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The Dial of Destiny, the Indiana Jones franchise’s long-delayed fifth chapter, has in common with the de-aging technology it liberally subjects Harrison Ford’s face to for flashbacks the sense that, although we’re meant to be looking at what’s in front of us like it’s the real thing, something’s off. What’s off is the feeling that we don’t need to be doing this again. Certainly not after the franchise’s last crack at a long-delayed sequel (2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), which it’s pretty much always been in vogue to not like that much; certainly not for the more than two and a half hours this new follow-up unusually spans. (I say unusually because the average runtime of the typical Indiana Jones movie had until now been about two hours — a change of literal pace you can definitely feel.) But IP movies are (mostly) too hot these days to keep the lure of reviving figuratively dead characters at bay.

Lack of vitality aside, The Dial of Destiny isn’t bad. And until you start to feel the bloat that comes when a movie is overlong, it effectively offers the good-humored and globe-trotting thrills to which audiences have for generations been returning when in need of escapism turned more appealing by nostalgic value. For many people who bought tickets to The Dial of Destiny over the weekend, revisiting the franchise poses something similar in comfort to a bowl of hot soup on a snow day. Unlike older viewers who saw the 1980s trio and, like the franchise’s original craftsmen, might have found themselves fondly looking back at the Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s and movies like Cobra Woman (1944), King Solomon’s Mines (1950), or Secret of the Incas (1954), most people now simply feel sentimental about Indiana Jones.  

Following an extended, 1944-set prologue whose minutiae will come in handy later, we meet Jones in The Dial of Destiny settled into grumpy-old-mandom. It’s 1969, he’s in his late 70s, and he’s living alone. He’s separated from love-interest-turned-wife Marion (Karen Allen) after the death of their son in the Vietnam War kindled the sort of unbearable grief that created fissures in their relationship that, after a while, seemed all but certainly impossible to heal from. It’s also the start of his retirement, ushered in in the movie by one last session at Hunter College (he’s been teaching archeology there) that’s so representatively discouraging in its powerful lack of classroom interest that you could understand why he immediately gives away the goodbye gift his colleagues hand him at his requisite going-away party. The Dial of Destiny elicits real bittersweetness in the moments where it really sits in Jones’ waning mortality and its consequent disappointments. That’s in large part because it obviously makes you think of the mortality of the person playing him. Ford is as engaging as he’s ever been; the natural weathering of his face and body reminds you just how long he’s been being engaging for us. 

You fear Jones’ twilight years are going to amount to more of what he’s doing when The Dial of Destiny properly opens: with him in an easy chair after falling asleep the previous night in front of the TV, angrily awoken by some young and hip neighbors partying at an unreasonable hour. Then in swoops Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), his now-grown goddaughter. She’s inherited Jones and her father’s (Toby Jones) interest in archeology but not nearly as much as their careful, preservative aims. She’s more grifter than academic, tracking down treasures so that she can sell them to the highest international bidders. She wants Jones’ help finding the device the movie gets its title from, a gilded thing created by the ancient Greek scientist Archimedes that may hold the secret to time travel. (Waller-Bridge brings a Katharine Hepburn-esque esprit to the role; she finds a nice comic patter with Ford, their characters’ shifting dynamic, loving in a paternal-filial way before becoming more antagonistic and then back again, one of the film’s more dependably rewarding features.) Jones would rather not have any part of it. But naturally someone in his orbit wanting an ancient and potentially dangerous treasure also means that someone very bad wants it too. That someone is Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), an incognito Nazi whose whole complex is, I could be Hitler if Hitler were smarter. He’s become one-track-minded about using the dial to head back to 1939 to permanently alter World War II’s conclusion in his favor.

That, of course, won’t happen, but only after Jones and Helena and a kid (Ethann Isidore) they pick up in Morocco along the way do a lot of international trekking that will engender many show-stopping car chases and action sequences between them and Voller and his posse. (There’s one you wish were a little flashier that’s all set deep underwater, flurries of eels with scarily strong jaws guarding something everybody is searching for.) The Dial of Destiny’s problem is that the voyaging goes on a lot longer than it needs to. There’s an obligatory quality to the changes in scenery. Some of the attendant tedium almost gets remedied by the film’s fun time-traveling climax. It both refreshingly heightens the fantasy elements latent in these movies and warps the franchise’s own relationship with nostalgia. Here, being confronted with the stuff of the past is too freaky to be fully enjoyed through rose-colored lenses. You hope you’ll be able to get away from that past soon.

You needn’t worry all that much about an escape from that nightmare, though. Indiana Jones fans know by now that concerns of that variety should be tilted in a “how are they going to get out of this one” rather than an “if they get out of this one” direction. The Dial of Destiny can’t help itself from finishing everything with a bit of obvious fan service, but it worked over me maybe even better than the overarching movie does. It’s a satisfying final word; since Jones’ present-day “too old for this” attitude probably won’t be budging even a lick at 90, I hope the franchise really lets it be final. 

WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO for most of Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary is parse the real from the fake. This stagey two-hander entirely set in a hotel room stars Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott as Rebecca and Hal. The film begins in the thick of one of its deceptions: with Rebecca, ostensibly a lawyer, paying a visit to Hal’s hotel room so that he can sign some papers. (He’s due to take over a hotel-chain CEO position following his magnate father’s recent passing.) But that actually isn’t who Rebecca is at all. It turns out that everything she’s saying actually comes from a script tucked in one of her briefcases, and her sleek blonde bob is actually a wig hiding an unwieldy mop of curly black hair. 

Sanctuary quickly lets on the true, or at least what seems to be true, nature of the pair’s relationship. Complications ensue when Hal, given that he’s about to take on a big-responsibility, high-profile job, in so many words tells Rebecca that he no longer wants her in his life. The pair’s unpredictable squabbling over the course of a little more than an hour and a half never quite has the tricksy tension and cockeyed sexiness Wigon is clearly aiming for; Sanctuary’s emotional and psychological games always feel a little too showy, a little broad, to be that believable. But Abbott and Qualley, who in their short careers have made it a point to pursue creative challenges far more than surefire career boosters, are predictably great enough that they’re magnetic even when the film’s bursts of self-serious silliness push us away.