Review: 'Materialists,' led by a radiant Dakota Johnson, explodes the romantic movie expectations and makes us fall in love with them all over again.

How do you know when you’ve met “the one”? In dating, as with movies like filmmaker Celine Song’s luminous comedy-drama “Materialists,” it depends a lot on chemistry — and even more on dropping the facades and being emotionally honest and true.

Meet Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, who works for Adore Matchmaking, where she specializes in finding the perfect romantic match for her clients. As the movie begins, Lucy has logged her ninth wedding success — though on the big day, the bride, Charlotte (Louisa Jacobsen), is having qualms about marriage, and it takes a serious pep talk from Lucy to get the nuptials back on track.

During the reception for Charlotte and her new husband, Lucy meets the groom’s brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’s both ridiculously rich and seriously charming. Lucy first tries to recruit Harry to sign on for Adore’s service — she calls him a “unicorn,” a guy who most of her women clients would be desperate to date. But Harry is more interested in dating Lucy, and after a while, that’s what happens.

At this wedding reception, though, Lucy also encounters one of the cater waiters, John (Chris Evans), an underemployed actor who’s also Lucy’s ex-boyfriend. The attraction is apparent, and in one flashback scene — where the couple argues about whether to pay $25 to park John’s car in Manhattan or miss a dinner reservation — we understand the money issues that led to their break-up. 

Song, as writer and director, cleverly sets up this scenario like a Hallmark-ready rom-com, with a classic love triangle in which Lucy must choose between the rich guy but the poor guy. In the second act, though, she complicates the formula, because neither Pascal’s Harry nor Chris’s John play to the rom-com stereotypes.

Part of the complications come from Lucy’s work, which presents her with an endless parade of wealthy New Yorkers with insanely overreaching ideas about who they can attract on the dating market. Her work with one client, Sophie (Zoe Winters), provides some key insights into Lucy’s disillusionment with her job.

If act one is a rom-com, and act two is a romantic drama, act three surprises by being the last thing a romance-minded viewer would expect: A thoughtful and precise dissection of all the rules of romance movies. Song deftly makes Lucy and her two suitors dig into the meaning of love, of marriage and of relationships. Song even reaches back to the time of the cavemen, a narrative device that is more meaningful than one might expect. (This is Song’s second movie, after her amazing debut “Past Lives.”)

Evans and Pascal are delightful in their roles, which represent the two sides of Lucy’s desires: The electricity of true love and the stability of wealth. But it’s Johnson, better than she’s ever been in a movie, who carries the weight of Song’s movie effortlessly. Johnson has earned her stripes on both the comedic and dramatic sides of Hollywood romances, and she displays a hard-earned wisdom as she becomes Song’s collaborator in deconstructing those Hollywood tropes.

The sure sign that “Materialists” is doing its job well is that it tears down the expectations of movie romance, and still ends up being a movie romance for the ages. The fundamental things apply, somebody sang in my all-time favorite movie — and Song and Johnson apply them brilliantly.

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‘Materialists’

★★★★

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and brief sexual material. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: 'How to Train Your Dragon' is a sturdy, action-packed live-action remake of the animated original

It’s been 15 years since DreamWorks made one of their best animated movies, “How to Train Your Dragon” — and now, some of the same players have teamed up to make a live-action version that opens up the seemingly endless debate of what is gained by doing with human actors what already has been done so well with pixels and paint.

So far this year, Disney has trotted out live-action reworkings of their 1937 landmark movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and their 2002 charmer “Lilo & Stitch” — following in the footsteps of so many others, mostly from the Disney archives, including “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Mulan” and more. Seems only fitting for DreamWorks to want to get in on the action, particularly when their corporate partners at Universal have a “How to Train Your Dragon” theme park opening in Orlando.

I don’t care too much about the idea that these live-action cash grabs — their reasons for existence are more economic than artistic — are inherently evil. There have been dozens of movie versions of “Hamlet,” and we’re well past calling them a blot on the memory of what ol’ Will S. staged back in Stratford in 1599 or whenever. I take my live-action remakes one at a time, and judge them as I see them today.

With that in mind, I declare that this “How to Train Your Dragon” — written and directed by Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the 2010 animated version with Chris Sanders — strikes a strong dramatic tone, even if he could stand to stray from the source material a bit more.

As before, we’re on the small north Atlantic isle of Berk, where Vikings scratch out a tough existence that’s sometimes punctuated by random attacks by fire-breathing dragons. Berk’s chieftain, Stoick (played then and now by Gerard Butler), is the hardest Viking of all — which means he’s often disappointed in his son, Hiccup (Mason Thames), who’s far more brains than brawn. 

Hiccup tries to impress Stoick by building a weapon that he thinks can take down the nastiest dragon of all, a night fury — a breed no Viking has ever killed or captured. When Hiccup tries out the weapon during a dragon attack, it seems to go haywire, deepening Stoick’s disappointment. 

But when Hiccup goes into the woods, he discovers that he actually grounded a night fury — and the black beast is trapped in a canyon, unable to get off the ground because Hiccup injured the dragon’s tail. Hiccup also discovers that the dragon, which he calls Toothless, isn’t a killer after all.

What follows, as with the original, is a clever juxtaposition of two parallel stories. In one, Hiccup works to gain Toothless’ trust, trains him to be ridden, and invents a prosthetic tail assembly for him. In the other, Hiccup is pressed into dragon-fighting training with the teens who usually tease him, where he works to impress the gutsiest young fighter of all, Astrid (played by Nico Parker). 

It’s this middle section where the new version really cooks, as it establishes the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, and the tensions among Hiccup’s teen classmates, more completely than the animated version did. Credit the expressive nature of the actors, particularly Thames and Parker, and the extended screen time DeBlois gives them. (The movie clocks in a half-hour longer than the animated film.)

If you’re truly enamored with the animated film, seeing live-action scenes that copy the original beat for beat — like the iconic moment of Toothless first allowing Hiccup to touch his snout — can be maddening. It would have been nice for DeBlois and his team to rethink new ways to capture that narrative, but I’m sure “the suits” would have complained that they weren’t getting the “How to Train Your Dragon” they were expecting.

Here’s the thing, though: This is the “How to Train Your Dragon” you’re expecting. And because the original was really good, it’s not too hard to believe that a copy, made by the people who gave the first one so much care and attention, could get it right — or mostly right — a second time. 

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‘How to Train Your Dragon’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for sequences of intense action, and peril. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'The Life of Chuck' is an ambitiously constructed story about the value of a life, but it gets too clever for its own good

The filmmaker Mike Flanagan may be one of the more creative people working in the horror and suspense realms today — and you only need to look at his work with Stephen King’s “Doctor Sleep” or his Netflix miniseries, like “The Haunting of Hill House” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to see the genius at work.

So why is the ambitious “The Life of Chuck,” which Flanagan wrote and directed off of a King short story, feel like a cleverly conceived misfire? Maybe it’s because Flanagan holds his secrets so tightly that he never allows the audience the space to enjoy the life-affirming message he’s so eager to express.

Flanagan tells his story in three acts, starting with the third act. In this act, titled “Thanks Chuck,” it’s the present day and the world seems to be collapsing in on itself, with natural disasters everywhere and people losing access to the Internet. The main characters here are Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Felicia (Karen Gillan), ex-spouses who reconnect in the face of the growing chaos. There’s also one weird constant: Messages of thanks to Charles Krantz, or Chuck, for “39 great years.” (Think of the Julia Reagan tribute billboards seen across Utah and other states, but increasingly sinister.)

Then comes Act Two, called “Buskers Forever.” That’s also set in the present day, and starts with Taylor (Taylor Gordon, the drummer known as The Pocket Queen) busking on a summer afternoon, when a guy in a business suit stops and starts dancing to her rhythms. This, we recognize from the previous portion of the film, is Chuck Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston. Chuck starts dancing with a woman in the crowd (Annalise Basso). Flanagan fills in a lot of character detail here, mostly through an overbearing narrator with the unmistakeable voice of Nick Offerman.

Act One carries the title “I Contain Multitudes,” which means we’ll come back to the Walt Whitman recitation that starts the movie. We also meet young Chuck (played by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay at various ages), and some of the many loose ends are tied up, some of them a little too neatly.

Flanagan has assembled quite a troupe of actors through his past works, and many of them — like Gillan, Lumbly and Basso, as well as Mark Hamill, Kate Siegel (who’s married to Flanagan), Samantha Sloyan, Violet McGraw and Heather Langenkamp — give some graceful small performances here. One newcomer to Flanagan’s acting ensemble who’s striking here is Mia Sara, making her first screen appearance in 12 years.

Flanagan has a gift for densely layered narratives that make surprising connections across time and space. It’s a gift that serves him best in his miniseries, where he’s got the time to let the magic unfold. In “The Life of Chuck,” that gift works against him, and the cleverness interferes with the emotional connection. There’s stuff in this movie that should make even the hardest heart weep, but those things get caught up in Flanagan’s intricate mechanism and never have the desired effect.

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‘The Life of Chuck’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Prime Minister' profiles New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern in a thoughtful and deeply personal documentary

In politics as in documentary filmmaking, access is everything — and “Prime Minister” directors Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz get extraordinary access and use it to create a fascinating, emotional portrait of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The main narrative runs from 2017, when Ardern suddenly ascended to the leadership of New Zealand’s Labour Party, just two months before a general election, to her somewhat surprise resignation in 2023. In between, Ardern faced and answered a series of crises that would humble any world leader.

She spoke at the United Nations in 2018, urging global cooperation in the face of Donald Trump’s isolationism. There was the mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch in 2019, in which 50 people were killed — and prompted Ardern to become her country’s mourner-in-chief, and then push for a nationwide ban on assault weapons. 

The biggest crisis came in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic. Ardern oversaw a national shutdown, and closed her country’s borders — a move that, for awhile, allowed New Zealand to avoid the worst of the pandemic’s first wave. As the pandemic continued, Ardern led the efforts to get her citizens to get the vaccine, which caused a backlash from a minuscule but loud far-right protest movement, which unfurled misinformation and Trump flags in front of Parliament. (Of all the things the United States could export, why that?)

Oh, and just as she took office in 2017, Ardern found out she was pregnant. Her daughter, Neve, grows into the movie’s scene-stealer.

Walshe and Utz have footage from deep inside Ardern’s campaign, government and home life. Her then-partner, and now husband, broadcaster Clarke Gayford, started shooting footage on his phone when Ardern was named to lead the Labour Party, and kept getting the view from inside the house for years after. The film also had access to audio diaries Ardern recorded over the years, part of an oral history project that usually doesn’t release its clips until the subject dies. All told, the filmmakers said, they had 200 hours of material to comb through.

What Walshe and Utz produce is both expansive and intimate, covering not just Ardern’s politics but her personal side — from the security dangers the wing nut protesters put her family through to her deep interest in the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who serves as a metaphor for a leader making hard decisions to keep people alive.

“Prime Minister” presents a strong argument that the test of leadership isn’t what a leader plans to do, but what a leader does when the unexpected comes. Based on the evidence of history and this engaging documentary, Ardern clears the bar with room to spare.

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‘Prime Minister’ 

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 13, at the AMC West Jordan. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language snd mild breastfeeding scenes. Running time: 102 minutes.

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This movie was originally reviewed on January 24, 2025, when the movie premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Unholy Trinity' is a Western that likes its shootouts but doesn't know what to do with its characters

The Western thriller “The Unholy Trinity” feels like the work of someone who thought it would be a good idea to make a Western, but didn’t have enough good ideas after that.

Director Richard Gray and screenwriter Lee Zachariah, both Australians, start with a prologue that would seem to set up the premise: A young man, Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), arrives at a prison in the Montana territory, 1888, just in time to say goodbye to his father, Isaac (Tim Daly), who is being hanged for murder he swears he didn’t do. The son promises to go to the town of Trinity and kill the sheriff, Saul Butler, who framed his father.

Henry arrives in Trinity, a tough town where trust doesn’t come easily, and finds the sheriff — and quickly finds out it’s not Saul Butler, who’s in the graveyard, but the new sheriff, Gabriel Dove (Pierce Brosnan). Dove defuses the situation quickly, sets Henry up in the local hotel on the condition that Henry leave town in the morning.

Before morning comes, Henry gets tangled up in a couple more murders, of two brothers (Beau Knapp and Tim Montana) and a prostitute (Katrina Bowden). Henry didn’t kill them – one of the brothers got his throat slit by a mysterious benefactor who calls himself St. Christopher. He’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, who gives whatever wit and spark this muddled movie has.

St. Christopher is after something — which he explains by and by — and he’s happy to cause chaos in Trinity if it suits his purpose. He finds it advantageous to fan the flames of racist dissent when one of the town business leaders, Gideon (Gianni Capaldi), demands that Dove go after a Blackfoot woman, Running Cub (Q’orinank Kilcher), accused of killing the former sheriff.

Gray stages a series of gun fights that carry a certain frenetic energy, but he films them so haphazardly that they lose any sense of coherence. And the performances of “The Unholy Trinity” are thrown out of balance by Jackson, who’s so fascinating he makes everyone else feel like dead weight. 

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‘The Unholy Trinity’

★★

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters. Rated R for violence, language and some sexual material. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'The Phoenician Scheme' adds some melancholy, and Benicio Del Toro's charm, to Wes Anderson's patented whimsy

At their best, the movies of director Wes Anderson are like Russian nesting dolls, where one narrative sits inside another and another — like with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” or his Roald Dahl shorts. 

Anderson’s latest, the sublime and slightly melancholy “The Phoenician Scheme,” is more like a train set, a string of interlocking mini-narratives lined up like boxcars, each adding nuance to what went before. The locomotive for this particular train, the one who powers it all, is actor Benicio Del Toro.

Del Toro plays Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda, an industrialist and arms dealer, circa 1950, who we meet as he is in the midst of his sixth plane crash — which, like the others, was an assassination attempt. Violence is an old companion to Korda, who casually offers hand grenades to his guests like they were hand towels.

Knowing his enemies won’t stop coming at him, Korda decides he needs to groom his heir. He passes over his nine sons, who live in his sprawling mansion and have a talent for violence, and chooses his only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Liesl has no interest in her father’s fortune, as she is a novice working towards a life as a nun.

Korda enlists Liesl — as well as Bjørn (Michael Cera), a tutor who becomes an assistant — to finish his latest and greatest business scheme, overhauling the infrastructure of Phoenicia. (If you know Phoenicia is a region in what’s now Lebanon and Syria that hasn’t existed since shortly before the birth of Christ, congratulations. You’re smart, and this information will not help at all while watching this movie.)

There are multiple parts to this scheme, and each part forms an episode in Anderson’s script (he shares story credit with Roman Coppola, a frequent collaborator). Each part involves rewriting some previous deal with one of his investors, to cover a “gap” in his funding. And each trading partner has reason to be suspicious or vengeful toward Korda.

The trading partners and the other characters Korda encounters are, true to Anderson’s style, played by an array of famous faces, a list that includes Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright and Scarlett Johansson. Korda also is dealing with Excalibur (Rupert Friend), a government agent on orders to disrupt Korda’s scheme, and his half-brother Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has some schemes of his own.

Korda is also contemplating mortality — multiple assassination attempts will do that — and has moments where he imagines the afterlife. Heaven is populated with such folks as Willem Dafoe, F. Murray Abraham and, in an amazing instance of typecasting, Bill Murray as God.

Del Toro has worked with Anderson before, on “The French Dispatch,” and seems to run on the same wavelength, capturing both Anderson’s offbeat humor and his wistful worldview. In admiring Del Toro’s top-tier performance, though, don’t neglect giving praise to young Threapleton, who keys in on Anderson’s deadpan dialogue style as if it’s her first language. (If Threapleton looks like someone you’ve seen before, ht helps to know that she’s the daughter of Kate Winslet, who came close to working with Anderson on “The French Dispatch,” and should try again to make that connection happen.)

“The Phoenician Scheme” is a lot to take in, as Anderson’s dense plotting and rapid-fire dialogue deliver a lot of information all at once. Best to let it wash over you, and get caught up in the whimsical absurdity and humane undertone that Anderson brings to his films.

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‘The Phoenician Scheme’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, some sexual material, nude images, and smoking throughout.  Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Ballerina' cuts through the 'John Wick' mythology to give Ana de Armas an action-movie character of her own

The main problem with the “John Wick” franchise is its mythology — a problem that started when the filmmakers decided it needed to have one. Why can’t we just have an anti-hero who shoots, stabs, slices and punches his way through hundreds of hired killers and leave it at that?

That problem, the mythology, threatens to choke the life out of the first “John Wick” spinoff movie, “Ballerina” — but, thankfully, the mayhem is entertaining enough, in a movie that gets a fair share of mileage out of the charms of star Ana de Armas.

The mythology here starts with the backstory of the prologue. De Armas’ character, Eve, is introduced to us as a young girl (played by Victoria Comte), living in a beachside mansion with her father, Javier (David Castañeda). Then armed commandos swarm the place, at the behest of a crime lord, The Chancellor (David Byrne), who wants to punish Javier for trying to escape his cult-like community. Javier fends off the bad guys but dies in the process, leaving Eve an orphan.

Someone takes an interest in young Eve: Mr. Winston (Ian McShane), who fans of the franchise know as Wick’s protector and the manager of the New York branch of The Continental, the shadowy chain of luxury hotels that is safe haven for criminals around the world. Winston offers young Eve his services, whenever she should ask.

Eve lands in a training school for future assassins. She practices her ballet until her feet bleed, and also learns martial arts, weapons and other deadly skills. The school’s leader, known as The Director (Anjelica Huston), gives Eve her first contract — which is how she runs into some of the killers associated with The Chancellor’s cult.

(For those paying attention to the details of the franchise, Huston’s presence sets this story within the timeline of the third “John Wick” movie, “Parabellum.” This means that Keanu Reeves’ Wick is still alive — he wasn’t looking to good by the end of the fourth movie — and available for an appearance here somewhere.)

Eve wants to chase after The Chancellor’s goons, but The Director won’t allow it. If someone from her tribe tried to kill The Chancellor’s assassins, the fragile peace between both sides would be shattered. But Eve is determined, so she asks Winston for information — which sets up the last half of the movie.

Director Len Wiseman manages not to gum up the action too much — which means he’s improving from when he directed “Underworld” and the “Total Recall” remake. The real credit should go to the stunt team, a factor that has put the “Wick” movies ahead of the pack, and to de Armas, who throws herself into the fight scenes with an admirable recklessness. 

De Armas’ efforts hit their peak in the movie’s extended climax, set in a mountainside village where seemingly every citizen — down to the local barista — has lethal talents and is happy to display them. If moviegoers have to endure some mythology to get to a scene with dueling flamethrowers, that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

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‘Ballerina’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/bloody violence throughout, and language. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'Dangerous Animals' is a grindhouse movie with flair, topped by a devilish Jai Courtney, a strong turn by Hassie Harrison, and lots of sharks

I didn’t realize how much I missed seeing a well-made grindhouse movie — a B-movie horror movie with finely crafted twists — until director Sean Byrne threw one in my lap with “Dangerous Animals.”

Byrne, an Australian filmmaker directing his third film after “The Loved Ones” (2009) and “The Devil’s Candy” (2015), seems to understand that the most important elements to an effective psycho-killer movie is an appropriately nasty killer with a solid m.o. and a smart hero or heroine using their wits and courage to survive the carnage. 

The killer here is Tucker, played by the Australian actor Jai Courtney. He’s a burly guy running a tour boat out of Gold Coast, Queensland, taking the tourists out to see the sharks circling. What those tourists don’t know, until it’s too late, is that his kink is killing those tourists by feeding them to those sharks. There are more details to his pattern, but it’s better not to know too much ahead of time.

Tucker’s would-be victim is Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American surfer living out of her van. We learn early on that she’s had a rough life — an orphan who lived in a series of foster homes — and has a touch of the con artist. Zephyr doesn’t trust easily, which is why she surprises herself when she meets a nice guy, Moses (Josh Heuston), and they almost immediately make love in the back of her van.

Zephyr leaves Moses behind to catch the waves before dawn, which is when Tucker kidnaps her and holds her captive, handcuffed to a metal cot in a lower deck of his boat — alongside Heather (Ella Newton), a future victim Byrne and rookie screenwriter Nick Lepard introduced in the movie’s prologue.

The bulk of this tight thriller happens on Tucker’s boat, as Zephyr tries to outwit him, exploit the holes in his murderous process and stay alive long enough to see it through. It’s always surprising, sometimes unsettling and ultimately rewarding.

The extra strength of “Dangerous Animals” is the back-and-forth between its stars. Harrison, who played the ranch hand Laramie on three seasons of “Yellowstone,” is a Final Girl for the ages, making Zephyr’s fear and resolve feel entirely earned. Courtney has always been one of those guys who never quite jelled as an action hero — his misfires include “Suicide Squad,” “A Good Day to Die Hard” and “Terminator Genisys” — but is shockingly good as a full-out maniac.  

Oh, and yes, the sharks — whether real, mechanical or computer-generated — are really cool. What more could you want in a shark-driven serial-killer movie?

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‘Dangerous Animals”

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content/grisly images, sexuality, language and brief drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.