Christmas week movie releases 

• Searchlight Pictures
• Poor Things

Poor Things
Many classic films have been driven by this satirical concept: We take for granted certain things in our world which, if viewed from a perspective seeing them for the first time, are clearly ridiculous. In their adaptation of Alasdair Gray's novel, director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara craft a unique sort of feminist fable. What would a world built around the desires and expectations of men look like to a woman trying to understand it as a blank slate? Bella Baxter (Emma Stone)—salvaged from the Thames in Victorian London as an unidentified nine-months-pregnant corpse—is revived by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) through an experimental transplant of her fetus's brain into her body. The resulting creation begins with the physical and mental capacity of an infant, and Stone's performance is hilarious both as a full-sized baby and as a person learning the codified, gendered rules of her society. Lanthimos leans into an exaggerated design and color palette for his world (once it emerges from the black-and-white of Bella's early existence) that evokes vintage Terry Gilliam, and does occasionally go over-the-top with the fish-eye lenses that emphasize a distorted view of things. But the great supporting performances and the wicked humor throughout the picaresque narrative allows for a delightfully naughty skewering of whether the way things have always been makes any sense at all. Available Dec. 22 in theaters. (R)

• A24 Films
• The Iron Claw

The Iron Claw
The problem with writer/director Sean Durkin's story of the real-life Von Erich wrestling family isn't that he goes excessively bleak; if anything, he reins in the actual parade of tragedy these people endured. Even dialed back to about 80% of true-to-life awfulness, though, this narrative starts to feel punishing once its thematic notions have become clear. We get the backstory about patriarch Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) as a one-time professional wrestler who has passed his obsession on to his sons—Kevin (Zac Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons)—in a way that shapes their entire lives. And we get a great flavor of life on the mid-tier wrestling circuits of the early 1980s, and how a wrestler like Kevin who's great in the ring might not get a chance at the big time if he's bad on the microphone. But while every performance is solid and Durkin brings some style to what might have been a rote biopic, there's not a lot more to be gleaned from the story 'round about the point where Fritz makes it clear he has a ranked order for which son is his favorite, depending on how they're following Fritz's plan for their lives. Toxic masculinity and bad parenting—which also includes Maura Tierney as the passive mother—certainly make for dramatic conflict, up to the point where the mounting consequences are almost too much to stomach. Available Dec. 22 in theaters. (R)

• Warner Bros. Pictures
• The Color Purple

The Color Purple
For nearly 40 years, the conventional wisdom has been that Steven Spielberg was the wrong filmmaker to adapt Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; after this filmed version of the stage musical interpretation, perhaps the real problem is that the novel lends itself to questionable adaptation decisions. The same narrative structure remains, beginning in early 1900s Georgia where Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi as a teen, Fantasia Barrino as an adult) is married off to "Mister" (Colman Domingo), beginning a decades-long struggle with abuse and being able to find her own personhood. This version does at least recognize the full-on sexual relationship between Celie and Mister's mistress, jazz singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), and nails the casting pretty much from top to bottom; it's hard to imagine a better choice than Domingo to take the place of Danny Glover. The real issue is that people keep trying to fashion this edgy story into feel-good melodrama, which is certainly what happens when you turn its scenes into musical production numbers. It's not even that those numbers are poorly crafted, because some of them are quite exceptional as directed by Blitz Bazawule, including the movie-style fantasy Celie imagines for her feelings about Shug. They simply don't feel right for this story, which—while it is about surviving pain and finding unexpected happiness—feels better served by quiet dignity than by the swelling of an orchestra. Available Dec. 25 in theaters. (R)