Your ultimate guide to Bangkok

Review by Joshua Rothkopf “I didn’t think I would have to save the world this summer,” says a near-terrified Peter Parker (Tom Holland, still charmingly dorky in an Anton Yelchin vein) near the front end of Spider-Man: Far from Home. Many viewers will feel heard: Little more than two months have passed since Avengers: Endgame crushed it with three hours of intergalactic pain, not to mention last December’s superb animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Can’t Marvel give it a rest for a season? Well, no. Almost aware of how thirsty it is, the new movie—meta, irreverent and nowhere near a bad time—works best when it plays like a vacation from MCU seriousness. An unexpected blast of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and a cheesy montage of fallen superheroes (it turns out to be a high-school AV club’s video tribute) brings us up to speed in a new post–Tony Stark world of people reckoning with the “Blip,” when half the world’s population disappeared and suddenly came back. Peter, meanwhile, a self-described “16-year-old kid from Queens,” hopes to reveal his true feelings to MJ (Zendaya, feisty while being quietly vulnerable, showing off big range between this and HBO’s Euphoria) while on a class trip in Europe. As Far from Home leans into this travelogue section, much of it shot on location (the exquisite gondolas and cozy back alleys of Venice require no CGI to be superheroic), you wish the film would remain a breezy teen comedy, one with a panicky best friend (J

Review by Joshua Rothkopf Something is off about this defiantly unmagical remake of The Lion King, a film that is both photorealistic—down to every artfully crafted lens flare and whisker on Simba’s chin—and the furthest thing from real. It’ll either mildly disturb you or make you feel like your skin is on backward. Granted, it’s still The Lion King: still a study piece of Hamlet-derived musical theater, only with 100 percent more Beyoncé, which is never a bad thing. (Look deep into the lemon eyes of her lioness, Nala, and you can swear you see her.) But Disney’s animated movies have traditionally been invitations to dream bigger than nature; even when you go to one of its theme parks, you submit to pretending. This new Lion King is an invader of the real world, its characters akin to stuffed trophies mounted on the wall. They’re lifelike, yes, but somehow not alive. Almost certainly, kids aren’t going to mind this, even as their imaginations get a little shortchanged. Set in one of Africa’s uncannier valleys, today’s Lion King remains a story about talking and singing animals; no amount of digital work is going to change that. And vocal talent is what semi-saves this remake from Jungle Book director Jon Favreau’s more computerized instincts. As the regal Mufasa, sensible leader of the Pride Lands, the rumbling James Earl Jones still has his Darth Vader sonority on tap. He remembers to give an actual performance, as does Donald Glover, voicing the cub who would be king with

Trashy movies aren’t good for you, but sometimes they burn with an unexpected honesty that feels more earned than the stuff we’re supposed to prefer. Such is the case with Ma, a scuzzy and brutal revenge thriller set in some hard-luck, blue-collar town (never named) filled with uneasy stares and kids making dumb choices. It’s an unusually potent atmosphere for a quickie Blumhouse horror project; you can’t say this one is elevated by the presence of Octavia Spencer—it’s more that she allows herself to descend to the crazy-eyed pleasures of being monstrous. She plays Sue Ann, a never-not-suspicious local who buys the teens cases of booze and lets them party in her basement. There are ulterior reasons for her friendliness. You know exactly what they are from the start (the coy ’80s-set flashbacks to Sue Ann’s own high-school trauma are extraneous). Call it a welcome surprise that Tate Taylor, the director of Spencer’s brassy turn in The Help as well as the underrated James Brown biopic Get on Up, seems to be harboring an inner Wes Craven. When Ma breaks bad, it breaks bad hard, with some real wince-inducing moments of bodily harm. The film’s bland young hero, Maggie (Diana Silvers), doesn’t seem to have a chance in Sue Ann’s abattoir, but Taylor distracts us with juicier details on the periphery, like Maggie’s mother, a divorced cocktail waitress (Juliette Lewis, exuding abandonment). There’s an undertone of rage to Ma, a stink. It’s a film in which co-workers snipe at each oth

Turns out, Pixar’s sentient toys can still make us cry: Nearly 25 years after their cinematic debut, the sweetly selfless plastic pals return in a fourth Toy Story, one charged by the animated series’ thematic essence of finding purpose in being useful to others. It’s a hopeful, immensely human chapter that echoes the franchise’s complex notions of loyalty, displacement and self-worth, doing so with humor and warmth. Working from a script by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom (as well as six other story contributors, including ousted ex-Pixar chief John Lasseter), director Josh Cooley successfully balances all of these elements—a noteworthy achievement considering the large cowboy boots he had to fill after the epic yet nuanced Toy Story 3, one of Pixar’s more perfect achievements. The reliable company of old friends certainly helps: Now happily living with a new kid, Bonnie (voiced by Madeleine McGraw), Tom Hanks’s pull-string pardner Woody, Tim Allen’s devoted Buzz Lightyear, Joan Cusack’s feisty Jesse and the rest of the gang are back. New to the clan is Forky (Veep’s Tony Hale, adding nervy personality and genuine weirdness), an existentially confused spork with low self-esteem that the ever-imaginative Bonnie creates as a kindergarten craft project. Convinced of his status as trash (an unusually raw class dilemma for a Pixar movie), Forky get a crash course on his toyness from Woody, himself thrown by a life crisis resembling that of a retiree. Bonnie has moved on to o