Given that its 2016 predecessor proved to be boffo at the box office as well as a hit with critics, it seems surprising that it should have taken almost a decade for the Mouse House to give us “Zootopia 2” (Disney). Whatever may have caused the delay, the follow-up registers as an enjoyable adventure that’s suitable for all but the youngest.

Movies with a Christmas theme abound but ones that focus on Thanksgiving are rarer. Still, a handful of notable films have incorporated the November holiday into their plots.

With “Wicked: For Good” (Universal), director Jon M. Chu concludes his two-part adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s hit Broadway musical in the same luxuriant style with which he began it in 2024. Like its predecessor, moreover, the film is mostly free of objectionable content.

It’s hard to imagine the pitch session at which the premise of the would-be psychological thriller “The Carpenter’s Son” (Magnolia) was presented for approval. “Drawing on a 2nd-century apocryphal text,” the summary might have run, “why don’t we turn Jesus’ teenage years into the basis for a horror film?”

Rage is the predominant emotion in “The Running Man” (Paramount), the second screen version of Stephen King’s eponymous 1982 novel. As directed and co-written by Edgar Wright, it’s an anger-fuelled action film that’s bitter in mood as well as morally ambivalent.

Capsule reviews of theatrical movies available now for streaming or scheduled for broadcast on network or cable television as well as notes on TV programming for the same week.

With more than 400,000 viewers since its release as of Nov. 14, and counting, a new film about the Sacred Heart of Jesus has become an unexpected box office hit in France — and a lightning rod for controversy.

In the lead-up to Pope Leo XIV’s Nov. 15 meeting with a group of Hollywood actors and directors, the Vatican offered an insight into the American-born pontiff’s cinematic taste by publishing a short list of his favorite films. Despite its brevity, the collection of four movies covers quite a lot of thematic and tonal territory.

A new documentary released by the Vatican on Pope Leo XIV’s early life is more than just a film about the life of the new pope, but the story of an ordinary person who answered a calling to serve the church, said Vatican News journalist Salvatore Cernuzio.

With a grunting, barbaric alien for its protagonist, the sci-fi action film “Predator: Badlands” (20th Century) gets off to an unpromising start. Yet by the end of the movie, the brute in question — Dek by name and played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi — has experienced a conversion to better values.