Freeze Frame: “Hollywood Stargirl” (PG), “Watcher” (R), “Eiffel” (R)

Lenexa, Kansas native and “America’s Got Talent” winner Grace VanderWaal stars in the Disney+ musical, “Hollywood Stargirl,” a sequel to the 2020 film “Stargirl.” When Stargirl and her mom leave Arizona for the West Coast, the young singer gets involved with neighbors trying to make their own movie. While it’s totally predictable and filled with anachronistic music that would have come from Stargirl’s grandparents’ generation, “Hollywood Stargirl” is a sweet-natured movie that should appeal to its target demographic of pre-teen girls…and their grandmas.

Actress Maika Monroe is becoming something of a horror scream queen. In the creepy thriller “Watcher,” Monroe portrays an American woman who moves to Bucharest with her Romanian husband. There, she becomes convinced that she’s being watched and followed by a neighbor whom she suspects to be a serial killer. Is she paranoid or are her fears legitimate? Filmmaker Chloe Okuno explores the stranger-in-a-strange-land genre adding a couple of ghoulish twists. While it’s overly familiar, Monroe’s strong performance is the thing that makes “Watcher” watchable.

Ever wonder what Gustav Eiffel went through as he struggled to erect his famous tower in Paris in 1889? The romantic drama “Eiffel” may not tell the true story, but it tells a modestly entertaining one. Romain Duris plays the famed designer and engineer, here embroiled in a rekindled affair with a married woman, played by Emma Mackey, as he builds his controversial monument. The amorous plot is fanciful and welded onto Eiffel’s story like an extra girder. Still, the leads are attractive, and the production is handsomely mounted. “Eiffel” isn’t towering, but it’s an agreeable old school romance.

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