Review: 'Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom' delivers Aardman's clay-animated wackiness in an efficiently hilarious package

If you’re familiar with the clay-animated works of Aardman Animation — the folks behind Wallace & Gromit — you know that the studio’s latest, “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” is going to pack more laughs in 80 dialogue-free minutes than you otherwise might have thought possible.

Shaun, you may recall, was introduced in 1995, in the Wallace & Gromit short “A Close Shave,” the most rambunctious of the sheep that W&G had to free from rustlers. Shaun has gone on to a popular TV series and now three movies, all hilarious and lacking any recognizable language, 

As the new movie begins, it’s nearly Halloween, and the sheep are about to celebrate the fruits of their long labor, tending to a secret pumpkin patch. Meanwhile, their farmer is hoping to ask the local veterinarian out to the town’s annual Halloween Hoedown. Before he can, though, he stumbles into the pumpkin patch, destroying the entire crop.

The ever-inventive Shaun borrows one of the farmer’s science books, and develops a formula that will grow one seed into a full-sized pumpkin in a matter of days. Eventually Shaun and the other sheep realize the formula is unstable — but not before the farmer gets some mixed in with his anti-baldness lotion, and glops it all over his scalp. Soon the farmer has grown great amounts hair all over his body, until the nervous townspeople think they’re being attacked by a giant hairy monster. And it’s up to Shaun, his flock and their sheepdog, Bitzer, to put things right again.

The directors, Aardman veterans Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, keep the action and the gags moving so briskly that you may need a repeat viewing or two to get all the jokes. Writers Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, along with a small army of animators, make sure those jokes are worth the second view — sometimes looking back to classic silent movies and just as often throwing in a modern reference to see who’s paying attention. (There’s a “Game of Thrones” gag that nearly put me on the floor.)

The movie manages to be quite universal — with the absence of discernible dialogue, just hums and grunts — and also specifically British. Another of my favorite jokes involves Bitzer borrowing the farmer’s truck, but carefully placing the “L” sticker, the British indicator of a student driver, on the tailgate.

“Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” is also that rare beast, a Halloween movie that viewers of any age can enjoy. Something this delightfully wicked this way comes not often enough.

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‘Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild scary action. Running time: 80 minutes.

Review: 'The Weight' is a riveting heist thriller propelled by Ethan Hawke's performance as a dad at the end of his rope

Ethan Hawke has been a working actor so long, over more than 100 roles in movies and TV, that we almost take him for granted — until he breaks out a performance, like he does in director Padraic McKinley’s heist drama “The Weight,” that reminds you how devastatingly good he can be.

Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, who in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, is struggling to keep a roof over his head and that of his little girl, Penny (Ava Berry). One day, after Murphy and Penny are evicted from their apartment, Murphy has an unfortunate encounter with some unsympathetic Portland police, and he ends up being sent away to prison.

At a labor camp in Deschutes County, the warden, J.J. Clancy (Russell Crowe), lays down the law: Work two days, get one day taken off your sentence. Murphy does the math, and sees there’s no way to get enough time deducted to get out before the state puts Penny up for adoption. 

Clancy offers Murphy an alternative, one that’s as dangerous as it is illegal. Clancy knows someone at a nearby gold mine, Taggert (Alec Newman), who wants to move several gold bars over 100 miles of Oregon forest and hills, to keep the FDR administration from confiscating it. Clancy tells Murphy to pick three inmates he trusts — and if they finish the job, Clancy will sign the paperwork to release them. Murphy may not believe Clancy and Taggert will live up to their end of the bargain, but he’s got little choice but to agree.

Murphy picks his three accomplices: Rankin (Austin Amelio), who’s on the most recent of many prison stays; Singh (Avi Nash), a socialist intellectual; and Olson (Lucas Lynggard Tønnesen), a Scandinavian immigrant. They’re joined on the journey by two of Taggert’s men, Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), and by Anna (Julia Jones), an Indigenous woman at the mining camp, who may be the best person to get them through the woods alive.

McKinley, a TV director making his feature debut, evokes some of the classics in the canon of desperate men moving contraband (think Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” or William Friedkin’s remake, “Sorcerer”), as the men have to confront natural obstacles and what’s more treacherous: other men.

At the center is Hawke, grim and grave, the determination to complete this task and get back to his daughter etched in every crevice of his face. Hawke doesn’t talk a lot here — a contrast to his Oscar-nominated performance in “Blue Moon,” as the overly verbose Lorenz Hart — and he makes every motion and syllable speak volumes.

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‘The Weight’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in several theaters. Rated R for language and some violence/bloody images. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'American Doctor' shows viewers the horrors of Gaza, with three doctors trying to save lives during wartime

“Harrowing” doesn’t begin to describe the war violence shown in director Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor,” which shows the efforts of three U.S.-based surgeons trying to save lives in Gaza — and how they try to process the horrors of what they’ve experienced.

The three doctors have all worked at Nasser Medical Center, in Khan Younis in Gaza, often at the center of the response to shelling and bombings by Israeli military forces. And their reactions, as we find out, are shaped in part by their different backgrounds:

• Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an abdominal surgeon from California, arrived last March during a ceasefire — and stayed when the bombing started. He’s of Pakistani heritage, and he talks about how his parents faith (they’re Zoroastrians) have led him to advocate for peace wherever possible. He also expresses frustration that the United States, the government of his country, supplies so many armaments to the Israeli government.

• Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, works at Nasser to save the limbs of children wounded in Gaza. He’s Jewish, but is also ferociously angry at the Israeli Defense Forces and the Netanyahu government, which he blames for perpetuating the deadly violence in Gaza.

• And Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency-room doctor from Chicago, is Palestinian American. He’s worked before at Nasser, but as the movie unfolds is frustrated that the Israeli government regularly blocks him from returning to treat the wounded in Gaza. Instead, he tries to raise awareness in the U.S. of what he’s seen firsthand.

Poh Si Teng, who’s also one of the movie’s five cinematographers, captures the daily grind and panic of the doctors and nurses trying to keep people alive. 

The film also labors to keep the doctors’ political leanings at arm’s length — there’s a conversation at one point about whether Perlmutter’s militancy helps or hurts the hospital’s efforts — but in this hot-button atmosphere, how one views “American Doctor” may be preordained by where one stands to begin with.

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‘American Doctor’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for graphic scenes of war violence, and for language. Running time: 93 minutes; in English, and in Arabic with subtitles.

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This review previously appeared on this site on January 23, 2026, when the movie premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Practical Magic 2' isn't a sequel we needed, 28 years later, but Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman make some sisterly magic

I had utterly forgotten about “Practical Magic,” the 1998 darkish comedy with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters who were witches and living under a curse that killed any man who fell in love with them. I found my review in the archives and discovered I hated the movie, giving it a paltry 1½ stars. 

So it was a pleasant surprise, albeit a small one, that “Practical Magic 2” wasn’t the unnecessary slog of a legacy sequel I feared it would be — but instead a fairly enjoyable reunion with two charming actors 28 years after they first teamed up.

The curse on the Owens women remains strong, as the first scene shows Sally Owens (Bullock’s character) and Gillian (Kidman) at the grave of Sally’s second husband, Gary — the part Aidan Quinn played in the first movie. Graveside, Sally extracts a promise from Gilly, that she will never tell her daughters that they are witches. Sally has suppressed her magic abilities ever since.

Cut to an indeterminate number of years later, and Sally is organizing a family party for their aunt, Jet (Dianne Wiest), who continues to live with her sister, Aunt Franny (Stockard Channing). Gilly arrives late, and Sally’s adult daughters — doctor-in-training Antonia (Maisie Williams) and art history student Kylie (Joey King) — arrive just a bit later. A surprise guest arrives: Gideon (Xolo Maridueña, from “Blue Beetle”), Kylie’s boyfriend. 

There’s another unwanted guest: A death beetle, whose clicking indicates that someone in the house will die soon. Jet knows it’s her turn to go, and she passes shortly after the birthday party. Jet leaves gifts for everyone, with a special one for Franny. It’s a book of magic spells that might, if worked properly, hold the secret to lifting the family curse.

The secret is soon needed, when Gideon is hit by a car and put in a coma — the day after Kylie finally said she loves him. Gilly forces Sally to reveal the family secret to Kylie and Antonia, and a distraught and desperate Kylie grabs the magic book and heads to London. Sally and Gilly follow her, leaving Antonia to watch over Gideon (and leaving poor Williams abandoned for most of the movie).

In London, the Owens women meet two men who become important to the story: Prof. Ian Wright (Lee Pace), an expert in witchcraft in general and the Owens’ legend in particular; and Tom Lockland (Solly McLeod, from “House of the Dragon”), who tends to the manor where the sisters’ ancestor lived and died, starting the curse.

Director Susanne Bier, who worked with Bullock on the apocalyptic “Bird Box,” creates the best moments when each pair of sisters — Sally and Gilly, Jet and Franny, and Kylie and Antonia — pair off, demonstrating that the sisterly bond is the purest form of magic. This pays off particularly well with Bullock and Kidman, who have a loose chemistry that wasn’t so evident in their first pairing 28 years ago. King (in the role Evan Rachel Wood played at age 11) carries her half of the movie quite well, too.

“Practical Magic 2” has its share of flaws, mostly in the cobbled together script (credited to three writers) and in the unnecessary fan service references that I’m guessing few fans will actually remember. It’s not a movie we needed, but as long as it’s here, it’s enough to enjoy Bullock and Kidman making a little magic.

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‘Practical Magic 2’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content, suggestive material and brief strong language. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'Hope' delivers action and thrills at a breakneck pace, and runs through genres and ammo with ludicrous speed

The Korean action thriller “Hope” is a mystery, a monster movie, a chase picture, and a few other genres I don’t want to give away — and the biggest thrill is in how writer-director Na Hong-jin shuffles the deck moving from one to the next.

In Hope Harbor, a seaside town, the police chief, Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), arrives with his backwoods cousin, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), to an odd scene: A dead cow in the middle of a road, with large bloody gashes on its body. Neither the chief or his cousin’s hunting buddies can figure out what killed the cow. Maybe a bear came out of the woods, or a tiger from a nearby preserve. 

Then the chief heads back into town and sees more carnage. Cars are upended, bodies are lying in the streets, and entire businesses are hollowed out. Soon the chief is either running toward or speeding away from the danger — some of it with his eager young officer Sung-ae (played by Hoyeon, from “Squid Game”) taking aim with the large array of weapons she’s carrying. 

For much of the film, Na is toggling between the chief and Sung-ae in town and Sung-ki and his pals in the woods — each facing different renditions of the same peril. Na keeps the tension going a good deal longer than one might expect, pumping up a furious adrenaline rush through several sustained action sequences. There’s also a surprising amount of humor, particularly of the gallows variety.

And then there’s the ending, which comes completely out of left field and still feels like an organic result of what happened before. (I’ll note that the efforts of Irish actor Michael Fassbender and his Oscar-winning Swedish wife, Alicia Vikander, are also featured in the last half hour — but I won’t say how.)

“Hope” is a welcome reminder that action movies are universal, and that Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly any more.

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‘Hope’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content and language throughout. Running time: 160 minutes; in Korean, with subtitles.

Review: 'Edie Arnold Is a Loser' is a goofy Utah-made teen comedy with a punk-rock sentiment, a 'Napoleon Dynamite' vibe and a generous heart

Like many movie critics, I tend to be wary of scrappy low-budget movies made locally — for the same reason restaurant reviewers may not trash a substandard mom-and-pop restaurant, and save their critiques for the really delicious places to go. No critic wants to be the bad guy to someone they might run into in the grocery store.

So the fact that I’m reviewing the Utah-made teen comedy “Edie Arnold Is a Loser” at all is a positive indicator. This is a fun, offbeat and exuberant movie about teen girls chasing a nearly impossible rock ’n’ roll dream so passionately that you’d be made of stone not to want to see them succeed.

The title character, Edie Arnold (played by Adi Madden Cabrera) is a student at Our Lady of Undying Sadness, an all-girl Catholic school. She loves music, though it’s difficult to show that love when she’s assigned to play percussion for the school’s woeful choir, led by the picture-perfect and tone-deaf Kati Vital (Alana Mei Kern). Up in the organ loft, she plays accompaniment with her very nerdy best friend, Frances (McKenna Tuckett), while daydreaming about the cutie from the nearby boys’ school, Walter Boyd (Lucas Van Orden).

Spurred on by Frances, Edie performs a rebellious act, sneaking away from her status-conscious mom (Cherish Rodriguez) to go see a punk band play at a scuzzy music venue. When the girls get there, they learn that the band’s drummer has passed out, and Frances volunteers Edie to fill in. Edie discovers that she likes punk rock, she’s good at playing it, and she wants to play more. Before they know it, Edie and Frances have told everyone — notably the goofy emcee, Iggy (Gabe Root), that they have a band.

The next step for Edie and Frances is to convince the other outcasts at their lunch table, Judith (Niki Rahimi) and Ellen (Alexa Paige), to join their band. They also have to sneak the school’s instruments out of the organ loft, without arousing the suspicion of the school’s cruel disciplinarian, Sister Myra (Star Hermann). Thank heavens for Sister Sheena (Luseane Pasa), the choir director, who thinks Sister Myra needs to unclench her rosary a little.

Directors Megan Rico (who wrote the script, inspired by her own Catholic school days) and Kade Atwood neatly capture the adrenaline rush of teen defiance. There’s a goofiness to the movie’s humor, like in Tuckett’s performance as the anarchic sidekick, that evokes strong comparisons to  two more products of the I-15 corridor, “Napoleon Dynamite” and “SLC Punk!”

It’s the sweetness of “Edie Arnold Is a Loser” that puts it more on the “Napoleon Dynamite” side of the Utah movie spectrum. Edie herself, alone or with her bandmates, emerge as a good kid, just trying to find her voice when so many other things – her school, her rivals, the nuns and her mom — want her to be meek and quiet. It’s hard to think of a teen movie character who deserved her punk rebellion more.

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‘Edie Arnold Is a Loser’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for strong profanity and some sexual dialogue. Running time: 72 minutes.

Review: 'Onslaught' is an incoherent and blood-soaked mess, a horny teen's dumb idea of sex and violence.

About the only thing going for “Onslaught” is that it’s the most accurately titled movie I’ve seen in a while — a brutal bloodbath of a thriller that runs supporting cast members and the audience through the meat grinder with nothing meaningful to show for it.

Somewhere way out in the New Mexico desert, there sit two locations that are conveniently close to each other for director Adam Wingard and writing partner Simon Barrett to let go unexploited. One is a trailer park, where Celeste (Adria Arjona), a former U.S. Army sniper who has PTSD over her Afghanistan experiences, lives near other outcasts, notably an old Vietnam War veteran, Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson). When the movie starts, Celeste’s ex (Jacob Scipio) has dropped off their 5-year-old daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), for some unannounced custody time. 

The other location in the desert is a super-secret military lab, where a former Nazi scientist — played by Dan Stevens, hamming it up with a bald cap and fringe hair on the back and sides — has been working to create an indestructible super-soldiers, tinkering with the DNA of military men believed to be dead or MIA. The leader of the three test subjects, nicknamed The Butcher, is played by MMA fighter Alex Pereira, to give you a sense of the physicality of the bad guys, and the amount of seriousness we’re expected to give anything that follows.

Of course, the super-soldiers escape containment and start messily killing anyone they come across, first at a truck stop mini-mart and eventually at Celeste’s trailer park. It’s there that Celeste tamps down her nerves and fights back to protect Daisy and lay waste to the three genetically altered monstrosities.

It’s clear that Wingard, who has directed the last two “Godzilla vs. Kong” movies, is trying to get back some of the blood-soaked glory of his earlier horror movies, like “You’re Next.” He’s also trying to set a record for the kinkiest way to introduce characters — both with Stevens’ Dr. Kemmler, crawling under the stiletto heel of his wife, Frau Kemmler (Rebecca Hall), and for the weird government operative, Cyrus (Drew Starkey), whose S&M session with topless women in leather is interrupted when he has to clean up the crime scenes left on the super-soldiers’ gory trail.

The whole exercise of “Onslaught” feels like an antisocial 15-year-old incel drew his most disturbing fantasies of sex and violence in a spiral binder, and those pages became the movie’s storyboards. Coherence and logic never survived the script stage, as Wingard seems intent on making the harshest bloody mess that the usually tasteful A24 will let him get away with. Here, he gets away with a boring murder, followed by another boring murder, and so on, in repulsive repetition. 

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‘Onslaught’

★

Opens Friday, September 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, some gore, sexual material/nudity, and language. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour Live in Paris' puts the pop star's visual spectacle somewhat at odds with her music

At the very least, the pop star Katy Perry knows what her fans, the KatyCats, want to see in her live shows: Big flashy spectacle, several costume changes, and a big believe-in-yourself finish centered on two of her hits, “Roar” and “Firework.”  The rest is window dressing, and there’s a lot of that in Perry’s latest concert movie, “Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour Live in Paris.”

The movie was filmed last November, over two shows at Accor Arena in Paris, on the tour where Perry was selling her underwhelming dance album “143” — her first album not to go gold or better since her triple-platinum breakout “One of the Boys” back in 2008. The tour’s narrative plays like a video game, with Perry’s robot avatar, KP143, going through various levels to collect energy hearts and defeat an evil A.I. called Mainframe. 

The video game cut scenes serve a practical purpose in the show, to keep fans entertained while Perry goes to her changing room below the stage and dons another thigh-baring costume. Each section is another level in Perry’s game, and the setlist is somewhat divided by parts of her career.

Yes, it all feels like Perry asked ChatGPT to create a concept that’s similar to, but legally different from, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour — and this is the result. (Perry even copies Swift’s trick of going semi-acoustic for a couple of surprise “deep cuts” midway through the setlist.)

It’s all entertaining as far as it goes, though without the vision that Perry’s contemporaries displayed in their recent concert films — like Swift in the Eras tour, Beyonce in “Revolution” or Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” In those concerts, the songs seemed to be in harmony with the visual spectacle, where with Perry they’re working against each other.

It probably doesn’t help that when Perry does a medley of her earlier hits — including “California Gurls,” “Teenage Dream,” “Hot n Cold” and “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)” — you can hear the age in the dated lyrics and her avoidance of the higher notes. She boasts to the Parisian audience during this stretch that she’s 41 years old, without taking the hint that she maybe should retire that part of her repertoire.

Still, a final act that incorporates “Daisies” — a sentimental favorite that Perry wrote when her daughter was born — along with the heart-tugging “Roar” and “Firework” has the desired effect of bringing artist and audience together in a celebration of empowerment. The KatyCats will lap it up with enthusiasm.

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‘Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour Live in Paris’

★★★

Opened Wednesday, September 2, in theaters. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some profanity and suggestive dancing. Running time: 132 minutes.