Review: 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' is old-school 'Star Wars,' with strong action and a fun sense of adventure

I grew up as a “Star Wars” fan, someone who at age 12 took two buses to get to the other side of Spokane, Wash., in the summer of 1977 to attend the one theater in town playing the original movie. (In my eighth-grade journalism class that fall, I wrote a critique of it — my first movie review.)

However, I was resistant to jump into the TV series spun out of the movies. That galaxy far, far away, I’ve always thought, needed to be seen on a big screen.

Now comes “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the first live-action release spun out from one of the franchise’s TV shows. (“Solo” and “Rogue One” were prequels of the original trilogy, and “The Clone Wars” predated the animated series that followed.) And where I may not know the ins and outs of the lore behind the characters, I didn’t find that ignorance a barrier to enjoying an old-school example of “Star Wars” action and adventure.

For folks like me who didn’t watch the show, a quick bit of background: Our hero here is Din Djarin, a former bounty hunter played by Pedro Pascal — though, with the helmet he is honor-bound to always wear, it’s hard to tell. (In the closing credits, two other actors are credited as Pascal’s body doubles.) Din has given up that mercenary-for-hire life to be father and protector to Grogu, a toddler of 53 years who’s of the same species as the old Jedi master Yoda. 

Still, Din, who’s sometimes called Mando, now works for the New Republic — this movie is set between the events of the original trilogy and “The Force Awakens” — hunting down the remnants of the Galactic Empire. The Republic commander, Col. Ward (Sigourney Weaver), sends Din out on a tricky mission: Return Rotta the Hut (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), the surviving son of Jabba the Hutt, to the two Hutts currently ruling the deceased Jabba’s crime syndicate. Once Rotta is returned, the twin Hutts will give the Republic information to capture the Empire’s biggest fugitive, Janu Coin (played by Johnny Coyne, showing how lazy “Star Wars” writers are getting in naming characters). 

Din, with Grogu on his shoulder occasionally using The Force to move stuff around, discovers Rotta on a planet fighting in gladiator battles — and being so ripped that several “Star Wars” fans may put him on their “hear me out” lists. Din also learns that the guy holding Rotta’s fighting contract is … wait for it … Janu Coin.

This is just part of the somewhat twisted plot that director Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) and his co-writers, Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, devise in a script only slightly elevated from a couple of back-to-back TV episodes. Where Favreau succeeds is in staging one dynamic action set piece after another, highlighting Din’s skills as a hand-to-hand fighter and his dexterity with a blaster and flame-thrower.

“The Mandalorian and Grogu” also marks the first “Star Wars” live-action movie that isn’t directly or indirectly tied to the fate of the Skywalker family (unless you count the parts Rian Johnson put in “The Last Jedi” that J.J. Abrams tried to memory hole in “The Rise of Skywalker”). It is, as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, taking the first step into a larger world — but still only baby Yoda steps.  

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‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'I Love Boosters,' an absurd satire of fashion and capitalism, shows director Boots Riley at his most brilliant craziness

How much you love “I Love Boosters” will depend on what lever of absurdity and off-the-wall humor you can cram into your eyeballs.

Writer-director Boots Riley kicks up the strangeness well above that of his 2018 feature debut “Sorry to Bother You,” for a feverishly funny satire of fashion and late-stage capitalism that makes The Daniels’ “Everything Everywhere All at Once” look like a neorealist drama.

“Boosters,” the movie informs us early, are fashion-conscious shoplifters, people who steal haute couture from high-end boutiques and sell them at a deep discount. Mariah (Taylour Paige), a member of the Velvet Gang in the Bay Area, says it’s not theft but “fashion-forward philanthropy.” For fellow booster Sade (Naomi Ackie), it’s a way to make some side money to cover the costs of raising two kids.

But for the Velvets’ leader, Corvette (Keke Palmer), it’s about the money and something else: Revenge against one billionaire designer, Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore), who has over the years stolen designs from the internet — including from Corvette herself. And every time Christie declares over social media that she’s creating art while the boosters are “low-class urban bitches,” Corvette’s anger grows larger.

The Velvets target Christie’s chain of stores, Metro Boutiques, each one assigned to sell clothes in monochrome. One store may sell only yellow, so if you want something in green, you have to go to another store. 

Corvette soon discovers, though, that there are others with beefs against Christie. There’s Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez), a Metro Boutique clerk who resents having to sacrifice her paycheck to buy her company-mandated work outfits. And in China, Jianhu (Poppy Liu) is trying to lead a labor movement at the factory that makes Christie’s clothing — and when she and a colleague discover the bosses are experimenting with a teleporter (to save shipping costs), Jianhu suddenly lands in Oakland looking to steal the same clothes the Velvets want.

Riley’s script is endlessly inventive, often going down several paths simultaneously and occasionally in some bizarre and raunchy directions. The smoldering hot character played by Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” star, LaKeith Stanfield, encapsulates much of the movie’s adults-only humor.

Riley has much of his cast dialed up to 11. There’s Don Cheadle, unrecognizable under prosthetics, as a self-help guru with a pyramid scheme. And Moore is particularly manic as the designer with the delusional sense of her status as an artistic vision. Those overamped performances make you appreciate Ackie’s quiet charms as Corvette’s no-nonsense best friend. 

If there’s a limitation to Riley’s vision in “I Love Boosters,” it’s his budget, particularly in the somewhat distracting special effects and stop-motion animation that illustrate the director’s more insane thoughts. Those shortcomings are minor, and just an indication of how far Riley can go if someone wants to follow him down the rabbit hole.

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‘I Love Boosters’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language throughout and brief drug use. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Steal This Story, Please!' shows firebrand journalist Amy Goodman's work and her drive to tell stories other media won't

I suspect that a lot of journalists, if you gave them truth serum, would say they want to be like Amy Goodman, the fearlessly in-your-face reporter and host of “Democracy Now!,” where she frequently speaks truth to power and goes places the mainstream media won’t go to interview the most disadvantaged people on Earth.

Goodman’s career, and the origins of her hard-charging personality, are given their due in “Steal This Story, Please!,” a documentary that follows her attempts to get the powerful to speak the truth and to give attention to the voiceless.

Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (“Trouble the Water”) show us Goodman’s no-compromise style with the opening scene, as she follows one of Donald Trump’s climate advisers through a 2018 global environmental summit. She peppers the guy, P. Wells Griffith III, with questions, and he stays silent. He tells Goodman to call his office to make an appointment, and she asks him for a business card so she can make that call. When he ducks into the U.S. delegation’s office, an aide blocks her — and then refuses to give her the business card Griffith said he’d give her.

Goodman started her journalism career at New York’s independent radio station, WBAI, learning how to work a mic and edit tape as she went. She was a fast editor; a colleague describes how she did an interview only minutes before airtime, then started editing — and played the first half while she still edited the second half.

The story that made Goodman nationally famous was her coverage, with The New Yorker’s freelancer Allan Naim, of a 1991 massacre of East Timorese independence protesters at the hands of the Indonesian military. The Indonesian forces beat Goodman and severely injured Naim, but they got out with the story — highlighting how the Indonesians’ weapons were supplied by the U.S. government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The footage got used by U.S. media, and brought the plight of the Timorese to the world’s attention.

Both at WBAI and, since 1996, on the nationally distributed Pacifica Radio, Goodman has covered stories other media wouldn’t touch:

• Her interviews Moreese Bickham, a wrongfully convicted prisoner in the Louisiana State Prison, and got him freed. 

• She aired the prison reports of Mumia Abu-Jamal, on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for his role in killing a cop. 

• On 9/11, she and her crew stayed in their studios, a renovated former firehouse a few blocks from the World Trade Center, and experienced the toxic dust from Ground Zero. 

• She got arrested covering protesters at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minnesota. 

• She told the world about the Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access pipeline. 

The through line of Goodman’s work has been talking to the people outside, the ones on the ground being affected by what the people in power were doing. Sometimes, but not often enough, telling those stories got those powerful people to change their minds. 

“Steal This Story, Please!” showcases Goodman’s work, and her philosophy that any journalist could do what she does, if they want to stand up to their corporate bosses.

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‘Steal This Story, Please!’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for war violence and language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Obsession' is a simple horror premise played out to intense extremes, neatly dancing from terrifying to ludicrous

The premise for the new horror movie “Obsession” is simple and direct — with a “be careful what you wish for” message that’s echoed in the film’s advertising — but what makes this disturbing and stomach-churning exercise in body horror is in the ways writer-director Curry Barker goes over the top and keeps accelerating. 

Baron (Michael Johnston), “Bear” to his friends, works in a music store with his three best pals: Ian (Cooper Tomlinson), Nikki (Inde Navarrette) and Sarah (Megan Lawless). They hang out for bar trivia night, with Nikki not realizing how much of a crush Bear has on her, and Bear not seeing that Sarah is crushing on him pretty hard, too.

Bear is preparing to ask Nikki out on a date, so he goes to a New Age-y shop to find a crystal pendant to replace one she lost. Instead, he comes across a novelty item, a “One Wish Willow,” that one is supposed to break in half and make a wish. Bear chickens out at the moment he’s about to ask Nikki out, and then cracks open the One Wish Willow and wishes that Nikki would fall in love with him harder than anyone in the world.

And, with that, one can almost hear the fingers of a monkey paw curling up.

Suddenly, Nikki has turned around and invited Bear into her house, and to her bed. It all happens so quickly, and so strangely, that Bear isn’t sure whether the wish-granting willow’s actually responsible for the change. As the movie progresses, and without giving away too much, Nikki’s behavior gets more psychotic — and much of Barker’s attention is given toward how Bear and their friends react to the social awkwardness and, eventually, the pure terror.

It takes some strong performances to pull off this kind of outrageous behavior while drenched in stage blood, straddling the line between horrific and ridiculous. Johnston is fascinating, as his Bear slowly realizes how his rash act has uncorked such horrific consequences. But it’s Navarrette (who you may recognized from The CW’s “Superman & Lois”) who pulls out the stops, fearlessly throwing herself into Nikki’s wish-induced craziness. 

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‘Obsession’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, sexual content, pervasive language and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Omaha' is a troubling family road trip, driven by intense performances by John Magaro and two child actors

The success of director Cole Webley’s intense drama “Omaha” is due entirely to the tight ensemble of performers — three actors, two of them under the age of 10 — in the claustrophobic space of a dilapidated Toyota crossing the American West.

Webley and screenwriter Robert Machoian start with a father, played by John Magaro (“September 5”), carrying his sleeping 6-year-old son, Charlie (Wyatt Solis), to the car. Then he wakes his 9-year-old daughter, Ella (Molly Belle Wright), and tells her to join her brother. They’re taking a trip, Dad tells them, from their home in Nevada to Nebraska. (The bulk of the movie was filmed in Utah, and only locals would be able to notice.)

Dad tells the kids the trip will be a fun adventure. Ella notices the envelope Dad put in the glove box — containing the kids’ Social Security cards and birth certificates — and suspects the family is moving.

Webley and Machoian plant other clues for the audience, like the fact that a sheriff’s deputy approaches Dad just before they’re leaving, reminding him that the house has to be vacated today — or the hints that Ella and Charlie’s mom “got sick” and is no longer in the picture.

Why has Dad put the kids in the car? And why Nebraska? Those questions are eventually covered in Machoian’s spare script, but saying more would deny viewers the opportunity to watch Magaro’s restrained performance as a working-class man slowly unraveling.

Part of the beauty of Magaro’s performance is that it works in perfect harmony with the young actors playing his children. Especially good is Wright (who starred in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever”), who carries the emotional weight of this road trip with a strength more experienced actors would have trouble mustering. Together, Magaro and these remarkable children make “Omaha” an intense and rewarding drama.

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‘Omaha’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic material. Running time: 83 minutes.

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This review previously ran on this site on January 24, 2025, when the movie premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' gives a fictionalized, and surprisingly dull, account of Vladimir Putin's rise

We’re familiar with the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” which she coined to describe the workaday attitude that could lead to atrocities like the Holocaust. 

In “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a fictionalized take on the rise of Russia’s Vladimir Putin from the view of the political fixer who secured his rise, we’re confronted with something else: The evil of banality — the idea that having no morals and a dull demeanor leads one to horrific actions because the person is to boring to think of doing anything else.

Vadim Baranov — the movie’s fictitious main character, played by Paul Dano — is introduced in retirement, telling his version of Putin’s ascension to an American scholar (Jeffrey Wright) visiting his snowy residence outside Moscow. Dano deploys the same calm monotone portraying Vadim in flashbacks and in narrating the story, and you question whether anything in life could cause Vadim to show an emotion. It’s like watching the HAL 9000 from “2001” in a chunky sweater.

Vadim tells of his youthful days as a theater student, in the says when Mikhail Gorbachev was starting the political changes that would allow the Soviet Union to crumble. Vadim begins a romance with Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), a jaded artist, but their relationship falters when she shows more interest in Vadim’s friend, Dmitri Sidorov (Tom Sturridge), who represents a new breed in Russia: The oligarch, hustling for money through avenues legal and otherwise.

As Gorbachev is succeeded by the unsteady maverick Boris Yeltsin (George Sogis), Vadim becomes a successful producer for Russian state television, devising reality shows that attract eyeballs but not brains. His boss, Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), is tasked with making Yeltsin seem engaged with Russians — and when that fails, he starts looking around for a new political leader onto whom Boris can lavish his image-making talents. 

Boris finds such a candidate in Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a former KGB agent who Boris thinks can be molded into the sort of tough, dynamic leader the Russians can get behind. Putin — played by Jude Law in a rich performance that goes beyond caricature — wins his election to prime minister, and Boris tries to warn Vadim of the monster they’ve created. But it’s too late, and Vadim is well on his way to shaping Putin’s public image and getting sucked into his power games.

Director Olivier Assayas, maker of such masterpieces as “Personal Shopper” and “Clouds of Sills Maria,” and co-writer Emmanuel Carrère adapted Giuliano Da Empoli’s 2022 novel, deftly inserting the fictional Vadim into key moments of Putin’s rise to power. Those richly detailed moments, showing everything from Putin’s crackdown on Chechnya to his manipulation of the Sochi Olympics, are the best parts of the movie.

What’s less interesting is Dano, whose strenuous efforts never to raise his voice or betray an emotion work against him and the movie, denying us a chance to understand the mind of someone drawn to power without considering the consequence. He’s an empty shell of a character, and when Law’s Putin finally shows up 44 minutes into the movie, Dano practically disappears — and I didn’t really miss him.

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‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

★★

Opens Friday, May 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, some sexual material, graphic nudity, violence and a grisly image. Running time: 136 minutes.

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.