Review: 'Wildwood' is a stop-motion epic, creating an epic fantasy world that's massive and intimate at the same time

Through five movies, from “Coraline” to “Missing Link,” animation fans have grown to expect a unique kind of craftsmanship from Laika, the Oregon-based stop-motion studio that produces handcrafted movies in a computer-driven world.

With the studio’s sixth and easily most ambitious movie, “Wildwood,” director Travis Knight (“Kubo and the Two Strings”) and his Laika team have outdone themselves by creating a fantasy on a level of “The Chronicles of Narnia” and using their little plastic-and-fabric figurines to create something both epic and intimate.

Our heroine, Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, formerly of “Andi Mack”), is a 12-year-old girl living in Portland, Oregon, with her baby brother, Mac (voiced by the director’s son Arthur), and their granola-ish parents (voiced by Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson). When the parents assign Prue to babysit Mac, they give one command: Don’t leave the house. Prue, like most kids, disobeys and sticks Mac in a wagon behind her bicycle and heads into town, where she runs into her very nerdy classmate, Curtis (voiced by Jacob Tremblay).

Prue takes Mac to a playground, and is surprised when dozens of crows descend on the jungle gym. (Yes, comparisons to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” are inevitable, and the set-up remains as terrifying as ever.) Suddenly, the crows take Mac airborne, and Prue must pursue them to the bridge at the edge of town, which leads to what has been called “the Impassable Wilderness.” At first, it lives up to its name, but Prue and tagalong Curtis are allowed inside.

What they find is an army of coyotes, dressed in Napoleonic military uniforms. The coyotes serve the Dowager Princess, Alexandra (voiced by Carey Mulligan), who has designs on reshaping the forest to something dark and foreboding, for reasons that will present themselves in due course.

Prue’s journey to find Mac leads her through a bureaucratic rabbit warren, and eventually to The General (voiced by Angela Bassett), a giant hawk who commands the kingdom’s birds (except the crows). Prue also finds Wildwood’s wisest woman, Iphigenia (voiced by Tantoo Cardinal), who helps her understand the magic-fueled circumstances that led to her and Mac’s birth. 

Meanwhile, Curtis is taken down a different path. First drafted into Alexandra’s coyote army, Curtis eventually falls in with her rivals, the Bandits, and their swashbuckling leader, Breandan (voiced by Mahershala Ali). 

The voice cast is extraordinary. Besides the names I’ve already mentioned, there’s Awkwafina, Charlie Day, Tom Waits, Jemaine Clement, Len Cariou, Blythe Danner and Rob Delaney. That’s an impressive roster for any animated movie, and Knight deploys them expertly.

Screenwriter Chris Butler — who directed “Missing Link” and co-directed “ParaNorman” — has expertly adapted “Wildwood” from the children’s book series written by Colin Meloy (frontman for The Decembrists) and illustrated by Meloy’s wife, Carson Ellis. Meloy and Ellis are Portlanders, too, and the sense of place they and the Laika team bring out is note-perfect.

The most remarkable thing about “Wildwood” is its massive sweep. The grand finale is a battle sequence that would put “Braveheart” to shame, with hundreds of animated animals taking up arms and sacrificing their lives. (The PG-13 rating is to be taken seriously for that reason.) The stop-motion animation, augmented with some computer work, is intense, overwhelming and intimate in ways that even live-action films have difficulty achieving.

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‘Wildwood’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'A Talent For Murder' brings Helen Mirren as a crafty novelist together with Alden Ehrenreich as a devious underling for clever gamesmanship

The key thing to know about “A Talent for Murder” is that Helen Mirren plays the famed author Patricia Highsmith, but it’s not a biopic — but instead a completely invented thriller in which the writer of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” matches wits with a Ripley-like figure in a conflict over her life and legacy.

Set in 1995, the movie finds Highsmith alone in her home in Switzerland, smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch and dismissive of humanity in general — and, in particular, of Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), who has come from her New York publisher eager to get her to sign a contract to write a sixth book in her “Ripley” series.

Highsmith has no interest in revisiting her social-climbing sociopath, no matter how fat a contract she’s offered. Ridgeway appeals to her vanity, telling her he knows more about Highsmith’s books than anyone other than herself — and that he could give her a premise for another Ripley book, something interesting enough that she would want to finish it.

What Ridgeway suggests is that Ripley meets a beautiful American heiress, and devises how to marry her and klll off the relatives standing between her and her inheritance. The heiress bears the same name, Clementine Balfour, and likeness as the young woman (Olivia Cooke) Ridgeway met on the train to Switzerland. 

This resemblance between Ridgeway’s story and Ripley’s allows director Anton Corbijn (“The American”) and screenwriter Joanna Murray-Smith (adapting her play “Switzerland”) to blur the lines between parallel narratives — and to show how Ripley’s influence, and Highsmith’s needling, could change how Ridgeway goes about wooing the “real” Clementine.

The twin connections between Ehrenreich and Cooke make for some steamy scenes, but the real explosive chemistry is between Mirren’s Highsmith and Ehrenreich — as both Ridgeway and Ripley. The movie makes us consider how much control Highsmith has over her elusive Ripley, until you realize this is Highsmith and this is Mirren, and control is something neither woman is likely to give up. 

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‘A Talent for Murder’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 23, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, some violence and language. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'You Can See Everything' brilliantly upends what we think about Elizabeth Holmes, true-crime narratives and even documentaries themselves

No matter how much you know, or think you know, about Elizabeth Holmes — now serving time in a Texas minimum-security prison for fraud in connection with her Theranos blood-testing device — the perception-bending documentary “You Will See Everything” will upend your ideas about her, the true-crime genre and the very nature of documentary storytelling.

The quick way to describe it is that the title is true, but also inadequate to what directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim deliver.

Fielder, known for his comedy work on “Nathan For You” and his investigatory docu-series “The Rehearsal,” was invited, we’re told initially, to bring a movie crew to capture Holmes’ life in 2023, in the month before she must report to the Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Texas, where she’s now serving more than 11 years for defrauding investors (though not defrauding patients, which Holmes says is an important distinction).

Fielder takes an on-camera role in the documentary, interviewing Holmes and her partner, tech entrepreneur and hotel heir Billy Evans, in a rental house on the Pacific coast near San Diego. They are there with their son, William, not yet two years old during filming, and their two-month-old baby daughter — named Invicta, according to People magazine, but referred to here as Ivy. At some point, Fielder takes up Holmes’ and Evans’ offer to sleep in the guest house, which allows near-total access. Or at least the appearance of it.

During the weeks in the rental, Fielder talks to Holmes and Evans about Theranos, and their stated hopes of trying to rebuild the company and prove that their one-drop blood-testing technology can actually work. Are they serious? Or is Holmes continuing the con that put her in prison? Fielder doesn’t know, and every time he tries to probe a bit deeper, something interrupts the conversation — usually it’s Evans telling the crew that Holmes has to be somewhere, or help get the kids to bed. 

What Fielder does get out of Holmes complicates the narrative that’s been built up around her by news reports, true-crime podcasts and Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-winning portrayal of her in the 2022 Hulu miniseries “The Dropout.” By the time Holmes goes to prison, about halfway through this nearly three-hour movie, Fielder has more questions than answers.

The second half of the film shows Fielder and Oppenheim, the unseen but equally important collaborator, as they try to find those answers. 

There is no force on earth that would make me spoil what happens next. I will say this much: What Fielder and Oppenheimer do is brilliant, creating some of the purest cinema I’ve ever seen.

The questions raised in “You Can See Everything” go beyond Elizabeth Holmes and a particular criminal case. Fielder and Oppenheim get us thinking about our fascination with narratives, and how we process the story when facts don’t readily fit those narratives. It’s a movie that could, if you allow it, change the way you see everything.

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‘You Can See Everything’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some graphic nudity. Running time: 174 minutes.

Review: 'Sense and Sensibility' finds Jane Austen being adapted in an earthy, naturalistic telling of the Dashwood sisters' romances

In reviewing director Georgia Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility,” one must first address the genteel elephant in the room: The Ang Lee-directed, Emma Thompson-written 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s first novel.

The Lee/Thompson version was a sublime adaptation, with a stately look in which every set and costume looked perfect — a lovely backdrop for Austen’s precise language and understated emotions. Nothing will dislodge that movie from my heart, but I find myself making some room for this earthy, sensual take on Austen’s tale of financial and romantic troubles.

The new film’s rugged spine remains the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones in the Thompson role) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles, filling the part that introduced the world to Kate Winslet). Their father have left Mrs. Dashwood (Catríona Balfe) and her three daughters — younger Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) rounds out the family — reliant on others’ goodwill for continued lodging. That goodwill falls short when Fanny (Stacy Martin), the greedy wife of their the girls’ uncle John (Tom Brooke), sets her sights on their house. 

The Dashwood women move to a more affordable cottage in Devonshire. (It’s fascinating to see how much real estate plays into Austen’s work.) Fanny’s brother, Edward Ferrars (George Mackay), is a regular visitor, and he and Elinor seem to get along well — though Fanny warns that their mother expects Edward to marry a woman with more money. Meanwhile, Marianne, whose ideas of romance are less practical than Elinor’s, finds herself drawing the attention of the much older Col. Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), but is soon smitten by the dashing John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), until he’s sent to London by his family. 

Oakley (whose previous film was the 2022 lesbian drama “Blue Jean”), working off an elegantly spare script by first-timer Diana Reid, emphasizes the Dashwoods’ closeness to the natural world around them. Oakley gives us a sense that the girls, Marianne particularly, would be as happy living in the woods around Devonshire as they would inside their cottage. 

This “Sense and Sensibility” draws its main strength from the sisterly bonds among Elinor, Marianne and Margaret — particularly in the way Elinor sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of helping the headstrong Marianne when her heart is repeatedly broken. The relationship allows Edgar-Jones (“Twisters,” “I Heard the Crawdads Sing”) to display her understated charm, but mainly gives Creed-Miles enough room to give an expressive performance I believe viewers will fall in love with.

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‘Sense and Sensibility’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some thematic elements, partial nudity and brief violence. Running time: 131 minutes.

Review: 'Whalefall' is a strange survival tale inside a whale, but it gets too serious when diving into a turbulent father-son relationship

Just as sperm whales barf up ambergris, a waxy substance once famously used to make perfume, Hollywood sometimes horks up an oddity like “Whalefall,” a strange and not very successful swing at a survival thriller.

Austin Abrams stars as Jay Gardiner, a college student in Iowa visiting his mom (Elisabeth Shue) and his sisters (Jane Levy, Emily Rudd) in the seaside California town where he grew up. The visit comes one year after the death of his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a salty sea dog who taught Jay how to scuba dive and respect marine creatures.

Screenwriters Brian Duffield (who directed) and Daniel Kraus (who wrote the novel on which this was based) reveal early on that Mitt was dying from mesothelioma and opted instead to die by suicide, putting diving weights around his waist and jumping into the sea. Jay decides he’s going to recover Dad’s remains, so he puts on his scuba gear, gets his tank filled with air, and goes out to where Dad jumped. Doing so, he evades the Coast Guard crew that has closed off the beach, because of reports of sperm whales and orcas nearby.

Once in the water, Jay becomes the star in the most bizarre action sequence I’ve seen in a long time — when he gets bumped by a massive whale and caught in the tendrils of a giant squid the toothy whale is trying to eat. By the time it’s over, Jay is stuck in the whale’s esophagus, trying to keep from being pulled further down the animal’s digestive tract. He estimates he’s got less than an hour of air left in his tank, and limited options for how to get out.

The scenes inside the whale are weirdly fascinating, a one-against-nature thriller that plays like a waterlogged remake of James Franco in “127 Hours.” If Academy voters want to think outside the box, they should give a long look at the work of production designer Ramsey Avery here.

Unfortunately, Duffield (“Spontaneous,” “No One Will Save You”) is less sure-footed when the movie comes up for air. The story is laden with flashbacks that reveal of the fractured relationship between Jay and his father. The scenes get mileage out of Brolin’s craggy visage and gravelly voice, but the seriousness of the drama here is at odds with the weirdness of Jay’s survival efforts in the whale.

Then there’s the movie’s final scenes, which suggests Jay is intuiting a cosmic bond between the whale and his father — a flight of metaphysical fantasy that is more ludicrous than transcendent, and leaves “Whalefall” drowning in its own self-regard. 

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‘Whalefall’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for peril, violent content, bloody images, some strong language, and thematic content. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'The Social Reckoning' digs into Facebook's dark secrets, and recasts Mark Zuckerberg as the scheming bad guy

It’s a bit of a disservice, while watching writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” to think too hard about the 2010 movie “The Social Network,” which Sorkin also wrote (and David Fincher directed) — which is an odd thing to realize about a sequel.

Where that Fincher/Sorkin joint (for which Sorkin won an adapted-screenplay Oscar) unfolded as a bubbly character study of the young Mark Zuckerberg morphing from an arrogant know-it-all into a rich arrogant know-it-all, the new movie is something different. Sure, Zuckerberg is still a pivotal character — played this time by Jeremy Strong rather than Jesse Eisenberg — but the main action of this modern thriller is centered on two people trying to unravel what Facebook’s founder has wrought.

One of these people is Frances Haugen, played by “Anora” Oscar winner Mikey Madison. Haugen works in Facebook’s civil integrity unit, the group of coders tasked with reducing Facebook’s hate speech posts and political misinformation. Haugen is a true believer, and often declares how much she loves her job because of how Facebook allows people to connect with each other.

In 2019, when the movie begins, Haugen’s team gets a warning from Facebook’s top PR guy (Billy Magnussen) about a new arrival to the Bay Area: Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White), a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. Horwitz has been assigned to the Journal’s San Francisco office to cover Facebook. He’s not a tech guy — his editor (Betty Gilpin) mocks him for his inability to use GPS on his rental car — but he’s an investigative reporter, and Facebook isn’t just a tech firm but a force in politics and culture.

Horwitz’ approach of Haugen is tentative. They meet in a park, a neutral spot away from her Facebook colleagues (some of whom live in her apartment building). She wants to be anonymous and off the record, which makes it hard for Horwitz to pin down anything she’s telling him about how Facebook changed its mission, away from just connecting and toward getting people to watch and react — and how the most rage-inducing posts prompted the most reactions.

While Horwitz continues to work on Haugen — the pas de deus of a reporter and a source has seldom been depicted so smartly — through 2019 and the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie also jumps forward to 2021 and an important day for Zuckerberg. 

On this day, Facebook’s founder is suffering through a practice session for an upcoming Congressional hearing. He impatiently listens to his image consultant (Wunmi Mosaku) tell him how to speak and nod and appear human, while a former confidante (Bill Burr) sits in the back and peppers the boss with criticism — particularly about the election misinformation spewing out of the social network. Zuckerberg, here and elsewhere, insists that Facebook is blameless, comparing the site to a “cork board” that can’t control who posts whatever on it. But everything Horwitz is uncovering, and everything Haugen is feeding him, tells a more sinister version of the story.

Sorkin has a long history — “A Few Good Men,” “Moneyball,” “Steve Jobs” and on every episode of “The West Wing” he ever touched — of writing words to be spoken by the smartest people in the room, and having actors good enough and lucky enough to deliver them with conviction.

Madison chews through the tech talk about how Facebook works, and gets through that to show the sharp yet idealistic young woman who thought people would do the right thing even when the the wrong thing was more profitable. White depicts Horwitz as a smart guy realizing how much he has to learn about the tech industry. And Strong, wedging himself into the uncanny valley between Zuckerberg’s responses and human expression, captures the petty small-mindedness of a man often mistaken for one of the world’s deepest thinkers.

If “The Social Network” made a sympathetic outlaw anti-hero out of Zuckerberg, “The Social Reckoning” is an important corrective — a reminder that it’s the people breaking free of Facebook’s outsized influence who deserve our attention and praise.

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‘The Social Reckoning’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'The Lake' gives the Great Salt Lake its closeup, and highlights the people trying to save a fragile natural wonder

I may not be the right audience for “The Lake,” director Abby Ellis’ quietly compelling documentary about the environmental plight of the Great Salt Lake — because, as a journalist in Utah whose colleagues have reported on the lake for decades, I already know a lot of the information and some of the players in this film.

If you’re from outside Utah, or are in Utah but haven’t paid attention, Ellis’ movie is a bracing introduction to the problems of what The New York Times once called an “environmental nuclear bomb.”

Ellis starts in 2023, as several scientists warn about the dangers posed by the lake losing its water supply. Exposing the lake bed, they warned, would allow toxic dust — with chemicals like arsenic and cadmium — into the air, spreading up and down the Wasatch Front, threatening the health of some 3 million people downwind. (Those people include me, my family, my friends, every person I encounter in an average day, and a massive chunk of the population of Utah.)

Two of those scientists — ecologist Ben Abbott at Brigham Young University and biologist Bonnie Baxter at Westminster University — take the lead on a study that issues a dire warning: Within five years, the lake will shrink to the point where the dust will overwhelm hundreds of square miles in Utah and beyond.

Ellis’ documentary follows the aftermath of that report, which was roundly rejected by Utah political leaders, particularly after two years of good rain reset the timetable. Ellis shows Abbott wrestling with the urgency of the lake’s plight, and whether his passion to spread the word veers into activism. Baxter, on the other hand, deals with the possibility that lake bed exposure might be affecting her own health.

The third person highlighted in Ellis’ film is Brian Steed, a longtime player in Utah government, who’s tabbed to be the state’s first Great Salt Lake commissioner. Steed works to navigate the political landscape, seeking common ground between the two groups— farmers and cities — that use much of the water that isn’t getting to the lake. (Note: In May, four months after the movie’s premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Steed resigned as Great Salt Lake commissioner for a job at Utah State University.)

Ellis lays out complicated concepts, like how terminal lakes are created and how so many of them have ceased to exist, with lucid explanations — illustrated with gorgeous images of the lake’s eerie beauty. She also gives all sides a chance to tell their stories, as they seek to build bridges and work together to find a solution. It’s a rare documentary about the environment that doesn’t cast anyone as the bad guy, and doesn’t leave the audience without hope.

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‘The Lake’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 9, in theaters. Not rated, but probably PG for thematic elements. Running time: 88 minutes. 

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This review initially appeared on this site on January 22, 2026, after the movie premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Digger' tries to make satire out of the climate crisis, with Tom Cruise pushing hard but not bringing any comedy to the project.

Well into the cosmic misfire that is “Digger,” there’s a moment where a character, played by Sophia Wilde, is yelling at the character played by star Tom Cruise that what they’re doing is satire — and that satire is supposed to be funny.

This moment suggests that director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu has crossed over into that Netflix parody of moviemaking, where characters have to shout the movie’s most basic points to the audience, who may be folding the laundry or looking at their phones. 

One could say the same of a scene earlier in this humorless attempt at satire, where the President (John Goodman) tells Cruise’s character, oilman Digger Rockwell, that he’s dying of “cancer of the asshole.” Certainly something has ventured up someone’s sphincter in this movie, though I firmly believe it was Cruise and his director.

When the movie starts, we see Cruise as Digger, arguably the richest and most powerful man on Earth, indulging in typical rich-person behaviors — like tending to his cat, who’s infirm to the point of immobility and would be heading for that big scratching post in the sky if Digger would listen to his veterinarian’s diagnosis.

Digger clearly thinks he’s smarter than all of his experts, whether it’s the vet or the researcher at the Rockwell company’s drilling station off the coast of Greenland. Digger’s main expert, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), learns that seconds after Digger finished that call, an explosion of methane from underground destroyed the drilling station and caused a massive ice shelf to break off and start floating toward Europe.

Digger meets the President and the cabinet to explore options, including hoping the ice shelf will steer clear of Europe, worrying that it will cause a tsunami that will kill hundreds of thousands, or nuking the thing into smaller icebergs. Digger decides he has to take charge, so he can stop the climate catastrophe that he knows he started.

The movie soon takes a sharp left turn, which I will not describe in case everything I’ve said so far about this misbegotten movie didn’t impress you and you still want to watch it for yourself. 

What you’ll see is a self-important attempt at satirizing the climate crisis and the indifference of powerful men. (The only woman approaching a level of power is Digger’s sister, a renewable-energy CEO played by Sandra Hüller.) The script — credited to Gonzalez Iñárritu and three other writers — is too literal to be funny and too outlandish to be anything else. It makes the 2021 climate comedy “Don’t Look Up” look like the laugh riot only its producers thought it was.

It’s tempting to credit Cruise with trying something different, for being willing to stretch beyond his action-movie stardom. The problem is that Cruise acts like all this humor-free ridiculousness is imparting a deeper message, when the chaos he and Gonzalez Iñárritu are stirring up destroy all attempts to give the movie a serious edge.

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‘Digger’ 

★1/2

Opens Friday, October 2, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for pervasive language. Running time: 129 minutes.