Your Weekly Watchlist

Do let us out when January is over (Mean Girls/Paramount).

Even in an era glutted with movies and television, there is an eternal entertainment truth: January is a wasteland. Awards movies are in wide circulation, but when it comes to new stuff, it’s slim pickings. Despite a kinetic performance from Alaqua Cox, Echo will not reverse superhero malaise. As for Mean Girls—a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a 2004 teen comedy—school’s out forever. A trailer for a musical in which nobody sings is a warning sign, but the main problem with Mean Girls is that times have changed.

Twenty years ago, Tina Fey had a genius idea to morph Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes into a wiseass Lindsay Lohan vehicle. Adolescence may still be a nightmare, but Gen Z anxieties don’t map neatly onto those of their aging predecessors (larding on cell phone and gender identity jokes doesn’t help). Post-pandemic, we don’t buy the tired reduction of high school as a manic quest for hotness. The late John Hughes crystallized that mythology back in 1984. Time to graduate to new narratives about youth. — Stacy Hamilton

Polar Night

True Detective: North Country (Max). Dame Jodie Foster is an undervalued national asset. Yes, Clarisse, she's made some good pictures. But not as many as you might think. We like her for her intensity as well as for her impeccable French. In the fourth outing of HBO’s anthology crime series, she’s Liz Danvers, an Alaskan cop investigating the disappearance of scientists from an arctic research station during bleak nordic winter. Kali Reis is a fellow officer who knows the secrets that drove Liz to the edge of the world. Chilling! — John Thornton