Category: Film Reviews by Amy

Considering the many facets of the cinematic landscape in 2023

Barbie is my favorite movie of 2023.

Why pretend otherwise? It’s solid gold (solid pink gold) all the way to its core, with excellent performances, writing, casting, camera work, production design and use of music. It has great details happening in every shot. It excellently captures the toy element of the Barbie world, from the way people move (that Margot Robie sideways flop when she sits down despondently is perfect) to how extremely secondary Ken is in kid Barbie play. I rewatched Barbie recently (it’s available for rent and purchase and streaming on Max) and caught little moments that I don’t think I did the first time. I also gained a new appreciation for the absolutely knockout performance by Ryan Gosling; if ever Oscar wants to award a comedic (at least, on the surface) performance, this would be the one. Watch it — watch it and be impressed that Greta Gerwig could get this all done and put so much of her own sensibility in a toy tie-in movie.

As much as 2023 is the year of Barbie and as much as a Barbie is a movie I’m certain I’ll watch again, probably before we even make it to this March’s Oscar ceremony, which better have some serious Barbie representation among the nominees, that wasn’t the only delightful, gleeful memorable movie watching experience I had this year. I speak, of course, of Slotherhouse, a Hulu movie about a killer sloth. No, let me back up, Slotherhouse is a mostly (at least for its first two-thirds) played-straight movie about sorority house drama where some of the sorority sisters mysteriously disappear and also a sloth adopted by one of the girls is giddily murderous. I described the sloth, named Alpha, in my review thusly: “Alpha is a little shy of standard teddy bear size and has a ‘sloth puppet stretched over Teddy Ruxpin frame’ look.” This movie perfectly balances tone and it is an absolute blast.

What else is worth a mention from 2023?

• Movie is absolutely, wonderfully, as advertised: Part of what is great about Slotherhouse is that it is exactly what you think it is and it does that — that being sorority-sister-murdering sloth — perfectly. And, I will take that over half-assed execution of Serious Film That Wants to Say Something any day. (Is it unfair to put Oppenheimer, now available for rent or purchase, in that latter category? You watch and decide; I thought it was well-made but also, just, sigh, eyeroll, OK, movie, calm down.)Other movies that do well with a goofy, as-stated concept include Plane (rent or purchase and streaming on Starz), the Gerard Butler movie about action on and related to an airplane. Sometimes Butler is doing “plane” (he says stuff like “thrust” and “landing gear”), and sometimes he is off the plane fighting bad guys in order to save the plane passengers. Sink into this dumb movie like a comfortable chair and enjoy how little thought it requires of you.

Also in this category: Cocaine Bear (rent, purchase and on Prime Video). As is stated by Alden Ehrenreich’s character in the trailer “the bear, it did cocaine.” Elizabeth Banks masterfully directs this movie where, yeah, there are some side plots about drug dealers and a cop and forest rangers and some kids cutting school, but mostly a bear does cocaine and chases people. Adults like the late Ray Liotta and Margo Martindale and Keri Russell show up and have an absolute blast.

• Horror and comedy — two great tastes that taste great together: That you might hurt yourself laughing is the scariest element of nominal horror movie Slotherhouse. But several movies this year proved that comedy and horror work great together. The Blackening (rent, purchase and streaming on Starz) features a group of friends spending Juneteenth weekend together and finding themselves the target of both systematic racism and a murderous psycho. Leave the World Behind (Netflix) is not as big in its comedy but you can’t convince me that comedy isn’t largely what it’s doing in this seemingly cool psychological thriller about, maybe, the end of the world? Totally Killer (Prime Video) takes a modern teenager (played by Kiernan Shipka) back to 1987 to the Halloween when her mother’s high school friends were murdered — and back to her mother as a teenage Heathers-esque jerk. From the Gen Z shock at the “Hooters waitress”-like gym uniforms to the perfect fringed white jacket Shipka wears, the movie is a hoot. Of course, the blend of absurdity and horror this year truly belongs to M3gan (rent, purchase and on Prime Video), the early-year release about a kid-sized robot doll and the horrors of same. This movie seems to hate technology and have no redeemable characters and I enjoyed both of those aspects. As I said in my review: “When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I probably thought something like ‘ugh, what ridiculous nonsense.’ After seeing it, though, my reaction is ‘What ridiculous nonsense! 10 out of 10! Four stars! No notes!’”

• The freshest popcorn: It was not a banner year for sequels, in my opinion. I left movies like Magic Mike’s Last Dance (rent, purchase, Hulu and Max) andCreed III (rent, purchase, Prime Video, Sling, Philo and, ha, MGM+) feeling like they were fine, a notch above OK, but not quite up to the standards of their predecessors. I had warmer feelings toward John Wick: Chapter 4 (rent, purchase and Starz), The Equalizer 3 (rent or purchase) and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (rent or purchase), both of which deliver rollercoaster fun even if they aren’t the standouts of their series. My favorite of the sequel-franchise outings from this year is probably The Marvels (still in theaters; the internet predicts February as when it will land on Disney+). The Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel-focused series Ms. Marvel is the only one of those Disney+ Marvel TV shows I’ve been able to bring myself to watch all episodes of and I loved it. Though this movie, a sequel to the story of Capt. Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) and a movie introduction to adult Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), didn’t have as much Kamala and the Khans as the show, we do still get her excellent mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) and we get these three women working together and learning how to be part of a team. Carol and Kamala also have some of that Tony Stark and Peter Parker mentor/mentee energy, which is cute. And there are some nice weird moments that make this feel like more than just another interlocking piece of the MCU (unlike this year’s Ant Man and Guardians of the Galaxy movies, which I found to be a slog — they’re both on Disney+ if you want to see for yourself).

• “I am the fury”: The hands down best action-packed, save-the-day movie I saw this year was not part of a major franchise but it was part of what I think of as the Nida Manzoor cinematic universe. Manzoor is the creator of the excellent TV show We Are Lady Parts (worth the price of a month of Peacock, where you can find all six episodes of the so-far sole season; it is also available for purchase). She also wrote and directed this year’s Polite Society (rent, purchase and Prime Video). Would-be stuntwoman teenage Ria (Priya Kansara) is horrified when her big sister Lena (Ritu Arya) seems to be putting aside her art to settle for a marriage to a too-perfect Salim (Akshay Khanna), son of the suspicious (but awesome in her evilness!) Raheela (Nimra Bucha).

• “Let me be normal and regular like everybody else”: There is a spectacular triple feature to be had in Barbie, Polite Society and, to kick it off, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (rent, purchase and Starz). This excellent adaptation of the Judy Blume classic features three strong performances in three stories of characters finding their way — Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) dealing with being 12 in a new school and the horrors of “your changing body” along with big questions about religion; her mom Barbara (Rachel McAdams) trying to figure out her place as the mom of an older kid and as a newly stay-at-home mom, and Margaret’s grandma/Barbara’s mother-in-law Sylvia (Kathy Bates), whose family is no longer in the city and who has to reconstruct her life for herself. Strong work all the way around, from the acting to the story adaptation.

• “You are so not invited…”: Honorable mention in the “taking tween/young teen girls and their feelings seriously” category goes toYou Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah(Netflix), starring Adam Sandler and his real-life daughters Sadie and Sunny. The way this comedy portrays the highs and lows of 13-year-old girl friendships is smart and funny and — triggering? Let’s just say it left me very happy to be decades away from 13.

• Animated: When I made my Vulture Movie Fantasy League picks (vulture.com; Joe Reid of This Had Oscar Buzz runs it and it’s great fun), I found myself struggling to limit my animated films. I personally loved Nimona (Netflix), a plucky adventure with a sophisticated heart about what makes a hero and what makes a monster. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (rent, purchase and Paramount+) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse(rent, purchase and Netflix) both feature solid storytelling and eye-catching animation that play with the visuals of their respective comic book origins. My kids loved Trolls Band Together (in theaters and available for purchase) because they love all loud, bright Trolls content and they cracked up at Leo (Netflix), the Adam Sandler-starring/co-written weird but sweet animated tale of a classroom pet lizard.

• Big Important Movies: There are a fair number of Big Important Movies from the end-of-the-year rush that I haven’t caught up with yet, either because I haven’t had the nearly three hours (looking at you, Napoleon, which is still in theaters but, honestly, I’m waiting for its Apple TV+ debut in the hopefully near future) or because they only recently became available locally (Wonka, Poor Things, The Color Purple, Ferrari, ha Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom — all in theaters now) or on streaming (Maestro and Nyad on Netflix). But, if you’re looking for some serious fil-uhm, may I recommendThe Holdovers (in theaters and available for purchase), a bittersweet Alexander Payne-directed dramady starring Paul Giamatti as a seemingly unlikeable professor at a boys prep school in 1970s New England. Da’Vine Joy Randolph gives an excellent performance as a grieving mother in this “found family at Christmas” tale. Asteroid City(rent, purchase and Prime Video) is an extremely Wes Anderson Wes Anderson movie, all typewriters and rotary dial phones, that folds a stage play into a teleplay into, I don’t know, a music box of melancholy. The more I think about Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla(rent or purchase) the more impressed I am about what she’s saying about the 14-year-old girl who is pulled into Elvis Presley’s orbit. Flora and Son(Apple TV+), another movie from Once and Begin Again writer-director John Carney, is a delightful movie about a mom and teenage son working through their own life stuff and their difficult relationship with each other by making music (it is way less corny than that sounds).

My favorite of the Big Deal movies in 2023 — after Barbie, which I’d put up against auteur production — might be Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (rent and purchase). This is not a perfect movie; it has its issues in structure, in focus and in how it tries to compensate for the struggle between the most compelling character (Lily Gladstone’s Molly) and the central characters (played by screen charisma runner-ups Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro). But Gladstone’s performance is one of the year’s best and when she’s on the screen the movie holds your attention absolutely.

2024, maybe, at the movies
With all the usual caveats about movie schedules being as unsettled as weather predictions at this point, here are some of the 2024 films I’m excited about:

Mean Girls (Jan. 12) The film adaptation of the stage musical adapted from the 2004 movie was “meh” to me until I saw the trailer; now I’m excited (and for the return of Tim Meadows and Tina Fey in their original parts, along with the addition of gym teacher Jon Hamm).
Lisa Frankenstein (Feb. 9) It’s a new Diablo Cody-penned movie!
Dune: Part Two (March 1) I guess I’ll be seeing this one — which is hopefully as visually dazzling as the Part One — on the big screen.
Kung Fu Panda 4 (March 8) Always good to have a reliable kid movie during the cabin fever part of winter.
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (April 12) These movies have thus far been fun.

Featured photo: Barbie.

A look at new family films

Need to entertain an all-ages crowd? There are several new streaming movies geared at family audiences — though the exact ages of who is in that audience may vary.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (PG) is probably good for most elementary schoolers and up (Common Sense Media pegs it at 7+), though it is a movie with chicken heroes and chicken nugget-making villains, so be forewarned if you have picky eaters and you don’t want to knock nuggets off an already small list of acceptable foods.

The original Chicken Run came out forever ago in 2000, but in the time of the movie it hasn’t been quite as long. The original crew of chickens who Great Escaped from Tweedy Farm now live a pleasant life on an island well away from people. Coop leader chicken Ginger (now voiced by Thandiwe Newton) and American rooster Rocky (now voiced by Zachary Levi) have a little chick of their own — Molly (Bella Ramsey), who as the real action of the movie gets going is a teenager chicken. She gazes longingly at the land across the water, especially when she sees a brightly colored truck for Fun Land Farm — a happy chicken has his very own bucket and is giving two thumbs up. Against her parents’ wishes, Molly decides to find out what Fun Land is all about and manages to get on a truck with her new friend Frizzle (voice of Josie Sedgwick-Davies). Ginger and Rocky and a gang of chickens are in hot pursuit and when it becomes clear where she’s gone — and that “Fun Land Farm” is a terrifying, nugget-making megafactory — they organize an attempt to break her out.

This sequel has the same British sweetness and can-do spirit of the previous Chicken Run (even if it doesn’t feel quite as clever) and other Aardman movies, though it isn’t quite as gentle as Shaun the Sheep outings. It’s a plucky adventure with enjoyable visuals. (B+, Netflix)

The Bad Guys: A Very Bad Holiday(TV-Y7) is set earlier in the Bad Guy timeline than the 2022 movie, back when the crew was still bad: Mr. Wolf (voice of Michael Godere), Snake (voice of Chris Diamantopoulos), Mr. Shark (voice of Ezekiel Ajeigbe) and Ms. Tarantula (voice of Mallory Low) — bad and not being voiced by their bigger-name movie actors. The crew is looking forward to their traditional Christmas Day heisting of loot, when the city is too focused on celebrating to notice. But then they accidentally destroy a beloved Christmas parade balloon, essentially crushing the holiday spirit of the city. Thus, in order to be able to rob on Christmas, they must first “save Christmas.” At a brisk 22 minutes, this lightweight bit of naughtiness and fun entertained my elementary-school-age kids even if it doesn’t have quite the cleverness or the finesse of the feature. (B, Netflix)

New Hampshire’s own Adam Sandler is the star voice and one of the writers on Leo (PG), a full-length (an hour and 42 minutes) animated movie about two classroom pets: Leo (voice of Sandler) the lizard and Squirtle (voice of Bill Barr) the turtle. Leo has ticked through the years eating lettuce while watching decades of fifth-graders go by, dreaming about life outside. Then he overhears a dad guess that lizards only live about 75 years; figuring he’s about 74, Leo is suddenly desperate to see the world. When a new teacher forces kids to bring home the school pets over the weekend, Leo sees a chance to escape. But instead he finds himself doing the thing animals aren’t supposed to do — he talks to human child Summer (voice of Sunny Sandler), who has trouble fitting in with the other kids. He helps her improve her conversation skills and make friends. He returns to the classroom determined to make a break for it the next week but soon finds that he likes talking with the kids during his weekends at their houses and enjoys helping them with their problems. The movie is peppered with strange but charming Adam Sandler songs — in one, to tell a girl she should stop crying, he croons “boo-freaking-hoo”; it’s weird but I liked it? Which is my overall feeling about this movie — it’s funny and also weirder and kinder than you’d expect. For my kids, the movie was comedy gold; they cracked up frequently. (Small note of caution: one song does have fifth grader wistfully singing about the joys of being age 9, when he used to leave out cookies and milk.) (B, Netflix)

Merry Little Batman (13+), like all Batman properties, feels older and darker than the vaguely Captain Underpants-ish cartooniness of the animation would suggest. Batman long ago ended crime in Gotham and thus Bruce Wayne (voice of Luke Wilson) hasn’t donned the Batsuit in quite a while; he spends all his time with his 8-year-old son Damian (voice of Yonas Kibreab). When a surprise call for superhero assistance lures Bruce out to Nova Scotia on Christmas Eve, Damian is left with a sleepy Alfred (voice of James Cromwell) at Wayne Manor. A chance burglary becomes something of a Home Alone situation, with Damian donning a paper bag Batman mask and makeshift cape to protect his home and, most importantly, the junior utility belt his dad gave him. Soon Damian is heading in to Gotham with a Batsuit of his own attempting to retrieve his belt from the thieves while the Joker (voice of David Hornsby), who is of course behind the initial theft, gets a more dastardly idea than just city-wide present-purloining after seeing the chaos Damian visits on his henchmen. I enjoyed the animation style here and the relatively sweeter Batman story but I would definitely save this for the tweens and up (B, Prime Video).

Getting into some live-action offerings, Genie(PG) features sad-dad Bernard (Paapa Essiedu) having lost his job due to the jerkiness of his boss (Alan Cumming), and alienated his family, wife Julie (Denee Benton) and young daughter Eve (Jordyn McIntosh), due to overwork. Sitting in his apartment alone, he glumly rubs the dust off an old jewelry and out pops Flora (Melissa McCarthy), a genie. She tells him the “three wishes” of lore are a myth — he gets unlimited wishes! Once she convinces him of her powers, he sets about trying to use his wishes to win back his family, accidentally getting in some light art-theft trouble along the way. The movie is sweet; McCarthy is good as a knowledgeable-but-distractable style of genie. (B-, Peacock or available for purchase).

Family Switch(PG) also trods familiar ground, with a family that feels disconnected from each other and find themselves Freaky Friday-ed after a run-in with a twinkly Rita Moreno. Mom Jess (Jennifer Garner) wakes up in the body of soccer star teen CC (Emma Myers) and vice versa; dad Bill (Ed Helms) swaps with 14-year-old son Wyatt (Brady Noon), and baby Miles (Lincoln and Theodore Sykes) swaps with the dog. That last swap has nice comedy potential — it’s hard at times to know whether we’re supposed to think the baby or the dog is smarter. The kid/parent swaps feature familiar beats about the olds trying to relate to “fellow teens” and the kids trying to pull off adultness. There are some nice moments of comedy: teens in the parent bodies wonder why they’re exhausted at like 7 p.m. and why everything close up is so blurry; the dad suddenly in his son’s body says he feels like Spider-Man in that he can run without cramping up. It’s cute but it also drags and there’s more talking than hijinks. (C+, Netflix)

The magic in Candy Cane Lane(PG)is also of the trickster nature: dad Chris Carver (Eddie Murphy) inadvertently signs a contract with naughty elf Pepper (Jillian Bell) for enchanted Christmas decorations in his attempt to win a big cash prize in a neighborhood holiday decorating contest. The “12 days of Christmas”-themed tree he buys features “lords a leaping” and the like that come alive and he must retrieve the “gold rings” in order to keep from joining Pepper’s collection of tiny Christmas village figurines — previous victims voiced by Nick Offerman, Chris Redd and Robin Thede. Eventually Chris has to bring wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross) and kids Joy (Genneya Walton), Nick (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and Holly (Madison Thomas) in on his unfortunate bargain. There are moments of nice holiday zaniness and geese-a’layin-related humor and David Alan Grier is a fun Santa Claus. (B-, Amazon Prime Video)

The Family Plan (PG-13) is decidedly an older teens and up movie but it has a goopier family movie sensibility, making it for — no one? Mark Wahlberg is Dan — suburban car salesman and dad of baby Max (Vienna and Iliana Norris) and teens Nina (Zoe Colletti) and Kyle (Van Crosby) and loving husband to Jessica (Michelle Monaghan). Before he became all that, though, he was a government assassin. When worlds collide he must first fight a dude in the supermarket while Max is Bjorn-ed to him and then trick his family into a “Las Vegas road trip yay!” that is really a meetup to get passports for new identities for them all. Along the way he has to fight off henchmen — discreetly — while trying to get up the nerve to tell his family about his past. Meanwhile, they are each dealing with issues of their own: Kyle is secretly a video game-playing superstar and Nina is a snotty jerk because of a clearly terrible boyfriend. The movie is too violent for younger kids and kinda too boring for anybody else. (C, Apple TV+)

Featured photo: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.

An uptight middle-aged lady takes her Brooklyn family on a weekend trip to a beautiful country house on Long Island in Leave the World Behind, a dark, laugh-out-loud psychological horror.

The movie very self-consciously introduces us to marketing executive Amanda Sanford (Julia Roberts) and her roiling uptightness and anger by having her happily pack for a spur-of-the-moment family road trip as she explains to her college professor husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) that she spent the morning thinking about how much she hates people — and there was another, emphasis-adding word in there before “hates.” She’s rented a house for the family — which also includes teen son Archie (Charlie Evans) and just-turned-13 daughter Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) — in a hamlet called Pointe Comfort. The drive turns rural enough that Rose loses internet on the iPad where she’s binging Friends but the house is a design dream, with a large kitchen and a lovely pool. Amanda smiles sunnily as she meanders through the tasteful, dreamy master bedroom and has the same look of contentment as she loads purchases from the cute grocery market into her car, her mood only slightly darkening as she sees a local (Kevin Bacon) load up his truck with canned foods and water bottles. But all is well as the family lies out on the beach, enjoying the post-season sparse crowd and the sun and the view of the water where a large tanker ship seems strangely close. Doesn’t that seem close, Rose tries to say to her family several times but is ignored until Amanda, looking up from a snooze, is all, hey that’s really close and it’s not stopping. The family grabs their bags and rushes away just as the large ship runs aground up onto the beach.

Once they’re home, they find the internet is out and their phones don’t have service but everything basically seems normal and the kids jump into the pool while the parents make dinner. Later, Amanda and Clay are playing Jenga and enjoying wine when there is a knock at the door. G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali), decked in a tuxedo, and his 20-something daughter Ruth (Myha’la), dressed in an evening gown, are at the door. G.H. graciously apologizes and calls Amanda by name when he introduces himself as the man she emailed with when she rented the house. This house is his house and they, G.H. and Ruth, have driven out to stay the night. The night or maybe longer — there’s a blackout in the city and he can’t walk the 14 floors up to his city apartment. With all the traffic and chaos, he doesn’t want to go back to the city and even offers to refund Amanda her money, unlocking a drawer and handing her cash, so that he and Ruth can stay in the in-law apartment in the home’s basement. Amanda is, er, the most printable description is probably “a brittle jerk” about this request and doesn’t entirely believe G.H.’s claims to own the house. Ruth finds her father’s extreme politeness to this snotty lady and her family excessive, especially since they are asking to stay in the basement of their own home. Eventually, though, everybody goes to bed with a general idea that they’ll make sense of things in the morning.

“Making sense” is not a task easily accomplished. After a vague emergency alert, the TV offers nothing but fuzz. No phones, no internet. Clay’s attempt to drive into town is disastrous without GPS. Rose keeps seeing weird animal-related things. But at least Archie seems pretty happy when Ruth comes down to the pool in her bikini.

Ruth and Amanda’s instant dislike of each other, Clay’s clumsy attempts at being useful and friendly, the kids’ them-focused problems (Archie wonders if he can visit his girlfriend vacationing an hour away, Rose just really wants to see the last episode of Friends), G.H.’s fears about what’s happening, Amanda’s whole personality — it’s all really well-executed in this movie that shoots even scenes of banal upper-middle-class-ness with theatrical dread. The characters are spikey but also get some humanity to them. They are helpful to each other but they also make things a little worse at all times with the information they don’t share. Amanda and G.H. seem to take turns condescendingly telling each other that things are going to be fine or that something is totally normal when neither particularly believes it themselves. And throughout there is a sense that one of the most fraught elements of whatever is happening may be the miscalculations and conclusions jumped to by these reluctant housemates about each other, with both Amanda and Ruth just wanting the other’s family to leave already.

Also, Leave the World Behind is funny — bleakly, sorta meanly funny, but funny. I found myself laughing out loud frequently (and in that vein, it has a pretty great final note) and just sort of enjoying the way the movie frequently seems to be tickled with itself. A

Rated R for language, some sexual content, drug use and brief bloody images, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Sam Esmail (who also wrote the screenplay, based on the book of the same name by Rumaan Alam), Leave the World Behind is two hours and 18 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.

May December (R)

An actress attempts to get into the head of a woman she’ll be portraying in a movie in May December, a well-acted disturbing drama from director Todd Haynes.

Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is a famous enough actress that people get wide-eyed when she passes by and will fan-out about her previous work. Her upcoming movie is a sort of indie production looking at a scandal from the 1990s involving Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who was then in her mid 30s. As Gracie tells it, she was married and working at a pet shop when she had a passionate affair with a coworker that led to the end of her marriage to her husband at the time with whom she had three children. Another way to describe that “affair” would be felony child sexual assault, as Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), the boy she was caught with, was 13 years old.

Gracie went to jail, where she gave birth to their first child, Honor (Piper Curda), now a college student. Gracie and Joe eventually married and also had twins, Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung), who are, as the movie starts, days away from their high school graduation. Gracie and Joe, who is now in his mid 30s, live in Savannah, the town they’ve always lived in. So they have a support system of family and a small group of friends who buy Gracie’s home-produced baked goods but also Gracie occasionally receives boxes of poo in the mail.

Elizabeth shows up to kind of shadow Gracie — to convey the truth of Gracie and Gracie and Joe’s relationship, as she tells everyone. Gracie might have her reservations but also seems to like the idea that she’ll have some control over the revisiting of her infamy. Elizabeth learns to mimic Gracie’s mannerisms and sometimes intentionally lispy speech and also inserts herself into the family’s life in a way that is mildly to moderately destructive to this already deeply damaged group of people. Included in this emotional quicksand is Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), Gracie’s youngest child by her first marriage, who was a tween when the scandal came to light and seems to have been destroyed by it.

Actually, even Elizabeth, who shows up with an almost journalistic pose of wanting to “understand,” seems pretty messed up in how she basically just wallows in the griminess of Gracie and her choices. She might claim to want “the truth” but that seems to always translate to the most tabloid-y approach. Portman is commendably game at letting us see the actory nonsense of her character without trying to convince us that Elizabeth is, like, doing art. Likewise, Moore is very good about leaving it vague how much of Gracie’s awfulness is the result of unhealed damage from her own youth and how much is self-conscious predatory behavior masquerading in false innocence. It’s an impressively unflattering portrayal.

The standout performance, though, is from Melton, who gives us a Joe so firmly stuck in the trauma of what happened to him that he can’t see his way out or even be particularly useful in shielding his kids from their mother’s emotional abuse. Melton does a good job of giving us a person who seems thoroughly flattened — someone who is never not screaming on the inside but is almost immobilized on the outside. It is all deeply unpleasant to watch.

And there’s your May December poster quote: “very well acted, deeply unpleasant to watch!” The movie has moments of (very dark) dry humor but those don’t exactly lighten the “aftermath of a horrible car crash” vibes that follow you throughout. I don’t think you’ll be sorry having seen it, particularly if you are a follower of Oscar-y, year-end movie conversation, but I won’t pretend you’ll have a whole lot of fun sitting through it. What’s that, like a B+? For all the quality?

Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Todd Haynes with a screenplay by Samy Burch, May December is an hour and 57 minutes long and streaming on Netflix.

Featured photo: Leave the World Behind.

A girl wishes upon a star and the star comes down to hang out in Wish, an underbaked mush of a fairy tale about the eternal struggle between security and liberty that also has the feel of a half-hearted Disney IP origin story.

Asha (voice of Ariana DeBose) is a 17-year-old living back in the once upon a time on the Mediterranean-y island of Rosas, which is ruled by King Magnifico (voice of Chris Pine), who founded the city-state years earlier with his wife Queen Amaya (Angelique Cabral). King Magnifico is a good sorcerer and he designed Rosas as a land where people of all backgrounds could come and live together in peace and safety under his rule — so right away you know he’s a villain. But this would be a real short movie if everyone else realized it, so the people of Rosas just think of him as a benevolent ruler who grants wishes. Every citizen gives Magnifico their wishes when they turn 18 — wishes being represented by a sort of glowy bubble — and he keeps them safe. Regularly, he picks one citizen to have their wish come true, which he accomplishes with his magic. In the meantime, the adult populace is not burdened by these wishes, the content of which they forget.

Asha is interviewing to be his apprentice and help him with his magic-ing. Perhaps she’s a little hopeful that doing this will help her 100-year-old grandfather Sabino (voice of Victor Garber) and her mother Sakina (voice of Natasha Rothwell) get their wishes granted. But when she sees her grandfather’s wish bubble floating around Magnifico’s wish bubble arboretum and asks Magnifico to grant it, he basically says “no job for you” explaining that her grandfather’s vague desire to create something that inspires future generations could lead to revolution or violence.

A dejected Asha later sings a song about wanting more for her people than All Of This and poof, a star appears. The star is a cute little blob of a thing that squeaks around and sprinkles glitter dust, giving animals, like Asha’s pet goat Valentino (voice of Alan Tudyk), the ability to talk and sing another song about how we are all made of star dust. Asha becomes determined to retrieve her family’s wishes — and eventually everybody’s wishes — so people can have the chance to make them come true on their own. As Asha’s friends observe of their 18-year-old buddy Simon (voice of Evan Peters), giving up their wish makes people a little less themselves, less whole.

Meanwhile, the magical light show caused when the star came to Earth has Magnifico worried that someone else is using magic and challenging his rule. He can’t figure out what’s going on with his own good-guy magic so he turns to a book of dark magic and also asking people to fink on each other to try to find this Threat to Rosas. He goes from being a basically benign dictator who is maybe a little too impressed with his own handsomeness to being a megalomaniac who won’t tolerate any dissent because one teen girl asked him a question.

Also, Asha maybe invents animation using the tiny-drawing-on-a-page-corner flipbook method?

We get a lot of information about the Wish — how it makes people feel to give it to Magnifico, how he cares for them, what he does with them when he gets his dark magic, why he is such a helicopter mom about people’s hopes and dreams. There is a general “Magnifico lost his birth family in a land riven with strife,” which is what pushed him to make a cheery dystopia. But there is a sense of “oh and also this” when it comes to story elements rather than a clear, streamlined story with clear motivations for Magnifico. Similarly, the movie is filled with general Disney Easter Eggs that often play as in-jokes and almost appear to maybe sort of build up to something — “and that’s how A became B” — but also don’t really. All the nods to Peter Pan and Bambi etc. (and all the visuals that feel like “remember that cottage from Sleeping Beauty? This isn’t that but hey made you think of it didn’t we?”) feel more like a fast food “100 years of Disney” promotional meal package than a real story. There’s a world in which Disney just creates a montage of discussion of wishes and dreams with clips from its movie library and achieves the same thing (that thing I think being the centrality of wishes and dreams to Disney stories) with more genuine emotion and brevity.

Wish feels like a movie that had some general ideas of what it wanted to do and where it wanted to go but had no clear idea how to get there and so it just filled in the gaps with “default Disney story” stuff. Likewise, the music feels very much like someone shoved Frozen and Moana into a food processor and this is the texture-less paste that came out. The songs here read as extremely first-drafty and forgettable.

All that said, my kids and other kids in a very full theater seemed to be mostly hanging in with this movie — perking up the most when Valentino the goat was in on the action (the line, which also appears in the trailers, that involves him saying he found a secret door with his butt got a big laugh). The talking animals do provide some nice moments of weirdness and I wish (ha) the movie had gone more in on that kind of goofiness than on creating something that feels more like a commemorative coin than a lively new story. C+

Rated PG for thematic elements and mild action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn with a screenplay by Jennifer Lee & Allison Moore, Wish is an hour and 35 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios.

Trolls Band Together

Poppy, Branch and the crew reunite for a caper winding them through the music of pop boy bands of the last 30+ years in Trolls Band Together, a perfectly cromulent hour and a half of kid entertainment.

Poppy (voice of Anna Kendrick), queen of the Trolls, and Branch (voice of Justin Timberlake), her frequently grumpy boyfriend, prepare for the marriage of Poppy’s good friend Bridget (voice of Zooey Deschanel) and Gristle (voice of Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Bridget and Gristle are both Bergens, who are larger and more monstery than Trolls and used to eat Trolls but now everybody parties together. As Bridget and Gristle say their I-dos, the ceremony is interrupted by John Dory (voice of Eric Andre), Branch’s long-estranged brother. Branch and his four brothers were once members of the boy band BroZone together but broke up after a concert went wrong when they tried to achieve the perfect family harmony. John Dory wants the group back together to give perfection another try as he thinks it will be the only thing that can break the diamond bottle their brother Floyd (voice of Troye Sivan) is being held in. Floyd was trollnapped by Velvet (voice of Amy Schumer) and Veneer (voice of Andrew Rannells), a brother-sister pop duo of plasticy-looking creatures. They are personally talentless but have devised a way of draining Floyd of his talent to make them seem like the superstar vocalists they pretended to be.

As Floyd was Branch’s kindest brother, he decides to join John Dory on his quest, eventually scooping up other brothers Spruce (Daveed Diggs), who now calls himself Bruce and runs a resort with his wife and many children, and Clay (voice of Kid Cudi) to rescue Floyd. Along the way, the gang comes across an old Bergen putt-putt course that is now home to a band of Trolls left behind in Bergen Town all those years ago when Poppy and her father, then-King Peppy (voice of Walt Dohrn), escaped. As has already been spoiled in some of the trailers, one of those Trolls is a fast-talking, quick-hair-braiding, high-energy Troll named Viva (voice of Camila Cabello), Poppy’s long-lost sister. Viva is excited to see Poppy again but does not know about or believe the news that Trolls and Bergens are now friends.

As with other entries in this jukebox sugarfest series, Trolls Band Together pastes together bits of boy band song elements — reaching back to Boyz II Men and New Kids on the Block as well as Timberlake’s own NSYNC, which delivers a new original song for this movie and all the moms seeing it who remember a boy band fandom of their youth. It’s cute, as the music always is in these movies, though this one doesn’t feel quite as tune-packed as previous entries. This movie also feels less about Poppy than previous entries, which focused on Poppy’s leadership or Poppy’s friendship with Branch. Here, she feels more along for the ride.

And that’s all fine. These movies aren’t Pixar-in-its-prime levels of story-telling and visual delight. But they are fast-moving, upbeat, silly and occasionally weird in a way that provides a nice little tart element to all this cotton candy. They are kid-friendly without being actively adult off-putting. B-

Rated PG for some mild rude and suggestive humor, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Walt Dohrn and Tim Heitz with a screenplay by Elizabeth Tippet, Trolls Band Together is an hour and 31 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Wish.

Coriolanis Snow grows from an ambitious teenager into the guy who will one day be Donald Sutherland in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel to the Katniss-era Hunger Gameses based on the book by the same name.

In the movie’s main timeline, Coriolanis (Tom Blyth) is a high school senior or something who is trying to win a big scholarship that will not only cover his university tuition but also get money to his family. The Snows were once a big noise in the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem, the dystopia where all this business is set. But then there was a rebellion and both of Coriolanis’ parents died and now they are sort of shabby gentry with Coriolanis and his big-sister-like cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafter) living with their grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) in an apartment they can’t quite afford. On the day when Coriolanis expects his winning of the Plinth Prize to be announced, the school’s head Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, who seems like he’s really trying) tells the top students that they have one more task before anyone’s getting any scratch. They will all become mentors for competitors in the upcoming Hunger Games, a death match ritual featuring children from the 12 Districts the Capitol rules.

The Hunger Games, now in their 10th year, are not the hot-ticket reality show Super Bowl-like blowout they are in the later movies. Their ratings have declined so much the ruling government seems on the fence about whether they should still have them. Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), a games designer and bio-weapons designer and general nutcase, is really insistent that they continue and I think hopes the mentors will jazz them up a little. Though why exactly is unclear. As viewed in this movie (and actually, in the whole series), the Hunger Games seem like a waste of time (and an easy target for dissenters) for this authoritarian regime that seems to be having enough trouble just keeping itself out of civil war.

Anyway, victory by the competitors in the games will mean victory for the students competing for the Plinth Prize. And “victory” doesn’t necessarily mean being the last gamer standing. It can also mean having a competitor with a compelling story who gets people to tune in. Lucky for Coriolanis, his mentee is Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler, having fun with what she’s given). When Lucy Gray’s name is called during the reaping, she responds with a knowing smile. As she walks to the podium, surrounded by whispers, in a fancy Belle Epoque-y dancing girl dress, she stops to put a snake down a girl’s back and then she sings a defiant little song into the mic. A member of a tribe of traveling musicians, she’s known for twangy folk tunes and boyfriend seducin’. So much more personable than the girl with tuberculosis!

Snow quickly figures out how to play the publicity game element of the Hunger Games, helping to develop some of the elements — donate to your favorite player! — that will become an important part of the Games in the later years. Also giving hints to what the Games will become is a theatrical weatherman named Lucky Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman) who is trying to make this show all it can be.

Dinklage might be the guy doing more Serious Acting than this movie warrants, but Schwartzman seems to be the guy really finding a tone and leaning all the way in with it. His Lucky doesn’t exactly fit with the vibe of the rest of the movie, but he’s definitely the film’s most entertaining element.

This movie falls somewhere between “the dark education of a could-go-either-way Coriolanis Snow” and “a guy who starts off as an ambitious opportunist remains ambitious, sees opportunities.” As the Games progress, Coriolanis’ desire to have Lucy Gray be successful for his own goals turns into actual desire for Lucy Gray. They are, for a while, in love. Or either one or both of them is playing a long con to use the other for their advancement in this morally bankrupt society. Or life is complicated and both things are true. Intellectually, I like that the movie lets you read the story it’s telling in a few different ways. In fact, the more I thought about the way this movie’s character motivations were constructed, the more interesting I found it.

After the fact.

In the moment, sitting in the theater, this made for some very slow, boring storytelling. I know who Snow is going to become and this movie doesn’t really give me a reason to care how he got that way. And I feel like I’m watching the teen soap operaversion of Hunger Games dystopia — it’s all smaller, snottier and more high school. The big scary Panem Capitol and its rulers don’t even seem quite as all-powerful and authoritarian here as in the original movies — they are basically every familiar aristocracy of rich jerks you’ve ever seen anywhere, from Gossip Girl to, like, real life.

I’ll give the movie this: It’s visually interesting in a “huh, neat” kind of way, with its riff on a past that sort of fits with the future we see in the original films. But “huh neat” is not enough to sustain two hours and 37 minutes of movie. C+

Rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Frances Lawrence with a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt (from the book by Suzanne Collins), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is two hours and 37 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

The Holdovers (R)

A grumpy classics teacher is forced to babysit the kids left at a Massachusetts boys school for the Christmas holiday in 1970 in The Holdovers, a movie directed by Alexander Payne.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the most “Paul Giamatti character” of Paul Giamatti characters. A classics professor who eats and sleeps his job, he is a surly tyrant to his students, difficult with the school’s headmaster (Andrew Garman) and just sort of awkward around everyone else.

After handing out a bunch of D and F grades on a test to his students, berating them about their performance and general intelligence and assigning them homework during the break, Paul finds out that he will also be working over vacation. The teacher who had been expected to stay at the school to watch the handful of boys who weren’t going home weaseled out of the assignment and the headmaster, still mad that Paul wouldn’t pass an important donor’s son, makes Paul do it. Not only do the boys have to stay at school but they must all move to barrack-like lodgings in the infirmary because the heat will be off in their normal dorms. And Paul has decided that they need a regular schedule of outdoor exercise (in the Massachusetts winter) and study. And they all have to eat together in the school dining hall, where food is cooked by Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who warns Paul not to expect anything too great because there won’t be any new shipments of ingredients until the new year.

Mary, the head of the dining services, is stuck at the school in a different way — her son Curtis was a student but recently died in Vietnam. She feels like she needs to stay in this place, the last place they were together, at least for this, her first Christmas without him.

Eventually, the handful of boys is whittled down to just one — Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a boy who was told at the last minute by his mother that he needed to stay at school so she and her new husband could have a honeymoon. Deeply resentful and heartbroken about this, Angus is also generally having a hard time. He’s been kicked out of a few previous schools and doesn’t have close friends at this one. He’s mourning the loss of his father and is angry about how his mother has moved on. And Angus and Paul have the natural irritation for each other that two people with a lot of the same qualities can easily have.

Three people trying, sometimes failing, to deal with the stuff life has thrown at them is the core of this movie and these three people forming an unlikely, temporary family unit makes up the bulk of what moves the story along. This very familiar kind of tale plus the very conscious 1970s vibe of the movie (right down to the “film” hisses and pops that kick off the movie’s audio) and the “everything you expect from a Paul Giamatti character” nature of Paul shouldn’t work, it should feel like the most done of “it’s been done” movies. And yet, for me, it all came together. That was a nice, kind movie — was my reaction, which sounds damning but wasn’t. It all coalesces — the core three performances, the little moments each actor gets to show you into the layers of their character, the most sitcom-like humor. The Holdovers was quietly charming and tartly gentle. B+

Rated R for language, some drug use and brief sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Alexander Payne with a screenplay by David Hemingson, The Holdovers is two hours and 13 minutes and is distributed in theaters by Focus Features.

Featured photo: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau team up, much to Ms. Marvel’s teenage-fangirl glee, in The Marvels, a mostly fun adventure movie in spite of some Marvel Cinematic Universe “did you do your homework?”-ing.

I came to this movie slightly more prepared than usual with these Marvel movies that have TV series tie-ins, having seen — and absolutely loved — the Ms. Marvel series all about high schooler Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a comics-making, Avengers-loving Pakistani-American girl from Jersey City. I did not see the Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)-centric Secret Invasion or WandaVision, where I gather we meet the grown-up Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). But it’s fine; the movie recaps enough about who everybody is and their relationships to each other — like, for example, that Monica still thinks of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) as Aunt Carol Danvers, best friend of her mother, the late Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), who died during the five years Monica was Blipped away.

Monica has superpowers now and works for Nick Fury at the S.H.I.E.L.D.-in-space-like S.A.B.E.R. Carol/Captain Marvel is still traveling the universe looking to help people, basically alone except for her cat, Goose, who is a tentacle-mouthed Flerken. Kamala is still in Jersey, still in high school, still making comics when she should be doing homework — as her loving and rightfully suspicious mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) reminds her.

Muneeba, Kamala’s dad Yusuf (Mohan Kapur) and Kamala’s older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) are deeply confused when, after a crashing noise upstairs, Captain Marvel comes down from Kamala’s room. At the same time Kamala finds herself floating in space, where Fury, watching from a space station, had expected to see Monica, who is suddenly on the strange planet where we had just seen Carol. It seems that some kind of space-time-portal-thingies have entangled Carol, Kamala and Monica and whenever they use their powers, they change places. This phenomenon has something to do with the bangle (one identical to the one Kamala wears) that Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), our antagonist, has dug up and put on. Dar-Benn, a Kree warrior/leader person, is trying to use the power she gains from the bangle to transport, via wormhole, resources from other planets to her people’s dying homeworld, Hala. From a Skrull planet, she steals the atmosphere. From another planet, she attempts to steal the water. From Earth’s solar system, she intends to steal the sun.

(OK, so — Skrull, Kree, Flerken, Blip? Translation: The first two are warring aliens who appeared in Captain Marvel and other MCU properties, a Flerken is a cat that’s really an alien and the Blip was the whole Thanos thing. And, Thanos? Look, I don’t feel like this is anybody’s MCU entry point but if it is maybe just take notes for post-film Wikipedia-ing. It took catching a bit of Captain Marvel for me to remember “oh, yeah, Hala is a thing we know.” Meanwhile, we are introduced to a brand new planet, Aladna, and an alien people who communicate largely through song and I feel like, if we want to pile on the lore, why not go with new, delightfully weird lore like that?)

Monica and Carol haven’t reconnected since Monica was a child and of course everybody seems a little uneasy about bringing teenage Kamala to intergalactic battles. But the three women eventually realize that their tangled powers mean they need to work together.

The movie has some fun with the powers-tangling concept. The scene that sort of introduces the three superheroines to each other features a prolonged fight with the three swapping places throughout, occasionally pulling bad guys with them, which is how the Khan family ends up fighting Kree and how Goose ends up at the family home, at one point eating some Khan family knick-knacks. It’s choreographed for maximum fun, with the three characters figuring out the rules and what their powers are and who they’re fighting. Later we get a training montage of the three learning how to use the position swaps so they can mount a fight against Dar-Benn.

I also appreciate that the movie pulls the Khans into the adventure, as Kamala’s family was so central to her story. Plus Shroff’s Muneeba is great and I found myself wishing that the movie had given her some superhero-ing of her own. Muneeba’s “you’re not allowed to go on a space adventure” protectiveness also helps to root Kamala’s character in her teenagerness.

The chemistry between the three women is nice too. We don’t get some antagonism-for-the-sake-of-antagonism shoved into the relationships. Instead, we get Carol and Monica reckoning with their past and all three of them learning to work together and value each other’s contributions. It’s a small thing but it keeps the movie relatively light and fun.

The Marvels mostly keeps its head above the Kree/Skrull-ness MCU soup but it does feel like a struggle. The whole business of Dar-Benn’s planet and Captain Marvel’s past feels like it gets in the way of really setting this movie free to be the buddy-adventure it wants to be. B

Rated PG-13 for action/violence and brief language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nia DaCosta with a screenplay by Nia DaCosta and Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik, The Marvels is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by Walt Disney Studios in theaters.

Featured photo: The Marvels.