Review: 'The Sheep Detectives' is a whimsical delight, a gentle comedy about farm animals becoming crime solvers

There may not be a mood that’s harder to get right on film than whimsy — so when a movie gets that delicate balance of humor, absurdity and charm just right, as “The Sheep Detectives” does brilliantly, you have to stop and celebrate.

Top-billed Hugh Jackman plays George Hardy, who tenderly cares for a flock of sheep in the English countryside. He sees to all their needs, has given each one of them names, and every night before going to bed, he reads to them. Murder mysteries, mostly.

What George doesn’t know is that when he goes to bed, the sheep talk to each other as they try to guess who committed the crime in that night’s book.

The sheep have distinctive personalities, and the voice casting matches them well. They include: the distinguished oldest sheep, Sir Ritchfield (voiced by Patrick Stewart), the cantankerous rams Ronnie and Reggie (both voiced by “Ted Lasso” star Brett Goldstein), the loner Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston), the maternal Cloud (voiced by Regina Hall), and the wise Mopple (voiced by Chris O’Dowd), who alone possesses the knack among the sheep of not forgetting things that are unpleasant. The leader of the sheep, and of the mystery book club, is Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Just as the sheep are close to solving the latest literary whodunnit, a real-life mystery lands in their midst — when they find George dead in front of his caravan. Lily says the sheep can figure out this case, just by following the advice they’s learned from listening to George’s nightly readings.

Certainly there are plenty of likely suspects, who are all gathered in town when George’s lawyer, Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), invites several townspeople to the reading of his will. The possible suspects include: a rival shepherd (Tosin Cole), the town’s butcher (Conleth Hill), the local innkeeper (Hong Chau) who had a crush on George, and a newcomer, Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon), who was visiting George because he was her long-estranged daughter. 

The idea that George was murdered also interests Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), the town’s not-very-bright constable, and Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), a rookie reporter who thinks cracking the case could make for a winning news story.

The sheep soon find that solving a real murder is harder than the books make it out to be — and there’s the added problem of getting the humans to believe a murder has happened. The steps Lily and the others take to lead the townsfolk — especially Officer Tim — to the clues they’ve found make for a good amount of the movie’s off-kilter humor.

Director Kyle Balda finds a level of charm and wit that eluded him helming three movies in the “Despicable Me”/“Minions” franchise, striking a tone that’s similar to “Babe” or the “Paddington” films. Also give credit to screenwriter Craig Mazin —  who co-created “The Last of Us” for HBO, as radically different a project from this as you could imagine — for adapting German crime writer Leonie Swann’s novel, “Three Bags Full.”

“The Sheep Detectives” is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you as you watch. You think you’re settling in to watch a sweet, slightly odd little comedy about farm animals and murder, and things unfold that deliver a surprising gentleness and emotional heft. It’s as perfectly delightful as a movie can be.

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‘The Sheep Detectives’

★★★★

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic material, some violent content and brief language. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Mortal Kombat II' is a bloody, awful movie that only the franchise's most devoted fans might enjoy

Many of the same people who made the 2021 reboot of “Mortal Kombat” — based on the ‘90s video game — are back for “Mortal Kombat II,” including director Simon McQuoid and 10 cast members.

So what’s new in this sequel? Well, there’s Karl Urban — whose franchise credits include “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movies — hamming it up as Johnny Cage, a fading action star who gets a chance to uncover the warrior behind the Ray-Bans and 5 o’clock shadow. Besides him, it’s more of the same nonsensical and hyper-violent fighting.

In what passes for a plot in Jeremy Slater’s script, we’re told that Earth — sorry, Earthrealm, in the game’s parlance — is 0-for-9 in a combat tournament against the dark forces of the Outworld, and one more loss means the Outworld’s brutal emperor, the skull-masked Shao Kahn (played by the beefy Martyn Ford), will take over Earth forever. 

In the prologue, we see Shao Kahn conquer another world by killing its king and taking the queen, Sindel (Ana Thu Nguyen), and the princess, Kitana. As an adult, Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), is outwardly loyal to Shao Kahn, her stepdad, but secretly trains to one day fight him. 

In Earthrealm, Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) gathers the available fighters for the next tournament, including returning characters: The energy-shooting Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), robot-armed Jax Briggs (Mehcad Brooks), fire-wielding Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), power-absorbing Cole Young (Lewis Tan) and, eventually, the laser-eyed Scottish smart-mouth Kano (Josh Lawson). 

Kano’s presence, as well as that of enemy fighters Bi-Han (Joe Taslim) and Kung Lao (Max Huang), are proof that dying in the first movie wasn’t going to keep someone out of this one. And as Asano and his “Shogun” castmate Hiroyuki Sanada learned, winning Emmys wasn’t enough to break a contract to appear in the sequels.

If you’re expecting some clever screenwriting tricks to explain all of this, forget it. McQuoid and Slater are only interested in getting these characters on the set together so the fighting can start. And, as in the game, there’s a lot of blood-splattering carnage in front of green screens in the places where satisfying action sequences should go. Not even the game’s idiotic taglines — like “finish him!” and “get over here!” — can make “Mortal Kombat II” feel like more than watching someone else play a video game.

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‘Mortal Kombat II’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, and language. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: Billie Eilish concert film, 'Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D' captures the singer declaring her independence and taking her audience along

Seeing a concert film for an artist whose music you don’t know well becomes a case study in the mechanics of entertainment — and with “Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D,” those mechanics prove to be quite fascinating.

My familiarity with the 24-year-old Eilish was admittedly limited, mostly to the two songs that won Oscars for her and her brother Finneas: “No Time to Die” from the James Bond movie of the same name, and “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie.” As the movie went on, I recognized probably her most played single, “Bad Guy,” and that was it. I like the other songs in the set list, but what really struck me here was the stagecraft and what it represents.

On her “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour, Eilish performed in the round, on a massive rectangular stage whose floor featured the same kind of digital screens that also descended from the ceiling. And, in a departure from the massive productions of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour or Beyonce’s “Renaissance” tour (both of which were captured in spectacular concert films), Eilish doesn’t go in for costume changes. At both shows filmed for this movie, in Phoenix, Arizona, and Manchester, England, Eilish wears the same outfit: An oversized t-shirt and basketball jersey (with the words “Hard and Soft” across the front), baggy men’s shorts, and sneakers.

In one of the movie’s interview segments, Eilish explains to her co-director and camera operator James Cameron (yes, that James Cameron) how her clothes are a choice, and an expression of her feminism. By dressing in a way that makes her comfortable, rather than in some body-hugging outfit, she’s telling her audience – mostly young women like herself and teens who want to be like her — that they can be who they are and be happy. And a rock star.

Seen in that light, and with a few snippets of fans explaining how Eilish’s music has sometimes literally saved their lives, “Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D” is a celebration of acceptance. It captures Eilish doing exactly what she wants to do: Live her life, sing her songs, and hang out with 20,000 people who can sing them, too.

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‘Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour Live in 3D’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language, and suggestive references. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Blue Heron' is a heartbreaking debut movie from director Sophy Romvari, about neurodivergence and the unreliability of memory

In her emotionally searing family drama, “Blue Heron,” writer-director Sophy Romvari makes her feature debut and lands on an important truism in filmmaking: Biographical specificity, when done as well as she does it here, leads to emotional universalty.

Romvari’s semi-autobiographical story starts with a family pulling up their U-Haul to a new house on Vancouver Island. The parents, played by Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa, are Hungarian immigrants. There are twin boys, Henry (Liam Serg) and Felix (Preston Drabble), who act as you’d expect boys of around 10 years old would. And there’s the observant youngest child, Sasha, age 8, played by Eylul Guven, a quietly moving newcomer.

There’s one more person in the family: The kids’ teen half-brother, Jeremy, played by Edik Beddoes, also making his movie debut. Jeremy is the only blond in the family, and that’s not the only reason he stands out. He seldom speaks, and is withdrawn from his younger siblings. It becomes clear that Jeremy is somewhere on the autism spectrum — and when each viewer realizes that is a good indicator of whether they know someone who’s neurodivergent. 

In the first half of the film, Romvari captures through young Sasha’s inquisitive gaze the many ways a neurodivergent family member can become the center of the house. Jeremy’s obstinance, his refusal to do what his parents tell him, and even his run-ins with the law, occupy the parents’ time and attention — particularly the mother, who questions her parenting skills and at one point gets angry at her husband for detaching from Jeremy’s troubling behavior.

In the second half, the movie shifts abruptly. It’s year’s later, and we’re following a young woman in Vancouver, B.C. (played by Amy Zimmer). She’s a filmmaker, and we watch set up her documentary camera before gathering a group of social workers together to discuss a case file. It doesn’t take long to piece together that the case is Jeremy, and the filmmaker is the adult Sasha.

It’s here, building on the events in the movie’s first half, that Romvari gets to the real point of her delicately devastating film: The unreliability of memory, and how the things we think we remember from our childhoods may not hold up to scrutiny. 

Romvari draws moving performances from her largely unknown cast, creating a fractured family trying to find their way through an intractable situation — one encountered by thousands of families, though each feels like they’re the only ones in the world facing it. “Blue Heron” doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it does declare that those families aren’t alone.

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‘Blue Heron’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violent content, and language. Running time: 90 minutes; in English and Hungarian, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Devil Wears Prada 2' gets the gang back together for fashion and fun, with Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep connecting over the struggles of today's journalism

It may seem odd that a bubbly comedy like “The Devil Wears Prada 2” — a continuation of the Anne Hathaway / Meryl Streep fashion magazine franchise launched 20 years ago — would come out of the gate on the first movie weekend of May, traditionally the start of the summer movie season.

Isn’t the first weekend in May the time for action movies, science fiction and fantasy, you may ask. Then you look at what happens in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and see that it’s very much a fantasy — of the wish-fulfillment variety.

When we reunite with Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, she’s left behind the world of Runway magazine, where she had a memorable internship under the impossible-to-please Miranda Priestly (Streep’s character) 20 years earlier. Andy, we’re told has had a stellar career as a journalist, covering important stories all over the world, most recently for a New York newspaper.

Then, at the very moment she’s about to receive a prestigious award, her phone buzzes — along with the phones of all of her colleagues at the table. They’ve all been laid off, via text. Andy gives an acceptance speech that becomes a viral moment, as she laments the state of American journalism.

Meanwhile, back at Runway, Miranda is dealing with a different journalistic problem. A poorly vetted puff piece about a fast-fashion brand has blown up in her face, with the internet abuzz about the sweatshop conditions that Runway failed to report. Miranda, who has seen her extravagant budgets and print edition pages both slashed as she’s transitioned to digital content, has her back against the wall.

The owner of the magazine conglomerate, Ira Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), decides to give Runway a credibility boost by hiring Andy as its new features editor. That Irv does this without telling Miranda first just heightens the tension when she encounters Andy again. Andy tries to assign some solid news stories, but finds getting online readers to click on the articles is a bigger challenge than she thought. 

Meanwhile, Miranda has to make deals with advertisers, which is how Andy again meets up with Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Miranda’s former assistant and now an executive at Dior. Rounding out the reunions, Andy also connects with Runway’s long-suffering design director, Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), still feeling the sting of Miranda’s lack of appreciation for his myriad talents.

It’s fascinating to watch director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, both back from the first movie, use the real-life problems of today’s journalism — capricious ownership, corporate bean-counting, sacrificing credibility for clickbait — in a setting where ostentatious wealth and sequined glamour are the norm. It’s even stranger to let audiences, who likely fretted about the amount of gas it took to get to the theater, consider the choice of which billionaire to root for: Irv, Emily’s tech bro boyfriend (Justin Theroux) or the tech bro’s ex-wife (Lucy Liu).

There’s a fair amount of wit in the script, with Tucci’s Nigel again getting many of the best lines as he continues to school the surprisingly sunny Andy in both fashion and appeasing Miranda. (As a jaded old journalist, I question how enthusiastic and spunky Andy seems to be after two decades as a reporter.)

But the real fun – aside from picking out the many cameo appearances and luxuriating in the playgrounds of the extremely rich — is watching Hathaway and Streep back together to spar again as the imperious Miranda and the optimistic Andy. Hathaway seems to up her game in her scenes with Streep, and Streep seems to enjoy working to turn this impossibly arrogant character into something human. Their chemistry gives “The Devil Wears Prada 2” the fizzy energy it needs. 

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‘The Devil Wears Prada 2

★★★

Opens Friday, May 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language and some suggestive references. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: "Mother Mary" puts Anne Hathaway and Michaela in a visually arresting tale of friendship and possession — with dialogue that's beneath both of them

“Mother Mary” is a stunning look at two former friends — a pop diva and her onetime costume designer — sorting through their demons, figuratively and literally. 

And if writer-director David Lowery (“The Green Knight,” “The Old Man and the Gun”) has taken one more pass through the screenplay to make the dialogue shine as brightly as the visuals, it would be an undeniable masterpiece. As it is, it’s a flawed but fascinating work.

Lowery creates a two-hander of a story, starting with the title character (played by Anne Hathaway), a pop star who fills stadiums with cheering fans, who see her command the stage in a glittering bodysuit and a headpiece that looks appropriate for a medieval depiction of the Virgin Mary.

That look, taking elements of Renaissance biblical imagery and Joan of Arc, was the creation of Mother Mary’s longtime collaborator, fashion designer Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel). Mary credits Sam with applying the Catholic iconography to launch her career. But they’ve been apart for more than a decade, while Sam has built up her fashion label.

So it’s a surprise when Mary shows up, unannounced, at Sam’s estate and workshop outside London, while Sam is preparing for her next runway show. Mary demands that Sam make her a dress — no, THE dress — for her comeback tour, which starts in three days. Sam reluctantly agrees, after extracting from Mary a promise that she can make the dress she wants, and Mary won’t object to it or refuse it.

Through their conversations, and the breathtaking visuals Lowery brings to bear, we get a fuller picture. Mary is vulnerable, returning to the stage after a stage accident that nearly killed her. Sam is also vulnerable, still smarting from the argument that ended their artistic and personal collaboration. And there’s something else, something apparently set loose when Mary invited a medium (played by FKA Twigs) to perform a seance after a concert — the last show before the accident.

Lowery channels the spectacle of a major pop star’s stadium show, taking cues from Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Madonna to get Mother Mary’s onstage allure. To get the sound right, he’s enlisted FKA Twigs and the team of Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff (a frequent Swift collaborator) to write Mary’s songs, which sound like they belong being chanted to thousands of adoring fans. 

Unfortunately, Lowery has saddles his stars with dialogue that feels both cryptic and cliched at the same time. One wouldn’t want the actors to say everything on their characters’ minds, but if you’re not going to be clear, at least be clever. It’s telling that some of Hathaway and Coel’s best moments are ones where they barely speak, letting their iconic and expressive faces do the work when the words are inadequate. 

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‘Mother Mary’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some violent content and language. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'I Swear' is a feel-good biopic about a man with Tourette's, raised higher by Robert Aramayo's emotional performance

Most biographical dramas don’t have as much cursing as you find in “I Swear,” but given the subject — a Scottish lad with Tourette’s Syndrome, which comes with involuntary tics and verbal outbursts — it’s understandable.

However, like many biopics about someone with a debilitating medical condition, there are ample moments of emotional uplift and sentiment, sometimes laid on a bit thick.

The movie starts with its main figure, John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo), in 2019, as he’s about to receive an MBE, a high British honor, presented by the Queen of England herself. He’s being honored for his work advocating for people, like him, who have Tourette’s. The joke in the preliminary scene is that in his moment of triumph, he blurts out something rude about the Queen.

The movie then flashes back to 1983, when a young John, played by Scott Ellis Watson, is introduced to the audience as a regular teen in Edinburgh, Scotland. He’s one of three kids of Heather (Shirley Henderson) and David (Steven Cree). He’s starting in middle school, and he’s showing promise as a soccer goalkeeper.

As the school year starts, young John starts developing uncontrollable movements in his neck and back, as well as spitting and swearing. His mum, thinking he’s joking, forces him to eat on the floor, facing the fireplace. His dad reacts by walking to the pub, and later walking out of the marriage. His headmaster (Ron Donachie) applies a belt to the boy’s palm.

After a suicide attempt, his mum takes John’s condition seriously enough to see a doctor, and soon John is on medication to tamp down his tics and outbursts. The medication also makes him miserable — which Dottie (Maxine Peake), the mother of one of John’s classmates, sees instantly. Dottie, a former mental-health nurse, takes John into her family home, the first sign of love and understanding he’s felt since his Tourette’s began.

The adult John tries to live a normal life, though his shouted obscenities get him in trouble with guys who start bar fights, thugs who beat him up on the street, and police tossing him in jail. With Dottie’s help, John finds a job at the town’s community center, assisting the gruff caretaker, Tommy (played by the great Scottish actor Peter Mullan). 

It’s Tommy, in his no-nonsense way, who says what becomes John’s motto for life: “The problem is not Tourette’s. The problem is that people don’t know enough about Tourette’s.”

Writer-director Kirk Jones — whose resumé includes “Waking Ned Devine,” “Nanny McPhee” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” — isn’t the most subtle of filmmakers, and here the moments of John’s life are played out in a steady, unremarkable progression. There are some surprising grace notes, particularly near the end when a much older John is shown a research team’s work in trying to quell the louder effects of Tourette’s. 

The reason to watch “I Swear” is Aramayo, a talented young actor whose work here earned him a Best Actor BAFTA. (You may remember the unfortunate moment when the real Davidson let loose with a vocal tic during the award ceremony, shouting out the N-word near a microphone when “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo had taken the stage.) 

Aramayo gets the surface mannerisms of John’s condition down (and there’s some obligatory documentary footage of John over the closing credits to use for comparison), but more importantly he captures the feeling of what it’s like to be burdened with this condition — and also carry the positivity that has allowed him to build a meaningful life.

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‘I Swear’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 24, in select theaters. Rated R for language throughout and some violence. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'Michael' captures the performing side of Michael Jackson, but leaves the personal stuff on the cutting-room floor

Some of what’s in “Michael,” a family-authorized biographical drama on the life of pop icon Michael Jackson, is quite effective — for example, the way newcomer Jaafar Jackson captures his uncle’s dance moves and charismatic performing style. 

Other elements of this soft-focus drama are terrible reminders of other bad musical biopics, namely “Bohemian Rhapsody” — which shares in common with this movie the same atrocious cameo actor and a nagging sense that part of the story isn’t being told for the sake of maintaining a deceased star’s still lucrative legacy.

Jaafar Jackson mostly doesn’t show up for the first 45 minutes, as director Antoine Fuqua and screenwriter John Logan tell a strictly chronological story of how Michael Jackson became the King of Pop. It starts in Gary, Indiana, in 1966, with Michael (played at age 8 by Juliano Valdi) and his four older brothers constantly rehearsing for their hard-driving father, Joseph Jackson, played menacingly by Colman Domingo. Joseph pushes his sons to get their movies perfect, and when Michael complains that they’re tired and need to go to school in the morning, Joseph brings out the belt to tan young Michael’s backside.

This family dynamic — of Joseph treating Michael brutally while his brothers and their mother, Katherine (Nia Long), are helpless to stop it — is the constant in Michael’s life, even as an adult. When Michael wants to start a solo career, he sends two record-company executives to tell Joseph, and they come back with an unsatisfactory answer. When Michael finally gets a good lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller), one of Branca’s first moves is to fire Joseph as Michael’s manager, by fax.

Much of what Logan (“Gladiator,” “The Aviator”) strings together in this script is career highlights — topping the charts with the Jackson 5, then releasing the solo albums “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” — dotted with sweet moments of Michael connecting with fans, visiting children in the hospital, and collecting a vast array of toys and animals (including his chimp, Bubbles, created here with computer animation). 

What you won’t get in “Michael” is anything detailing the last 20 years of his life. Jackson died in 2009, and the movie ends with his 1988 tour, performing “Bad.” So the movie omits anything about his reported substance abuse issues, accusations of mistreating boys (for which he was acquitted in a 2005 criminal trial), and eccentric behavior on his Neverland Ranch. (The ranch is never mentioned, though early fascinations with Peter Pan, Oz and Disney are.)

Fuqua, who made music videos before embarking on a movie career that includes “Training Day” and “The Equalizer” franchise, exercises those old muscles to create some compelling musical moments. Fuqua and Jaafar Jackson neatly recreate Michael’s 1983 TV introduction of the moonwalk, a rehearsal of the dance moves in the “Beat It” video, and the filming of Jackson’s “Thriller” video. (In a funny aside, Jackson never refers to them as videos, but as “short films.”)

Most of the dramatic moments — and the portrayals of such luminaries as Motown’s Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) and Quincy Jones (Kendrick Sampson) — are serviceable, if flat and cliche-filled. The absolute clunker involves a meeting between Michael and CBS Records’ head honcho, Walter Yetnikoff, played by layers of disfiguring facial makeup wrapped over Mike Myers’ face. Yes, Myers played a similarly awful rendition of a record-label boss in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the second attempt is more annoying than the first.

“Michael” will give fans of the late singer’s music what they want to see: Letter-perfect re-enactments of Jackson’s signature musical moments — moments you could stream on YouTube. Anyone wanting a peek into what made Jackson tick will moonwalk away disappointed.

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‘Michael’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some thematic material, language, and smoking. Running time: 127 minutes.