Review: 'Is This Thing On?' explores stand-up as catharsis, but finds hope in strong performances by Laura Dern and Will Arnett

Love’s a funny thing, and so is divorce in “Is This Thing On?,” a shaggy comedy-drama from director Bradley Cooper that gives a rare leading-man spotlight to Will Arnett as a guy who finds a unique avenue for turning his life around.

Arnett plays Alex Novak, who has a finance job that we almost never see him do. Mostly we see him hanging out with his irresponsible actor friend, nicknamed Balls (and played by Cooper), and Balls’ overly understanding wife, Christine (Andra Day). Sometimes Alex’s wife, Tess (Laura Dern), is there, but that may soon change — because Alex and Tess are in the process of getting a divorce.

Cooper, who reworked a script by Arnett and Mark Chappell, presents the mechanics of the Novaks’ parting in a matter-of-fact style. There’s no precipitating incident, no screaming arguments, no revealed infidelity. It’s just two people who have decided, quite rationally, that the marriage has run its course. 

What we’re here to see is the aftermath. That starts when Alex, alone on a New York night, goes into a bar and learns that the way to get around the $15 cover charge is to sign up to perform stand-up comedy on open-mic night. He gets onstage without a prepared act, and starts unloading about his impending divorce. He gets a few mild giggles from the audience, but the experience is cathartic, and he wants more.

(The movie is based, loosely, on the story of English comedian John Bishop, who tried stand-up to cope with his own divorce. Americans might know Bishop from the short season he co-starred on “Doctor Who,” near the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run as The Doctor.)

While Alex is turning open-mic night into his personal therapy sessions, Tess is trying to figure out what’s next in her life. A former Olympic volleyball player, Tess is considering getting back into the sport as a college coach. The notion draws some attention, particularly from another coach, Laird, who might also be a potential romantic interest. (Laird is played, in an unusual bit of casting, by NFL legend Peyton Manning, who’s surprisingly not bad at this acting thing.)

Cooper spends most of the movie’s first half showing Alex building up his stand-up set, and his resilience to lukewarm crowds. The cast is populated with some real comics, and includes Amy Sedaris as the comedy club’s nurturing owner, who encourages Alex to dig deeper for his comedy.

The second half gets more interesting, as Alex and Tess finally have the heavy discussions they should have had earlier — about how their marriage fell apart and how they’re still strongly attracted to each other.

Some elements in “Is This Thing On?” fail spectacularly, and none harder than Cooper’s own performance as Balls, whose clearly limited acting talent is overwhelmed by his unjustly placed confidence in himself. It’s perhaps the most blatant act of cinematic self-sabotage I’ve seen in ages.

But it’s hard to stay angry when Dern and Arnett are on their game. Separately, they present a fascinating dichotomy in post-divorce coping, with one spiraling and the other blossoming. Together, they make one feel that love just might conquer all.

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‘Is This Thing On?’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, sexual references and some drug use. Running time: 121 minutes.

Review: 'Primate' is a chimp-centered slasher movie that lazily slaughters its young cast in order of stupidity

What is the strange magic that turns seemingly intelligent people in their 20s into complete idiots? It’s being written into a horror movie, like director Johannes Roberts’ chimp-driven splatter movie “Primate,” which is designed solely to find semi-innovative ways to slaughter its cast.

In a remote house on the coast of a Hawaiian island, Lucy (played by Johnny Sequoyah) is coming home from college, with her best friend, Kate (Victoria Wyant), along for company. Kate has invited another friend, Hannah (Jess Alexander), who flirts with a couple of frat bros (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon) on the plane.

Lucy quickly reunites with her family: Her father, Adam (Oscar winner Troy Katsura); her teen sister, Erin (Gia Hunter); and Ben (performed by Miguel Torres Umba), who is a chimpanzee who can communicate through sign language and a touchscreen with a symbolic vocabulary. Ben, we’re told, was raised as part of the family by Adam and his wife, a linguist who died from cancer.

Lucy’s barely unpacked her bags when Adam says he has to leave everyone for a day, while he goes off to a book signing where he also aims to pitch a movie based on the family’s life raising a chimp. That’s OK, though, because Lucy, Kate and Hannah have plans to party by the pool, with Lucy’s high-school crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng).

Everything seems to be going fine, except for the thing the audience knows because of a foreshadowing prologue where a veterinarian goes into Ben’s enclosure, and the chimp — who, we soon learn, was infected with rabies, rips the vet’s face off. And Roberts (who made the shark movie “47 Meters Down” and its sequel) is content with letting the audience see the repulsive gore and body horror images in all their blood-red disgust. 

There are moments to recommend in “Primate,” largely coming from Katsura. The actor, who won the Oscar for supporting actor as the deaf fisherman dad in “CODA,” brings some warmth to the patriarchal role — and his lack of hearing is woven into the script fairly cleverly. 

When Katsur’s not in the picture, which is the entire middle section, “Primate” plays like another dumb psycho killer movie, with the attractive young cast making inexplicably stupid decisions and getting ripped to shreds one by one. The only tension Roberts mounts is making us guess in what order the characters will be dispatched.

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‘Primate’

★1/2

Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language, and some drug use. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Greenland 2: Migration' presents round 2 of the apocalypse, and more chances for Gerard Butler's machismo and Morena Baccarin's fierce protectiveness shine through.

Surviving the apocalypse isn’t something you do just once, as the end-of-the-world sequel “Greenland 2: Migration” proves as it runs the Garrity family again through the aftermath of a cosmic cataclysm.

For those who don’t remember the first movie, “Greenland,” a quick recap: John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and young son witness part of a comet striking the planet, causing mass catastrophe around the world. The family’s only hope is to find the one safe space left, in Greenland.

The sequel picks up five years later, with the Garrity family — including a 15-year-old Nathan, played by Roman Griffin Davis (“Jojo Rabbit”) — living with a few hundred other survivors in a bunker in Greenland. But surviving isn’t the same as living, since the bunker dwellers seldom see the sun because of radiation let loose by the comet, as well as occasional fragments of the comet that have been caught in Earth’s orbit and sometimes come crashing down.

With tremors laying waste to the Greenland base, the Garritys have to hit the road for a rumored sanctuary in southern France, in the crater where the comet, Clarke, originally struck. The journey puts the family through unstable territory, and people occasionally shooting at them. A further complication is that John is suffering a persistent cough — and, to paraphrase Bowen Yang from a 2024 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, “that’s movie for ‘dying.’”

The script — by Mitchell LaFortune and the first movie’s writer, Chris Sparling — sets numerous obstacles in the path of the Garrity family, most of them setting up action sequences for director Ric Roman Waugh (who also directed Butler in “Angel Has Fallen” and “Kandahar”) to stage for maximum thrills. The script also conjures up a string of lucky coincidences to ensure the Garritys always find friendly allies with a filtered air supply and a handy vehicle.

There are worse ways, I suppose, to make an action movie that highlights Butler’s rugged intensity and Baccarin’s tiger-mom ferocity. “Greenland 2: Migration” is gritty, sometimes cliched and often in love with its reliance on SteadiCam shots. But it’s a get-the-job-done thriller that delivers the action without pretense.

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‘Greenland 2: Migration’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, bloody images, and action. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'No Other Choice' is Park Chan-Wook's brutal and morbidly funny take on downsizing, and what Lee Byung-hun's desperate character will do for a job

Park Chan-Wook’s new movie, the darkly comic “No Other Choice,” pairs well with “Decision to Leave” to represent the Korean director at his most down-to-earth — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry many of the outlandish flourishes and psychological horrors Park has brought to such movies as “Oldboy,” “Thirst” and “The Handmaiden.:

Lee Byung-hun — who worked with Park early in their careers, notably the 2000 thriller “Joint Security Area,” before Lee became a global star via “Squid Game” — plays Man-su, who has worked at a Korean paper company for decades. He argues that experience should count for something, but the American corporate types who buy the company don’t care, and Man-su is laid off.

Man-su goes through the different stages of post-employment indignity, including group therapy sessions and classes in how to present oneself in a job interview. But with few other paper companies hiring, Man-su knows the competition is tough, in part because they’re the people he used to work with. So Man-su slowly comes to create a new plan: Eliminating the competition, literally.

Park puts Lee through his own indignities, staging scenes that are both brutally funny and just plain brutal in their depiction of Man-su slowly rationalizing murder and discovering his ineptitude at pulling it off. 

The movie is bolstered by strong source material: Park and his three co-writers are adapting “The Ax,” a novel by American detective novelist Donald E. Westlake. Park doesn’t remove the menace Westlake’s hard-boiled plotting, but he adds a strain of morbid humor — particularly in Man-su’s stakeouts and his efforts to apply his paper-making managerial skills to the problem solving necessary to kill someone and not get caught.

Of course, what makes “No Other Choice” resonate is that it’s not something that only might happen to someone in South Korea. (It’s telling that an earlier adaptation of “The Ax” was made in France two decades ago.) Anyone fearing for their job in today’s corporate world can imagine being in the same position as Man-su, and making the same desperate choices.

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‘No Other Choice’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence, language and some sexual content. Running time: 139 minutes; in Korean with subtitles.

Review: 'The Plague' is an eerie and unsettling drama centering on a kid experiencing the cruelty of teen boys — and deciding whether to fight back or join in

Anyone who has had teen children, or has been a teen child, will recoil with horror and recognition through “The Plague,” a psychological drama that centers on the harms of isolation and peer pressure.

The setting is 2003, at a summer camp for boys learning water polo. The boys learn the basics of what’s often a rough-and-tumble sport, but nothing in the water is as nasty as what the group dynamic of these boys does to a kid who doesn’t fit in.

Ben (Everett Blunck) isn’t that kid, at least not yet. But he’s closer in temperament to the outcast kid in the camp, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), than to the boys who tease and torment a kid who quotes “The Lord of the Rings” in the sauna when only Ben is around.

The gang of boys, with the constantly smirking Jake (Kayo Martin) as their ringleader, maintain a rumor that Eli has “the plague.” According to Jake’s telling, the plague starts with a skin rash and descends into more terrible symptoms — and any boy who touches Eli has to wash himself off immediately or risk contracting the plague himself. 

The boys react to Eli’s presence by scattering like cockroaches in the cafeteria, for fear of being touched. Ben, desperate to be part of the group, joins in this behavior — though he has second thoughts when he actually talks to Eli in the locker room. As Ben starts to befriend Eli, or at least not treat him like a pariah, Jake see a chance to make Ben the next target of the gang’s cruelty.

Writer-director Charlie Polinger, making his feature debut, conjures up a 21st-century variation on “Lord of the Flies,” a situation where boys are given free rein to be who they want to be — and who that is turns out to be horrible little pricks. There’s only one adult in the room here, a coach played by Joel Edgerton, but he’s largely ineffectual when he’s present, which isn’t a lot. 

The lads are mostly on their own in “The Plague,” which pumps up the psychological tension without giving us enough details to get past the “kids can be cruel” stereotypes. The camp, we discover early, is a bad place for sensitive boys like Eli, and an even more dangerous place for a kid like Ben, who’s one small push from falling off the fence between prey and predator. But the audience’s investment in where Ben lands is muted by Polinger’s inability to show us more clearly what’s at stake.

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‘The Plague’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 2, in theaters. Rated R for language, sexual material, self-harm/bloody images, and some alcohol and drug use - all involving children. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Marty Supreme' casts a likable Timotheé Chalamet as a charmingly unlikable table-tennis champ

In “Marty Supreme,” Timotheé Chalamet is given the biggest test an actor can face — play the most unlikeable character imaginable in a way that will make audiences love you anyway — and darn if the kid doesn’t do just that.

Chalamet carries the movie, no easy task in a two-and-a-half hour period piece that director Josh Safdie fills to the brim with outlandish moments, sharp characters, a wealth of nontraditional acting talent and a completely original take on the underdog sports drama.

Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, who has a dream to be the greatest table-tennis player in the world. To hear him tell it, he already is the best, and he just needs the money to get to the great tournaments around the world to prove it. But this is 1952, and the people around him in Brooklyn think table tennis is a kid’s game, and not a serious sport.

In addition to being a dreamer, Marty also is a cad. In the stock room of the shoe store where he works, he’s having sex with Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), who’s married to another man — and soon learns that she’s pregnant. He feels cheated by the store’s owner, Murray Norton (Larry “Ratso” Sloman), so he tries to break into Murray’s office and steal back the money he thinks he’s owed — which leads to a run-in with New York’s finest. 

Marty manages to make it to London for a major tournament. He shows his table tennis skills, advancing to the final against a fearsome Japanese competitor, Koto Endo (played by Koto Kawaguchi). But his hijinks away from the table, complaining to a table tennis official (Pico Iyer) about the accommodations and then running up a huge hotel tab charged to the sport’s foundation, land him in more trouble.

In London, he also encounters a wealthy American couple. The husband, Milton Rockwell (played by “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary), owns a multi-million-dollar pen manufacturer who has an offer to bankroll Marty’s career, if he’s willing to sacrifice his integrity. The wife, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), is an actress on the downslope of her fame — with whom Marty, almost inevitably, has an affair.

That’s probably enough synopsis to provide the gist of the breakneck pace of the script, by Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, who also co-wrote “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems,” both movies Safdie directed with his brother, Benny. 

I haven’t mentioned the eclectic array of supporting performers in this movie, including Fran Drescher as Marty’s mother, Tyler Okonma (aka Tyler the Creator) as his cab-driving buddy, and other roles for NBA legend George Gervin, filmmaker Abel Ferrara, Vegas showman Penn Jillette and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi. It’s like the casting director Jennifer Venditti was playing her own game of Mad Libs, and somehow it all works.

The gem among the supporting cast is A’zion, who brings a ferocity to Rachel, a woman scorned who won’t put up with her jerk husband but also won’t let Marty get away with his irresponsible antics. A’zion is only in the movie for a few short stretches, but she electrifies every scene she’s in. 

From those opening scenes in Brooklyn to a riveting finale in Japan, a rematch between Marty and Endo that’s as unpredictable as it is inevitable, Chalamet charms his way into the audience’s heart. Marty may do unspeakable things and treat everyone around him like rungs on his ladder to table-tennis success, but Chalamet makes it all feel alright. He plays Marty like an overgrown puppy who knows he’s so cute that he can crap anywhere and everyone will still find him adorable — and “Marty Supreme” hits its stride at the exact moment when Marty starts to realize that not everyone thinks what he’s doing is cute.

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‘Marty Supreme’

★★★1/2

Opens Thursday, December 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity. Running time: 150 minutes.

Review: 'Song Sung Blue' lets Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman sincerely sing and act through a true-life melodrama

Though writer-director Craig Brewer’s musical romance “Song Song Blue” is based on a true story, it feels like the most cornball melodrama, with onstage triumphs and backstage tragedies parceled out in regular intervals.

Without the performances of Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, who bring complete sincerity to their roles, the whole thing would melt away like a hot August night.

Jackman plays Mike Sardina, a singer and guitarist who bounces around Milwaukee’s third-tier music venues in the 1990s, from state fairs to karaoke bars, trying to entertain wherever he can. He does have standards, though, as he demonstrates when he refuses to sing “Tiny Bubbles” as Don Ho at a nostalgia show organized by his friend Mark Shurilla (Michael Imperioli), who does a fair Buddy Holly. He’d rather perform as his alter ego, Lightning.

At one of these shows, Mike meets Hudson’s character, Claire Stengl, who does an impressive job singing as Patsy Cline. The two hit it off, both because they love performing and because they both have had hard lives — Mike acknowledges right off he’s an alcoholic who’s been sober 20 years, while Claire is raising two kids, geeky Dana (Hudson Hensley) and mortified teen Rachel (Ella Anderson). 

Claire suggests Mike perform Neil Diamond songs — though Mike, being an admirer of Diamond, isn’t sure he can do the songs justice. So Claire offers to duet with him, playing keyboards to accompany Mike and his guitar. They’re so good together that Mike suggests they perform under the name Lightning & Thunder — an idea Claire responds to by kissing Mike.

Brewer (who also directed “Dolemite Is My Name” and “Hustle & Flow”) spends the movie’s first half establishing Mike and Claire as a couple, both musically and romantically. In montages set to Diamond’s songs, Brewer captures their early struggles connecting with an audience, their fast courtship and wedding, and their gradual winning over of Milwaukee fans — culminating in the career pinnacle, an invitation to open for Pearl Jam. Even Rachel and Mike’s teen daughter, Angelina (played by the indie singer King Princess), become fast friends.

At around the one-hour mark, something horrific happens out of the blue that changes Mike and Claire’s trajectory radically. The rest of the movie unfolds from that moment, and how Mike, Claire and their families work to recover — and, you can bet, the music of Neil Diamond plays a part in that healing.

The movie is based on a 2008 documentary about the real Scarina family, directed by Greg Kohs, also titled “Song Sung Blue.” I’ve never seen the documentary, and I was actually relieved that Brewer didn’t include clips of the real Mike and Claire over the closing credits — because it would have diminished the effect of Jackman and Hudson performing.

Jackman always lives up to the title of one of his previous movies, “The Greatest Showman,” and here shows us Mike’s onstage swagger and the vulnerability just beneath the surface. The star here, though, is Hudson, who’s pressed into mounting some powerful physical acting (a result of that tragedy I mentioned), and bringing warmth and soul to Claire’s backup and duet singing. 

While Brewer’s script sometimes skirts the edge of shameless emotional manipulation, what earns the movie its flowers is the way he crystalizes Mike and Claire’s joy of entertaining people, even in a Thai restaurant on karaoke night. These folks aren’t expecting a shot at the big time, just a chance to make people smile — and, by the time the movie’s over, darn it if you’re not smiling with them.

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‘Song Sung Blue’

★★★

Opens Thursday, December 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some strong language, some sexual material and brief drug use. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants' is more of the same from your favorite rectangular cartoon hero

There’s a handy shorthand to determine whether you will like “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants”: Have you liked “SpongeBob SquarePants” over the years?

If the answer is yes, then you’ll probably like this latest movie in the cartoon franchise, because it delivers the same level of offbeat gags and manic pacing that you used to get in 11-minute bites. If not, find your fun elsewhere.

In this feature-length cartoon, the eager and innocent SpongeBob (voiced by Tom Kenny) wakes up and see that he is now officially 36 clams tall — which means he’s finally a “big guy,” and can ride on the scariest roller coaster in Bikini Bottom’s biggest amusement park. Once he gets there with his best buddy Patrick Star (voiced by Bill Fagerbakke), SpongeBob chickens out and runs back to his boss, Mr. Krabs (voiced by Clancy Brown, who also makes a live-action appearance in the prologue). 

Mr. Krabs tells SpongeBob there are other ways to prove one’s bravery — and when SpongeBob runs into the most fearsome ghost in the ocean, The Flying Dutchman (voiced by Mark Hamill), the little sponge thinks this his way to prove his “big guy” status. The Dutchman has his own motive for pushing SpongeBob along: He needs an innocent soul to help lift the curse that has kept The Dutchman a ghostly prisoner for centuries.

That’s the story, such as it is, that director Derek Drymon (a veteran of the TV show) and writers Pam Brady and Matt Lieberman present here. Thankfully, these filmmakers know the gags are the important part, and there are enough of those to keep kids and some adults laughing.

One thing “The SpongeBob Movie: The Search for SquarePants” confirms is the scene-saving status of voice actor Fagerbakke, whose deadpan readings of the dead-brained starfish can squeeze a laugh out of pretty much anything. Patrick has always been great, but in this movie, he’s a star.

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‘The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for rude humor, action and some scary images. Running time: 89 minutes, plus a 7-minute short, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 - Lost in New Jersey.”