Review: 'Hamnet,' a tale of William Shakespeare and his wife, beautifully captures how nature and grief are lived and translated into art

Director Chloe Zhao opens “Hamnet” in a forest, the sort of magical place where William Shakespeare could have set one of his lighter comedies, like “As You Like It” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” — which makes the emotional ride this imagined drama about Shakespeare’s personal life all the more moving.

Anne Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), referred to here as Agnes, spends her time in this forest collecting medicinal herbs and training her falcon — both talents she learned from her mother, who was labeled a forest witch. It’s also where Will (Paul Mescal), who teaches Latin to Agnes’ brothers to pay off his family’s debt to her father (David Wilmot), encounters Agnes. 

On their first meeting, he kisses her and she sends him away. On their second meeting, she asks him to tell a story — and he recalls the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which charms her. They have sex, and Agnes becomes pregnant. Her parents banish her, and Agnes and Will marry and have a daughter, Susanna.

Time passes, in an ethereal way that suits Zhao’s beautifully meditative style, and Agnes becomes pregnant again. Will is miserable trying to write in the country, so Agnes agrees that Will should go to London to pursue writing plays and staging them.

Agnes then gives birth to twins — a daughter, Judith, who seems at first to be stillborn but gradually comes to life, and a son, called Hamnet. All three children are a joy to their mother, and dote on Will when he occasionally comes home. In one scene, the three kids portray the witches from Will’s play, “Macbeth,” and he laughs heartily.

I do not intend to spoil what happens next, suffice it to say it involves how young Hamnet is connected to Shakespeare’s similarly named play — a play about parents and children dealing with grief and loss, and the expression of those emotions through some of the most soulful words ever put to paper. (In the film, the two also are connected by blood: The young actor who plays Hamnet, Jacobi Jupe, is the brother to Noah Jupe, who in the film’s shattering climax plays the actor performing as Hamlet in Will’s company.)

The script — which Zhao wrote with Maggie O’Farrell, on whose novel the movie is based — doesn’t tell when it can show, and Zhao shows with subtlety and quiet inference. This is a movie that gives its rewards to those willing to sit with it, to follow Agnes as she brings their children together with nature and grieves when tragedy strikes, and to listen to Will turn those emotions into poetry.

Mescal is ferociously good as the brooding Will, but it’s Buckley who becomes the heart and soul of “Hamnet” — as she channels Agnes’ bond with nature, and primarily as she lets waves of emotions play out quietly on her face in the movie’s brilliant ending. 

——

‘Hamnet’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic content, some strong sexuality, and partial nudity. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'Merrily We Roll Along' captures the joys of the Broadway revival — including Jonathan Groff's impossibly good looks and Daniel Radcliffe's neuroses

Since most of us don’t have the ready cash or proximity to New York to experience the magic of a Broadway musical, the next best thing is a movie like “Merrily We Roll Along,” which nicely captures the live show in a bottle.

Shot in June 2024 at New York’s Hudson Theatre, the movie features the Tony-winning revival of composer Stephen Sondheim’s smartly conceived musical about a playwright, Frank Shepard (played here by Jonathan Groff), and his two best friends, musician Charley Kringas (Daniel Radcliffe) and magazine writer-turned-novelist Mary Flynn (Lindsay Mendez). 

When Sondheim and playwright George Furst initially wrote the musical in 1981, they kept the story structure from the source material, a 1934 Kaufman/Hart play: Telling the story in reverse chronology — showing Frank, Charley and Mary first as older and disillusioned, gradually catching them younger and more idealistic.

The opening scene is in Frank’s Hollywood home in 1977, when he’s a successful producer of lucrative but dumb movies. Director Maria Friedman, who also directed the stage version, starts by putting Groff’s impossibly handsome face in tight closeup, even when he’s not the one singing — and Frank’s feelings of self-loathing and self-centeredness play out on his face.

Mary is on the sidelines, drunkenly acting as Frank’s conscience, making acerbic comments about the hangers-on trying to get Frank’s attention. She’s also watching as Frank’s wife, Broadway actress Gussie Carnegie (Krystal Joy Brown), is figuring out that Frank is having an affair with the ingenue of his latest show (Talia Robinson, part of the play’s versatile ensemble). Charley is missing, because he and Frank haven’t spoken to each other in four years.

A musical transition takes the story back to 1973, and the last time Frank and Charley talked. It was on live TV, when the two, then a successful songwriting duo, were promoting their latest Broadway show. The interviewer lets slip something Frank hadn’t told Charley yet: Frank has signed a three-picture deal, which will mean a move to Hollywood. Charley unloads to the interviewer about his frustration with Frank’s pursuit of money over art. The song, “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” is a fast-moving ball of lyrical rage, and Radcliffe knocks it out of the park.

Then it’s 1968, and Frank has a new apartment overlooking Central Park, welcoming his son, Frankie (Max Rackenberg), who he hasn’t seen since a bitter divorce from Beth (Katie Rose Clarke). The reason for the divorce: Frank’s affair with Gussie, then married to Joe (Reg Rogers), the producer of Frank and Charley’s breakout stage hit, “Musical Husbands.” Mary, who we figure out has long carried a torch for Frank, learns of the affair and takes up drinking.

Each step backwards in the timeline, the story shows us the friendships as they started, grew and grew apart. We also see how Frank and Charley’s youthful enthusiasm, and their desire to make art that means something, took the blows that life usually delivers — family responsibilities, financial survival and the messiness of having other people depend on you. And all of it is delivered through some of Sondheim’s best compositions, with complex rhyme schemes and intelligent wordplay.

All three leads are a joy to watch. Mendez builds a mask of sarcastic wit to hide the pain of loving Frank and not feeling that love returned. Radcliffe shows Charley to be a jittery ball of anxiety, a perfect foil for the glad-handing Frank. And Groff dominates as he portrays, in reverse, Frank’s slow slide into artistic compromise. Seeing all three together, in this time capsule of a movie, is sheer theatrical delight.

——

‘Merrily We Roll Along’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for drug use, some strong language, and smoking. Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Five Nights at Freddy's 2' is fan service at its worst, a horror thriller that will bore all but the die-hards

Two years ago, director Emma Tammi had it both ways with her cinematic take on Scott Cawthon’s video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s” — delivering the characters and jump-scare shocks the game’s fans demanded, while trying to craft a plausible and fairly good horror thriller that newcomers could enjoy. 

Now, the inevitable sequel, “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” goes all in with the fans, and leaves anyone on the outside wondering why anything this tedious and incoherent ever made it to theaters. And, what’s worse, the whole thing ends with an obvious attempt to set up a third movie.

The prologue sets up what’s ostensibly different about this chapter of the story. It’s a flashback to 1982, in what we quickly learn is the original location for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where animatronic animal characters entertain kids amid the arcade games, ball pit and pizza parties going on around them. These scenes focus on one introverted girl, Charlotte (Audrey Lynn Marie), whose obsession with one animatronic creature — The Marionette — ends badly.

Fast-forward 20 years, and we’re back with the characters from the first movie. Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is trying to raise his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), who’s now 11 and has a not-so-healthy fascination with robotics. Mike is also, as we see early, about to go out on a first date with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), the cop who helped take down the possessed animatronics in their local Freddy’s restaurant.

Vanessa is dealing with bad dreams, mostly involving her dead father, William Afton (Matthew Lillard), the creator of the original Freddy’s and its creepy animal figures. She hasn’t been entirely honest with Mike about everything she knows about her father’s work, but it all comes spilling out when a group of young ghost-hunting social-media stars (led by “Regretting You’s” McKenna Grace) accidentally unleash the Charlotte-possessed Marionette, which aims to kill parents everywhere by remotely controlling the original Freddy robots.

Tammi is back directing this sequel, and she manages to create a few good movie scares. The key weakness here is the script, credited solely to Cawthon, the game’s creator, who’s good at referencing his past work but terrible at setting up a movie scenario more complicated than a jump scare. Those tricks may work repeatedly in a video game, where they catch you because your mind is busy trying to figure out the gameplay, but get old fast in a movie.

Then there are the copious Easter eggs, which are given more thought than the movie’s actual plot. One sequence involves the Freddy character attacking a family on Elm Street (get it?). YouTuber CoryxKenshin returns in a cameo as a disbelieving cab driver. And horror movie fans will get a chuckle, maybe, when they see the actor who plays Charlotte’s father: Skeet Ulrich, Lillard’s partner in crime in the original “Scream” back in 1996. 

Winking references, though, do not a good movie make. Neither do telegraphed “twists” that are included only to set up a third movie. If the point of the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” franchise is that observers are supposed to survive in this creepy scenario, the makers should really make sure those entering Freddy’s world don’t die from boredom first.

——

‘Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’

★

Opens Friday, December 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violent content, terror and some language. Running time: 104 minutes.

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 Rian Johnson 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?”

——

‘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. 

——

‘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 characters 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 nitpicky.

——

‘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.

——

‘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. 

——

‘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.