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WHAT TO WATCH

Jun 13, 2024 12:27PM ● By Jenniffer Wardell

Inside Out 2 (in theaters) 

Trips to our younger years can be magical, but watch out for the trauma. 

“Inside Out 2” does an excellent job of capturing what it feels like to be a young teenager, but that can be a two-edged sword. Half of the movie is a hilarious, heartbreaking journey through Riley’s mind, all of it celebrating complex emotions and the importance of every experience life has to offer. The other half is an endless gauntlet of teenage situations where even the slightest wrong move feels like it will have world-ending consequences, all rendered accurately enough to give the audience flashbacks. If your teenage years were tough, watching this movie might just give you PTSD. 

Though the original movie was released in 2015, Riley has only been aged up to 13 for the sequel. One night puberty hits her with all the suddenness it seems to from a parents’ perspective, and bad news just before a special hockey camp makes her feel like her entire future will be determined by the next three days. Inside her head, Anxiety shows up with a brand-new set of emotions and locks Joy and her friends away as she tries to totally re-make Riley’s personality to fit in. 

The emotions stuff is both powerful and fun by turns. One of the best running gags is a riff on children’s educational shows that is absolutely pitch perfect, but it’s also an element that leads to the wrenching, cathartic finale. The non-Joy emotions get to do a lot more, and Joy gets to grow even more without letting go of who she is. It’s a great family adventure, with possibly a little free therapy on the side. 

Just watch out for those flashbacks. 

Grade: Three and a half stars 

The Watchers (in theaters)

When it comes to atmospheric supernatural horror, less explanation is usually better than more. The things that go bump in the night are always less terrifying when you find out what they are, especially if a 20-minute monologue is involved.

Sadly, Ishaya Night Shyamalan didn’t get that memo. The director is following in her famous father’s footsteps by leaning heavily on creepiness and plot twists in her inaugural movie, “The Watchers,” but she missed a few other lessons. Unlike “The Sixth Sense,” which kept the clues to its biggest twist silent and subtle, “The Watchers” telegraphs its ultimate mystery with chunks of exposition that feel like Wikipedia entries. There are some interesting ideas here, but I wish Shyamalan had left more of it to the imagination.

The movie focuses on Mina (Dakota Fanning), an emotionally disconnected pet shop employee who pretends to be other people in bars. When she’s sent on an assignment at work, she breaks down in the middle of the forest and gets caught by mysterious figures. Trapped in a box and stared at by mysterious figures, Mina keeps trying to escape as both her secrets and those of the group’s unseen “watchers” are revealed.

Unfortunately, Mina’s backstory also gets in the way of the movie’s often excellent atmosphere. The story itself is perfectly fine, but since no one else gets nearly the same level of detail it takes on more significance than it deserves. It doesn’t seem to tie in to the movie’s larger themes at all, and telling it to us over and over again doesn’t change that fact. Just like with the rest of this movie, more words don’t equal more meaning.

Grade: One and a half stars


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