Review: 'Obsession' is a simple horror premise played out to intense extremes, neatly dancing from terrifying to ludicrous

The premise for the new horror movie “Obsession” is simple and direct — with a “be careful what you wish for” message that’s echoed in the film’s advertising — but what makes this disturbing and stomach-churning exercise in body horror is in the ways writer-director Curry Barker goes over the top and keeps accelerating. 

Baron (Michael Johnston), “Bear” to his friends, works in a music store with his three best pals: Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Nikki (Inde Navarrette) and Sarah (Megan Lawless). They hang out for bar trivia night, with Nikki not realizing how much of a crush Bear has on her, and Bear not seeing that Sarah is crushing on him pretty hard, too.

Bear is preparing to ask Nikki out on a date, so he goes to a New Age-y shop to find a crystal pendant to replace one she lost. Instead, he comes across a novelty item, a “One Wish Willow,” that one is supposed to break in half and make a wish. Bear chickens out at the moment he’s about to ask Nikki out, and then cracks open the One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki would fall in love with him harder than anyone in the world.

And, with that, one can almost hear the fingers of a monkey paw curling up.

Suddenly, Nikki has turned around and invited Bear into her house, and to her bed. It all happens so quickly, and so strangely, that Bear isn’t sure whether the wish-granting willow’s actually responsible for the change. As the movie progresses, and without giving away too much, Nikki’s behavior gets more psychotic — and much of Barker’s attention is given toward how Bear and their friends react to the social awkwardness and, eventually, the pure terror.

It takes some strong performances to pull off this kind of outrageous behavior while drenched in stage blood, straddling the line between horrific and ridiculous. Johnston is fascinating, as his Bear slowly realizes how his rash act has uncorked such horrific consequences. But it’s Navarrette (who you may recognized from The CW’s “Superman & Lois”) who pulls out the stops, fearlessly throwing herself into Nikki’s wish-induced craziness. 

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‘Obsession’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Omaha' is a troubling family road trip, driven by intense performances by John Magaro and two child actors

The success of director Cole Webley’s intense drama “Omaha” is due entirely to the tight ensemble of performers — three actors, two of them under the age of 10 — in the claustrophobic space of a dilapidated Toyota crossing the American West.

Webley and screenwriter Robert Machoian start with a father, played by John Magaro (“September 5”), carrying his sleeping 6-year-old son, Charlie (Wyatt Solis), to the car. Then he wakes his 9-year-old daughter, Ella (Molly Belle Wright), and tells her to join her brother. They’re taking a trip, Dad tells them, from their home in Nevada to Nebraska. (The bulk of the movie was filmed in Utah, and only locals would be able to notice.)

Dad tells the kids the trip will be a fun adventure. Ella notices the envelope Dad put in the glove box — containing the kids’ Social Security cards and birth certificates — and suspects the family is moving.

Webley and Machoian plant other clues for the audience, like the fact that a sheriff’s deputy approaches Dad just before they’re leaving, reminding him that the house has to be vacated today — or the hints that Ella and Charlie’s mom “got sick” and is no longer in the picture.

Why has Dad put the kids in the car? And why Nebraska? Those questions are eventually covered in Machoian’s spare script, but saying more would deny viewers the opportunity to watch Magaro’s restrained performance as a working-class man slowly unraveling.

Part of the beauty of Magaro’s performance is that it works in perfect harmony with the young actors playing his children. Especially good is Wright (who starred in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever”), who carries the emotional weight of this road trip with a strength more experienced actors would have trouble mustering. Together, Magaro and these remarkable children make “Omaha” an intense and rewarding drama.

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‘Omaha’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic material. Running time: 83 minutes.

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This review previously ran on this site on January 24, 2025, when the movie premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' gives a fictionalized, and surprisingly dull, account of Vladimir Putin's rise

We’re familiar with the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” which she coined to describe the workaday attitude that could lead to atrocities like the Holocaust. 

In “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a fictionalized take on the rise of Russia’s Vladimir Putin from the view of the political fixer who secured his rise, we’re confronted with something else: The evil of banality — the idea that having no morals and a dull demeanor leads one to horrific actions because the person is to boring to think of doing anything else.

Vadim Baranov — the movie’s fictitious main character, played by Paul Dano — is introduced in retirement, telling his version of Putin’s ascension to an American scholar (Jeffrey Wright) visiting his snowy residence outside Moscow. Dano deploys the same calm monotone portraying Vadim in flashbacks and in narrating the story, and you question whether anything in life could cause Vadim to show an emotion. It’s like watching the HAL 9000 from “2001” in a chunky sweater.

Vadim tells of his youthful days as a theater student, in the says when Mikhail Gorbachev was starting the political changes that would allow the Soviet Union to crumble. Vadim begins a romance with Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), a jaded artist, but their relationship falters when she shows more interest in Vadim’s friend, Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge), who represents a new breed in Russia: The oligarch, hustling for money through avenues legal and otherwise.

As Gorbachev is succeeded by the unsteady maverick Boris Yeltsin (George Sogis), Vadim becomes a successful producer for Russian state television, devising reality shows that attract eyeballs but not brains. His boss, Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), is tasked with making Yeltsin seem engaged with Russians — and when that fails, he starts looking around for a new political leader onto whom Boris can lavish his image-making talents. 

Boris finds such a candidate in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former KGB agent who Boris thinks can be molded into the sort of tough, dynamic leader the Russians can get behind. Putin — played by Jude Law in a rich performance that goes beyond caricature — wins his election to prime minister, and Boris tries to warn Vadim of the monster they’ve created. But it’s too late, and Vadim is well on his way to shaping Putin’s public image and getting sucked into his power games.

Director Olivier Assayas, maker of such masterpieces as “Personal Shopper” and “Clouds of Sills Maria,” and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère adapted Giuliano Da Empoli’s 2022 novel, deftly inserting the fictional Vadim into key moments of Putin’s rise to power. Those richly detailed moments, showing everything from Putin’s crackdown on Chechnya to his manipulation of the Sochi Olympics, are the best parts of the movie.

What’s less interesting is Dano, whose strenuous efforts never to raise his voice or betray an emotion work against him and the movie, denying us a chance to understand the mind of someone drawn to power without considering the consequence. He’s an empty shell of a character, and when Law’s Putin finally shows up 44 minutes into the movie, Dano practically disappears — and I didn’t really miss him.

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‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

★★

Opens Friday, May 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, some sexual material, graphic nudity, violence and a grisly image. Running time: 136 minutes.

Review: 'The Sheep Detectives' is a whimsical delight, a gentle comedy about farm animals becoming crime solvers

There may not be a mood that’s harder to get right on film than whimsy — so when a movie gets that delicate balance of humor, absurdity and charm just right, as “The Sheep Detectives” does brilliantly, you have to stop and celebrate.

Top-billed Hugh Jackman plays George Hardy, who tenderly cares for a flock of sheep in the English countryside. He sees to all their needs, has given each one of them names, and every night before going to bed, he reads to them. Murder mysteries, mostly.

What George doesn’t know is that when he goes to bed, the sheep talk to each other as they try to guess who committed the crime in that night’s book.

The sheep have distinctive personalities, and the voice casting matches them well. They include: the distinguished oldest sheep, Sir Ritchfield (voiced by Patrick Stewart), the cantankerous rams Ronnie and Reggie (both voiced by “Ted Lasso” star Brett Goldstein), the loner Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston), the maternal Cloud (voiced by Regina Hall), and the wise Mopple (voiced by Chris O’Dowd), who alone possesses the knack among the sheep of not forgetting things that are unpleasant. The leader of the sheep, and of the mystery book club, is Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Just as the sheep are close to solving the latest literary whodunnit, a real-life mystery lands in their midst — when they find George dead in front of his caravan. Lily says the sheep can figure out this case, just by following the advice they’s learned from listening to George’s nightly readings.

Certainly there are plenty of likely suspects, who are all gathered in town when George’s lawyer, Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), invites several townspeople to the reading of his will. The possible suspects include: a rival shepherd (Tosin Cole), the town’s butcher (Conleth Hill), the local innkeeper (Hong Chau) who had a crush on George, and a newcomer, Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon), who was visiting George because he was her long-estranged daughter. 

The idea that George was murdered also interests Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), the town’s not-very-bright constable, and Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), a rookie reporter who thinks cracking the case could make for a winning news story.

The sheep soon find that solving a real murder is harder than the books make it out to be — and there’s the added problem of getting the humans to believe a murder has happened. The steps Lily and the others take to lead the townsfolk — especially Officer Tim — to the clues they’ve found make for a good amount of the movie’s off-kilter humor.

Director Kyle Balda finds a level of charm and wit that eluded him helming three movies in the “Despicable Me”/“Minions” franchise, striking a tone that’s similar to “Babe” or the “Paddington” films. Also give credit to screenwriter Craig Mazin —  who co-created “The Last of Us” for HBO, as radically different a project from this as you could imagine — for adapting German crime writer Leonie Swann’s novel, “Three Bags Full.”

“The Sheep Detectives” is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you as you watch. You think you’re settling in to watch a sweet, slightly odd little comedy about farm animals and murder, and things unfold that deliver a surprising gentleness and emotional heft. It’s as perfectly delightful as a movie can be.

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‘The Sheep Detectives’

★★★★

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic material, some violent content and brief language. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Mortal Kombat II' is a bloody, awful movie that only the franchise's most devoted fans might enjoy

Many of the same people who made the 2021 reboot of “Mortal Kombat” — based on the ‘90s video game — are back for “Mortal Kombat II,” including director Simon McQuoid and 10 cast members.

So what’s new in this sequel? Well, there’s Karl Urban — whose franchise credits include “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movies — hamming it up as Johnny Cage, a fading action star who gets a chance to uncover the warrior behind the Ray-Bans and 5 o’clock shadow. Besides him, it’s more of the same nonsensical and hyper-violent fighting.

In what passes for a plot in Jeremy Slater’s script, we’re told that Earth — sorry, Earthrealm, in the game’s parlance — is 0-for-9 in a combat tournament against the dark forces of the Outworld, and one more loss means the Outworld’s brutal emperor, the skull-masked Shao Kahn (played by the beefy Martyn Ford), will take over Earth forever. 

In the prologue, we see Shao Kahn conquer another world by killing its king and taking the queen, Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), and the princess, Kitana. As an adult, Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), is outwardly loyal to Shao Kahn, her stepdad, but secretly trains to one day fight him. 

In Earthrealm, Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) gathers the available fighters for the next tournament, including returning characters: The energy-shooting Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), robot-armed Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), fire-wielding Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), power-absorbing Cole Young (Lewis Tan) and, eventually, the laser-eyed Scottish smart-mouth Kano (Josh Lawson). 

Kano’s presence, as well as that of enemy fighters Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) and Kung Lao (Max Huang), are proof that dying in the first movie wasn’t going to keep someone out of this one. And as Asano and his “Shogun” castmate Hiroyuki Sanada learned, winning Emmys wasn’t enough to break a contract to appear in the sequels.

If you’re expecting some clever screenwriting tricks to explain all of this, forget it. McQuoid and Slater are only interested in getting these characters on the set together so the fighting can start. And, as in the game, there’s a lot of blood-splattering carnage in front of green screens in the places where satisfying action sequences should go. Not even the game’s idiotic taglines — like “finish him!” and “get over here!” — can make “Mortal Kombat II” feel like more than watching someone else play a video game.

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‘Mortal Kombat II’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, and language. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: Billie Eilish concert film, 'Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D' captures the singer declaring her independence and taking her audience along

Seeing a concert film for an artist whose music you don’t know well becomes a case study in the mechanics of entertainment — and with “Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D,” those mechanics prove to be quite fascinating.

My familiarity with the 24-year-old Eilish was admittedly limited, mostly to the two songs that won Oscars for her and her brother Finneas: “No Time to Die” from the James Bond movie of the same name, and “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie.” As the movie went on, I recognized probably her most played single, “Bad Guy,” and that was it. I like the other songs in the set list, but what really struck me here was the stagecraft and what it represents.

On her “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour, Eilish performed in the round, on a massive rectangular stage whose floor featured the same kind of digital screens that also descended from the ceiling. And, in a departure from the massive productions of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour or Beyonce’s “Renaissance” tour (both of which were captured in spectacular concert films), Eilish doesn’t go in for costume changes. At both shows filmed for this movie, in Phoenix, Arizona, and Manchester, England, Eilish wears the same outfit: An oversized t-shirt and basketball jersey (with the words “Hard and Soft” across the front), baggy men’s shorts, and sneakers.

In one of the movie’s interview segments, Eilish explains to her co-director and camera operator James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron) how her clothes are a choice, and an expression of her feminism. By dressing in a way that makes her comfortable, rather than in some body-hugging outfit, she’s telling her audience – mostly young women like herself and teens who want to be like her — that they can be who they are and be happy. And a rock star.

Seen in that light, and with a few snippets of fans explaining how Eilish’s music has sometimes literally saved their lives, “Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D” is a celebration of acceptance. It captures Eilish doing exactly what she wants to do: Live her life, sing her songs, and hang out with 20,000 people who can sing them, too.

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‘Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language, and suggestive references. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Blue Heron' is a heartbreaking debut movie from director Sophy Romvari, about neurodivergence and the unreliability of memory

In her emotionally searing family drama, “Blue Heron,” writer-director Sophy Romvari makes her feature debut and lands on an important truism in filmmaking: Biographical specificity, when done as well as she does it here, leads to emotional universalty.

Romvari’s semi-autobiographical story starts with a family pulling up their U-Haul to a new house on Vancouver Island. The parents, played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa, are Hungarian immigrants. There are twin boys, Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble), who act as you’d expect boys of around 10 years old would. And there’s the observant youngest child, Sasha, age 8, played by Eylul Guven, a quietly moving newcomer.

There’s one more person in the family: The kids’ teen half-brother, Jeremy, played by Edik Beddoes, also making his movie debut. Jeremy is the only blond in the family, and that’s not the only reason he stands out. He seldom speaks, and is withdrawn from his younger siblings. It becomes clear that Jeremy is somewhere on the autism spectrum — and when each viewer realizes that is a good indicator of whether they know someone who’s neurodivergent. 

In the first half of the film, Romvari captures through young Sasha’s inquisitive gaze the many ways a neurodivergent family member can become the center of the house. Jeremy’s obstinance, his refusal to do what his parents tell him, and even his run-ins with the law, occupy the parents’ time and attention — particularly the mother, who questions her parenting skills and at one point gets angry at her husband for detaching from Jeremy’s troubling behavior.

In the second half, the movie shifts abruptly. It’s year’s later, and we’re following a young woman in Vancouver, B.C. (played by Amy Zimmer). She’s a filmmaker, and we watch set up her documentary camera before gathering a group of social workers together to discuss a case file. It doesn’t take long to piece together that the case is Jeremy, and the filmmaker is the adult Sasha.

It’s here, building on the events in the movie’s first half, that Romvari gets to the real point of her delicately devastating film: The unreliability of memory, and how the things we think we remember from our childhoods may not hold up to scrutiny. 

Romvari draws moving performances from her largely unknown cast, creating a fractured family trying to find their way through an intractable situation — one encountered by thousands of families, though each feels like they’re the only ones in the world facing it. “Blue Heron” doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it does declare that those families aren’t alone.

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‘Blue Heron’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violent content, and language. Running time: 90 minutes; in English and Hungarian, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' gets the gang back together for fashion and fun, with Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep connecting over the struggles of today's journalism

It may seem odd that a bubbly comedy like “The Devil Wears Prada 2” — a continuation of the Anne Hathaway / Meryl Streep fashion magazine franchise launched 20 years ago — would come out of the gate on the first movie weekend of May, traditionally the start of the summer movie season.

Isn’t the first weekend in May the time for action movies, science fiction and fantasy, you may ask. Then you look at what happens in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and see that it’s very much a fantasy — of the wish-fulfillment variety.

When we reunite with Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, she’s left behind the world of Runway magazine, where she had a memorable internship under the impossible-to-please Miranda Priestly (Streep’s character) 20 years earlier. Andy, we’re told has had a stellar career as a journalist, covering important stories all over the world, most recently for a New York newspaper.

Then, at the very moment she’s about to receive a prestigious award, her phone buzzes — along with the phones of all of her colleagues at the table. They’ve all been laid off, via text. Andy gives an acceptance speech that becomes a viral moment, as she laments the state of American journalism.

Meanwhile, back at Runway, Miranda is dealing with a different journalistic problem. A poorly vetted puff piece about a fast-fashion brand has blown up in her face, with the internet abuzz about the sweatshop conditions that Runway failed to report. Miranda, who has seen her extravagant budgets and print edition pages both slashed as she’s transitioned to digital content, has her back against the wall.

The owner of the magazine conglomerate, Ira Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), decides to give Runway a credibility boost by hiring Andy as its new features editor. That Irv does this without telling Miranda first just heightens the tension when she encounters Andy again. Andy tries to assign some solid news stories, but finds getting online readers to click on the articles is a bigger challenge than she thought. 

Meanwhile, Miranda has to make deals with advertisers, which is how Andy again meets up with Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Miranda’s former assistant and now an executive at Dior. Rounding out the reunions, Andy also connects with Runway’s long-suffering design director, Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), still feeling the sting of Miranda’s lack of appreciation for his myriad talents.

It’s fascinating to watch director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, both back from the first movie, use the real-life problems of today’s journalism — capricious ownership, corporate bean-counting, sacrificing credibility for clickbait — in a setting where ostentatious wealth and sequined glamour are the norm. It’s even stranger to let audiences, who likely fretted about the amount of gas it took to get to the theater, consider the choice of which billionaire to root for: Irv, Emily’s tech bro boyfriend (Justin Theroux) or the tech bro’s ex-wife (Lucy Liu).

There’s a fair amount of wit in the script, with Tucci’s Nigel again getting many of the best lines as he continues to school the surprisingly sunny Andy in both fashion and appeasing Miranda. (As a jaded old journalist, I question how enthusiastic and spunky Andy seems to be after two decades as a reporter.)

But the real fun – aside from picking out the many cameo appearances and luxuriating in the playgrounds of the extremely rich — is watching Hathaway and Streep back together to spar again as the imperious Miranda and the optimistic Andy. Hathaway seems to up her game in her scenes with Streep, and Streep seems to enjoy working to turn this impossibly arrogant character into something human. Their chemistry gives “The Devil Wears Prada 2” the fizzy energy it needs. 

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‘The Devil Wears Prada 2

★★★

Opens Friday, May 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language and some suggestive references. Running time: 119 minutes.