Wendell & Wild (PG-13)
Voices of Lyric Ross, Angela Bassett.
As well as the voices of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as Wendell and Wild, respectively, two demons that find a human Hell Maiden, Kat (Ross), to help them visit the land of the living in this animated feature.
Kat is a girl consumed with anger and guilt about the death of her parents when she was a child. Certain that she was the cause of the car accident that killed them, she carried that with her to profit-focused group homes, unkind schools and juvenile detention. She returns to her home town as a teen to go to a private girls school and finds that the death of her father and the destruction of his brewery ushered in the downfall of the town of Rust Belt — a downfall cheered along by the Klaxon family who own Klax Korp. The snakey Klaxons (voices of David Harewood and Maxine Peak) want to bulldoze the town entirely to make way for a corporate prison. Dogged activist and local council member Marianna (Natalie Martinez) is attempting to stop Klax Korp and to prove that they’re behind the fire at the brewery. Her son, the artistic Raul (voice of Sam Zelaya), a trans boy who also attends the school, refuses to listen when Kat says she’s not a good person to be friends with.
Raul joins Kat on a trip to her parents’ gravesites when Wendell and Wild, demons with whom she is newly acquainted, promise to revive them. But Sister Helley (Bassett), one of the school’s teachers, has tried to warn her about doing business with demons.
A harebrained brother duo with a plan to build a real-world amusement park, Wendell and Wild might have a connection to Kat but they’re willing to do business with the Klaxons to make their Dream Faire a reality. Making deals with the devil (or in this case a devil’s goofy sons) is one of this movie’s themes, along with the greed behind services that should be helping people. It’s a surprisingly complex kind of villainy for a kids’ movie (Common Sense pegs it at age 11 and up; I’d say at least that). And Kat’s redemption arc is only partly about magical powers or demons — it’s mostly about learning to forgive herself.
The movie delivers all of this thoughtfully and with some truly lovely visuals. The animation here is stop-motion (we see Kat in the real world with a filmmaker at the very end of the credits) and everything from the characters themselves to the clothes they wear or their surroundings has texture and heft. The people have a slightly angular quality with almost hinge-like features on their faces that call to mind marionettes but with more fluid movements. The movie is able to give us personality and emotion in the characters’ faces that give them a depth beyond their stylized look. A Available on Netflix.
The Good Nurse (R)
Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne.
Nurse Amy Loughren (Chastain) struggles to work while dealing with a heart condition but comes to suspect friend and colleague Charlie Cullen (Redmayne) isn’t just bending the rules by helping her in this movie based on a real-life story of a serial killer. The movie makes it fairly clear early on that Charlie is a killer, even if we don’t know the extent of his crimes going in (though I feel like I’ve read a couple of People magazine stories about it).
Amy doesn’t suspect Charlie right away but she does suspect something is going on when a patient who had been recovering suddenly dies. The hospital later investigates, but does so in such an aggressively unhelpful manner that the police detectives (Noah Emmerich, Nnamdi Asomugha) seem pretty sure from the jump that something has gone wrong.
Chastain does a good job of radiating competence — something she is often very good at doing with her characters. Redmayne is mostly a collection of oddball behaviors and twitches, which is a thing I often believe to be true of his performances. Overall, The Good Nurse has the feel of an extremely well-made TV crime drama. B- Available on Netflix.