Review: 'The Rivals of Amziah King' is an exuberant mix of genres made wonderful by Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Angelina LookingGlass

It’s difficult to get a handle on what kind of movie “The Rivals of Amziah King” is — part musical hang-out movie, part heist caper, part revenge thriller — but easy to love it, because director Andrew Patterson blends ideas so seamlessly and provides Matthew McConaughey with one of his best roles in years.

McConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper who spends his days tending to his hives and his nights playing bluegrass music with his friends wherever they gather — at someone’s home, at the church potluck or outside a drive-in burger joint. 

It’s at Ulysses’ Drive-In where Det. Sunderland (Bruce Davis) finds Amziah, and asks for help solving a mystery. Sunderland has seized barrels of stolen honey, and he wants Amziah’s expertise to identify where they came from. Amziah goes to work in his honey plant, with help from a former employee, Remick (Jake Horowitz). Remick brings along a buddy, Colemar (Tony Revolori), who gets his ponytail caught in Amziah’s honey extraction machine — which results in a moment of bloody comedy in which Amziah and his friends rush Colemar to a hospital to get his scalp reattached.

Amziah’s default mode is energized zen — acting quickly and decisively when needed, but with a laidback attitude that seems pitched perfectly to McConaughey’s “alright, alright” screen persona. In the movie’s first hour, we pick up hints of hard times in Amziah’s younger days, losing his wife to cancer and going through financial struggles with his beekeeping operation. He also mentions casually, in an important bit of foreshadowing, that the honey business “is not full of kind people.”

When Amziah stops at a diner for coffee, he sees that his waitress is a familiar face: Kateri (played by Angelina LookingGlass), for whom Amziah and his wife once served as foster parents. Amziah brings Kateri along to the potluck, where he walks her through the different dishes and teaches her “there’s truth and there’s lies” in what’s served. McConaughey is having a ball chewing through writer James Montague’s dialogue, just as much as he enjoys breaking into song with his pals.

Amziah brings Kateri under his wing, teaching her how the honey business works. Amziah tells her about the three types of bees — the drones, the workers and the queen — and how a bee colony is like a community, where the bees look after each other to ensure their mutual survival. Kateri quickly learns that the community of Amziah’s friends work the same way in their Southern town. (The movie was filmed in Alabama and Oklahoma.)

For the first hour of a movie that’s slightly over two hours long, Patterson — who made a powerful debut with his 2020 radio-based supernatural thriller “The Vast of Night” — introduces us to Amziah and this community, and shows how welcome Kateri becomes. It’s such a pleasant place to visit, with food and music and camaraderie in generous amounts, that you scarcely notice that the plot hasn’t really kicked in. Then it does, with pivotal events for Amziah and his bees that put Kateri on a path toward justice and maybe some revenge.

Amziah’s friends — including Remick, the heavily accented Timmy (Scott Shepherd) and Amziah’s lawyer Rippy (Rob Morgan) — provide Kateri with support and guidance. She’ll need it, because she’s up against a ruthless agriculture tycoon, Dob McCoy (Kurt Russell). 

In a movie loaded with treasures, including a bluegrass soundtrack co-produced by the legendary T-Bone Burnett and featuring the Avett Brothers, McConaughey’s performance is an all-timer. He plays Amziah as a man holding his regrets but not weighed down by them, looking at life with a battered but still open heart. You’d have to go back a decade or more, maybe to “Interstellar” or “Magic Mike,” to find him in better form.

One of the wisest things McConaughey and Patterson do in “The Rivals of Amziah King” is to transfer the dramatic load to young LookingGlass, who makes a compelling movie debut. (She’s an Indigenous actor, with a recurring role last season in “Dark Winds.”) LookingGlass doesn’t say a lot, but within her stillness is a fire that fuels Kateri’s drive to make right what’s gone wrong. 

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‘The Rivals of Amziah King’

★★★★

Opens Friday, August 14, in theaters. Rated R for language and some grisly images. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'The End of Oak Street' pits a suburban family against monsters, in a satisfying mix of Spielberg's America and 'Twilight Zone' menace

The suburban horror-thriller “The End of Oak Street” is an efficient machine for delivering shocks with classic storytelling and modern movie technology — and gives a solid cast, led by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, room to battle monsters like in the good old days. 

It’s the early ‘80s — an early reference to Carl Sagan’s 1980 miniseries “Cosmos” is a clue — in a typical Michigan suburb. During a neighborhood block party, we get to know the Platt family: The dad, Greg (McGregor), who’s working odd jobs to augment his income, though it’s clear he’s hiding something beyond his drinking; the mom, Denise (Hathaway), whose writing a novel on the sly inspired by her marital disappointments; daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a Cornell-bound science nerd; and Brian (Christian Convery), who accidentally broke another kid’s arm and is trying to dodge that kid’s bullying brother.

Writer-director Brian Robert Mitchell, who made the spookily scary “It Follows” and the head-scratching “Under the Silver Lake,” is going for a specific period here — not just ‘80s suburbia, but the suburban ideal of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” He gets the tone and atmosphere just right, no doubt assisted by his producer, longtime Spielberg devotee J.J. Abrams.

Like those movies, a bright light outside sparks the mystery. Brian sees it first, when he’s looking for the family dog, Starbuck. And the after-effects of that light slowly become apparent — that somehow a large chunk of the neighborhood has been cut out from the rest of the city, and plunked down in a land where dinosaurs exist and are on the hunt.

Mitchell stages some chilling scenes of the Platt family and a neighbor girl, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), dodging the massive creatures and eventually fighting back. (I didn’t realize how satisfying it would be to see Hathaway wielding a shotgun.) And those scenes are interspersed with some genuinely heartbreaking moments of the Platt family desperately trying not to fall apart under the stress of trying to survive.

“The End of Oak Street” also shows another important influence for Mitchell: “The Twilight Zone,” and the way Rod Serling’s classic series could use horror and science-fiction tropes to explore timely stories of human frailty and resilience. You may think the Platt family will survive their ordeal (and I’m not going to confirm or deny your conjecture), but you know they will be changed when it’s over.

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‘The End of Oak Street’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language and suggestive material. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie' isn't as bad as the first two movies in the series, because who doesn't enjoy dinosaurs?

It would be technically true, if a desperate bid to get blurbed in a movie ad, to say that “PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie,” the third in the preschool-targeted animated films, is the best movie in the series. It’s not great, but the first two were pretty terrible examples of toy commercials masquerading as entertainment.

This installment proves the wisdom of a Hollywood maxim: Any story can be improved by putting dinosaurs in it.

The PAW Patrol, if you don’t know already, is a plucky and well-equipped group of young dogs who perform daring rescues by land, air or sea. As this movie starts, the squad has just saved a family — the parents are voiced by Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton, because why not? — whose yacht caught fire. Then their massive aircraft carrier (available where you buy toys) hits a storm and runs aground on an uncharted island.

The PAW Patrol find a population of dinosaurs, but they’re all friendly. That’s because of the island’s other inhabitant, a pup named Rex (Hayden Chamberlen), who lives in harmony with the Dinos. Rex is depicted using a dog wheelchair, and it’s actually nice to see that no one mentions it.

What passes for a plot here centers on the PAW Patrol’s old nemesis, Mayor Humdinger (voiced by Ron Pardo), recently paroled from prison and eager to make a fortune mining the diamonds discovered on Dino Island.

Grown-ups could make an argument to be made that Dino Island was better off before the PAW Patrol came, and brought humans in contact with the dinosaurs. But that’s not the movie director Cal Brunker and his writing partner, Bob Barlen, are making for the little ones.

This is a light, candy-colored adventure whose unnecessary celebrity voice cameos (including Terry Crews, Jennifer Hudson and Bill Nye) are alleviated with positive messages — like when the pups’ 10-year-old human caretaker, Ryder (voiced by Henry Bolan), gives pep talks to a doubting firedog Marshall (voiced by Carter Young). 

“PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie” isn’t great entertainment, but any moviegoers with small children will appreciate the positivity and the action — and, on a hot August day, the air conditioning in the theater is a plus.

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‘PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild action/peril. Running time: 88 minutes.

Review: 'One Night Only' serves up a rancid rom-com premise that not even Monica Barbero's abundant charms can save

It’s strange for a movie with a premise as idiotically off-track as the one in the rom-com “One Night Only” to get made. Usually, someone at the studio or among the producers would strangle a bad idea like this one in the crib, rather than feed it and let it grow into a full-scale terrible movie.

The premise is laid out in the opening seconds — that sex between unmarried adults is illegal in the United States, and everyone has been fitted with a sensor on their wrists that alerts the cops if two consenting adults are making the beast with two backs outside the confines of marriage. There is an exception, for one night a year, 12 hours where anything goes if all parties are OK with it and wear condoms.

Think of it as “The Purge,” the franchise where all crime is legal for one night, but with consensual intercourse. And, like “The Purge,” the premise of “One Night Only” leads to a lot of questions — the biggest being “who the hell would agree to this?” and “why hasn’t the overthrow of the government started yet?” — that the movie doesn’t come close to answering.

There’s a movie-logic reason for such a premise, which is that romantic comedies need a reason to keep their central couple apart for as long as possible. In the old days, social norms, religious admonishments and the Hays Code — Hollywood’s prudish self-policing policies, which invented rules like having even married couple sleep in separate beds onscreen — took care of that. In more liberated times, it’s gotten tougher to keep the walls of Jericho (like in “It Happened One Night”) upright. 

The couple that director Will Gluck (“Easy A,” “Anyone But You”) and screenwriter Travis Braun are trying to keep from making whoopee are Allie (Monica Barbero), a singer who makes a living turning pop songs into pharmaceutical jingles, and Owen (Callum Turner), who owns a pizzeria.

Owen’s plan for the evening is to hook up with his longtime girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), and propose marriage. Allie’s itinerary calls for her and her best pal, Jacinda (played by the singer King Princess) to go looking together for a couple of hot guys at a bar. Both plans are thwarted by the other party — Malika wants to sleep with a hot neighbor, while Jacinda finds a sexy prince (Okieriete Onaodowan) while Allie’s in line for the bathroom.

Allie’s lesbian roommate (Quintessa Swindell) tells Allie to go out there and find someone, and gives her a dress with fewer square inches of fabric than a hand towel to attract a likely partner for the night. Owen can’t go back to the apartment he shares with Malika, or hang out with his mom, Linda (Molly Ringwald), because she’s got plans with her boyfriend, Bob (LeVar Burton). 

Out on the streets, Allie and Owen keep running into each other — and they ignore the signs from the universe, and bad screenwriting, that they should be together.

There are some funny moments here and there. My favorite is when Allie tries to navigate a bar full of desperate guys (including “Succession’s” Cousin Greg, Nicholas Braun, and “SNL’s” Ben Marshall) looking for a woman who will indulge their kinks. Or there’s an extended joke where Owen goes from bodega to bodega to find one that still has condoms in stock.

But the repressive and stupid unfairness of the mandate that sets up the 12-hour scenario, and the forced way Gluck includes clocks in every scene to remind inattentive viewers of the countdown, can’t be overcome. That’s especially sad for Barbero, who’s an incredibly charismatic performer — as she proved playing Joan Baez in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and getting an Oscar nomination for it — who deserves a star vehicle that’s not as aggravating as “One Night Only.”

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‘One Night Only’

★1/2

Opens Friday, August 7, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material, language and brief nudity. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'The Samurai and the Prisoner' is an elegantly staged and intense drama of power and hubris in 16th century Japan

A sharply tense thriller wrapped in the trappings of a period drama, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “The Samurai and the Prisoner” is an elegantly mounted tale of a warrior who thinks he’s outsmarted his enemies — only to find the threat was under his own roof.

It’s 1587, and the samurai commander Murashige Araki (Masahiro Motoki) has betrayed his warlord, Nobunaga Oda, and has fortified his position in Arioki Castle. Surrounded by advisers and generals, Murashige is sure that Oda can be defeated, particularly if he enlists other samurai to change their allegiances. But Murashige’s methods — particularly his decision not to kill his prisoners, in the honorable tradition — confuse his supporters, who fear Murashige is showing dishonor and that no samurai will join his side.

When Oda sends an emissary, Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda), to negotiate a truce, Murashige throws Kanbei in his dungeon. When another prisoner, another warlord’s son, Jinen, demands he be killed, as is customary, Murashige refuses, and makes sure there are no weapons in his cell that he could use to kill himself. When Jinen ends up dead anyway, Murashige has a mystery to solve — and only Kanbei, who is given the facts of the case, can solve it.

This pattern repeated himself, through the seasons, and Murashige can’t figure out why he’s plagued with unexplained deaths. He talks about it with his wife, Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), but her advice is clouded with the knowledge that she belongs to the same religious order as Jinen, and believes in honor being upheld through bloodshed. Kanbei, locked up below the castle, seems to be the only one who understands Murashige’s problem — but, given his bloody incarceration, what motive does he have to help his jailer?

It’s a bit surprising to learn that Kurosawa is not related to the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, in part because Murashige’s attempts at interrogating his underlings and parsing through stories that don’t agree with each other bears a striking resemblance to the older man’s classic memory drama “Rashomon.” Kiyoshi Kurosawa also stages some impressive samurai fight scenes, reminiscent of his namesake’s films, like “The Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo.”

That’s enough comparisons, though. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s adaptation of Honobu Yonezawa’s novel stands up on its own. “The Samurai and the Prisoner” is sweeping yet intimate, and moves from whisper-soft to bold and brash as Murashige slowly discovers who he can trust in his castle — and the chilling answer is that he can’t even trust himself.

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‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for bloody violence. Running time: 148 minutes; in Japanese with subtitles.

Review: 'Cookie Queens' is a sunny, heartwarming documentary that follows four girls as they strive to sell Girl Scout cookies.

There’s probably a hard-hitting documentary to be made about the system in which thousands of pre-teen girls toil away several late-winter weekends selling a sugar-filled product for $6 a box, propping up an $800 million-a-year industry for which they get paid in trips and trinkets and not in cash.

“Cookie Queens” is not that documentary. Instead, it’s a light and breezy look at four girls, ranging in age from 5 to 12, who work hard to succeed at selling Girl Scout cookies. 

Director Alysa Nahmias follows four girls from across the country working to meet their cookie-selling goals. They are:

• Olive, 12, in Charlotte, N.C., who has her own website to promote herself and her cookie sales. She holds the state record for most cookies sold in a season, around 8,700, but this year she sets herself a lower goal of 4,000 boxes sold.

• Shannon Elizabeth, 8, in El Paso, Texas, has just become a Brownie, and wants to sell 2,750 boxes so she can earn a backpack — and enough money for her troop that she can attend Girl Scout camp in the summer.

• Ara, 5, in San Diego, is selling cookies for the first time, and has set a goal of just 55 boxes this season. Ara, with her parents’ help, also is managing her diabetes – and wonders why the Girl Scouts don’t make a sugar-free variety.

• Nikki, 9, in Chico, Calif., aims to follow in the footsteps of her teen sisters, Naya and Nala, who have been champion cookie sellers in past years.

Nahmias follows the four girls through the six-week cookie season in February and March, and the cyclical nature of the selling. The first weeks are full, as customers get excited to see the Samoas and Tagalongs and Thin Mints return. But a few weeks later, the novelty has worn off and the girls have to hustle to make their goals.

The movie also shows what the parents go through in supporting their girls. Olive’s mom and Nikki’s mom are both veterans of the cookie life, and support their girls and sometimes get, sorry to say it, a little pushy. Then there are Shannon Elizabeth’s parents, who worry about whether they can afford the upfront costs of cookie selling — in which they pledge to pay for cases of cookies in the hopes they can sell them all. 

“Cookie Queens” does not approach the Girl Scout cookie season with cynicism or with a dark view of how it’s a microcosm of American capitalism. It shows these girls as saleswomen and strivers, but first and foremost it shows them as little girls, finding fun, hope and opportunity through sugary treats.

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‘Cookie Queens’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 7, in theaters. Rated G. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Wild Inside' follows an owl's journey from captivity to big-city freedom, and how humans cheered for and affected the bird's survival

The thin line between humans and nature is the boundary depicted in director Penny Lane’s absorbing documentary “Wild Inside,” whose hero was the one New York City needed and maybe deserved in 2023.

The Big Apple became taken with the story of Flaco, an owl who escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo and, for a year, lived free around the park and other parts of Manhattan. For bird experts, Flaco’s life outside the zoo was remarkable because he was an Eurasian eagle owl, a species not native to North America. His story resonated in part because he was another immigrant making a life for himself in New York City.

Lane details how the zoo initially tried to capture Flaco and put him back in his home. The zookeepers reasoned that Flaco had never lived in the wild and wouldn’t be able to hunt for himself, but he soon found he could feast on New York’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of rats and mice. The zoo relented, but other bird experts warned of other dangers of being a bird in New York, such as big buildings one could hit or rodents carrying rat poison.

A fair amount of Lane’s documentary is spent following a group of bird watchers, who go out at night with cameras to capture images of the nighttime avian scene. They’re an eccentric bunch, and quite charming. (Two of the birders Lane profiles met while birding and later got married.) Their observations and infrared footage act as a barometer for the health of both Flaco and New York’s non-human population.

Lane — whose past documentaries have chronicled American quackery through animation (“Nuts!”) and the cheeky First Amendment battles of the Satanic Temple (“Hail Satan?”) — finds in Flaco more than the easy fodder for the “and finally” slot on local TV news. She finds a cautionary tale of urban living, one that ponders how humans have created an ecosystem that’s not too healthy for us and downright harmful to every other species with which we share the planet.

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‘Wild Inside’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for bloody dismantling of small animals. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'I Want Your Sex' presents Gregg Araki in his familiar stance as a neon-soaked provocateur, but targeting the art world and prudish Gen Z feels beneath him

The filmmaker Gregg Araki has been pushing buttons for decades, with movies like “The Doom Generation” and “Smiley Face,” so it’s no surprise that his latest, “I Want Your Sex,” tosses out provocations like they were flyers advertising an art gallery opening.

What’s surprising, and not in the best way, is that he directs those barbs at some of the lowest-hanging fruit of all: The contemporary art market and stuffiness about sex.

Araki begins with an obvious homage to “Sunset Blvd.,” but in reverse. Here, it’s the possibly unhinged woman, L.A. artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), floating face-down in the pool, and her boy toy, a gallery intern named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman), discovering her there. Elliot also narrates the story, in the form of an interrogation from two disbelieving detectives (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, who give ironically the most normal performances here).

The movie zooms back 9-1/2 weeks (a 40-year-old movie reference; look it up, kids), to show how Elliot ended up in Erika’s orbit. He’s unemployed, mooching off his bi-curious best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders) and being ignored by his post-doc girlfriend Minerva (Charli XCX), when he interviews to be an intern at Erika’s gallery.

Erika hires Elliot, but soon the young intern realizes there’s more to the job than writing press releases and chewing gum for her next art project. Nope, Erika is soon using Elliot for her personal sexual pleasures, which venture into leather, blindfolds, paddles and the kinkier parts of the Amazon inventory. He sticks with this because it turns him on, though Erika’s top assistant, Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), warns him, “You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”

Araki employs a candy-colored palette to suck Elliot and us into Erika’s art world — a world Erika breezily admits floats on enough B.S. and hucksterism to make P.T. Barnum envious. The director, again working with his “Now Apocalypse” co-screenwriter Karley Sciortino, also throws in some sharp commentary about Gen Z’s monastic aversion to sex, then confronts the audience about that attitude by including enough sexual content that the credits list two intimacy coordinators. (How this movie got an R rating is for scholars to figure out.)

Where “I Want Your Sex” becomes most entertaining is in how it squares the veteran Wilde, who’s at her most uninhibited here, with the comparatively green Hoffman. There’s 19 years between these performers, and they throw themselves into that age gap with enthusiasm. 

Araki tosses so much juice into his dismantling of the art market that he has difficulty bringing the story together in the finale, which of course brings us back to that pool scene and what follows. The resolution isn’t nearly so fun as the build-up that led up to it.

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‘I Want Your Sex’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 31, at several theaters. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, and pervasive language. Running time: 90 minutes.