Movie Reviews: MOANA 2, MARIA, SWEETHEARTS 

• Walt Disney Pictures
• Moana 2

Moana 2
Sometimes, you just have to acknowledge that your main problem with a movie is really the principle of what it represents—in this case, a sequel that's merely "the same, but more." Here, Disney follows up its 2016 feature by sending Moana (Auli'i Cravalho) and the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) out on another seafaring quest, in this case lifting a curse on a sunken island in order to allow for a reunification of divided island peoples. It's kind of a nice idea to center unity over division as an inherent good, but the filmmaking team here never seems interested in pursuing it beyond the abstract, focusing instead on set pieces and musical numbers. And in both cases, compared to the original, they're just bigger without being any better; in particular, the new songwriting team of Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear feel like they're trying to mimic the style of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Moana songs in a way that just draws attention to their shortcomings, including quite a few half-assed rhymes. Cravalho and Johnson remain engaging central figures, and there are a few fun visual ideas, like a giant blobfish-looking critter. The whole enterprise simply reeks of unnecessariness, regurgitating themes of brave striving. It's a place-filler on a release calendar, something where you can pass the time without thinking too hard about how it's less an act of creation than an act of re-creation. Available Nov. 27 in theaters. (PG)

• Netflix
• Maria

Maria
I'm not about to complain when a creative-artist biopic ditches the structural predictability that often hinders the genre; I will suggest that it's possible to be more selective about what to install in its place. Director Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight (who collaborated on the Princess Diana-centric Spencer) offer a profile of celebrated operatic soprano Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) focusing on the final week of her life in 1977 Paris, long retired from public performance but not ready to give up her craft entirely. Spencer employed a similar device of understanding a public figure through a relatively narrow window of time, and here it allows Jolie's performance to capture how the persona of an imperious diva is used as a kind of emotional shield. That material alone—emphasizing Maria's relationship with her two loyal house servants (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher), and her love-hate relationship with living up to her own legend—proves compelling enough, but the script also takes a detour into a hallucinated journalist (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as Maria processes her life. And there are occasional black-and-white flashbacks to pivotal moments, like being pimped out to Nazi soldiers by her mother as a youth in Greece, or her first meeting with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), which sometimes feel more distracting than insightful. The result is an often-entertaining character study that feels like it misunderstands the idea of "opera" as meaning "there's no such thing as too much." Available Nov. 27 in theaters; Dec. 13 via Netflix. (R)

• New Line Cinema
• Sweethearts

Sweethearts
It's hardly unprecedented for a narrative to offer a secondary character whose sub-plot is more interesting than that of the ostensible protagonists, but it can still make for frustrating viewing when you spend much of the time waiting to get back to the good stuff. At its core, this is the tale of Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) and Ben (Nico Hiraga), platonic BFFs-since-middle-school struggling through their freshman year as college dormmates, who realize that what they need to shake them out of their doldrums is to break up with their respective hometown romantic partners during Thanksgiving break. What follows is mostly a "one crazy night" comedy premise, as Jamie and Ben's plans are repeatedly thwarted, and the situations writers Jordan Weiss (who also directed) and Dan Brier concoct for them are rarely as laugh-out-loud funny or outrageous as they seem intended to be. Then, periodically, they'll turn their attention to Palmer (Caleb Hearon), the third member of Jamie and Ben's friend troika, who's planning on using the holiday to come out as gay—and Hearon creates a character too endearing and complicated to exist in the "gay friend" shadows. Theoretically, those two largely-parallel stories both explore that messy post-high-school time of figuring out who you really are and what you want—but only one of them feels like more than a thin armature on which to hang a bunch of bawdy set pieces. Available Nov. 28 via Max. (R)