A musical kiss, a mom-centered thrill ride, an AI battle, a #MeToo drama, a sexy real-life thief, and a hapless 20-something struggling on London's streets. Lots happening this week at your local cinema.
Roofman
In theaters Friday
We begin on a roof, with a masked figure — Jeffrey Manchester, played by Channing Tatum — breaking into a McDonald's from above. He hides inside overnight before surprising the staff as they arrive, relieving them of the cash in the safe, and politely ushering them into the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator, making sure they put on coats first. When one guy doesn't have a coat, Manchester offers him his own, closes the door, and calls the cops so he knows they'll be let out quickly. "Nice guy," they all say to reporters afterward, as did real-life staffers at dozens of McDonald's locations around the country before the real roofman was finally captured.
Manchester was sentenced to 45 years in prison, which seems sufficiently out-of-scale with his crimes that movie audiences won't have much trouble rooting for Tatum's roofman to escape, and then to evade capture (as the real Manchester did) by hiding in a Toys R Us store for six months. It helps that Tatum is among the most ingratiating actors in Hollywood – it's hard to imagine this story landing without him — and that Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), a Toys R Us employee, takes a shine to him when he donates purloined toys to her church. In a less nuanced movie, she'd be Maid Marian to his Robin Hood, but things are never that simple in real life. And with filmmaker Derek Cianfrance casting some of the folks who figured in the actual events to play themselves, real life increasingly asserts itself in the film. Tatum is so utterly winning that it's hard to register the hurt the character's causing. That's brought into sharp relief over the final credits in what amounts to a three-minute mini-documentary featuring real-life interviews. – Bob Mondello
Tron: Ares
In theaters Friday
There's the germ of an idea hidden in this overproduced silliness directed by sequel journeyman Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) whose Disney epics usually require a colon in their titles. It evidently occurred to someone that the dude-caught-in-a-videogame premise of the original 1980s Tron might be flipped on its head to push AI dudes out into the real world. Alas, that's roughly where the new film's inspiration ends, and while the screenplay nods in the general direction of a story about competing corporations pushing different notions of what AI might be useful for, the film mostly settles for updating motorcycle graphics from the earlier films. Tron's bikes were multicolored in 1982, Tron Legacy's bikes were yellow in 2010. Tron: Ares' bikes are red. That's progress for you.
Characters are limited to a single trait — Jared Leto's titular rebellious AI dude is discovering feelings, Greta Lee's AI inventor cares deeply about her sister, Evan Peters' villainous tech bro is rapacious, Jodie Turner-Smith's AI automaton is relentless. And the climactic battle is as grandiose as it is preposterous with the city of Vancouver terrorized by a lot of red lines that look vaguely like vapor trails. A waste of pixels in pretty much every respect. – Bob Mondello
Kiss of the Spider Woman
In theaters Friday
A grey South American jail cell erupts into Technicolor musical fantasies in Bill Condon's disjointed musical-within-a-movie-musical. It's an adaptation of songwriting team John Kander and Fred Ebb's Broadway musical adaptation, which came after the non-musical film adaptation and a stage adaptation of Manuel Puig's 1976 novel. As that complicated lineage suggests, a lot of hands have tugged at this story of Argentine political dissident Valentín (Diego Luna) and his flamboyant, queer cellmate Molina (Tonatiuh) near the end of a military dictatorship. Molina has been coerced by the prison warden to glean info from Valentín that torture hasn't extracted. His method is to harness his own obsession with a glamorous 1940s screen siren and conjure scenes from her biggest hit, the title picture, in which she plays both the sweet heroine, and her seductive assassin-nemesis.
Jennifer Lopez — slinky and in fine voice — is in her element in the flashy musical numbers, as is Tonatiuh, who imagines himself as her closeted gay confidant. Luna, whose naturalistic acting style makes him persuasive in the prison cell, is less so when playing the film-within-a-film's love interest. His costars are seasoned musical performers, whereas he has a pleasant but thin voice and moves like a civilian, not a dancer, which takes much of the heat out of a tango that ought to be a seductive showstopper.
Director Bill Condon, whose direction of Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls, and Beauty and the Beast suggest this material should be well within his wheelhouse, throws 1940s production values and considerable invention into the musical staging. But the original Broadway musical, with music and lyrics by the creators of Cabaret and Chicago, was never among their first-tier tuners, and it remains a lackluster concoction here. – Bob Mondello
After The Hunt
In theaters Friday
The director Luca Guadagnino's been busy: last year he released the campy tennis love triangle Challengers and the hazy period romance Queer. Now he's back with After the Hunt, in which Julia Roberts plays Alma, a Yale philosophy professor who's blurred the lines between the personal and professional, including with her colleague Hank, played by Andrew Garfield, with whom she shares an intimate flirtation.
Alma hosts dinner parties for students and faculty, and after one of them, her favorite student, Maggie, played by Ayo Edebiri, alleges that Hank sexually assaulted her after walking her home from the party the night before. Hank vehemently denies it, and Alma finds herself unsure of who to believe, and what to do about it. – Aisha Harris
After the Hunt is distributed by Amazon MGM Studios. Amazon supports NPR and pays to distribute some of our content.
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
In limited theaters Friday
For the most stressful moviegoing experience of 2025, I'd like to make the case for Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, which stars Rose Byrne as Linda, a mom single-handedly caring for her severely ill child while her truly awful husband is out of town. Within the first few minutes, a giant hole opens up in their home's ceiling, and Linda and her daughter are forced to live out of a motel while the issue gets fixed. On top of all of this, Linda's a therapist whose clients have their own issues and sometimes don't grasp the meaning of "boundaries." It's part psychological horror, part intense character study. But it's also — sometimes — darkly comical, and Byrne is the right actress for this kind of role, perfect for tapping into that exasperation, anger, and grim humor. For her performance (as well as supporting turns from Conan O'Brien, A$AP Rocky, and Christian Slater) it's worth the anxiety. – Aisha Harris
Urchin
In limited U.S. theaters starting Friday
In Harris Dickinson's assured, engaging debut as a writer-director, we first see our 20-something title character sleeping inches from traffic on a London roadside. Mike (Frank Dillane) has spent five unsheltered years asking for handouts, stealing and eating at charity food trucks. And from his twitchy, uneasy, vulnerable way of approaching strangers for spare change that no one carries any more, he looks to have been abandoned long before that. When a good Samaritan offers to buy him a meal, he responds by mugging him and lands in jail. But the aftermath of incarceration seems oddly promising. Social workers find Mike a place to stay and a restaurant job, and for a time, as he listens to self-help tapes and stays sober, he seems to be climbing out of the hole he's dug for himself.
Ironically, a mediated meeting with his victim — theoretically for healing and catharsis on both sides — is what seems likeliest to tip him back in. Dickinson's capturing of London street-life grittiness recalls the social realism of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, and he elicits a stellar performance from Dillane — skittish, sketchy and volatile except in one very funny scene where he pulls himself together and calls out a social worker for condescending to him. A sharp, compassionate portrait of life on society's edges. – Bob Mondello
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