of “Fury Road” and now “Furiosa,” like their “Mad Max” franchise predecessors, run on petroleum (scarce), water (scarcer) and blood (spilling constantly, corpses and vivisected limbs strewn all over the desert).

As gratifyingly different as the “Mad Max” movies have been, at heart Miller is making ever-more-grandiose biker movies, but with more than bikes. “Furiosa” lives and breathes righteous retribution, setting her unblinking sights on the pig-men who killed her mother, and who enslave women as harem chattel.

The new film, rather portentously divided into solemn-sounding chapters, covers many years, which marks a change from previous “Mad Max” sagas. More pertinent to the overall viewing experience (mine, at least), “Furiosa” is the grimmest and most deliberately punishing of Miller’s visions. The occasional stabs at black comedy feel a little off. In this awful if fabulously designed near-future, as Dementus’ resident History Man (George Shevtsov, a wizened Shakespearean fool) asks in voiceover, “how must we brave the cruelties?” The movie provides the two hour, 28 minute answer.

The internal tensions within “Furiosa” fill the screen, even when they can’t resolve their contradictory natures. Miller’s not kidding around. He doesn’t like how humankind mistreats its home or degrades the culture with “ridiculous perversions and witty mutilations.” That phrase is actually heard in voiceover here; it’s Miller, and the franchise, having a little fun with the paradox at the center of the “Mad Max” universe. Cheap thrills, beautifully executed, plus some unsettling food for thought: That’s the idea. Beautifully executed cheap thrills without the “unsettling” part are rare enough.

I’ll see “Furiosa” again for many reasons, none purer or more pleasurable than the peak action vignette, a roughly 15-minute chase involving a tanker truck (aka the War Rig), steroidal dune buggies, motorcycles and para-sailing warriors. It’s a wonder, exceeding even the best of “Fury Road.” To their huge credit, Miller and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel keep the longer takes of speeding warriors and their flame-throwing weapons of doom flowing, lucidly, excitingly. Yes, there’s considerably more digital futzing going on in “Furiosa,” compared to “Fury Road” (which was hardly all-analog). But Miller’s passionate artifice and eye for detail — including dreamy, digitally rendered sights such as Dementus’s biker army, swarming as one across the desert — are as good as it gets in modern visual effects.

Is the movie fun? Well, Furiosa’s story doesn’t really welcome that word. It’s gripping, even when it’s a bit of a trudge. Miller’s a visual genius. And a pile-driver. He’s also an adult, with a mature master filmmaker’s sensibility and serious intentions to go with his eternal-adolescent love of speed and noise. Budget estimates for Miller’s latest run between $168 million and $233 million, which is a tad more than the $350,000 “Mad Max” had going for it. But some things do not change. Even amid new depths of misery, “Furiosa” still delivers the clean, electrifying, inches-above-asphalt camera perspectives that made the Cinemascope-shot “Mad Max” so arresting nearly two generations ago.

Even if they’re not their own best screenwriters, some directors just know what they’re doing.

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images)

Running time: 2:28

How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 23

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

It’ll be part of the festival’s annual fundraiser, this year called the 60th Anniversary Cinema Soirée in support of the longest-running competitive film gathering in America. The film festival itself, which takes place in October, is the biggest public-facing component of the nonprofit Cinema/Chicago.

Reilly, an Oscar nominee for the 2002 film version of the musical “Chicago,” joined previous Chicago film festival editions, including a 2011 master class. In a statement, the Marquette Park area native and DePaul University graduate described the festival as “a great friend and supporter to films and filmmakers all the way along in its 60-year history and to me personally. I’m honored to be celebrated by this legacy institution and everything and everyone it represents.”

Also featured at the gala, filmmaker and educator Jennifer Reeder receives the festival’s Tour de Force award in recognition of her steadily rising profile and bracing genre explorations, most recently with “Perpetrator” (2023).

Al Roker, longtime “Today” show legend, serves as emcee of the event, to be held 6 p.m. June 1 at The Geraghty (2520 S. Hoyne Ave.) in Pilsen. Tickets range from $1,000 to $50,000 so, you know, not for the average broke cinephile but that’s how these nonprofit galas roll out of necessity; more information at chicagofilmfestival.com.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.