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Nobody Here but Us Chickens

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Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

by Hope Madden

It has been 23 years since Aardman animation briefly abandoned its cheese-loving besties Wallace & Gromit in favor of a prison break caper. Chicken Run saw one plucky hen named Ginger ­– inspired by Rocky the Rooster’s tall tales of being able to fly – organize a leave-no-chicken-behind escape mission from Tweedy’s Farm.

Chick Run: Dawn of the Nugget finds Ginger (voiced this go-round by Thandiwe Newton) and Rocky (now Zachary Levi) some time later (though certainly not 23 years later) living in chicken paradise with their friends and their brand-new chick, Molly (Bella Ramsey). But motherhood has turned Ginger from a courageous leader to a, well, chicken. Protective and worried about little Molly, Ginger encourages the flock to hide when they see trucks hauling chickens to a high-tech factory that will turn them into nuggets.

Ginger’s attitude changes once Molly’s in jeopardy, and the whole flock rallies to save the strong-willed little chick and the day.

It may be a lot to expect viewers to recognize some of the callbacks to the original, in that the target audience for this film was born about 15 years after Chicken Run was released. Adults may notice some absent voices but are more likely to sense the absence of Nick Park.

Park co-wrote, directed, and animated most of the early Ardman masterpieces. Like the Muppets without Jim Henson, Aardman just isn’t Aardman without Park. Sam Fell directs a script by Karey Kirkpatrick, John O’Farrell (both of whom worked on the original) and Rachel Tunnard. The visuals are pretty and nearly as engaging as you expect from Ardman, but everything – including the story, dialog and gags – feels a bit standard, a bit bland.

Newton and Levi offer relatively dull performances. On the other hand, Ramsey’s a delight and the vocal ensemble – Imelda Staunton, David Gradley, Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays, Jane Horrocks, Josie Sedgwick-Davies and Miranda Richardson – elevate and energize the otherwise vanilla script.

There’s nothing terribly wrong about Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. But when your animation studio sets the bar so high, “nothing terribly wrong” is quite a disappointment.

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Band of Brothers

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Immediate Family

by George Wolf

In the last couple decades, documentaries such as Standing in the Shadows of Motown and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom have given just due to the unknown musicians and singers who have long backed up our idols.

Director Denny Tedesco may have been first with the idea, though his debut doc The Wrecking Crew! endured years of delays until its 2008 release. Tedesco is back with Immediate Family, and while he’s still looking behind the musical scenes, his second feature boasts some important distinctions.

To start, it’s much more contemporary. This one features a trove of interviews that are not only recent, but feature musicians that are still highly relevant, such as Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Keith Richards, Lyle Lovett and more.

And secondly, for serious music fans (and even casual fans of a certain age), the names Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Waddy Wachtel and Danny “Kooch” Kortchmar may already be plenty familiar. As the film points out, that’s largely thanks to producers Peter Asher and Lou Adler, who in the 1970s decided to start featuring the names and faces of these longtime sidemen in the liner notes of the many albums they played on.

But even if you recognize these players, it’s still a kick to hear the superstars go into detail about how valuable they are, and to watch their specific grooves morph into fully produced classics.

It all follows a formula very similar to the one that made The Wrecking Crew! so irresistible, but with greatly improved production values that increase the immediacy along with the timeline.

Immediate Family ends up feeling like the next logical step in Tedesco’s musical journey. We get more great tunes, witness more important stages in the evolution of popular music, and spend some quality time with four more unique talents that are well worth getting to know better.

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She Seems Nice

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Eileen

by George Wolf

You need an “easy on the eyes” vamp for your nourish thriller? Anne Hathaway’s on your short list, for sure.

Soft-spoken, sheltered waif with eyes that long for a new life? Get me Thomasin McKenzie!

The casting in Eileen may be no surprise, but there are big surprises in store. And the way the two leads slowly draw their characters toward a deadly intersection keeps William Oldroyd’s second feature engaging throughout.

McKenzie is the put-upon Eileen, who quietly spends her days fantasizing about sex and violence and stashing away all the money she makes doing secretarial work at a boys correction facility in early 1960s Massachusetts. Eileen is also the daughter of the town’s former police chief (Shea Whigham), currently a paranoid, drunk widower with a penchant for verbal abuse and gun waving.

Eileen’s world is rocked when the facility’s staff psychologist retires, and Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) shows up to replace her. Tall, Ivy League-schooled with a sarcastic wit and a smoldering sensuality, Rebecca stands out plenty in the little New England ‘burg.

They meet for a couple drinks at the local bar and hit the dance floor while Rebecca belittles the leering regulars. Eileen is transfixed.

So she jumps at the invitation to visit over the holiday break, where Rebecca (and screenwriter Luke Goebel, Causeway) have a big bomb to drop.

Adapted from Ottessa Mosfegh’s award-winning 2015 novel, the film is a slow boil that leans on mood and atmospherics to lull you, even as you feel the creep of dread.

Both Hathaway and McKenzie are perfection, consistently smoothing the bumps when Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) seems a bit hesitant to fully embrace the story’s pulpy underbelly. He and Goebel also tweak the novel’s ending, leaving the resolution more open-ended and abstract.

Fans of the book may feel slighted, but Eileen lands on the big screen as its own slippery shape shifter, a simmering throwback with just enough thrills to satisfy.

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Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

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The Boy and the Heron

by Hope Madden

Remember when Hayao Miyazaki said he was retiring from filmmaking? And we thought the sublime The Wind Rises was his last feature? Well, the animation master delivers the best Christmas gift this year with the lovely, likely swan song, The Boy and the Heron.

More meditative than his early work, but more whimsical than The Wind Rises, Miyazaki’s latest follows Mahito through a turbulent time in his life. WWII rages, and Mahito recently lost his mother. His father, who runs a factory aiding in the war effort, relocates to the countryside where he’s married his late wife’s younger sister, Natsuko.

This new house brings with it something of the supernatural. Miyazaki taps some of the same wonderous ideas that fed Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro – two of his most beloved films ­– but The Boy and the Heron feels more like a farewell than an invitation.

Mahito is lured into an upside-down world in search of his stepmother. No one, absolutely no one, does an upside-down world as well as Hayao Miyazaki. Floating happy faced blobs, an army of hungry parakeets, even a pirate!

Characteristically gorgeous, the film combines the spectacle of Spirited Away with the solemnity of The Wind Rises. Joe Hisaishi’s plaintive score never overwhelms but quietly emphasizes the sense of loss that permeates the movie. And though the painterly magic we’ve come to expect from the unparalleled filmmaker is on display in every frame, the storytelling this time is openly wistful.

The Boy and the Heron may represent Mahito’s coming of age, but as he turns his back on the imaginative world he leaves behind, it’s hard not to feel as if Miyazaki is likewise waving goodbye.

Like Johnny Cash’s “American IV: The Man Comes Around”, Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” and David Bowie’s “Blackstar”, The Boy and the Heron represents an artist without peer delivering, lyric by lyric, an outright goodbye to all he’s built in his lifetime of artistry.

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Music of Your Life

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Maestro

by George Wolf

This time of year, we normally hear the term “Oscar bait” as a bad thing.

It might be the worst thing you can say about Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, a film that is grand and showy, meticulously assembled and clearly proud of the vision it brings to the screen.

And it should be proud, as Oscar and other well-earned award considerations will no doubt start piling up soon.

Cooper recently detailed his years of study as a conductor, as part of the preparation to write, direct and star in this Leonard Bernstein biopic. That type of well-timed admission may evoke some eye rolling, but the onscreen results of his commitment are pretty damn hard to deny.

From the opening sequence, Cooper’s camera sings with fluidity, teaming with Matthew Libatique’s exquisite cinematography and the maestro’s own rapturous music for thrilling evocations of creativity and joy, longing and heartache. Aspect ratios and color palettes change as Bernstein’s legend grows, while Cooper and co-writer Josh Singer (First Man, The Post, Oscar winner for Spotlight) ground it all in the endlessly compelling relationship between Leonard and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan).

Interviews with Leonard organically fill in the necessary career details, while the moving and nuanced performances from Cooper and Mulligan draw us into the complexities of the marriage. Cooper’s “Lenny” – buoyed by amazing age effects from the makeup department – is a force of nature, overflowing with musical genius, charm and ego, capable of both effervescent affection and a coldness that could reduce others to a life “surviving on what he could give.”

But as much as this movie is about the titular Maestro, a glorious Mulligan picks up the baton and walks off with it.

Felicia becomes our window into this mesmerizing world, and we feel her waves of love and sorrow as Leonard’s life as a closeted gay man chips away at her early declarations of guiltless freedom. It is Leonard’s emotional distance that hurts the most, and Mulligan conveys the daggers with heartbreaking grace.

Say what you will about Cooper’s apparent campaigning, but his generosity as both an actor and a director is never in doubt, and his film is better for it. Cooper’s instincts for construction have also grown exponentially since A Star Is Born (his stellar directing debut). Frame after frame is a wonder of style and storytelling, including an unforgettable extended take of simmering intensity and visual contrast that rivals the emotional wallop of Marriage Story‘s famous soul-baring confrontation.

While several layers of polish are indeed evident, Maestro is a film that soars early and often, via moments of glamorous cinematic muscle-flexing and intimate soul searching. It is as much about a great artist as it about the sacrifices great art often demands from both the artist and those who are closest to them. It’s a celebration of a legend and of a legendary bond, a sublime piece of moviemaking that deserves a standing O.

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The Horror of Microagressions

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Raging Grace

by Christie Robb

When Filipina illegal immigrant Joy (Max Eigenmann) has to come up with an extra five thousand pounds to fund her quest to obtain a work visa, she’s thrilled to get a job offer that pays one thousand a week under the table. It’s a live-in housekeeping gig at a swanky British estate that hasn’t been given a once-over in quite a long time.

There are few downsides. First, she’ll have to hide her young daughter Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla) from her employers. Second, she’ll have to look after the dying old white guy upstairs. And that involves following orders barked at her by the dying guy’s total Karen of a niece. Only, maybe the niece’s intentions aren’t entirely well-meaning. And then there’s the racism…and the classism…and the sexism. But, while Joy may be stressed, she’s also stoic and resilient.

This updated Gothic thriller helmed by debut director Paris Zarcilla and co-written with Pancake Zarcilla effectively suspends the viewer in a state of wary suspicion. Dim lighting, spooky old sheet-draped antiques, a discordant musical score, and a kid with a penchant for pranks and squeezing into tight spaces provides ample opportunity for jump scares.

But it’s not the long shadowy corridors, or the judgmental eyes of the family portraits on the walls, or the suspicious locked doors that spook Joy. It’s the worry that her kid is going to get her in trouble with the boss and she’ll end up getting deported.

Toward the end, the social-critique/Gothic horror gets a little bit too complicated and hard to follow for a few minutes with character choices that seem alternatively forced or not dialed up enough, but ultimately it was an effective take on the traditional atmospheric horror.

Could have used more rage, though.

Shudder Premiere

Away from Home for the Holidays

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The Sacrifice Game

by Hope Madden

The Holdovers by way of Blackcoat’s Daughter, Jenn Wexler’s latest mines the Manson-esque horror of the American Seventies for a new holiday favorite.

The Sacrifice Game opens on December 22, 1971. A homey suburban couple has just wished its last Christmas party guests a good night when the band of four who’ve been watching from the  yard come a knocking.

And that’s the thing about the Seventies. People still answered the door to strangers.

Not every scene in Wexler’s era-appropriate gem sings quite like the opener, but genre fans will be hooked, and rightly so.

Nearby, in the Blackvale School for Girls, news of the murder spree has kids happier than ever to go home for holiday break. Except poor Samantha (Madison Baines) and weird Clara (Georgia Acken). Which means their teacher, Rose (Wexler favorite Chloë Levine) has to stay behind, too.

Just as they sit down for Christmas Eve dinner, a knock at the door.

Naturally, Rose answers.

Part of the reason The Sacrifice Game works as well as it does is the casting of the cultish murderers, each with a fully formed character and each somehow reminiscent of the kind of Satanic hippie villains that once gloriously populated trash horror.

Olivia Scott Welch convinces as former Blackvale girl turned bad while Derek Johns delivers a sympathetic turn as the misguided veteran. Laurent Pitre’s self-pity is spot on, but Mena Massoud’s narcissistic charm outshines them all.

There’s enough grisly material for the true horror moniker, but nothing feels gratuitous. Each scene serves a purpose, and all dialog allows characters to unveil something of themselves. The youngers in the cast are not quite as strong as the rest of the ensemble, but their relative weakness is not crippling.

The film looks fantastic, and though the storyline itself is clearly familiar, Wexler’s script, co-written with Sean Redlitz, feels consistently clever.

It’s a rare year to be gifted with multiple enjoyable holiday horrors, but 2023 already boasts Thanksgiving and It’s a Wonderful Knife. The Sacrifice Game more than merits a seat at the same table.

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So Hot

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Everyone Will Burn

by Brandon Thomas

Ten years after her bullied son died by suicide, Maria (Macarena Gomez) looks to end her own life on a lonely bridge in the Spanish countryside. Before she can make the decision, Maria is approached by a small girl covered in soot and dirt. The girl, Lucia (Sofia Garcia) has achondroplasia, which is a form of dwarfism and also the same condition Maria’s son had. As Maria and Lucia’s bond intensifies, so does Lucia’s desire to rid the small town of the people who tormented Maria’s son and have continued to antagonize his suffering mother. 

Director David Hebrero throws a lot at the wall with Everyone Will Burn and amazingly, most of it sticks. Most prominently is the exploration of how people with certain mysterious health conditions are treated as “other” or even “evil”. It’s an ugly part of humanity we all believe to be in the past, but Hebrero puts the spotlight on how fear and misunderstanding can bring out the worst in even the most well-intentioned people. 

Hebrero’s visual language is hypnotic and often dream-like throughout. As Lucia dispatches members of the community (the highlight being the opening few minutes that leaves a policeman engulfed in flames), the nightmarish events taking place are fully realized through the expert camerawork. Similar to American filmmaker Ari Aster, Hebrero wrings a copious amount of tension out of seemingly mundane scenes around a dinner table or after a funeral. These are the scenes that left me squirming in my seat – not the ones involving carnage. 

Gomez is mesmerizing as the haunted Maria. There’s a lot of emotional weight to this performance and Gomez seamlessly transfers Maria’s grief and guilt from earlier in the movie, to wrath and righteous anger in the back half. It’s a performance so captivating that, despite Maria’s spiral into bloody vengeance, you can’t help but cheer her on. 

Everyone Will Burn starts strong and never lets its foot off of the gas pedal for the entire 2 hour running time. Visually, emotionally, and viscerally, this is a film that will stand tall and proud alongside the other excellent horror films of 2023.

Outtakes

Spooky, Ooky

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Where the Devil Roams

by Hope Madden

There is macabre beauty in every frame of Where the Devil Roams, the latest offbeat horror from the Adams family.

The film was co-directed and co-written by its three lead actors – Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams – who are also a family. The same team made last year’s Hellbender and 2020’s The Deeper You Dig, among others.  

Like their earlier efforts, Where the Devil Roams concerns itself with life on the fringes, rock music, and the family dynamic.

Their latest follows a sideshow act, a family. They perform unusual songs sung by their daughter Eve (Zelda Adams), who is, outside of these songs, entirely mute. But the act isn’t bringing in much lately, and as they move from town to town, sometimes Maggie’s temper or sense of justice means blood – even limbs, on occasion – will be spilled.

The family’s lived-in quality benefits the film. As they move from farmhouse to farmhouse, sideshow to riverbend, their tics and quirks meet acceptance born of familiarity. It not only anchors the bizarre nature of the film in authenticity, but creates a tenderness that makes you root for the family no matter their actions.

Poser continues to be a force. She compels your attention, carving out a character that’s vulnerable and strong, insecure, brutish and tender.

The ensemble convinces, particularly the sideshow performers, but the film’s most enduring charm is its vintage portrait look. It’s a gorgeous movie, the filmmakers creating the beautifully seedy atmosphere ideal to the era and setting.

Where the Devil Roams feels expansive and open, but like anything else in the sideshow, that’s all trickery. There’s more happening in this film than they let on, which is why the final act feels simultaneously “a ha!” and “WTF?!”

You won’t see it coming, but in retrospect, it was there all along.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?