A belated sequel with few surprises

 A well-matched Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman don't miss much of a beat as they revisit their performances in Practical Magic 2, a sequel to 1998’s Practical Magic, an adaptation of a novel by Alice Hoffman. 

 Despite dealing with witchcraft, Practical Magic 2 — directed by Susanne Bier — proves innocuous, a movie that unfolds pretty much as you'd expect, offering a cheerleading session for sisterhood and fan service for loyal followers of the original, a group that evidently swelled after the movie finished its theatrical run.

    Once again, Bullock and Kidman play the Owens sisters, sibling witches still haunted by the curse that drove the first installment. Men who venture into loving relationships with an Owens sister are doomed to die — and not of old age. 

    The lethal power of the curse explains the absence of Gary (Aidin Quinn), the character Bullock’s Sally paired with at the end of the first installment.

    This version restates the sisters' divergent approaches to magic: Kidman’s Gillian, the flighty sister, remains devoted to witchery. Sally tries to avoid it. She doesn't want her daughters (Joey King and Maisie Williams) to lead lives marred by spells, curses, and heartbreak.

    Perhaps as part of nostalgia service, the movie provides small roles for Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, who play aging witches, the aunts who raised Sally and Gillian in the small Massachusetts town where they still reside.

     Now a young woman, King's Kylie has fallen in love with genial Gideon (Xolo Mariduena). Doomed once the dreaded death beetle appears, Gideon is en route to becoming another victim of the love curse. 

    It doesn’t take long for an auto accident to leave poor Gideon in a coma. Once hospitalized, he's tended to by Williams' character, who's conveniently in the midst of her medical residency at the same institution. Hopefully, she'll have a great medical career because she pretty much vanishes from the rest of the proceedings.

     Not until Gideon's accident does Kylie learn about the witchy inheritance her mother has taken great pains to hide from her. Feeling betrayed by Mom's secrecy, Kylie jets off to England, hoping to end the curse so that she can marry Gideon.  

     Worried that inexperienced Kylie will fall prey to the dark side of magic, Sally and Gillian follow. In London, they contact a professor (Lee Pace) who’s made his academic bones studying what the movie refers to as “the craft.” Maybe he can help save Kylie while providing Sally with a potential love interest. 

   What? You thought she'd get through the movie without one?

     Before Sally and Gillian can catch up with Kylie, she meets a local (Solly McLeod) who offers to help but is so amiable we immediately suspect him of treachery.

      Add a few special effects (none particularly impressive), and you’ve got the idea, a sequel that leans heavily on the chemistry Bullock and Kidman ably generate. They don't collapse under the weight, which is about the best you can say for a movie that waves its wand lightly but can't conjures up little by way of surprise.

'Bird Box': a wan helping of horror

Sandra Bullock joins the post-apocalyptic fray in Bird Box, a movie about a woman trying to find safety for herself and two small children. The situation is dire because the world has been ravaged by a lethal menace that, following current movie fashion, never is really defined. All that's clear is that those who have the misfortune of looking at the world will die, mostly by suicide. Normal vision has become fatal. Director Susanne Bier quickly gets down to business: Bullock's Malorie and her two charges (Vivien Lyra Blair and Juian Edwards) must negotiate a dangerous river to reach their only hope for safety -- and they must accomplish this goal while wearing blindfolds. The movie shifts between this river trip and events that occurred five years earlier when a flight to safety brought a pregnant Malorie into the home of Douglas (John Malkovich). There, a variety of refugees from the ill-defined terror try to survive. These include another pregnant woman (Danielle Macdonald) and a veteran (Trevante Rhodes) who leads an expedition (via GPS) to obtain groceries. The tensions in the house unfold in reasonably predictable fashion until the narrative catches up with itself and rejoins Malorie's river expedition. Comparisons with the far better A Quiet Place seem inevitable with Bird Box coming up a loser in any game of compare and contrast. Bullock gives a strong, fiercely determined performance; the rest of the cast is in equally good form. But in trying to surpass generic horror, Bird Box achieves only limited success.

A two-continent search for a better world

In A Better World features strong acting and some fine moments, but its ending is too pat and its script is too committed to scoring moral points..

Last February, Danish director Susanne Bier won the best foreign-language film Oscar for In A Better World, a movie that tries -- boy, does it try -- to explore the impulses that lead to violence. To accomplish her task, Bier splits her narrative, following developments in her native Denmark and in a dusty, unnamed African country where villagers receive sporadic medical care.

In the Danish segments, school bullying becomes a springboard for a larger inquiry into the origins of violent behavior. In Africa, the movie explores violence generated by the wanton abuse of power in a lawless society: A local tyrant -- referred to only as Big Man -- brutalizes villagers, sometimes cutting open the bellies of pregnant women to settle trivial bets about the gender of an unborn child.

Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), a physician, provides the link between the Danish and African segments. A man of liberal conscience, Anton travels to Africa to minister to the poor. His wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), also a doctor, has assumed most of the responsibility for raising their two sons, one of whom (Markus Rygaard) is being bullied at school.

Anton and Marianne are newly separated, as a result of an affair Anton's had, but they still try to act in concert when it comes to their children. Though sometimes hampered by geographical distance, Anton's relationship with Elias seems tender and loving. And the kid clearly adores his father.

But Elias also responds to the overtures of a friend (William Johnk Nielsen), a new kid who has just lost his mother and who only recently moved to his grandmother's farm with his businessman father (Ulrich Thomsen). Thomsen's Christian responds violently to the bully most responsible for Elias' humiliation. A volatile mixture of anger and grief pushes Christian toward extremes, and Bier generates suspense about how far Elias will go in supporting his unforgiving pal.

After Anton returns from Africa, he attempts to teach Elias and Christian a lesson about the futility of violence. When he breaks up a playground fight, Anton gets crosswise with another father, an adult bully who knows he's in the wrong but insists that only he can tell his child what to do. Despite ample provocation, Anton refuses to fight the man, insisting that there's little to be gained from confronting the bully on his own terms. Christian can't accept such a "pacifist' approach. He thinks violence should be met with greater violence.

Throughout the movie, Bier creates situations that test her characters. At one point, Big Man suffers a severe leg wound, and asks Anton for treatment. Anton must grapple with a troubling ethical problem: Is he obligated to treat a man who has inflicted so much harm on others? Should he ignore the pleas of villagers who would be only too happy to see Big Man die?

The plot often feels as if it has been burdened by a need to illustrate such problems, but Bier does a lot right here, too. Anton's pain, Marianne's anger, Elias' loneliness, and Christian's fury all feel real; these elements may have been enough for any movie to handle without also wandering off to Africa, which (in truth) receives short shrift here.

Sometimes when a movie tries to do too much -- and this may be one of those cases -- it fails to do enough. Put another way: In casting such a wide net, Bier doesn't go deep enough. Full of promise and often absorbing, In A Better World winds up being too pat for a film that has dared so much.