Review: 'Michael' captures the performing side of Michael Jackson, but leaves the personal stuff on the cutting-room floor

Some of what’s in “Michael,” a family-authorized biographical drama on the life of pop icon Michael Jackson, is quite effective — for example, the way newcomer Jaafar Jackson captures his uncle’s dance moves and charismatic performing style. 

Other elements of this soft-focus drama are terrible reminders of other bad musical biopics, namely “Bohemian Rhapsody” — which shares in common with this movie the same atrocious cameo actor and a nagging sense that part of the story isn’t being told for the sake of maintaining a deceased star’s still lucrative legacy.

Jaafar Jackson mostly doesn’t show up for the first 45 minutes, as director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan tell a strictly chronological story of how Michael Jackson became the King of Pop. It starts in Gary, Indiana, in 1966, with Michael (played at age 8 by Juliano Valdi) and his four older brothers constantly rehearsing for their hard-driving father, Joseph Jackson, played menacingly by Colman Domingo. Joseph pushes his sons to get their movies perfect, and when Michael complains that they’re tired and need to go to school in the morning, Joseph brings out the belt to tan young Michael’s backside.

This family dynamic — of Joseph treating Michael brutally while his brothers and their mother, Katherine (Nia Long), are helpless to stop it — is the constant in Michael’s life, even as an adult. When Michael wants to start a solo career, he sends two record-company executives to tell Joseph, and they come back with an unsatisfactory answer. When Michael finally gets a good lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller), one of Branca’s first moves is to fire Joseph as Michael’s manager, by fax.

Much of what Logan (“Gladiator,” “The Aviator”) strings together in this script is career highlights — topping the charts with the Jackson 5, then releasing the solo albums “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” — dotted with sweet moments of Michael connecting with fans, visiting children in the hospital, and collecting a vast array of toys and animals (including his chimp, Bubbles, created here with computer animation). 

What you won’t get in “Michael” is anything detailing the last 20 years of his life. Jackson died in 2009, and the movie ends with his 1988 tour, performing “Bad.” So the movie omits anything about his reported substance abuse issues, accusations of mistreating boys (for which he was acquitted in a 2005 criminal trial), and eccentric behavior on his Neverland Ranch. (The ranch is never mentioned, though early fascinations with Peter Pan, Oz and Disney are.)

Fuqua, who made music videos before embarking on a movie career that includes “Training Day” and “The Equalizer” franchise, exercises those old muscles to create some compelling musical moments. Fuqua and Jaafar Jackson neatly recreate Michael’s 1983 TV introduction of the moonwalk, a rehearsal of the dance moves in the “Beat It” video, and the filming of Jackson’s “Thriller” video. (In a funny aside, Jackson never refers to them as videos, but as “short films.”)

Most of the dramatic moments — and the portrayals of such luminaries as Motown’s Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) and Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson) — are serviceable, if flat and cliche-filled. The absolute clunker involves a meeting between Michael and CBS Records’ head honcho, Walter Yetnikoff, played by layers of disfiguring facial makeup wrapped over Mike Myers’ face. Yes, Myers played a similarly awful rendition of a record-label boss in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the second attempt is more annoying than the first.

“Michael” will give fans of the late singer’s music what they want to see: Letter-perfect re-enactments of Jackson’s signature musical moments — moments you could stream on YouTube. Anyone wanting a peek into what made Jackson tick will moonwalk away disappointed.

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‘Michael’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some thematic material, language, and smoking. Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' serves up buckets of icky fluids in a grossout thriller has little to do with the classic monster movies

The title of “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” raises two question immediately: Who the f-bomb is Lee Cronin? And why is his take on the classic monster movie worth spending more than two hours of your life?

Answer No. 1: Lee Cronin is an Irish director who has made two movies before this, both horror movies: “The Hole in the Ground,” which premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and “Evil Dead Rise,” the 2023 sequel to the reboot of the Sam Raimi horror classic. 

Answer No. 2: After watching this oozing mess of jumbled horror tropes, I have no earthly idea why some big names in horror — including producers James Wan and Jason Blum — took a flyer on this guy. 

This version of “The Mummy” is not related to the classic Universal monster movies, or the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz adventure movies, or even the single entry in Universal’s aborted “Dark Universe” franchise. Like those others, the story does start in Egypt, and involves someone in a sarcophagus all wrapped up and carrying an ancient curse. After that, this movie is its own thing, and a pretty disgusting thing at that.

American TV reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is working in Cairo, and living with his wife, Larissa (played by the Spanish actress Laia Costa), and their two kids — with a third on the way. Their 8-year-old daughter, Katie (played at this stage by Emily Mitchell), is kidnapped by a mysterious woman (Hayat Kamille), and disappears in a sand storm. The Cairo police suspect Charlie and Larissa of killing their daughter, and they return to the States with no leads on where Katie ever went.

Flash-forward eight years, and Charlie and Larissa are living in Albuquerque, with Larissa’s mom, Carmen (Veronica Falcón). Teen son Sebastian (Shylo Molina) still holds some memory of Katie, while 8-year-old Maud (Billie Roy) was still in utero when her big sister vanished. 

Because of a plane crash in Egypt, police find a mysterious sarcophagus — and when researchers open it, they find Katie (Natalie Grace), now 16 and badly disfigured. The junior cop on the case before, Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy, from TV’s “Ramy”), calls Charlie and Larissa, and arranges to have their daughter returned to her in America. But something’s deeply wrong, and Katie seems to be under some evil influence that soon spreads through the house, with horrific and really icky consequences. 

There’s not enough in Cronin’s revamping of the “Mummy” narrative to rank it better than anything Boris Karloff or Brendan Fraser or even Tom Cruise were ever associated with. Cronin’s chaotic script throws everything, especially fluids, at the screen with neither rhyme nor reason — and goes out of its way to separate the main characters, lest they ever compare notes for five seconds and figure out there’s a pattern to Katie’s possession. Only when Zaki finds the truth about the mysterious kidnapper, then flies to Albuquerque in record time, does the plot earn any semblance of understanding, but by then it’s too late.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is long on gory details and short on comprehension. It’s so wrapped up, if you will, in its horror effects that it loses the thread of coherence. 

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‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’

★★

Opens Friday, April 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong disturbing violent content, gore, language and brief drug use. Running time: 134 minutes.

Review: 'The Christophers' lets director Steven Soderbergh work with a couple of gifted actors - Sir Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel

Director Steven Soderbergh is at his best when he makes his filmmaking look effortless — and in “The Christophers,” a smart two-hander about what’s real and what’s not in the art world, he keeps things deliciously simple, which lets us just enjoy the byplay of Sir Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel.

McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an irascible old painter who freely admits that he hasn’t made anything good in 30 years, and anything at all in 20. But somewhere in the unused uppermost floor of his London townhouse, there are a series of unfinished canvases, which were meant to be a third series of paintings inspired by someone from Julian’s past, named Christopher.

Julian’s children, Sallie (Jessica Gunning) and Barnaby (James Corden), think there’s money in those unfinished works, and they think they’ll only get it after Julian croaks. Their plan is to have another artist finish The Christophers in Julian’s style, then leave them upstairs until they’re “discovered” after Julian’s death. Sallie, an art-school failure, suggests hiring an old classmate, Lori Butler (Coel’s character), who’s a good painter and has studied and commented on Julian in the past.

To start the scheme, Lori gets a job as Julian’s assistant, and finds the old man to be a mercurial personality, selling himself for videos on Cameo and impulsively deciding to unearth the old Christophers and burn them in the backyard fire pit. What follows is a game of wills between Julian and Lori, each trying to suss out what the other truly wants.

The screenplay is sharper and more wily than what you might expect from a Hollywood veteran Ed Solomon, whose works include the “Bill & Ted” movies, “Men In Black” and the “Now You See Me” franchise. Solomon keeps the focus small, usually just putting Julian and Lori in a cramped studio room and letting their tension create the fireworks. One could stage this on Broadway and not lose any of the friction between the characters, or miss any of the clever dialogue that explores ideas of what makes good art and what kind of legacy an artist leaves behind.

Coel, creator of the acclaimed series “I Will Destroy You,” gives Lori a hint of melancholy as she tries to play against Julian’s moods and the children’s not-too-bright scheming. It may be the greatest compliment to Coel is that she stayed on par with McKellen, who digs into this juicy role and finds both the acid humor and the loneliness beneath it. Together, they make “The Christophers” an unassuming work of art.

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‘The Christophers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 17, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Normal' reunites Bob Odenkirk with his 'Nobody' screenwriter, but the violent gun battles are less interesting this time

From its barrage of gun violence to it’s faux-ironic title, “Normal” is as predictable as small-town shoot-‘em-up as you’re likely to find — a series of tossed-off ideas for a violent action movie that never come together into an enjoyable whole.

Screenwriter Derek Kolstad, who created the “John Wick” franchise, rvteams here with Bob Odenkirk, who worked on the Kolstad-written “Nobody” movies. But the novelty of the unassuming guy revealing a powder keg of emotions underneath the surface has worn thin.

Odenkirk’s perfectly fine here, as grizzled lawman Ulysses Richardson, who’s hired to be an interim sheriff in a snowy Minnesota town, called Normal, after the untimely death of the former sheriff. Ulysses doesn’t want to clean up the town or get in anyone’s way. But something’s nagging at him, because something about the old sheriff’s death doesn’t add up — and the insincere glad-handing nature of Mayor Kibner (Henry Winkler), and the way the deputies treat the sheriff’s daughter, Alex (Jess McLeod), deepens Ulysses’ suspicions.

What might the problem be with Normal? Well, the movie’s opening sequence provides a clue, when it shows a Yakuza boss (Takahiro Inoue) disciplining some underlings quite violently and dispatching them to Minnesota.

There are some odd quirks in the cast, including Billy MacLellan as a not-too-bright deputy and Lena Headey (“Game of Thrones”) as an all-knowing bar owner.

Director Ben Wheatley — whose 2016 gangster melee “Free Fire” deployed as many guns as this does — doesn’t get in the way of what Kolstad (who shares story credit with Odenkirk) usually does: Arranges for lots of people to fire off weaponry as often as possible. Unlike the “John Wick” movies, where civilians never get shot, the violence in “Normal” feels more arbitrary — though it’s explained why the deaths aren’t so random, but that bit of narrative does nothing but give the green light to wallow in the indiscriminate shooting.

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‘Normal’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, and language. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'You, Me & Tuscany' reminds us of why we watch rom-coms: Good-looking people in gorgeous places — and, as a bonus, sumptuous food

In some ways, “You, Me & Tuscany” is a thoroughly modern romantic comedy — in that it stars to impossibly good-looking actors and puts them in a situation that is less plausible than movies with dragons in them.

But in a couple of key ways, director Kat Coiro’s movie is old-fashioned, starting with the fact that you (for now) have to see it in a movie theater, rather than streaming it on Netflix or tuning into the Hallmark Channel and sitting on the couch, folding laundry while you watch.

Halle Bailey, having survived the live-action “The Little Mermaid,” stars as Anna, whose work as a house sitter is a stopgap for her getting back to some semblance of a real life. In some quick character exposition, we learn that Anna learned to be a chef from her mother, and had nearly completed her degree at a culinary school when she dropped out when her mother got sick. Her dream had always been to go to Tuscany, and she still has the plane ticket her mom bought for them before she died.

In a hotel bar, maxing out her credit card on dinner, Anna tells this story to a traveling real-estate executive from, you guessed it, Tuscany. Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) shows Anna pictures of his villa, and the restaurant his father, Vincenzo (Paolo Sassanelli), has run for decades — the one Matteo has left behind to avoid following in the family business.

Anna takes this chance encounter as a sign to book that trip to Tuscany, and visit the town where Matteo’s family lives. Once there, she discovers the hotels are all booked up, for the town’s annual summer festival. With few options, she goes to Matteo’s villa — figuring he’d never go there — and sleeps in his bed.

The next morning, Matteo’s mom, Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari), and his Nonna (Stefania Casini) find the trespassing Anna. The accidental placement of a diamond ring on Anna’s hand leads to a misunderstanding, in which the whole family believes Anna is Matteo’s fiancee, and that her being in Tuscany means Matteo will be returning home soon.

Complicating the lie is the family’s neighbor, and adopted son, Michael (played by “Bridgerton” hunk Regé-Jean Page), who runs a nearby vineyard where Gabriella plans to stage Anna and Matteo’s wedding. Anna and Michael argue when they first encounter each other, but forced proximity allows them to soften toward each other — and Anna starts to worry she’s falling for him.

I haven’t said “spoiler alert” through any of this, because these plot points are all in the trailer — and besides, the script by Ryan Engel (who shares story credit with his wife, Kristin) is so welded to the rom-com formula that it would be a twist if any of that didn’t happen. 

But even an old formula still has its potency, with the right ingredients. And Bailey’s winsome smile, Page’s gorgeous abs and English charm, and the seductive images of Tuscan sunsets and Italian cooking are all the ingredients a trifle like this needs to be entertaining.

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‘You, Me & Tuscany’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and sexual material. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'Andre Is an Idiot' is a funny and touching look at an iconoclast's refusal to take a cancer diagnosis lying down

Director Tony Benna’s “André Is an Idiot” is a documentary for those of us who have seen hundreds of movies about someone fighting back against cancer with nobility and poise — and chucks it all in the crapper and says, “Screw that.”

The person going through cancer here is André Ricciardi, an iconoclastic San Francisco advertising guy whose mind is as full and as unkempt as the massive halo of gray hair around his head. The hair was one of the first things to go when, in 2020, André was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. The movie gets its title from the comment his mother made when she learned of the diagnosis — that colon cancer is easy to spot, and that André was an idiot for not getting a colonoscopy earlier.

André’s story starts in 1995, with his marriage to Janice, a bartender at his favorite bar who needed to marry someone for two years to get her green card. What started as a bit of a joke — and a way for Andre to get free drinks — eventually blossomed into true love and resulted in two daughters, Tallula and Delilah, who were 19 and 14 when André got his diagnosis. 

Since André didn’t do parenthood in the normal way — bedtime reading for his girls was “Helter Skelter,” the book about the Manson family — he’s determined not to be normal in fighting cancer. And while Benna chronicles André’s exploits with chemotherapy, the movie also shows André’s devotion to smoking pot and cracking jokes about dying, both to Janice and to his best pal, Lee. 

Benna honors André’s irreverence by following in kind. Some of the hospital misadventures are depicted with dolls in stop-motion animation. And when André decides that his father would never in a million years appear in a documentary like this, Benna finds a hilarious and apt alternative (which I wouldn’t spoil for all the money in the world).

Avoiding poignancy in a cancer journey is as impossible as cheating death itself. Benna shows us André’s tenacity, Janice’s weary work as his caregiver, and their daughters’ quite mature understanding that their dad won’t be here for long. By avoiding the cliches of a cancer documentary, injecting André’s subversive humor and irascible charm, “André Is an Idiot” hits the heart more squarely than you expect.

(Also, if you see this movie and don’t make an appointment for a colonoscopy, you really are an idiot.)

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‘Andre Is an Idiot’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and references to drug use. Running time: 88 minutes.

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

Review: 'Hamlet' sets Shakespeare's tale of grief and rage in modern London, and lets Riz Ahmed sink his teeth into a fiery performance

William Shakespeare wrote the play “Hamlet” around 1600, based on legends that date back 500 or 600 years earlier — and the marvel of Shakespeare’s longest and possibly best-known work is how it fits any era in which it’s made or set, including director Aneil Karia’s dynamic modern-dress version that’s propelled by an intense performance by Riz Ahmed.

The scene is London, starting with the death of the CEO of a major real-estate firm, Elsinore Properties. The CEO’s son, Hamlet (played by Ahmed), returns to England in the middle of a scenario that’s both ancient and current: The CEO’s brother, Claudius (Art Malik), is taking the company’s helm, and marrying his brother’s widow, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha). Hamlet, guided by his father’s ghost, believes his father was murdered by Claudius, and that the only way to prove it is to pretend to be mad.

Michael Lesslie’s script takes Shakespeare’s play and strips it down to the essentials. Several familiar side characters are gone, such as Rosenkrrantz and Guildenstern. And Hamlet delivers the comments he would usually say to his trusted companion Horatio to two other short-term confidants: His friend Laertes (Joe Alwyn) and Laertes’ sister, and Hamlet’s former lover, Ophelia (Morfydd Clark). Also lurking about is Claudius’ sinister assistant, and Laertes and Ophelia’s father, Polonius (Timothy Spall).

As Karia, Lesslie and Ahmed imagine their “Hamlet,” it’s a story of a young man who’s been in the orbit of wealth for his entire life, coming to grips with how quickly loyalty and grief can fall short when power is up for grabs. Hamlet’s struggle, as always, becomes most clear in the soliloquy that begins “to be or not to be…,” which Ahmed delivers with an enraged shout while driving at dangerous speeds on the freeway. 

Karia, who directed Ahmed in the Oscar-winning 2020 short “The Long Goodbye,” gives us everything we need to understand “Hamlet” and nothing we don’t. Mostly, he clears the path for Ahmed to dig into the anger and frustration this character has held inside for centuries, making us understand Hamlet as a modern tragedy.

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‘Hamlet’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 10, in theaters. Rated R for some bloody violence, suicide, brief drug use and language.. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Palestine 36' depicts a harrowing case of oppression from 90 years ago, and finds parallels to current struggles

Judging on filmmaking craft alone, “Palestine 36” is a moving depiction of a people facing persecution and answering with rebellion — and the escalation of that rebellion into brutal violence and repression.

And because the people being repressed in the film are Palestinians, and the ones committing the violence are occupying British forces who are working with unseen Jewish settlers, people will see this movie — or, more likely, not see it — and argue over its historical accuracy or its parallels to what’s happening 90 years later to modern Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank. 

As writer-director Annemarie Jacir tells it (and I stress that I’m merely describing her depiction of events here), the story begins with a young Palestinian man, Yusuf (Karin Daoud Anaya), finding work in Jerusalem as a servant to a prosperous Arab businessman, Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine), and his wife, Khouloud (Yasmine Al Massri), a modern Arab woman who writes blistering pro-Palestinian editorials under a male pseudonym. Amir and Khouloum also host dinner parties for the well-to-do of Jerusalem, namely the British colonists and the military occupation forces. 

Yusuf often travels back to his village, where his family is facing the loss of the land they have owned for generations. The fences keep edging closer and closer to their farm fields, with Jewish refugees from Europe trying to settle there. The British offer no help, and instead a junior bureaucrat, Thomas (Billy Howle), tells the village elders to get title deeds for their land — an impossibility, since there’s no documentation for their initial claim to the land. 

Then some of the Palestinian dock workers accidentally discover a cache of illegal rifles being shipped to the Jewish settlers. That convinces some Palestinians to take up arms themselves and begin a revolt. Meanwhile, Khouloum and other women rally at the British headquarters, where they get polite and meaningless reassurances from the British commandant — a role Jeremy Irons could play in his sleep, and here he kinda does.

Jacir filmed part of this movie in Palestinian territories — there’s a sentence it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever saying again — and those scenes capture the rough beauty of the place, and goes some way to explain why these characters would fight so hard to stay there. 

The movie includes some moments in history, such as the announcement by a British royal commission to recommend partition of Jews and Palestinians in the occupied British Palestine — a decade before the British tried another bloody partition, between India and Pakistan. And the movie ends with a brutal depiction of a real historical event, the massacre by British troops of the residents of the village of al-Bassa in 1938, at the height of the Palestinian revolt against British rule. 

How accurate is Jacir’s depiction of history? I’m not enough of an expert to give an answer. I also can’t attest to the historical accuracy of “Lawrence of Arabia” or “12 Years a Slave.” I can only judge on how the movie works as drama and cinema — and by those admittedly limited measures, “Palestine 36” is effective at depicting people fighting for the land they love, and at making us think about how the descendants of those people are coping with their struggles today. 

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‘Palestine 36’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for brutal war violence and language. Running time: 115 minutes; in English and Arabic with subtitles.