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.

Review: 'It Ends' puts rookie director Alexander Ullom and a talented no-name cast on an endless, and inventive, road trip

The supernatural thriller “It Ends,” the debut work of writer-director Alexander Ullom, doesn’t require buckets of blood or awful carnage to scare its audience — just a solid premise carried out to its logical and terrifying conclusion.

Four college-age friends are on a road trip, driving through the backwoods of Florida. After taking a turn into the woods, they can’t find the next turn they’re supposed to take. The GPS tells them to keep going straight, though the driver, Tyler (Mitchell Cole), an Army veteran, thinks they need to turn around.

They turn around, and immediately hit a dead end. So they turn around again and keep driving — and driving and driving and driving, for what seems like forever. The engineer of the group, James (Phinehas Yoon), notices that the gas gauge hasn’t budged since they got on this road. And the more easygoing Fisher (Noah Toth) and the car’s lone woman occupant, Day (Akira Jackson), notice that they’re not getting hungry or needing to stop and pee. 

At one point, they stop the car and get out for a moment. That’s when they learn something else about this road: That there are people in the woods on both sides, who rush the car in a frenzy, hurting anyone who would get in their way. So they hurry back into the car and keep driving.

There’s not a lot of overt violence in “It Ends” — the R rating is for the copious F-bombs — and it’s part of Ullom’s cleverness that he can generate tension and surprise just by showing how far these four characters will go on this nightmare journey. Ullom also adds a healthy dose of humor, as his doomed quartet grow and adjust to the strange new rules of their existence.

The foursome of actors, all unknowns, are a solid ensemble, and smartly enact the easy camaraderie of old friends caught in this “Twilight Zone” scenario. Ullom shows he can take very little money and create something thought-provoking and nail-biting.

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‘It Ends’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 28, at the Cinemark Century 16 (South Salt Lake) and the Cinemark Jordan Landing (West Jordan). Rated R for pervasive language. Running time: 89 minutes.

Review: 'Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma' analyzes the sexual tension of horror movies, then dives into that fear and desire with gusto

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun starts “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” as a scholarly dissertation on the cultural power of the American slasher film — and that’s not nearly as dry as you might think. But when Schoenbrun shifts from discussing horror movies to diving headlong into one, the excitement and sexual tension become deliciously unbearable.

Schoenbrun’s introduction informs viewers of the existence of one of the longest running horror franchises Hollywood ever made: The “Camp Miasma” series. It began as a typical story of horny teenagers at a sleepaway camp, getting messily cut to ribbons by a mysterious killer called Little Death, identified by a headpiece that resembles the square vent of a swamp cooler. The series produced more than a dozen sequels, each one worse than the last, until the franchise became a gruesome and problematic shadow of its former self.

Young filmmaker Kris Williams (played by Hannah Einbinder) sees it differently. Kris, identified in a trade paper as a “Sundance wunderkind,” is obsessed with the “Camp Miasma” films, and has been picked to resurrect the franchise. She calls it “zombie I.P.,” a piece of the studio’s intellectual property that’s a known name, but so blisteringly transphobic that the only way the suits can save it is to hire a queer filmmaker like Kris.

Before making her pitch to the studio, Kris ventures to the snowy Pacific Northwest to convince someone else: Billy Presley, the actress who played the “final girl” in the first “Camp Miasma” movie, and never acted again. Billy (played by Gillian Anderson) now lives in the old campsite where the first movie was filmed, and  Kris wonders if Billy has become a Norma Desmond, living in the dream world of her movie. Billy tells Kris that she lives at the camp because “someone’s got to be here when Little Death comes back.” When Kris declares that Little Death isn’t real, Billy replies, “Well, not with that attitude, he isn’t.”

Kris has told her agent (Sarah Sherman) that she wants Billy to star in her new “Camp Miasma” movie, not just appear in a fan-service cameo. Billy screens her personal copy of the first “Camp Miasma” for Kris (in which Schoenbrun lovingly copies the low-res style of the genre), and the young filmmaker starts revealing even deeper feelings. 

It’s here that Schoenbrun, who explored similar themes of onscreen sexuality in her 2024 psychological thriller “I Saw the TV Glow,” shifts from mirroring the mechanics of slasher movies and gets to her real game — exploring the combustible mix of fear and desire that feeds the horror genre. It’s something Kris (and, one assumes, Schoenbrun) has thought about since childhood, staying up late in the dark watching movies that evoked feelings they weren’t old enough to process.

As the movie goes on, Schoenbrun bends the narrative, with twisty imagery that David Lynch and David Cronenberg would have recognized as resembling their own. Schoenbrun doesn’t shy away from scenarios where revulsion, horniness and gallows humor bleed (no pun intended) into one, reveling in the odd irony that movies about a camp are loaded with campiness.

Einbinder, as anyone who’s seen her work in “Hacks” already knows, gives a spectacular performance here, holding in the young filmmaker’s roiling emotions until she can’t any more. Anderson has seldom been given a role this juicy, and she shatters all expectations of a horror movie star. And let’s give a special shout-out to the actor playing Little Death, Jack Haven (who starred in “I Saw the TV Glow”), who gives the character what few slasher villains have ever shown: Humanity and vulnerability.

By the final reel, and the reveal of the movie’s true “final girl,” audiences may be torn about “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” Does it fulfill its promise of reimagining the horror thriller? Does it bring a jagged energy to some well-worn movie tropes? Does it suggest the most passionate love affair ever subjected to buckets of blood? I believe the answer to all three questions is “yes,” so I suggest you pack a bag and get to camp immediately.

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‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 21, at several theaters. Rated R for bloody violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language. Running time: 112 minutes.