Review: 'Wake Up Dead Man,' the third 'Knives Out' whodunnit, has Daniel Craig solving a murder and pondering the mysteries of faith

Benoit Blanc — the dapper, drawling detective that Daniel Craig plays for the third time in the delicious “Knives Out” sequel “Wake Up Dead Man” — has a great “impossible murder” on his hands, further complicated because the person on the scene helping him may in fact be the killer.

Though Blanc is the first person writer-director shows us in the movie, he doesn’t come into play for a good 40 minutes or so. To get there, we start with the narrator, Father Jud Duplenticy, played by Josh O’Connor. Father Jud, a former boxer who punched out a deacon, is assigned to a remote church in upstate New York, Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. That church is ruled with an iron hand by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), whose fire-and-brimstone sermons are a far cry from Father Jud’s gentle pastoral view of the Roman Catholic Church.

The core of the parishioners seem to favor Mons. Wicks’ approach. Those include: Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), a sharp-eyed attorney; Dr. Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), the town’s physician, who’s in a funk since his wife left him; Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), a cellist who thinks Wicks’ prayers can cure her chronic pain; Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a formerly successful science-fiction author who’s turned into a conspiracy-mongering conservative; and Cy Draven (Daryl McCormack), Vera’s stepson and a cynically internet-savvy Republican political candidate.

There’s also Wicks’ always lurking assistant, Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who sternly oversees the church’s records and helps him keep discipline over the flock. Her one weakness is her love for the church’s groundskeeper, Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church), who would rather watch a baseball game than listen to Wicks berate newcomers over their sinful ways.

Father Jud aims to make some changes, to bring some New Testament tenderness to Wicks’ Old Testament fearfulness. The ensuing conflict takes a grim turn when, in the middle of Mass on Palm Sunday, Wicks is stabbed to death in a small storage room near the altar, a space where it seems impossible for anyone to enter or leave without being noticed. The first one to get to Wicks is Father Jud, and soon he becomes the only suspect that the local police chief, Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis), has on her list.

Here’s where Blanc enters the picture, and from there it’s an exhilarating mystery — a game, as several characters call it, in which Blanc combs through the evidence, picks through people’s alibis and unravels the dark secrets of every parishioner.

Johnson is also playing a serious game here, in which Jud and Blanc discuss and sometimes debate the differences between faith and science, between giving oneself over to a higher power and devoting oneself to reason and empirical data. Those moments make “Wake Up Dead Man” more than just a fun murder romp, like “Knives Out” and its first sequel, “Glass Onion,” but give the audience some deeper questions to ponder than just “whodunnit?”

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‘Wake Up Dead Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters; starts streaming December 12 on Netflix. Rated R for … Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Zootopia 2' delivers more sharp humor and plot twists than the original, and flies the messages under the radar

It’s been nine years since Disney debuted “Zootopia,” a clever and good-hearted animated tale about a rabbit cop and a con-artist fox who team up, in a parable about fear, prejudice and acceptance that seemed well timed for the political winds of 2016.

With “Zootopia 2,” director-writer Jared Bush and co-director Byron Howard return with a sharper story that keeps the political messaging more subtle and instead wows with sharp humor and a smartly twisty plot.

Officer Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and her partner Nick Wilde (voiced by Jason Bateman) are partners in the Zootopia Police Department — though the big bullies on the force, including Chief Bogo (voiced by Idris Elba), remain skeptical that the case they cracked to save the city wasn’t a fluke. Bogo is even less happy when Judy and Nick intervene in a customs bust, which ends in a chaotic car chase.

In the aftermath of that case, Judy thinks she’s found evidence that someone is smuggling a snake into Zootopia, a place where reptiles have been absent for a century. It was 100 years ago that a snake was believed to have killed a maid working for the city’s founder, Ebenezer Lynxley, credited as the inventor of the weather control system that allows so many different animals to live together peacefully in Zootopia.

As Judy digs deeper, with a reluctant Nick behind her, a bigger conspiracy unfolds involving the current Lynxley clan, who control the town and Mayor Winddancer (voiced by Patrick Warburton), a former action star horse. Soon, Judy and Nick are being framed for an attack on Chief Bogo, and are on the run with a refugee snake, Gary (voiced by Ke Huy Quan), the outcast member of the Lynxley family, Pawbert (voiced by Andy Samberg), and Nibbles Maplestick (voiced by Fortune Feimster), an overly eager beaver with a conspiracy podcast.

Bush’s script includes plot twists that would be welcome in any action thriller, as well as jokes that work for both the younger audience and the adults bringing them to the theater. (Just one example: When Judy and Nick go to the Zootopia jail, they encounter some of the criminals they helped put there, including the first movie’s main villain, the sheep Mayor Bellwether, voiced by Jenny Slate — who’s in a Plexiglass cell that evokes Hannibal Lecter’s room in “The Silence of the Lambs.”) 

There are some nice morals to this story, too — about being confident and trusting your partner, but also about using fear and propaganda to demonize outsiders — but in “Zootopia 2,” they sneak in under viewers’ defenses through the plentiful action and jokes. 

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‘Zootopia 2’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/violence and rude humor. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Eternity' presents a comic afterlife you wouldn't want to visit, with people you wouldn't want to hang out with forever

If, as the makers of the comedy-drama “Eternity” imagine it, I will get to choose one place to go after I die, I would not choose to spend my afterlife in the scenario depicted in this emotionally unbalanced movie — and certainly not with the shrill, plastic character we spend time with here.

When we meet Larry and Joan Cutler, they’ve been married for 65 years (played by Barry Primus and Betty Buckley), and seem to be in a perpetual conversation that is dominated by griping, complaining and bickering. However, it’s also clear they love each other greatly, with Larry tending to Joan as she’s going through cancer treatments.

At a gender-reveal party for one of their grandchildren, Larry chokes on a pretzel and dies. When he realizes what’s going on, he’s on a train headed to a way station for the afterlife. He’s also now played by Miles Teller, as it’s explained that when people die, their physical form reverts to the time in life when they were happiest — which is why, as Larry’s “afterlife consultant,” Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), explains, the afterlife has a lot of 10-year-old children and very few teen-agers.

Anna tells Larry that he has one week to choose from the variety of eternities available — which are pitched in an exhibition hall like commercial goods at a trade expo. When Larry says he doesn’t want to decide until Joan arrives, Anna tells him he’ll have to get a job in this limbo, so he does. One person he befriends is Luke (Callum Turner), who’s been tending bar in this station for 67 years.

Joan dies shortly after Larry, so she (now played by Elizabeth Olsen) soon arrives at the station, where her afterlife coordinator, Ryan (John Early), has been waiting eagerly to meet her. The reason for Ryan’s eagerness is that he knows what Larry doesn’t: That Luke is no mere bartender, but Joan’s first husband, who died in the Korean War and has been waiting for her all this time.

Joan is now faced not only with the choice of which eternity to live in, but which husband she might pick to share it with. And Larry and Luke’s childish behavior toward each other doesn’t make Joan’s choice any easier.

Director David Freyne and his co-writer, Patrick Cunnane (a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama), land some substantial laughs setting up the terms and conditions for the afterlife — where one can choose to spend eternity in idealized versions of 1840s Ireland or 1960s Paris, or something called “Man Free World” (which is fully booked, but the expansion is coming soon). They’re less successful as they try to define these characters or sketch out the plot mechanics as they navigate an eternal love triangle.

Too much of “Eternity” depends on the charisma of the three leads, which they have in abundance. The most engaging of the three is Olsen, who brings a post-death sense of liberation to Joan — someone who, finally, gets to do what she wants rather than what’s expected of her. One hopes Joan eventually chooses an afterlife that’s not so regimented and nitpick.

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‘Eternity’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and some strong language. Running time: 112 minutes.

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.