Review: In 'Wicked: For Good," both Erivo and Grande overcome the deadweight of a bloated two-movie franchise

Fans of last year’s “Wicked” likely will come into the concluding chapter, “Wicked: For Good,” expecting the same bouncy good time, elaborate computer effects to build the world of Oz, and the extraordinary pipes of Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba — well on her way to become the Wicked Witch of the West.

They’ll get the effects, none more spectacular than Erivo’s voice, but the bounce is less bouncy. Instead, director Jon M. Chu leans into the darker corners of the Broadway musical’s second half, as Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s Glinda the Good contend with the power dynamics of an authoritarian wizard (Jeff Goldblum), the fear-mongering propaganda of Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and how ambition can tear a friendship apart. There’s also a disturbing figure added to the mix, whose face we never see as she cuts a murderous path through Oz — someone by the name of Dorothy.

The second installment of the “Wicked” story starts with Elphaba attacking the Wizard’s troops as they build the Yellow Brick Road using enslaved animal labor. Elphaba trusts, naively, that the people of Oz can be made to understand how badly the Wizard is behaving — not factoring in the ways Morrible uses propaganda and her own magic to turn public sentiment against Elphaba.

Morrible knows that to create a villain, she must also create a hero as an alternative. So she starts working on turning Glinda into that hero — by providing her a bubble chariot, and arranging her wedding to Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), the captain of the Oz guard. But Fiyero’s heart is set on the person he’s been ordered to hunt down: Elphaba.

The first part of “Wicked” centered on Elphaba’s struggle to be accepted at Shiz University, and her discovery that she — like Morrible and unlike the Wizard or Glinda — actually has magic powers. This allowed Erivo to shine, particularly in the Act One closing number, “Defying Gravity.”

In this second part, the focus is on the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda — and how others, particularly Morrible and the Wizard, try to twist this unlikely friendship into something evil and curdled. 

And while Erivo is as strong here as before, the exuberant surprise is Grande’s turn in the tricky role of Glinda. Grande finds the perfect register to display the public persona of the good Glinda, with the mix of emotions — heartbreak, jealousy and (as seen in a childhood flashback) a strong case of imposter syndrome. Grande’s also a gifted comedienne and a dead-solid mimic, and she deploys those talents to concoct a Glinda who’s more tart than the cotton-candy persona.

Still, as with the first movie, there’s a fair amount of bloat in “Wicked: For Good,” including new songs — one for Erivo’s Elphaba and one for Grande’s Glinda — that don’t sparkle as much as the classics, and a few extraneous characters (sorry, Bowen Yang). For artistic reasons, these two films could have been pared down to a solid three-hour spectacle. For financial ones, we get the tail end of the five-hour overkill.

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‘Wicked: For Good’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/violence, some suggestive material and thematic material. Running time: 139 minutes.

Review: 'Sentimental Value' puts two great actors, Stellan Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve, in a wrenching tale of love, loss and art

The Norwegian-set drama “Sentimental Value” raises two questions that movie critics ask at this time of year, as the award-season talk overrides all other thought: Is Stellan Skarsgard one of the greatest actors of our lifetime? And is whether Renate Reinsve and Joachim Trier, who collaborated before this on “The Worst Person in the World,” the greatest actor-director combo since DeNiro and Scorsese?

And because these questions come up in a movie where Skarsgard and Reinsve play a father and daughter both united and divided by their art, the answers become secondary to the sheer enjoyment of actors sparking off each other creatively.

Trier, writing with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, starts by introducing us to Nora Borg, Reinsve’s character, an Oslo stage actor who’s introduced to us while she’s having a massive case of stage fright just as the curtain goes up on her new production. When Nora finally goes onstage, she’s brilliant — but one wonders what all the anxiety is doing to her.

Trier then shows Nora in the family house — the place where she and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), grew up listening to their parents argue. On this day, though, the house is filled with mourners, after the funeral of their mother, who died after a long battle with cancer. And in the door walks Gustav (Skarsgard), Nora and Agnes’ father.

While visiting, Gustav tells Nora he has something he wants to ask. Gustav, a famous movie director, has a new script, and he thinks Nora would be perfect in the lead role. Nora — whose screen work is apparently limited to a run on a popular Norwegian TV series — has never worked with her father before, and tells him she doesn’t want to start now.

Gustav then flies to Deauville, France, for a career retrospective tribute — including the screening of a movie that starred Agnes when she was 8 years old. One of his admirers at the festival is Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a famous American actor who declares she’s willing to cancel her previous commitments to make a movie with Gustav. 

Almost immediately, Gustav is back in Oslo, with Rachel in tow. Gustav has sacrificed some of his artistic vision to make his movie with Rachel, including changing it to English and signing a production deal with Netflix. But Gustav plans to shoot his movie in the old family home — if Agnes, who lives there now with her husband, Even (Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud), and their son Erik (Øyvind Hesjedal Loven), approves the shoot. Nora, back at work at the theater, starts to wonder if she made the right choice by refusing the role.

Trier’s approach seems simple — put any combination of Skarsgard, Reinsve and Lilleaas in a scene together, and the drama will take care of itself. Of course, it’s never that simple, but Trier is sharp enough to create the space for such magic moments, and trust that his extraordinary cast will find them, which they do.

People who know Skarsgard only from his big-budget Hollywood movies, like in “Dune” or “The Avengers,” should watch him here and be transformed by his fully inhabited performance as a filmmaker who knows what he’s given up to make his movies — but he knows he can’t stop himself.

Skarsgard is perfectly matched in Lilleaas as the caregiver who chose family over art, and particularly Reinsve as the daughter who, in a sense, had her father’s choice thrust upon her. It’s an emotional contrast, and both Lilleaas and Reinsve spar with Skarsgard to talk about love, loss and the impossibility of capturing all of it on film.

Trier does capture something — a story of regret and a late-in-life chance to prove oneself. And it captures the little cracks in a life and what it takes for a family to find them or even acknowledge them. 

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‘Sentimental Value’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 21, in theaters. Rated R for some language including a sexual reference, and brief nudity. Running time: 133 minutes; in English, Norwegian and French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Jay Kelly' is a surprisingly thoughtful road trip, where George Clooney shows the sad side of being, well, George Clooney

Have you ever wondered how much it would suck to be George Clooney? Me neither, but director Noah Baumbach devotes much time considering that question in a surprisingly moving comedy-drama, “Jay Kelly.”

Clooney plays the title character, a successful movie actor whose life is at its best when he’s on a movie set. For one thing, everyone waits on Jay hand and foot, from the catering folks to the makeup artist, Candy (played by Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach). For another, after a take, he can ask the director, “Can we do it again?” — a request which is as much about his acting quirks as it is a way to delay having to face the real world.

In that real world, Jay has two daughters: Jessica (Riley Keough), 34, a schoolteacher somewhat estranged from him; and Daisy (Grace Edwards), 18, and about to venture to Europe with friends before going to college. He’s mourning the death of his mentor, Peter (Jim Broadbent). And he bumps into a former friend from acting school, Timothy (Billy Crudup), who still harbors a grudge over an audition that changed their fates.

Jay’s closest relationship is with his manager, Ron Sukenick (Adam Sandler), who moves heaven and earth to satisfy his client’s wishes and whims. So when Jay suddenly declares he’s going to Europe — ostensibly to accept a film festival tribute Ron already turned down for him, but really to stalk Daisy in a fatherly way — Ron has to gather up Jay’s entourage, including Candy and eternally frustrated publicist Liz (Laura Dern), and hop on Jay’s private plane, first to Paris and later to Tuscany.

Traveling through Tuscany, in particular, allows Baumbach to indulge his inner Fellini, as he puts Clooney in fantasy flashback scenes reminiscent of Marcello Mastroiani’s musings in “8 1/2.” The trip also sets Ron thinking about what he’s missed in his life because he constantly puts Jay’s needs ahead of his own.

Sandler gives perhaps his best performance since “Punch-Drunk Love,” a melancholy consideration of roads not taken that prove what the comedian can do when he actually puts in an effort. But Baumbach’s film is really Clooney’s, as he ponders whether global acclaim and uncounted riches was worth the family sacrifices he made to achieve them — and whether, like with his movies, he can get one more take to get it right.

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‘Jay Kelly’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 21, in theaters; starts streaming December 5 on Netflix. Rated R for language. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'Rental Family,' with Brendan Fraser as an American actor in Tokyo, doesn't dig deep enough to overcome its sentimental streak

Somewhere buried in the fish-out-of-water comedy-drama “Rental Family” is a solid character study about an American actor in Tokyo that Brendan Fraser could really grabbed with both hands.

Alas, that movie is trying to dig out from a jumbled series of interlocking vignettes that keeps the audience at a distance from the main character’s emotional journey.

Fraser plays Phillip Vandarpleog, an American actor living in Tokyo, barely scraping by on the limited roles he can get as the token Westerner — or gaijin — in Japanese productions. His career highlight was as a smiling superhero in a toothpaste commercial. 

One day, his agent tells him he can get paid if he goes immediately to a funeral and act as a designated mourner. Phillip soon learns the funeral’s a fake — one of many scenarios set up by a guy, Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira, from “Shogun”), who runs a business called Rental Family. Tada’s business is renting out people who can act like whatever the client needs. After bering a funeral mourner, Phillip’s next gig is to be a Canadian groom for a woman (Misato Morita) who can’t tell her parents she actually wants to marry her girlfriend.

Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), one of Tada’s employees, explains to a disbelieving Phillip that this is the Japanese way — to concoct a comforting lie rather than reveal an unpleasant truth. Aiko’s specialty is “apology services,” playing “the other woman” to express remorse to a philandering man’s wife, letting the real mistress off the hook.

The director Kitari, who wrote the screenplay with Stephen Blahut, eventually puts Phillip juggling two cases at once. In one scenario, he’s hired by the family of a forgotten actor (Akira Emoto), to play an American movie journalist writing a biography of him. In the other, he’s the long-missing Western father of a mixed-race girl, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), brought in by the girl’s mother to encourage her to take a school entrance exam.

The problem with “Rental Family” is that there are so many vignettes, so many clients, that no one story ever gets enough traction. If Kitari would have focused on one — my vote would be Phillip’s guilt at lying to Mia — “Rental Family” would have felt more naturally moving and not so manipulative.

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‘Rental Family’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 21, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some strong language, and suggestive material. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'Now You See Me: Now You Don't' revives the magician franchise with a fizzy and fun heist caper.

The magician heist movie “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” — the third in the series that started back in 2013 — is nearly as smart as it thinks it is, which is considerable, and delivers a fair amount of fun.

Director Ruben Fleischer starts fast, with a declaration that the original Four Horsemen, the magician supergroup from the earlier films, are reuniting for an underground magic show in New York. And sure enough, he shows illusionist J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), sleight-of-hand expert Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), on stage together.

The trick, which as in the past installments revolves around stealing ill-gotten cash from some white-collar crook, turns out to be an illusion in itself — because the Four Horsemen were never there. Instead, three young magicians have borrowed the old crew’s identity for the big trick: Bosco (Dominic Sessa), the frontman; June (Ariana Greenblatt), the pickpocket; and Charlie (Justice Smith), the behind-the-scenes mastermind.

Back at their secret lair, the three youngsters discover that Atlas himself has found them — and, after threatening them with copyright infringement, gets to business. Atlas has been summoned by The Eye, the mysterious organization that orchestrated the events of the previous movies, to recruit these kids. The target is Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a ruthless South African diamond tycoon who’s planning to display her prize, a massive diamond called The Heart, to buyers in Antwerp.

Pulling off that trick is pretty cool, but escaping takes some help — in the form of the reunited Merritt, Henley and Jack, who apparently all received the same summons that Atlas did. During this sequence, Fleischer (who directed Eisenberg in two “Zombieland” movies and “30 Minutes or Less”) employs a well-worn trick of his own, by replaying the previous few minutes from angles that show how they did it.

By now, the two groups of magicians have joined forces, and take off for a series of action sequences that hop from France to Abu Dhabi — and reunite them with more figures from the previous films. (No spoilers from me, because seeing them is part of the fun.) 

The script is credited to five different writers, so it’s a bit of a surprise how well the story all holds together in the watching. One might wish for another run through the dialogue to polish the snarky banter, particularly between Eisenberg’s Atlas and Sessa’s Bosco — two sides of the same “smartest person in the room” coin.

Fleischer generates the most pleasure when playing with the mechanics of magic and illusion. There’s an extended sequence in a French chateau where the seven magicians are just messing around, trying to impress each other with their card manipulation and other gags. There’s a joy in those minutes that a less confident director would have cut because they don’t move the plot, instead of realizing that this is where the fun is.

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‘Now You See Me: Now You Don’t’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, violence and suggestive references. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'In Your Dreams' is a frustratingly adequate animated adventure, with no highs or lows to break it out of the middle ground.

There’s nothing drastically wrong with the animated fantasy “In Your Dreams,” but there’s nothing spectacularly right about it, either — it just sort of exists, inoffensively frittering away 90 minutes without leaving much behind in the viewer’s mind or soul.

Stevie (voiced by Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) is a slightly overachieving middle-schooler in Minnesota, who keeps her room tidy and gets upset if she doesn’t have straight A’s. Her biggest problem, she thinks, is sharing her bedroom and live with her younger brother, Elliott (voiced by Elias Janssen), who delights in magic tricks and getting in Stevie’s hair. 

As the story unfolds, though, Stevie is having some adult-sized anxieties — mostly from hearing her parents (voiced by Cristin Milioti and Simu Liu) arguing. The main topics of the arguments are money, Dad’s insistence on pursuing his music career and the possibility that Mom will get a teaching job in Duluth, a place Dad doesn’t want to live.

After visiting a bookstore, Elliott comes away with a dusty old volume, with the title “The Legend of the Sandman.” Stevie thinks nothing of it, until that night when she sees Elliott in his bed, which now moves like a bucking bronco. Of course, it’s a dream — and somehow the book is letting Stevie and Ellott live each other’s dreams.

This gives Stevie an idea: That if she can get to the Sandman, she can wish for everything in her life to be the way it was. Of course, anyone who’s ever watched a “Twilight Zone” episode or heard stories about a monkey’s paw knows that with wishes, specificity is very important.

In the land of dreams, Elliott is reunited with his long-missing stuffed animal, Baloney Tony (voiced by Craig Robinson) — a giraffe-like plush who shares with Stevie a mutual dislike for the other. They also see Nightmare (voiced by Gia Carides), the creator of nightmares, and the one thing keeping the kids away from the Sandman (voiced by Omid Djalili).

Director Alex Woo and co-writer Erik Benson, both Pixar alumni, have some clever visual ideas bouncing around this movie. The best is the M.C. Escher-like architecture of the Sandman’s inner sanctum, where the movie’s eye-twisting conclusion happens. 

Getting to that point, though, requires Stevie to learn some important lessons — about being able to accept change as it comes, and to appreciate the annoying little brother in your life — that are underlined a little too obviously, even in a movie aimed at children.

If there’s a word that best describes “In Your Dreams,” I think it would be “serviceable.” It’s an adequate animated entertainment, that gets the job done. But it’s nothing you or your kids will remember once the credits roll.

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‘In Your Dreams’

★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, November 14, on Netflix. Rated PG for thematic content, scary images, action/peril and some rude humor. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'The Running Man' is an action-packed takedown of corporate media's distraction machine, but it's more entertaining when it sticks to enjoyable mayhem

One’s enjoyment of “The Running Man,” director Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about televised bread-and-circuses, depends entirely on how seriously one takes it — the more fun it’s having, the more fun you’re having.

In a semi-dystopian America where one mega-corporation controls the government, police, health care and the media, Ben Richards — played by the amiably hunky Glen Powell — has been blacklisted by every employer for insubordination, because he has an annoying habit of helping his colleagues and suggesting they unionize. Ben’s desperate to pay for basic medicine for his ailing 2-year-old daughter, and from keeping his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), from working double shifts as a strip-club waitress. 

It seems like Ben’s only option to provide for his family is to sign up for one of the dominant TV network’s cruelty-based game shows — and the one with the biggest payout is called “The Running Man,” in which three contestants are depicted as hunted fugitives and are given 30 days to outrun the Hunters, who shoot to kill. 

The contestants earn a sliding scale of prize money based on how long they stay alive, and how many Hunters they might kill along the way. However, the viewing public also can cash in if they report the contestants’ whereabouts. (The currency bears the likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Ben in the 1987 movie version.)

The network’s star producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), the puppet master behind the scenes, goads Ben into signing on, even offering a bonus that can get his child some medicine right away. Ben soon learns, though, that the game is rigged — with a carnival barker of an emcee (Colman Domingo) painting Ben in the worst possible light to turn America against him. 

Wright, who co-wrote the script with his “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” collaborator Michael Bacall, places Powell’s Ben in a series of increasingly close shaves — trying to dodge the Hunters and the ever-present surveillance while staying on the run or finding allies who don’t believe the network’s propaganda. Soon, Ben realizes that he’s not just fighting for his family’s wellbeing, but also as a symbol of resistance against the authoritarian network that controls everything including the game.

The thrills come fast and frequently, with a series of action set pieces where Powell’s Ben is put through a high-tech wringer. The surprises come from the array of characters Ben encounters — a list that includes William H. Macy, Daniel Ezra, Michael Cera and Emilia Jones — as he dodges the Hunters and their camera drones, all orchestrated by Killian for maximum ratings.

There’s a serious theme in here, if you care to look for it, about the numbing effect of mass media — reality TV specifically — and the oppressive motives of those controlling it. But “The Running Man” is more comfortable, and more fun, when it just lets loose with the cinematic mayhem. It’s a dark ride, but a damned entertaining one.

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‘The Running Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, some gore, and language. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Nuremberg' pits two Oscar winners as a high Nazi officer and the American psychiatrist who unlocked his mind, in a drab history lesson

The long-debated question about Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime — were they uniquely evil in global history, or can humans anywhere create the conditions that gave rise to barbarous authoritarianism — gets a fresh conversation in “Nuremberg,” a movie that isn’t afraid of putting a thumb on the scale to get its desired answer.

Writer-director James Vanderbilt — in his first time at the helm since 2015’s “Truth” — takes viewers to 1945 and the end of World War II. Hitler has died of suicide in a Berlin bunker, and the Allied forces are gathering up the surviving Nazi high commanders. The highest-ranking official still alive is Hitler’s No. 2, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe).

Göring and the rest are brought to the Allied prison camp in Nuremberg — where the no-nonsense camp commandant, U.S. Army Col. Burton Andrus (John Slattery), must figure out what to do with them. The key consideration is whether executing them without a trial would be as bad as what the Nazis did to millions in the war and, in particular, the concentration camps where millions were put through a systematic death machine.

The man with the unenviable task of creating an international criminal court where one never existed is Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), a U.S. Supreme Court justice who has been told he’s in line to be appointed Chief Justice by President Harry S Truman. He’s told by his secretary, Elsie (Wrenn Schmidt), that taking the job may jeopardize that appointment, because of all of the hurdles that would prevent a court from happening.

While Jackson starts setting up a courthouse in Nuremberg — once the site of Hitler’s hate-mongering speeches — the Allied military decides they need a military psychiatrist to talk to the Nazi prisoners and figure out what makes them tick. That’s how Douglas Kelley, an unorthodox psychiatrist played by Rami Malek, is brought in to get to know the captured Nazis.

It takes a lot of table-setting — with characters describing various historical figures as if they swallowed a WikiPedia entry and had to regurgitate it — to get to what the movie sees as the central conflict: Having two Oscar-winning actors match each other on the screen, the blustering Crowe and the continually inquisitive Malek, does produce the expected fireworks, particularly as Crowe chews the scenery by the yard.

The prison-cell interviews do establish a rapport between the Nazi and the psychiatrist. (“The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is actually the name of Jack El-Hai’s book that’s the basis for the movie). They also show the audience the insidious way charm can paper over our revulsion to even history’s worst brutality.

There are solid performances aplenty in “Nuremberg,” particularly from Shannon, Slattery and Richard E. Grant as Jackson’s British prosecution partner. They are the ones most successful at escaping the clutches of Vanderbilt’s wooden direction and heavy-handed script, and finding something true about the pursuit of justice against the most monstrous of human beings.

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‘Nuremberg’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 7, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content involving the Holocaust, strong disturbing images, suicide, some language, smoking and brief drug content. Running time: 149 minutes.