If you see one spicy depraved satirical thriller this year that’s a cross between “Mean Girls” and “The Craft” and something far darker, by all means make that movie “Forbidden Fruits.” It’s an agreeably sharp-witted black-as-midnight comedy about four young women from Texas who work in a clothing-and-knickknack boutique at the Highland Place mall. They aren’t just friends; they’re part of a coven. Does that mean they’re actually witches? Maybe, maybe not.

What we can say for sure is that they’re shopping junkies obsessed with signifiers of their femininity (skimpy chemises, bracelets with charms, designer cupcakes), that their banter is peppered with the kind of slang (gorge, perf, vom) you’d expect from a movie that has Diablo Cody as one of the producers, that at one point they do a willowy dance to an EDM cover of Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” and that three of them are under the spell of their ringleader, Apple (Lili Reinhart), a cold vixen in long straight red hair and stiletto heels who controls their every move with agendas of her own.

Each of the girls is named for a different fruit. In addition to Apple, there’s Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), who in earlier age would have been the “ditz,” because she’s got a sensual innocence (she spends every Wednesday afternoon boinking a different dude from the food court), but she’s actually as sharp-tongued as the rest of them. There’s Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the most serious and skeptical. And there’s the mysterious newbie, Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who’s working at a candied-pretzel store called Sister Salt’s when Apple taps her to join the coven (though she doesn’t put it quite that way). She leads Pumpkin into the girls’ shared immersion in the ways of fashion and jargon and backbiting, their filtering of life through a scrim of pop, and the way that Apple layers her “sisterly” directives with an academic feminist righteousness. That, in fact, is what makes the film original — its perception that for these girls, progressive anger is now inseparable from fashion. 

If they are in fact witches, what’s the witchcraft about? In comedies like “The Craft” or “Practical Magic,” witchcraft has mostly been a free-floating expression of female power. But in “Forbidden Fruits,” Apple, the group’s Regina George, uses her status as head witch to enforce her rules about the way things should be. (You’re only allowed to text a dude using emojis.) Periodically, she’ll send one of her comrades into the dressing room that serves as a “confessional,” where the one you’re confessing to is the spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Why Marilyn? Because Apple considers her the ultimate female martyr, and says “no one could control her, not even the president.” Apple has a JFK assassination theory about Marilyn. According to the theory, Marilyn was murdered — by JFK — precisely because she couldn’t be controlled. In Apple’s eyes, the ghost of Marilyn now hovers over every dance of power between a man and a woman.

Cherry, promiscuous and confused, actually seems to have a bit of Marilyn in her. But what of the others? As Fig pursues a romance, which Apple tries to squelch, we realize that Apple, with her fear and loathing of men, is a witch of the spirit. Yet Lili Reinhart plays her with a diamond-hard smirk and a gleam of perception that lights up the screen. She’s like Parker Posey crossed with Ann-Margret. She has the potential to go far.        

At first, cued by everything in “Forbidden Fruits” that’s reminiscent of those earlier films, we think it’s all for fun: a high-camp giggle trip. But the film’s first-time director, Meredith Alloway (who co-wrote the script with Lily Houghton), has a vision that’s less facile and more contemporary than that. She has made a screw-loose comedy of stylized youth attitudes that doesn’t pretend to be “real,” but it’s also a serious movie that asks: What do young women today want? Love or justice or power? Or all three? And is any one of the three more powerful?

The movie takes a turn into suspense when Apple leads the others in putting a hex on someone, and the hex appears to work. What happens is unnerving, at which point the film passes through a looking glass of fear. There’s something new at work — a cultural hairpin turn — in the way that Apple is made out to be a figure of commanding but toxic damage. “Forbidden Fruits” goes over-the-top into shock and violence (which is staged with great wit), but what drives the movie forward is how it tries to pull its characters out from under the influence of someone whose witchery has made men the enemy. The movie says: It’s time to break that spell.

If there is one thing Sean (Adam Scott) would like to make perfectly clear, it’s that he’s only ever had the best intentions. He’s no bigot. He doesn’t buy into far-right propaganda like his parents (Ron Perlman and Colleen Camp) do. And he’s been nothing but hospitable to his new Airbnb guests, Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi) and Amir (Theo Rossi). If it happens that he finds them suspicious, it’s certainly not because they’re Middle Eastern. It’s only because there’s just something off about them, somehow.

As Sean eventually learns the hard way, though, good intentions can only ever count for so much. His movie, too, is proof of that. The premise of The Saviors, a genre-defying thriller written (with Travis Betz) and directed by Kevin Hamedani, is undeniably timely, exploring the way faulty assumptions about some unknown Other might have disastrous, even apocalyptic consequences. But an emphasis on broad ideas over nuanced detail yields a film that’s more interesting in theory than in practice.

Sean’s increasing fear of the Razi siblings isn’t the only problem he’s got going on. The only reason the place is being rented to begin with is because he and Kim (Danielle Deadwyler) are preparing to divorce and the mortgage needs paying off. No surprise, then, that Kim is initially skeptical of Sean’s conspiracy theories, assuming her aimless husband to be fixating on trivial nonsense. But as Kim also starts noticing odd things — including a missing journal and an alarming map, to add to the strange electrical equipment and unexplained lights Sean’s been trying to tell her about already — she slowly comes around.

The Saviors pitches its tone somewhere between horror, thriller and comedy, and there are elements of all of those in the slightly unnerving sense that Kim and Sean almost seem to need Amir and Jahan to be up to no good. The excitement of nosing around the siblings’ stuff, comparing notes afterward, hiring a private investigator (Greg Kinnear as Jimmy Clemente, who looks and acts exactly as you’d want a Greg Kinnear character named Jimmy Clemente to look and act) and planning to take their findings to the FBI rejuvenates their relationship like nothing else has. During a bout of make-up sex, Kim even asks for a change of position so they can both keep staking out the backyard while they screw.

But like much else in The Saviors, that almost psychosexual component is an intriguing idea that, once presented, just sits there. It’s not carried to some surprising logical extreme, nor deepened into rich character work. You can see what the film is trying to say about a political climate in which the best unifier is a common enemy, but it’s not expressed with enough finesse or confidence to hit a nerve.

The Saviors does not even tell us much about Sean and Kim, since despite Scott and Deadwyler’s affable chemistry — too affable, maybe, considering they’re about to split — the characters are so vaguely drawn that it’s never clear what brought this couple together in the first place, or what’s pulling them apart now. The real, meta reason for their coupling seems to be that the filmmakers wanted a Black woman to ever so slightly complicate the racial dynamics, calling Sean out for “living in a white bubble” when he fails to comprehend why these visitors might seem skittish in their lily-white town.

That she eventually starts to buy Sean’s thinking is rooted in another shrewd and salient observation, about the contagion of prejudice. The rank bigotry of a neo-Nazi newsletter filters through folks like Sean’s parents and sister (a very funny Kate Berlant) — which is to say conservatives, but mostly amiable ones. That, in turn gets spread to nice white liberals like Sean, then even more left-leaning skeptics like Kim. But once again, The Saviors undermines its own relevance by handling its characters like props being used to make a point, rather than people with their own complex motivations or contradictions.

This extends as well to Amir and Jahan, despite an impressive performance by Rossi that manages to convey the depth of Amir’s emotions long before we understand what’s behind them. The siblings are cryptic and unknowable by design, and Jahan even more so for her silence. (She’s deaf, Amir explains early on, but can lip-read.) The script does a decent job of keeping us guessing as to their true goals, playing on the tension between our desire to see them proven innocent and our gnawing realization that they’re clearly up to something strange.

Once the truth is out, however, and it becomes possible to piece together how the past several days have looked from their perspective, The Saviors just stops. It’s made its point — loudly and bluntly, including in a line of dialogue that might as well have been presented with a flashing neon caption reading “This is the theme of the movie” — and has nothing more to add. In fairness, it’s a message that’s always worth remembering, and one that sadly feels more essential than ever. If only it had been delivered in a package sturdy enough to really sell it.

Michael B. Jordan was all about sharing the love Sunday night, giving unsuspecting fans a thrill when he swung by an In-N-Out Burger with his lead actor Oscar after the Academy Awards.

And we’re not talking the In-N-Out typically served to the beautiful people at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Nope. Jordan showed up at an actual In-N-Out location, much to the delight of the burger lovers and paparazzi who swarmed the restaurant with him.

A first-time nomination was the charm for Jordan, who began his career around the turn of the millennium. The newbie nominee won the trophy out of the gate for his portrayal of twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s juke joint-and-vampires movie “Sinners.”

In viral videos of the visit, Jordan could be seen posing for the crowd, autographing an In-N-Out hat for one of the employees and sitting down at a table to dive into what appeared to be a double-double with cheese, with a pile of fries on the side. Fans stood on tables and booths, TMZ reported, to get a glimpse of the newly minted winner. There was a ton of cheering, then Jordan reportedly made a quick exit after a few bites.

The burger stop appeared to come after Jordan got his Oscar engraved at the Governors Ball, where he may have taken a pass on the chicken nuggets with caviar and smoked salmon with caviar on Oscar-shaped crackers. The double-double had no caviar, which was probably a good thing.

The actor did change from the formal black ensemble he wore to the show and to the restaurant into a brown double-breasted suit with a white shirt and black tie for the Vanity Fair party.

He was likely hungry after the ceremony, where folks in the audience had to make do during the show with a “Moderately Happy Meal™” from host Conan O’Brien. The snacks, which are traditionally left under the seats every year, included a box of candy — we heard Junior Mints and Raisinets — a small bag of Skinny Pop popcorn and water in a metal bottle.

Jordan had good company among the lead actor Oscar nominees, who also included Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke and Wagner Moura. His win came after a recent lead actor upset at the Actor Awards, formerly known as the SAG Awards.

Coogler’s win for original screenplay was a first also, though his three nominations this time around came after a 2021 best picture nod for “Judas and the Black Messiah” and one in 2023 for original song — the writer-director co-wrote “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

“Sinners,” the Oscars’ most nominated film ever, came away with four wins out of the 16 categories it was up for: In addition to Coogler and Jordan’s wins, Autumn Durald Arkapaw took home the trophy for cinematography (the first woman to win in that category) and Ludwig Göransson did the same for the score.