Freeze Frame: “Monkey Man” (R), “Wicked Little Letters” (R), “Música” (PG-13), “Someone Like You” (PG)

Bollywood meets “John Wick” in the over-the-top, ultraviolent thriller, “Monkey Man.” Actor Dev Patel wrote, directed and stars in the tale of an impoverished Indian man who extracts bloody vengeance on the people who killed his mother and destroyed his boyhood home. Patel shows some impressive chops in his flashy directorial debut mixing grisly mayhem and social commentary. It’s overblown, but for action fans, “Monkey Man” is a stylish guilty pleasure.

When does a movie filled with foul language seem quaint and benign? When it’s the British comic mystery, “Wicked Little Letters,” Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley star in a true story set in a small English village in the 1920s. A prim and proper woman received a series of profane anonymous letters and the resulting scandal made national headlines. A great cast and cheeky script make “Wicked Little Letters” a modest charmer.

The Amazon Prime movie “Música” is a wildly imaginative romantic musical comedy written and directed by Rudy Mancuso and based on his own life story. Rudy has synesthesia, a condition that turns every sound he hears into music, and that complicates his career pursuits and love life. While it is sometimes a bit gimmicky, “Música” is still an entertaining and inventive lark.

Author Karen Kingsbury eschewed Hollywood, producing her own cinematic rendition of her novel “Someone Like You.” Sarah Fischer plays a twentysomething woman who discovers love…AND that she was an in vitro baby AND that her identical sister was birthed and raised by another family, AND one member of this clan needs a kidney transplant. This faith-based tearjerker is very contrived but will score for those predisposed to lightweight Lifetime Channel fare. Others, beware.


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