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.

Review: 'Coyote vs. Acme' brings Looney Tunes into the courtroom, for a comedy that's relentlessly funny and sometimes sweet

As someone who grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons, it’s an electric experience to see that someone else — namely, the makers of the animated/live-action comedy “Coyote vs. Acme” — are as obsessed and enamored of the Looney Tunes characters as I am.

The movie, inspired by Ian Frazier’s comic short story in The New Yorker, starts with that nonspeaking predator, Wile E. Coyote, in his endless pursuit of the Road-Runner, beep-beeping across the New Mexico desert. Each time, Coyote deploys one of the many products of the Acme Corporation, and each time the device fails miserably. 

After a few thousand of these attempts, Coyote has had enough. He sees an ad for a lawyer in Albuquerque, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who specializes in getting small settlements from Acme for his ‘toon clients. (His law firm is Avery, Jones and Maltese — named for Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, three of the creators of the original Looney Tunes shorts.) Against Kevin’s advice, and spurred by Kevin’s niece and intern, Paige (Lana Condor), Coyote throws every Acme product he’s ever bought into a giant lawsuit.

The size of Coyote’s lawsuit draws the attention of Acme’s slick head lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), who offers a settlement that Kevin accepts but Coyote tears into pieces. Coyote wants to go to trial, for reasons that go beyond the legal. 

Meanwhile, Acme’s CEO wants this case to go away before Kevin and his firm learn too much about the corporation’s less savory practices — particularly a program called Project Sisyphus. The CEO is Foghorn Leghorn, and it’s a stroke of brilliance by screenwriter Samy Burch (an Oscar nominee for writing the Natalie Portman/Julianne Moore drama “May December”) that the rooster is depicted as a cartoon version of John Huston’s character in “Chinatown.”

In the movie’s opening, we learn how far Acme will go to keep secrets, even putting their top scientist, Dr. Lorre (from Jones’ 1946 classic “The Hair-Raising Hare”), in a portable cartoon hole. It’s one of many gags and references running through this cleverly laugh-packed movie, which manages to find a place for most every Looney Tunes character — Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, and even the more problematic ones. (The movie devises the only joke one could safely make in this day and age about Pepe Le Pew.)

What’s more, “Coyote vs. Acme” shows the heart beneath the endless chase between Wile E. Coyote and the Road-Runner. If you don’t think the relationship between two characters who speak a single word between them (“beep”), you’re in for a beautiful surprise.

It defies belief that we came so close to not getting to see the movie at all. When the movie was finished two years ago, the executives at Warner Bros. — the ones who thought “Space Jam: A New Legacy” was a good idea — planned to shelve “Coyote vs. Acme” as a tax write-off. Thankfully, fans forced the suits to sell off the distribution rights to a smaller company, Ketchup Entertainment, and we get to see this inventive and warm-hearted movie for ourselves. Strap on your rocket skates and get to the theater quickly.

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‘Coyote vs. Acme’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 28, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for cartoon violence. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'The Dog Stars' shows director Ridley Scott's action gifts remain strong, as Jacob Elordi is evolving into a leading man

It’s a reality film fans must face, that the director Ridley Scott, at age 88, will sooner rather than later make his last movie. I can’t say whether his 30th feature film, “The Dog Stars,” will be the last one — but I hope not, because this post-apocalyptic thriller has its moments, but it isn’t Scott’s best work.

Set in the year 2035, a few years after a virus has killed most of humankind, the film starts with Hig (Jacob Elordi), a bush pilot who has managed to survive through his skills as a mechanic He also has been trained by his friend, Bangley (Josh Brolin), a gruff survivalist who lives by the “shoot first, ask questions later” model to anyone who approaches the aircraft hangar they call home. 

His makes flights into the nearest city — which we learn is Denver — to scrounge supplies and steer clear of the Reapers, a maniacal cult that steals whatever it can find. Hig also visits the house where he used to live with his wife, Melissa (played in flashbacks by Sam Bennett). When in the air, Big sometimes hears radio calls out of Grand Junction, which becomes Hig’s symbol of a better and safer life.

At a certain point in the script — by “The Revenant” writer Mark L. Smith, adapted from Peter Heller’s novel — Hig decides he has to see if Grand Junction is real, and leaves Bangley alone to seek it out. He doesn’t get too far, when engine trouble forces a hard landing in a clearing. It’s there he meets a distrusting rancher, Pops (Guy Pearce), and his daughter, Cima (Margaret Qualley), a former medical resident. Hig repairs his plane and earns Pops’ trust, and the three work together to clear the meadow so Hig can take off again.

Parts of Smith’s script work better than others — and the finale, which covers the mythical Grand Junction and features Allison Janney in an odd role, is the part that’s the least successful. Smith’s script takes some interesting detours in parts, but that ending pulls the movie right off the map.

Still, there are smaller joys in Scott’s direction, which is unfussy and straightforward, and reminiscent of Nia DaCosta’s work in the similarly structured “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.” And Scott is a good guide for Elordi, who’s coming off his Oscar-nominated performance in “Frankenstein” and continuing his evolution into the strong, silent leading-man roles he seems destined to play. 

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‘The Dog Stars’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 28, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, and language. Running time: 118 minutes. 

Review: 'Buddy' cleverly reimagines an '80s children's show format into something weirder and more terrifying

The premise for the horror thriller “Buddy” is creepily effective because it tries to answer a question any sleep-deprived parent has asked: What if the fuzzy costumed character on your child’s favorite show was, in fact, horribly evil and killing the children on the show?

Here, the show is “It’s Buddy,” an early-‘90s relic in which a plush orange unicorn comes alive as a 6-foot living character who plays with a quartet of children who play, sing and learn lessons about being cooperative or brave. The episodes always end with the kids giving Buddy a big hug and singing about about much they love him.

For the first 25 minutes, that’s the pattern that director Casper Kelly and his co-writer, Jamie King, set up. They also show the cracks in the perfect children’s TV facade when Buddy gets angry or someone — either child performs or grownup actor, like Nurse Nancy (Phuong Kubacki) — doesn’t do what Buddy tells them to do. Then Buddy starts murdering people, and has to go find new cast members. How he does that is a mystery Kelly and King aren’t eager to give away too soon.

The movie cuts away from Buddy’s candy-colored set to a typical suburban home, where Grace (Christin Milioti) lives with her husband, Ben (Topher Grace), and their two sons. On the surface, everything seems fine, but Grace starts feeling uneasy — like there’s something missing in their well-ordered suburban life. 

While Grace is sorting that out, the kids in Buddy’s backyard start having their doubts about Buddy’s motivation for keeping the kids here, and for insisting that all the kids remain happy at all costs. One child, Freddy (Delaney Quinn, from “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), realizes that the kids have to get out of Buddy’s yard, so they devise a plan to escape to far-off Crystal City. 

How does Freddy’s story within the “It’s Buddy” hellscape and Grace’s suburban drama come together? That would be a major spoiler. Trust that it all makes sense within the stylized universe created here.

Kelly excels at bending a familiar family-friendly video style into something ghastly. He did it on his best known work, the 2014 video “Too Many Cooks,” a dark spoof of ‘80s sitcom credit sequences. Here, he evokes the cardboard and rainbows of the “Barney” genre, then twists it into something monstrous. 

Kelly has help here, particularly in the realization of Buddy, with Sergey Zhuravsky working the character’s body and Keegan-Michael Key providing his voice. The movie also boasts solid voice work from Patton Oswalt and Michael Shannon, and a surprising performance from the king of “B”-movies, Clint Howard.

With a premise like this, the difficulty is in sticking the landing, and “Buddy” delivers with a tense, bloody conclusion that will make you think twice about what you let your little kids watch.

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‘Buddy’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 28, in several theaters. Rated R for bloody violence, some drug content and language - all involving children. Running time: 95 minutes.