Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Feb 19 2025
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Movie Reviews

Monkey See, Monkey Kill

The deep horror roots of the sinister simian wind-up toy in “The Monkey”

The Monkey
Starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien & Christian Convery
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Feb. 21

As a horror flick, The Monkey certainly has its bona fides. It’s based on a 1980 short story by horror maestro Steven King, inspired by a much older classic creepy tale, The Monkey’s Paw, by British author W.W. Jacobs. One of the producers is James Wan, the creator of Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises. The director, Osgood Perkins, made last year’s Longlegs, a wild ride of freakish serial-killer disturbia with Nicolas Cage and a demonic doll. And the director is the son of Anthony Perkins, forever enshrined in the halls of horror as the cray-cray, cross-dressing Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho.

Here, murder and mayhem swirl around a wind-up monkey “toy” that unleashes all kinds of hellzapoppin’ when someone turns the “key” on its back, making its mechanical arms start to bang on a drum. As a drummer myself, hey, I get it—some people don’t think much of drum solos. But at least no one’s ever died, as far as I know, because I dig into a roll or a few paradiddles.

Theo James (from the dystopian Divergent films, and season two of The White Lotus) plays double roles as the adult versions of twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who’ve grown up loathing each other. As kids (both effectively played by Christian Convery, from Netflix’s Sweet Tooth) rummaging through their dad’s collection of souvenir curios, they discover a box containing the monkey. “Turn the key and see what happens” is the instruction on a label on the monkey’s back.

What happens when the key gets turned is spectacularly bad news. People start to die, in twistedly inventive, Rube Goldberg-ian ways—decapitated by a flying knife at a Japanese steakhouse, trampled to death in a sleeping bag by wild horses, mangled by a lawnmower, beheaded by a cannonball, eviscerated with a speargun in a pawn shop. No one is safe when this monkey gets cranked.

Unlike some other evil “objects” or playthings (like the dolls in Chuckie, Anabelle, M3GAN or The Boy), the monkey doesn’t participate or engage in the mayhem. It doesn’t come alive and pick up a kitchen knife, like the South America voodoo doll in Trilogy of Terror, chasing Karen Black in the made-for-TV shocker back in 1975, or directly menace Telly Savalas like Talking Tina, the “Living Doll” on that 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone. This sinister simian is more a silent summoner of evil, an inscrutable avatar for the deep, dark pit of existential unknowable-ness, staring us down with a relentless, unsettling grin and a drumbeat heralding doom…for someone.

Elijah Wood (Frodo from The Hobbit-verse) has a scene as a gonzo parenting guru, and the director himself slips into the role of Hal and Bill’s swinger uncle.  

The movie, which often feels like a smart-ass comedic spoof and send-up of horror cliches, runs on gleeful, ghoulish humor and an embrace of its own wild, wooly weirdness—like the school cheerleaders who show up to rah-rah-sis-boom-bah at murder scenes. It’s also got a subtext about fathers and sons, deadbeat dads, the various toxicities that families “pass down” through generations, and the infallible truth that we’ll all inevitably meet our expiration date someday. The movie even literalizes a line from the Book or Revelation: “And I looked and beheld a pale horse. And his name that sat on him was Death.” Giddy-up!

“Everybody dies,” the boy’s mother (Tatiana Maslany) tells them, after the funeral of their babysitter. “That’s life.”

That’s certainly life with The Monkey, where a twist of its key always brings an insanely over-the-top, spectacularly splattery encounter with the grim reaper. Who’ll be next? How many more people will die? Is the Monkey the devil? Can it be stopped?

And can you ever hear the retro grooves of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” again without thinking of a grinning keyed-up monkey, lopped-off heads, killer bees, and how a cobra can leap out of a golf course hole and clamp down on your jugular?

—Neil Pond

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Jan 29 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “You’re Cordially Invited”

Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon spar in raucous wedding comedy

You’re Cordially Invited
Starring Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon
Written and directed by Nicholas Stoller
Rated R

Streaming Thursday, Jan. 30, on Prime

“Things go wrong at weddings,” states Will Ferrell’s character in this raucous nuptials romcom—in which things do, indeed, go hilariously haywire as two wedding parties discover they’ve been mistakenly doubled-booked for the same time and place.

Ferrell plays the doting widowed dad planning the big day for his only child, his daughter (Suresh Viswanathan). Reece Witherspoon is the sister of another bride-to-be, wrangling the event for her younger sib (Meredith Hagner).  

Personalities clash and tempers flare as both groups compete for space, amenities, attention—and soon are plotting how each can foil and spoil the other’s day. The comedic mix has a terrific cast of supporting players, including standup comic Celia Weston, 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer and veteran actress Celia Weston, who’s appeared in some 75 movies and TV series—and who dang near steals the show as a drawly Southern-belle matriarch. The shenanigans get crazily sideways, but in the middle of the mayhem is a soft, slushy message about dads, daughters, family ties and how love and loathing can be flip sides of the same canoodling coin.

Ferrell, a funnyman with impeccable cred from a slew of hilarious movies, and the versatile Witherspoon do their darndest to ride the seriously silly, anything-goes wavelength, synching up their fine-tuned comedic timing to the orchestration of director Nicholas Stoller, whose resume includes Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), a pair of fratty college yukfests (Neighbors and its sequel) and a boisterous redo of Gulliver’s Travels (2010) starring Jack Black. It has a lot of laughs, but it also sometimes strains to keep all the unrestrained wackadoo on a leash.  

You’ve certainly seen wedding comedies before, from Bridesmaids to Wedding Crashers and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But you’re probably never seen one with such a crazy, anarchic ruckus, including a saboteur in a zebra costume, strip-club groomsmen, bawdy bridesmaids, and much more Hollywood attention to the Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duet “Islands in the Stream” than it’s ever gotten before.

And is that NFL icon Peyton Manning just standing around, one of the Jonas Brothers as a singing pastor with a soft spot for Creed, and SNL veteran Bobby Moynihan as the host of a Masked Singer-esque hit TV show? Yes, yes and yes.

And indeed, as you may have seen in any of the marketing materials, Will Ferrell wrestles an alligator. So if you’re ready for a wedding that offers one uniquely unhinged, surprisingly heartfelt trip down the aisle, well, You’re Cordially Invited to this one.

—Neil Pond

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Jan 16 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “One of Them Days”

Keke Palmer and rapper SZA are seriously broke besties in this riotously funny street-smart female buddy comedy

One of Them Days
Starring Keke Palmer and SZA
Directed by Lawrence Lamont
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Jan. 17

Two broke besties have a wild day in L.A. in this raunchy, riotously fun street-smart female buddy comedy that kicks off the new year’s movie season with a load of laughs. When Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (Grammy-winning rapper SZA, making a very impressive film debut) find out a freeloading boyfriend (Joshua David Neal) has absconded with their rent money, they’re off and running a crazy gauntlet of urban misadventures to get it back.

Along the way, they engage with a gaggle of characters who all contribute to the careening comedic spin. There’s the former stripper (Janelle James from TV’s Abbott Elementary) having a very tough first day working her new job at a blood bank. Another Abbott Elementary alum, Kayla Monterroso Meija, is a stressed-out clerk at a predatory loan company with a ridiculously high interest rate. Dreux swoons for a handsome guy (Patrick Gage) in a Mercedes, until she begins fretting that he might be an axe murderer. A voluptuous temptress (Aziza Scott, from TV’s Home Before Dark) certainly lives up to her nickname of Big Booty. When Alyssa recovers a pair of pricey Air Jordans off a power line, they run afoul of the shoes’ owner, a thuggish gang leader (Snowfall’s Amin Joseph). Euporia’s Maude Apatow is a chipper new—white—resident in the girls’ otherwise all-Black apartment complex, where she becomes an unlikely ally.

SZA and Keke Palmer star in “One of Them Days.”

But the movie belongs to Palmer and SZA, who have a natural, easy-flow chemistry as they plunge right into the riotous rush of it all, while an onscreen countdown clock keeps popping up to show how much time Dreux and Alyssa have left before they’re evicted from the apartment—or worse.

It’s wall-to-wall randy, rat-a-tat-tat zippy and zingy, peppered with f-bombs and other colorful zingers not meant for little ears. See if you can fill in the blanks of this sample of dialogue: “____, I got knocked on my ___ because of them ____.”  Asides about Black hair, Church’s chicken and one character’s, ahem, well-endowment all generated waves of raucous laughter at the screening I attended.

And underneath it all, there’s the foundational subtext of scrappy young Black women navigating jobs (and job interviews), testy romantic relations, depressing economic realities and rapacious rivals, while maintaining their own bonds of sisterhood. When they toast at the end, with Flaming Hot Cheeto margaritas, you’ll taste both the spice and the rich sweetness.

“It’s ghetto,” Dreux says, taking a sip, “but it’s got a runway quality to it.” You might say something similar about One of Them Days: It’s gloriously ghetto, but it totally runs with the gritty glamour of it all.

—Neil Pond

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Jan 14 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Unstoppable”

Inspiring true sports tale of the one-legged underdog who became a collegiate wrestling champ

Unstoppable
Starring Jharrel Jerome, Jennifer Lopez and Bobby Cannavale
Directed by William Goldenberg
Rated PG-13

Available on Amazon Prime Thursday, Jan. 16

You don’t have to be a sports fan to stand up and cheer for this rousing true story about Anthony Robles, who became a champion wrestler despite what was considered the significant handicap—to most everyone but him—of being born with only one leg. Based on Robles’ own 2012 autobiography, it’s an inspiring, heart-tugging tale about a teenage athlete determined to work his way to the top, despite a mountain of odds stacked against him.

Jennifer Lopez gives a solid performance as Robles’ mom, Judy, the emotional anchor in a domestic storm stirred by Robles’ bullying stepdad (Bobby Cannavale) while young Anthony is vying for a place on the Arizona State U wrestling squad and holding down a sideline job, scrubbing private planes at the local airport.

Jharrel Jerome, who stars as Robles, has both his legs, requiring some nifty digital effects to make him look like he doesn’t—and some seamless stunt doubling by Robles himself, who’s now in his mid-30s. It’s amazing to see just on a technical level, because you’ll absolutely be convinced you’re watching, well, a man with only one leg. And you are, except when you’re not. Ah, the magic of the movies.

According to one sideline commentator at a tournament, Robles wrestles “like a boa constrictor,” sliding, slithering, pouncing and squeezing his two-legged opponents. Even if you don’t know your pins from your takedowns, you’ll be amazing at the movie’s realistic depiction of the grappling, rough-and-tumble matches. And you can’t miss the overtones from another cinematic tale of an underdog when Robles’ visit for a match takes him up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and into the same exact spot as Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa in Rocky, nearly half a century ago.

The solid supporting cast also includes Don Cheadle and Michael Peña as coaches, and Shawn Hatosy as Roble’s most formidable rival, the intimidating Tom Brand from the wrestling powerhouse of Iowa State University.

“You make people believe in something,” Robles’ mom tells him as her son’s will to win and overcome creates a growing wave of support far and wide, fans of all ages who cheer him on. “You’re unstoppable.”

You’ll believe, too, in the message of this true-life sports drama with a smear or two of blood, copious amounts of sweat and even some tears. And if you really want your eyes to get moist, stay for the credits, where you’ll learn about Robles’ amazing achievements that continued after the events depicted in the film, as well his mother’s own triumphant, uplifting coda.

—Neil Pond

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Jan 08 2025
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Better Man”

Musical biopic puts a marvelous simian spin on Robbie Williams’ pop-stardom monkeyshines

Better Man
Starring Robbie Williams/Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton & Rachel Banno
Directed by Michael Gracey
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Jan. 10

I’ll venture that you’ve never seen anything like this swinging, soaring, stirring music biopic about British pop star Robbie Williams. Because the star of the show is a monkey.

Throughout the film, Williams is portrayed as a chimpanzee, meant to represent the singer as he sees himself, “unevolved” and immature. “I’m ugly, stupid and untalented,” is young Robbie’s stinging self-assessment. Though what we hear is Williams’ own singing and speaking voice, British actor Jonno Davies portrays him—via some amazingly tactile high-tech motion-capture technology—as the monkey. It’s like one of the primates from Planet of the Apes became a Brit-pop singing star.

When he’s 16, Williams joins the startup “boy band” Take That—in the vein of Boys II Men or Backstreet Boys—that would notch nearly 30 Top 40 hits, a dozen of which went to No. 1 on the British charts. The movie is filled with music, often as springboards for movie-musical sequences, like when the group hits the streets for an poppin’ and boppin’ take of the song “Rock DJ.”      

It’s a bold choice to portray your movie’s star as a simian, surrounded by ordinary people who don’t seem to notice anything unusual. But it allows for some wildly provocative, surprisingly evocative moments as director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) depicts just how maladjusted Williams feels, from growing up in working-class London to reaching the top of the pops as self-loathing singing star. The visual landscape is constantly moving and fluid, from “reality” to sweeping sequences of fantasy. When Williams crashes his car into a frozen lake, he’s swarmed by fans and paparazzi, pulling him deeper under. After he meets a cute girl at a party, the entire scene becomes a dazzling dance number orchestrated to the 1999 hit “She’s the One.” (And hey, this monkey’s got some smoooooth Fred Astaire moves!) When Williams is singing on stage and peers out into the audience, he sees troubling versions of himself, apes glaring back at him in scorn and disapproval. At one point, he dives into the crowd and fights them.

British actor Steve Pemberton plays Williams’ dad, an unabashed fan of classic crooners who abandoned his family to chase his own dreams of stardom. Rachel Banno is Nicole Appleton, the British pop star for whom Williams falls, hard, but eventually loses to another singing star, Liam Gallagher (Leo Harvey-Ellege) of Oasis. Alison Steadman (who played Mrs. Bennet in the mini-series Pride and Prejudice) is Robbie’s beloved grandmother, who gave him affection and support while munching on bags of crisps in front of the telly.

“I don’t want to be a nobody,” a sorrowful young Robbie tells his gram, recalling something hurtful and lingering that his father once told him. Robbie instead wants to be something that he would later express in his song “Better Man.”

That song, of course, becomes the title and the theme of this marvel of a movie, in which a CGI-motion-capture ape man makes us feel all kinds of human empathy for the real person he represents in some daringly creative cinematic monkeyshines.

—Neil Pond

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Dec 23 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Nosferatu”

New remake of the original vampire flick stirs up chills anew.

Nosferatu
Starring Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult & Willem Dafoe
Directed by Robert Eggers
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Dec. 25

A beautiful bride becomes a ravenous obsession for a monstrous vampire in this spectacularly spooky spin on an old, oft-told tale.

How old, and how oft-told? Well, the original Nosferatu was a silent movie back in 1922, long regarded the first vampire film. It was based on the novel Dracula, by Bram Stoker, from the late 1800s. That story, and that movie, are both lauded as groundbreaking masterpieces, launching multitudes of other movie offshoots over the next century. Now this new, supremely crafted creepshow stirs up the terrifying roots of the classic story with chills anew, pouring on a moody megadose of gloomy Gothic doom, dark red blood and gasp-y (sometimes ghastly) arousal to offset all your cozy holiday feelings of comfort and joy.

Lily-Rose Depp (yep, Johnny’ Depp’s model-turned-actress daughter) is Ellen, the young newlywed suffering from unsettling nightmares and violent seizures. Her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is a London real estate agent sent to faraway central Europe to arrange for a new home for the mysterious—and chilling—Count Orlock. (Though it’s never mentioned by name, a glimpse at an upside-down map notes the region as “Transylvania.”) And guess where Orlock wants to relocate? Yep, in London, just down the street from Ellen and Thomas.

Is Ellen sick with worry for her traveling husband? Or maybe distempered with melancholy, perhaps even possessed? Her friends (The Crown’s Emma Corwin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are concerned, puzzled, and unsettled by her troubling spells. During Thomas’ absence, they summon the local doctor (Ralph Michael Ineson), who eventually calls on a scholarly professor of all things ancient and occult-y (Willem Dafoe, perfectly cast).

Soon enough, the prof gets a pungent whiff of what’s up. Turns out the count (Bill Skarsgård) is a vampire with an appetite for blood—and a beyond-the-grave crush on Ellen. But by then, the bodies are piling up, rats have infested the town, the count has arrived after a fateful shipboard journey, and some little girls discover, tragically, that imaginary monsters aren’t so imaginary.

Director Robert Eggers is a maestro of malevolence, as he demonstrated in his previous films The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman. He confidently paints this tale with all kinds of disturbia and draws out—sometimes graphically—the mythos of sexuality that’s often been sublimated in vampire stories. Ellen’s writhing agonies are close to ecstasies as Orlock seduces her from afar, causing blood-spurting, eyeball-bulging contortions—and orgasmic sighs. As different characters say throughout the film, “He is coming!” Uh, well, you could put it that way.  


Willem Dafoe is a vampire hunter.

The movie also explores the nature of evil in a world of yore where demons and curses and fairytales are real, science and religion powerless against unholy darkness, and death a fact of life. Orlock, who turns out to be the eternally unquenchable demon Nosferatu, is quite literally death itself. Can the “plague” he brings to London be stopped? Not just with a stake—or pickaxe—through the heart, I’m afraid.

Let’s talk a minute about actor Bill Skarsgård. He’s best known for playing another demonic character, the killer clown in two It horror flicks. Here’s he’s truly unrecognizable under layers of facial prosthetics and slinking around like a half-decomposed corpse. Cloaked in shadow for most of the movie, he’s a hideously ossified incubus, a profane beast for the ages. He is indeed the stuff of nightmares.

And so is this movie, now leading the pack as the best—and most lavishly unnerving—scary movie of the year. It’s a devilishly potent, magnificently orchestrated scare fest that’s intentionally unsettling, but also strangely comforting. Because it’s a dark, delicious reassurance that as long as Robert Eggers is making movies, horror is in good hands.

—Neil Pond

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Dec 22 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “A Complete Unknown”

Timothée Chalamet channels Bob Dylan in tune-filled biopic about the young troubadour.

A Complete Unknown
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro
Directed by James Mangold
Rated R

In theaters Wednesday, Dec. 25

He hitchhiked a ride, in the back of a station wagon, into New York City in 1961—as a complete unknown—with dreams of becoming a successful singer/songwriter. That’s how this vibrant biopic of Bob Dylan begins, setting up its intoxicating whirl through the turbulent first half of the decade as the former Robert Zimmerman becomes the new “youthful” voice and face of folk music, setting the foundation for all that would follow.

And just this time last year, Timothée Chalamet was singing a different tune, as the spry young chocolatier Willy Wonka. Now he’s kicked it up a few notches and dug down deeper, giving a much more matured, grounded and finely nuanced performance as the enigmatic, petulant, creatively restless and intriguingly shape-shifting writer of such classics as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changing,” “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” He sings like Dylan, talks like Dylan, looks like Dylan and even nails Dylan’s tics and mannerisms. I’ll let true Bob Dylan scholars weigh in on the deep-dish accuracy, but to me, it sure feels like Chalamet could well be in the year-end Oscars race.

The movie introduces us to other real-life characters in Dylan’s early orbit. There’s banjo-playing elder statesman Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and the legendary Woody “This Land is Your Land” Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), twin pillars of era’s folk scene. Monica Barbaro, from NBC’s Chicago franchise (Chicago Justice and Chicago P.D.), brings fire, spice and ice as folksinger Joan Baez; her complicated and testy relationship with Dylan—she calls him an “asshole,” he disses her songwriting as something like “an oil painting at a dentist’s office”—becomes one leg of a romantic triangle with Bob and New York artist Suze Rotolo (Elle Fanning). Ozark’s Charlie Tahan is Al Kooper—who’d later go on to found Blood, Sweat & Tears—as he scoots behind the Columbia studio’s Hammond B3 for a Dylan session and lays down the distinctive organ intro for “Like a Rolling Stone”  (a line from which the movie takes its title). And there’s country hitmaker Johnny Cash (Robert Holbrook), who becomes a pen pal and idol to young “Bobbie.”

Director James Mangold, whose wide-ranging movie and TV work also includes Walk the Line (2005), the Oscar-nominated biopic about Johnny Cash and wife June Carter, creates an authentic, almost encyclopedic milieu of the times, from music-makers in hippie-dippy clothes and smoky Greenwich Village coffeehouses to brow-creasing worries about Communists lurking everywhere, nuclear Armageddon and race riots in the aftermath of the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. It shows how folk music became instrumental in the social activism of its times, its songs confronting and colliding with politics to create seismic pop-culture shifts and upheaval.

A Complete Unknown is really all about Dylan, how he became interwoven into the larger social fabric of the ‘60s, and how the success he wanted so badly also brought him a suffocating level of acclaim that he didn’t. And it’s about how he continually worked to create and re-create himself, twisting and retooling his musical identity in a stubborn refusal to conform to anyone’s expectations—and how even people close to him felt like they didn’t really know him, who he really was, or who he wanted to be.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez.

Fittingly, the movie ends in 1965, just after Dylan goes “rogue” at the iconic Newport Folk Festival, causing a near riot by introducing a jangly bombast of electric instruments and drums for his three-song closing set—and then coming out, with just his acoustic guitar, to sing “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” It’s his final kiss-off to the folk darling he used to be, and how he started. Then he roars off on his motorcycle.

Music fans will dig it for sure, and everyone else—including those too young to “remember” Bob Dylan or the ‘60s—can certainly appreciate the care and attention that clearly went into depicting the events, and finally the pivotal moment when the young troubadour, only in his mid-20s, shook off folk music’s dusty past and headed down a highway into the future. Like a rolling stone, indeed.

—Neil Pond

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Dec 19 2024
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Movie Review: “Sonic the Hedgehog 3”

Jim Carrey all but steals the show from the little blue multimedia mammal

Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Starring Jim Carrey, James Marsden, Tika Sumpter and the voices of Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba, Ben Schwartz and others
Directed by Jeff Fowler
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, Dec. 20

Since 1993—and Super Mario Bros.—Hollywood has been capitalizing on videogames and their built-in fan base of passionate gamers. Sonic the Hedgehog, the Japanese-based Sega series of the early ‘90s, has been one of the most successful, and most prolific, spilling over into television, comics and related games and generating its own galaxy of characters.

This third big-screen movie in the Sonic franchise continues the adventures of the quippy little blue computer-generated anthropomorphic hedgehog who can run faster than the speed of sound. Ben Schwartz (from TV’s Parks and Recreation) returns as the voice of Sonic, who’s joined again by his teammates, the brawny anteater Knuckles (voiced by Idris Elba) and Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessy), a gadget-guru fox.

It’s action-packed, zingy with wit and geared toward the generation-spanning audience the Sonic games and their multimedia spawn have been cultivating now for more than three decades. It’s a kid-friendly spy movie, a sci-fi tale, a meta heist comedy, a perilous adventure and a riff-tastic spin through time and space as Sonic faces off with another super-powered hedgehog named Shadow (voiced with just the right amount of angst by Keanu Reeves), discovering Shadow’s wrenching backstory and unraveling a sinister plot to, well, destroy the Earth.

There are shades of Mission Impossible, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Ocean’s 11, Armageddon, Austin Powers and James Bond, with nods to Godzilla and Casper the Friendly Ghost, loads of far-out gizmos and gimmicks and full-on montages orchestrated to the music of the Beach Boys and Jelly Roll. Even the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album cover gets a nod. And the moon gets sliced in half, like it was indeed made of cheese, and Sonic gets sucked into a gaping black hole. This little hedgehog sure covers a lot of ground.

Other familiar faces get in on the zaniness, including James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, Krysten Ritter, Shemar Moore and Natasha Rothwell. And Alyna Brown, the young Australian actress who played young Furiosa in this year’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, has a small part that resonates throughout the film.  

But the movie really belongs to Jim Carrey, who doubles down on his gonzo, over-the-top Jim Carrey-ness in a double role, returning as the rotund mad scientist Dr. Robotnik and also Robotnik’s mad-scientist grandfather. “It’s like we’re two characters, played by the same actor!” they both exclaim when they meet, looking into the camera for wink-wink emphasis. Carrey’s jokes fly fast and furious—even giving Sonic a run for his ha-ha’s—as he reflexively punches up nearly every scene with quips and puns and mannerisms and movie lines, from across the spectrum of his movie-comedy career, like he’s filling a carnival funhouse with his own greatest hits. If they handed out awards for best performance by Jim Carrey doing Jim Carrey alongside another Jim Carrey in a videogame franchise about a blue hedgehog, he’d be a solid shoo-in.

But for all its gung-ho go-for-it-ness, the movie has a soft, sensitive underbelly about friendship, family, making good choices, love and loss. It’s the awwwwwww at the center of all it all.

Fans of the franchise, of any age, will find a lot to like—especially in its end-scene hint of more to come. And everyone else, well, just sit back, buckle up and let Jim Carrey and Sonic take you on a way-out trip that suggests this speedy bright blue videogame breakout still has even more places for his blurry little legs to take him.

—Neil Pond

Dec 18 2024
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Movie Review: “The Brutalist”

Adrien Brody is an immigrant architect working to build an American dream in this sprawling post-Holocaust drama

The Brutalist
Starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pierce & Felicity Jones
Directed by Brady Corbet
Rated R

In limited release Friday, Dec. 20

Adrien Brody gives an impassioned starring performance as Lázló Tóth, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrates to America in 1947 to build a new life, hoping to draw on his pre-wartime work as an architect back in Hungary.

Taking its name from a mid-century architectural style, The Brutalist is big and bold as it majestically sprawls across the years and Lázló meets a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pierce) who wants him to oversee a monumental legacy project on a hillside in Doylestown, outside Pittsburgh.

This is a large-scale, epic movie, the kind of serious, soulful drama that generates significant Oscar buzz. It’s gorgeous and enormous (three and a half hours long), filled with dramatic intensity, terrific acting, a multi-tiered plotline, complex characters and over-arching themes about the immigrant experience, antisemitism, homelessness, the downside of the American dream and the lofty aesthetics of design. Add opium addiction, lusty sex, a deadly train derailment and a shocking rape for spicy seasoning.

Felicity Jones plays Tóth’s wife, stricken with osteoporosis from wrenching malnutrition in a concentration camp, forcibly separated from her husband in the turmoil of the battle of Budapest at the close of the war—and now confined to a wheelchair. Their teenage niece (Raffey Cassidy) is an orphan, rendered mute by the traumas of what she’s endured. Joe Alwyn is a pompous, smarmy son of privilege; you’ll want to reach through the screen and give him a good, hard slap across his smug face. A Black U.S. Army veteran (Zachari Bankolé) that Lázló meets in a soup line becomes a close friend.

It all looks amazing, with elaborate period detail and impressive, sometimes jaw-dropping visuals, the kind of grandiose skyscraper of a movie—with an overture, intermission and an epilogue—that harkens back to Hollywood epics of yore. The soundtrack—with originals by composer Daniel Blumberg—is auditory magnificence. The movie towers over most others by its sheer scope, unbridled ambition and elegant artistic vision, like the massive, concrete, steel and granite construction project at its core—an achievement designed not just for the present, but a thing to be admired far into the future. The Brutalist isn’t a popcorn matinee movie. It’s a cinematic triumph, a thing of beauty constructed for the ages, and one I promise you’ll watch in awe.  

—Neil Pond

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Nov 25 2024
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Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “Maria”

Angelina Jolie is magnificent as the late, great grand dame of opera in her faltering later years

Maria
Starring Angelina Jolie
Directed by Pablo LarraÍn
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Nov. 27 (and on Netflix Dec. 8)

Angelina Jolie gives a committed, center-stage, Oscar-bait performance as temperamental diva Maria Callas, a 20th century singing superstar who thrilled audiences all over the world. But by the 1970s, Callas’ voice and body were fading and faltering, and the distant applause of the opera houses—and the adulation in which she once basked—were becoming lost in a swirl of hallucinatory memories.

Jolie, whose multi-faceted career includes playing a rock-em, sock-em spy (Salt), a slam-bang videogame heroine (Lara Croft) and a regal Disney villainess (Maleficent), adds another bright plume to her cap as the once-heralded soprano, basking in glorious fantasy in the final weeks of her life in the 1970s. In the kind of sympathetic, deep-dish performance that tends to get awards attention, Jolie—as gorgeous as ever—reportedly prepared for the role for more than six months, learning the physicality and bold body mechanics of singing opera to realistically lip-sync to Callas’ actual vocals throughout the film. She gets a big bravo from me.

Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog, Let Me In) has a recurring role as a filmmaker—a figment of her imagination—interviewing Callas for a documentary about her. (Tellingly, the filmmaker’s name, Mandrax, comes from the sedative Callas has squirrelled away through her ornate Paris apartment.) The dreamscape documentary becomes central to the film, as it allows for numerous flashbacks illuminating Callas’ tumultuous life, including the traumas of her childhood (her mom, who told her she was “fat and unlovable,” and pimped her and her sister out to Nazis), her highly publicized affair with gazillionaire Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis (Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer), and her encounters in the 1960s with a handsome young JFK (Caspar Phillipson). And how Callas found herself in the middle of a scandal when Onassis began having extramarital affairs with both Callas and JFK’s wife, Jackie; yes, he was a lecherous filthy-rich asshole who loved ancient art, his luxury yacht and leggy brunettes.

Callas’ housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and manservant (Pierfrancesco Favino) are big parts of the story, trying to keep their boss grounded, anchored and safe as she drifts off, in more ways than one. “What’s real and unreal,” Callas says at one point, “is my business.”

Director Pablo LarraÍn utilizes a variety of techniques—mimicking cinéma verité, old newsreels and flights of sprawling psychological fantasy—to bring the story to immersive, vibrant life. Maria nowcompletes the Chilean director’s masterful trilogy of biopics about famous females, including Jackie (with Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy) and Spencer (Kristin Stewart played Princess Diana).  

It’s all a mad, magnificent swirl, with Jolie in the middle as the tragic diva whose escape—from harsh reality and the woes of her world—was her voice, her music…and then, her inner space. In a subtle grace-note touch, the film depicts Callas’ expired body, on the floor of her apartment filled with sculpted relics and fine art…where the whelps, whimpering and howls of her two little poodles become a sort of eulogy for the sublime high notes of her now-silent voice.

Fitting, that even dogs would want to continue her song, for a woman who once filled the cavernous spaces of the world with music. And Maria picks up her songful story again, hopefully for a new generation to discover one of the greatest, most acclaimed and sublimely troubled vocalists to ever grace an opera stage.

—Neil Pond

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