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Once and Future

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Mufasa: The Lion King

by Hope Madden

It was hard not to be a little worried about Mufasa: The Lion King. Or maybe it was hard not to be worried about Barry Jenkins. Too few of our genuinely brilliant independent film directors come away from Giant Studio Efforts unscathed. (Quick callback to last week’s JD Chandor debacle, Kraven the Hunter.)

Surely there are some auteurs who are able to leave their unique thumbprints on Disney films. No one comes to mind except Rian Johnson, and man, people really universally loved The Last Jedi, didn’t they?   

Well, Mufasa is far from the flaming disaster of Kraven, thank goodness. And it’s not nearly as polarizingly renegade as Jedi.

Safe. That’s what it is.

It’s also very pretty, if equally needless. The film delivers the origin story of Simba’s father Mufasa, providing—as origin stories so often do—a glimpse into the early development of other beloved and not-so-beloved characters. Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is separated from his parents and his pride by a great flood. Washed far from home, he’s saved by a bratty little cub called Taka (Theo Somolu). While Taka’s father, the king, will never accept this outsider, Taka’s mother (Thandiwe Newton) takes him in.

As Simba and Taka (voiced as older lions by Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr., respectively) flee a marauding pride led by the villainous Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen, gloriously and effortlessly villainous), they find out what kind of lions they really are.

And here for a while we get a bit of something refreshing. Mufasa’s worthiness to rule is grounded in skills learned from hunting with the females in the pride. And some of these transcend hunting skills: he listens, he’s humble, he’s honest.

The CG animation is mainly very impressive and there are camera movements and choices that feel like new ideas in an old tradition. But tradition wins out, not just in the look but in the storytelling. (Outsiders are bad. It takes a king to lead. Women support the men who make things happen. Lions don’t eat meat?)

The core story is often interrupted by a framing device of an elderly Rafiki (John Kani) telling the story of Mufasa. These breaks are meant to be funny, and sometimes they do generate a chuckle, but they feel more like well-timed bathroom breaks for when the film hits Disney+.

But it’s not bad. Your kids might like it. They won’t likely remember it, but they won’t hate it. It’s perfectly safe.

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Third Time Charm

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Sonic the Hedgehog 3

by Rachel Willis

There seems to be a trend in kids’ movies lately where sequels outshine their originals. That’s not always the case, of course, but it’s certainly true with director Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

The stakes continue to rise for Team Sonic – which includes the titular hedgehog (Ben Schwartz), Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) – as another hedgehog, Shadow (Keanu Reeves), is awakened from a 50-year-long hibernation. Shadow has a mission to avenge his mistreatment at the hands of humans by teaming up with Ivo Robotnik’s grandfather, Professor Robotnik. Both Robotniks are played with panache by Jim Carrey.

As with the previous entries, a lot of the film’s focus rests on Carrey. His villainous turn is amusing, but it often feels like too many others are underutilized, such as James Marsden and Tika Sumpter who reprise their roles as Tom and Maddie. Several additional actors return from the previous two films but, aside from Agent Stone (Lee Majdoub), they’re not given much to do.

However, the animated characters are the real stars of the show.  Our new villain, Shadow, is given a certain amount of depth we haven’t seen in the previous two films. Though it’s not a very original backstory, Reeves brings a certain quality to his character that helps elicit audience sympathy.

Sonic, himself, continues to learn what it means to make good choices in life and continues to impart a strong moral message to kids without losing the good-natured humor with which Schwartz imbues in the character.

The story isn’t without flaws, but the fast-paced, entertaining moments make up for the weaker moments. The overall feeling you get from the film is fairly satisfying, and without giving anything away, there is a sense of closure with the conclusion.

But make sure to stick around through the end credits for a hint of what may be in store for Team Sonic in the future.

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Why Yes, That Chicken Looks Familiar

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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

by Hope Madden

Just over 30 years ago, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit took in a lodger and invented a new kind of pants. Neither were what they seemed.

And just when you thought you’d seen the last of Feathers McGraw—well, several decades after you thought you’d seen the last of him—he resurfaces with a diabolical scheme involving zookeepers, turnips, and gnomes.

Oh, and vengeance. Vengeance most fowl.

Longtime Aardman Entertainment filmmaker Nick Park takes on a couple of partners this go-round in co-writer Mark Burton (Shaun the Sheep) and co-director Merlin Crossingham, who’s been part of the Aardman team for years, directing video games, television, as well as the documentary A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman.

After 2023’s disappointing Aardman sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the stop-motion plasticine legends could use a reminder of how they nabbed all four of those Oscars. And so, W&G return with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

What have the lads been up to? Gromit’s been finding peace in his garden. Meanwhile, Wallace has invented a yard gnome that does gardening so Gromit doesn’t have to. Norbot (voiced Reece Shearsmith) is so efficient and hardworking that the whole of Wallaby Street wants his help! What could go wrong?

Loads! Especially once Feathers McGraw catches wind of the new invention, thanks to the crack reporting of one Onya Doorstep (Diane Morgan).

We lost Peter Sallis, longtime voice of Wallace, back in 2017, but Ben Whitehead takes on lead duties with appropriate aplomb.

Otherwise, expect the expected, which turns out to be the film’s strength as well as its weakness. The film mixes silly with clever in exactly the right proportion, as is the charm with the entire franchise. Wallace is so addicted to tech that he’s sure his old ceramic teapot is broken because he keeps pushing its knob and nothing happens. It doesn’t turn on. Nothing!

There are dozens of bright sight gags, loads of Rube Goldberg style tech, and plenty of endearingly dunderheaded characters. The animation itself, full of thumb prints and vivid color, is as brilliant as it has ever been.

There’s just not a lot of surprises. No one expected a giant were-rabbit in the lads’ last film, and it was right in the title of 2005’s magnificent Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Vengeance Most Fowl is a comforting, comfortable adventure, but it breaks no new ground and leaves less of an impression than you might hope.

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Have the Moths Stopped Flapping?

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Nocturnes

by Matt Weiner

You’ll never look at a moth the same way again after seeing them up close—very close—in Nocturnes. The new documentary film from Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan is an intimate look at the hawk moth population in the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas.

But this isn’t a traditional nature documentary. Night after night, the filmmakers slowly reveal the work of the scientists as they study the moths, with a slice of life in the laboratory here and there. Mostly, though, there is only a well-lit screen in the middle of a dark forest, with only a scientist or two and a few local guides to assist with the meticulous photography.

Nocturnes is the kind of film that’s impossible to not use the word “meditative,” but that also doesn’t fully do justice to Dutta and Srinivasan’s subject. It is meditative, sure, but also hypnotic—and never dull.

And like other philosophical nature documentaries (with Koyaanisqatsi feeling like its biggest spiritual predecessor), Nocturnes is as much interested in humanity’s relationship to the natural world as it is to the moths themselves.

Climate change might seem far away from the verdant forests, but its presence and our human effects on a delicate ecosystem hover over the research. Nocturnes looks beautiful and sounds even better.

And yet the nonstop insect and animal noises from the forest (a soundtrack that pairs well with a restrained score by Nainita Desai) is nothing compared to its clarion call for humans to reflect on our place in the environment. And how even the smallest creatures can become a subject of endless fascination and study with the right perspective.

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Appointed Rounds

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The Six Triple Eight

by George Wolf

“Where there is no mail there is low morale.”

For a time during the height of WWII, there was no mail. Battalion 6888 – the only all-black outfit in the Women’s Army Corp to see overseas duty – was given six months to sort through a backlog of 17 million letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home.

If they succeeded, the women would restore hope to families and morale to the troops. If they didn’t, bigots throughout the military would use the failure as proof of inferiority.

Netflix’s The Six Triple Eight tells a lesser-known story of unsung heroes who deserve the acclaim, but the best intentions of writer/director Tyler Perry are often hamstrung by his broad brush and heavy-handed approach to telling it.

Our window into history is Lena Derriecott (Emily Obsidian of TV’s Sistas), who enlists after her high school love Abram (Gregg Sulkin) is shot down and killed in action. Captain (later Major) Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) whips Lena and the rest of the women into shape, and longs for marching orders that her superiors have no intention of providing.

But when President Roosevelt (Sam Waterston), First Lady Eleanor (Susan Sarandon) and National Council of Negro Women founder Mary McLeod Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) learn of the interruption of mail service, openly racist officers such as General Halt (Dean Norris) have to begrudgingly deploy the 6888th.

Perry adapts Kevin Hymel’s 2019 article “Fighting a Two-Front War” with a well-deserved respect for the mission, but a lack of depth that often reduces the timelines to little beyond sanitized set pieces and expositionary dialog. The ensemble consistently over-emotes, while even reliable talents such as Washington and Norris seem coached to push the dramatics and facial reactions.

The history lesson here – which includes the Army’s attempt to sabotage the 6888th – doesn’t need that hard sell. What these women accomplished was truly heroic, and Perry works best when he’s letting us in on the meticulous methods they found to connect the more hard-to-decipher addresses with their rightful owners.

Even the finale – when we get the expected (and welcome) archival footage featuring the real women involved – comes equipped with an extended retelling of the plot points we just watched unfold. From start to finish, The Six Triple Eight seems engineered for the distracted attentions of streaming audiences. So while the film’s limited theatrical run is appreciated, it also feels a bit outside the post code.

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My Only Friend

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The End

by Hope Madden

In 2012, Joshua Oppenheimer co-directed (with Anonymous, to keep the second filmmaker from being murdered) my personal pick for greatest documentary ever made. He won the Oscar two years later for The Look of Silence, a sequel of sorts, but The Act of Killing is unlike anything else ever made and will stay with me until I die.

That’s not the only reason I was excited about The End, Oppenheimer’s narrative feature directing debut. There’s also Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon, two of the greatest living actors. It’s a musical, but I won’t hold that against it.

Don’t think Wicked. The End is not dazzling song and dance numbers boasting stellar vocals set to catchy tunes you’ll be humming after the credits roll. The somber choreography and overlapping vocals feels a bit more inspired by Sondheim, and the setting is anything but dazzling.

George MacKay plays Son. He was born in the underground bunker Mother (Swinton) and Father (Shannon) evacuated to with Butler (Tim McInnerny), Doctor (Lennie James) and Friend (Bronagh Gallagher) sometime before climate change irreversibly destroyed the planet. They arrange and rearrange the masterpieces of the artworld that crowd their walls, swim to keep healthy, and practice emergency drills. Meanwhile Son is helping Father write his autobiography, that of the brave philanthropic energy tycoon who is definitely not to blame for the fall of mankind.

And there is fragile, manufactured, numb peace among them underground. Until Girl (Moses Ingram), an outsider, a survivor of the disasters that have claimed nearly everyone on the planet, makes her way to their compound.

With the influence of the outsider, each member of the little community reflects on what they’ve ignored for years: the little inconsistencies, the fictionalizations, the lies they tell themselves and each other to get numb. To forgive themselves of what a person is willing to do to someone else to survive.

It’s a clever conceit artfully executed. Each performance is beautiful. James and Gallagher are especially powerful in smaller roles. Oppenheimer’s script, co-written with Rasmus Heisterberg, quietly unveils each self-serving, nearly innocent sin that becomes the inescapable rot that ruins a civilization.

Aside from one devastatingly absurd number showcasing Shannon, the music doesn’t add a lot. Swinton’s not much of a singer (well, at least we’ve found the one thing she isn’t good at), which makes the songs a little harder to bear.

In the end, The End is a bold, admirable film that’s sometimes too obvious, a bit too long, and a tad gimmicky to meet its aspirations.

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Hunt for Green December

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Kraven the Hunter

by Hope Madden

I keep waiting for Aaron Taylor-Johnson to become a giant household-name superstar. He’s a good-looking kid, always turns in solid work, makes interesting career choices. I’ve been a fan since 2010’s Kick-Ass, but it doesn’t seem to me that he’s really hit.

Maybe now’s his time. He does a solid job in a supporting turn in Nosferatu, hitting screens this Christmas. And based on the trailer, he seems to be leading the most anticipated horror sequel in decades, next summer’s 28 Years Later. Plus, he’s finally starring in his own franchise comic book superhero movie, J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter.

And holy shit, J.C. Chandor! Do you know how good a director he is?! Margin Call, All Is Lost, A Most Violent Year—these are brilliant films. Brilliant! And you know what happens with genius indie directors pair up with Marvel. Just look how well that went for Oscar winner Chloé Zhao and her endlessly maligned Eternals.

What to know going in? It’s rated R. Hmmm, provocative. Oscar winners Ariana DeBose and Russell Crow join Taylor-Johnson, along with beloved indie actors Christopher Abbott and Alessandro Nivola, plus Fred Hechinger, who is killing it in 2024 (Thelma, Gladiator II, Nickel Boys).

The result: After a fun, bloody prologue, Act 1 plods along with scene after scene of exposition. In Act 2, we get to see a lot more exposition, a bit more action, but at least the seriously fine ensemble is able to carve out some weird, fun characters.

Hechinger comes off best as the sweet-natured younger brother Dmitri to Kraven (Taylor-Johnson). Both sons of criminal kingpin Nikolai Kravinoff (Crowe), Dmitri craves his father’s respect while Kraven spurns all his dad stands for and hunts down baddies like him all over the world.

Crowe, brandishing a ludicrous Russian accent, is fun in that saucy Russell Crowe way. Likewise, Nivola and Abbott are delightfully, drolly evil and seem to be having an excellent time.

DeBose is wasted in a badly written role. Her scenes are almost exclusively with Taylor-Johnson, who’s asked to look good shirtless, move about well, and talk more than the character should just to make sure audiences don’t get lost.

The biggest problem are the CGI animals. Yikes. (It makes one worry for the brilliant indie director Barry Jenkins and his leap to CGI animals/giant studios with next week’s Mufasa: The Lion King.) How can they all look this bad?

But, Act 3 delivers so much blood! I’d almost forgotten about that R rating until Kraven snaps shut those bear traps on that bad guy’s head!

It’s not a great movie. I doubt it’s really franchise material, which is almost too bad because I’d love to see Hechinger again. It’s not really worth waiting for the Act 3 payoff, unless you just really like bloodspatter and viscera in your superhero movies.

Maybe 28 Years Later will be better.

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Sister’s Keeper

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Scrap

by Rachel Willis

Writer/director (and star) Vivian Kerr’s film, Scrap, opens on a woman (Kerr) sleeping in her car. When a passing jogger asks if she needs help, she quickly makes her way to another location. It’s clear our protagonist, Beth, is living in her vehicle. 

Problems continue to pile up on Beth as she struggles to navigate this existence. She is also desperate to keep this tenuous situation from her brother, Ben (Anthony Rapp), in whose house she’s just crashed with her daughter, Birdy (Julianna Layne).

Because life is never simple, Ben has his own issues. However, in light of Beth’s situation, these don’t seem particularly compelling. His career as a writer isn’t going the direction he wants, and he and his wife, Stacy (Lana Parrilla) are struggling to have children of their own. The first problem feels like someone living the dream whining that the dream isn’t dreamy enough. The second problem elicits a lot more sympathy.

Of course, the strength of the film rests on both the stellar performances of Kerr and Rapp, and their amazing chemistry as a brother and sister struggling to understand each other. Stacy adds another dimension to the family drama, as she has so much less patience for Beth’s flakiness than Ben. And since neither Ben nor Stacy really understand what’s going on with Beth, Stacy’s lack of sympathy rings true.

There are additional pieces that come into play over the course of the film building a rich backstory.

Kerr does an excellent job addressing the questions that might arise while watching the film. It’s also easy for people to sit from a place of comfort and wonder why another might be so reluctant to share that their life is falling apart. Why they might make choices that seem counterproductive to moving forward.

The film’s biggest issue is that it, like Beth, too often treats Birdy as an afterthought. While it works for the character, it doesn’t work as well for the film. Birdy deserves a bigger place in the narrative, as she is as much affected by the situation as anyone. Because the film is otherwise so well-crafted, this only makes Birdy’s lack of depth stand out more.

But it’s hard to fault the film too much since Kerr paints such a touching portrait of a woman struggling to make it in a world that treats so many like her with such disdain.

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Winter of Discontent

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Oh, Canada

by Hope Madden

Paul Schrader has made a career of solitary, perhaps unforgivably damaged men seeking final redemption through self-sacrifice. The stakes and damage change from project to project, but the themes remain consistent. You can see what drew him to the Russell Banks novel Foregone, in which a lauded documentarian now dying of cancer sits for an interview determined to confess his fictionalized mythology to his wife.

Retitled Oh, Canada for the screen, the film sits with Leo Fife (Richard Gere), wheeled out in a sour mood to his living room, which has been transformed quickly into a film studio. His former students Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill) intend to film a final farewell with the famous American draft dodger turned Canadian documentary provocateur.

Leo just wants to tell his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) who he really is.

As Leo reminisces, Jacob Elordi takes on the younger self moving through marriage and back to high school, to youthful indiscretions and less youthful betrayals. Periodically, Gere will walk out of a scene as Elordi walks into it, Schrader reminding the viewer that memory is a tricky thing, sometimes as fanciful and artificial as fiction.

This artifice becomes the film’s undoing. There’s a staginess to the dialogue, a theatricality to the aging and de-aging, the way one actor will take on multiple personas. It fits with the theme of memory and truth but is at odds with what Schrader does best, and that’s brutal truth.

Gere delivers exactly that in the film’s most blistering and uncomfortable scenes, almost hateful in his regret, in his desperation to come clean—as clean as this rather dirty man can come. His contempt for himself extends to his students, some for being like him, some for having been weak for him. When the opportunity arises, Gere and Schrader are on a different level than the balance of the cast and the rest of the film. It seems Schrader exposes something of himself as this character, this filmmaker, commits his own deterioration and death to cinema.

The last Banks novel Schrader adapted, 1997’s Affliction, generated two Oscar nominations, including James Coburn’s win. And while both novels fit the Schrader canon, neither film seems like his creation, something sprung from the folds of his own brain.

Schrader’s greatest screenplays—Taxi Driver, First Reformed, The Card Counter—find hope in the hopeless resolution. Oh, Canada lacks the cohesion of story and the poignant irreversibility that Schrader’s best films boast.

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Most Natural Painkiller

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Queer

by Hope Madden

William S. Burroughs is a tough writer to set to film. Queer, an appendage to his first novel, Junky, published decades later as its own novella, is particularly thorny. Rather than submerging the writer’s themes and curiosities under layers of surreal flourish—as most of his novels did—both Junky and Queer mainly skim the surface in a Bukowski-esque autobiography by way of fiction. Mainly.

Protagonist William Lee—the Burroughs stand-in—is a recovering heroin addict in 1940s Mexico City, played with ferocious commitment by Daniel Craig. Without the buffer of the drug, Lee is a raw bundle of longing, isolation and desperation passing time among expats and looking for a different kind of fix.

Luca Guadagnino’s bittersweet period piece works best when it directs the confessional prose to create a character study. Craig meets that challenge, delivering a performance of unsheathed vulnerability and ache cut with salty wit and self-loathing.

Burroughs was the master of the unreliable narrator. Though Guadagnino doesn’t develop the same kind of reckless guide through his film, the script and performance make it clear that, though Lee is our protagonist, he’s not to be trusted. He’s a user, and though Craig’s performance is wonderfully human, he’s also every ounce the Ugly American.

That creates some fascinating scenes, but it does not make for much of a narrative arc.

Queer follows the relationship between Lee and the much younger WWII veteran Eugene Allerton, played with intriguing distance by Drew Starkey. Jason Schwartzman pops in and out for comic relief and the great Lesley Manville arrives in a third act that feels, while fascinating, also wildly out of place.

Because the relationship between Lee and Allerton is never really probed, and Allerton remains as distant and mysterious to us as he does to Lee, Queer feels unfinished. Guadagnino’s aesthetically lovely turns toward the surreal do little to either clarify the story or to deepen the mystery. They feel like ornamentation, which draws more attention to the artifice of the period detail, the stilted ensemble performances and the musical choices.

There is something in Queer that is beautiful, provocative, unsettling and unpleasant—all adjectives easily at home within the Burroughs atmosphere. It’s not a terrible way to spend an evening, but it’s not entirely satisfying, either.