'Wonder Park'

Pity the poor children who are left at the theater to watch the tedious animated tale “Wonder Park,” and take comfort in knowing that there won’t be many of them.

Even with a corporate tie-in to Nickelodeon, and probably an ad campaign saturating “SpongeBob SquarePants” reruns, my critic-sense tells me kids in the target demographic won’t much care about this uninspired mess.

The movie’s hero is June (voiced at different ages by Brianna Denski and Sofia Mali), a daredevil who designs elaborate amusement park rides on her tablet, then tries to build them in her backyard. After one particularly dangerous ride falls apart and sends June speeding into traffic, June’s mom (voiced by Jennifer Garner) comes up with an alternative: Building a miniature park in June’s room. 

June comes up with the ideas, and Mom whispers them into the ear of her stuffed monkey, Peanut, who in this imaginary scenario is the master builder of Wonderland. (Why the filmmakers wanted to court comparisons to Lewis Carroll is beyond rational understanding.)

This system allows Wonderland to flourish in June’s house, spreading to every room. But June’s playdates with Mom are interrupted when Mom becomes seriously ill and has to go away for treatment. Depressed, June boxes up all of her Wonderland creations, and the onetime daredevil becomes a safety obsessive, monitoring everything Dad (voiced by Matthew Broderick) eats, drinks and breathes.

Eventually, Dad convinces June to leave for a couple weeks to math camp. When the bus pulls over, June wanders into the woods, and discovers the remnants of a theme park. Soon, she realizes it’s her theme park, Wonderland — in disrepair, with the animal mascots she invented fending off a horde of once cute but now zombified plush chimp creatures. Turns out this Wonderland has fallen prey to “The Darkness,” a vague but obvious metaphor floating over the park.

The movie is a chaotic mess, which may have been inevitable given its troubled production history. Paramount reportedly fired the original director in January 2018, when he was accused of “inappropriate and unwanted contact” with women. (Through his lawyer, he denied the charge.) He was replaced by a trio of filmmakers, none of whom getting directing credit. Five months later, the actor who voiced one of the park mascots, a narcoleptic bear named Boomer, also was replaced after sexual-misconduct allegations. Somewhere between those two events, the movie’s title was changed.

They needn’t have bothered finishing the movie. The voice cast is adequate to the task, but only John Oliver, as a safety-obsessed porcupine, generates any laughs. The computer animation is serviceable, but only in brief flashes rises to Pixar-esque levels of oohs and ahs. Even the movie’s life lesson, about embracing one’s sadness to get to the light, is negated by an artificial ending. 

“Wonder Park” is a colossal blunder that sparks no joy, and the worst part is that Nickelodeon is apparently developing it into a TV series. Again, pity the poor children.

——

‘Wonder Park’

★1/2

Opens Friday, March 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some mild thematic elements and action. Running time: 85 minutes.

'Climax'

There’s more anti- than climax in “Climax,” the latest act of provocation from French director Gaspar Noë, who has a great idea and is damned if he can actually do anything meaningful with it.

Loosely based on a true story — if we’re to believe anything Noë tells us — “Climax” starts with a feverish premise. A dance troupe, circa 1996, has just finished an intense three-day rehearsal session in a repurposed boarding school, so now it’s time to party. The dancers get down on the dance floor in the multi-purpose room, while Daddy (Kiddy Smile) spins the discs, and Emmanuelle (Claude Gajan Maull) sets up a table of snacks and two punchbowls of sangria.

Noé begins with the closing credits — something he did in the brutal told-backwards drama “Irreversible” — and then settles in with a VHS-driven mashup of interviews with the individual dancers. Then the dancing starts, with exuberant and kinetic performances from the 20-plus dancers, shot in one long fluid take.

Some personalities emerge: The aggressive corndog David (Romain Guillermic), or the close-knit siblings Gazelle (Giselle Palmer) and Taylor (Taylor Kastle), or the apparent troupe leader, Selva (played by Sofia Boutella, the only familiar face in the cast, thanks to “Kingsman,” “The Mummy” and “Atomic Blonde”).

After awhile, Selva and some others start to notice that they’re feeling weird. They soon figure out that somebody has spiked the sangria with LSD, and most of the dancers — along with the DJ — are tripping out.

I won’t say much more about what happens after that, not because of spoilers, but because Noë doesn’t much care what happens next. He lets the characters devolve into their most primal selves. Then they devolve some more, seemingly taking the camera crew with them. 

As the movie goes on, the camera that so smoothly snaked around the dance floor and up and down hallways becomes as chaos-driven as the strung-out dancers. There could be an orgy happening — in fact, there might very well be — but it would be difficult to tell from the lurid dark shots composed by Noë’s regular cinematographer, Benoît Debie.

What begins as Noë’s most propulsive movie, an exercise in pure movement and visual sensation, ends up being as hollow as a chocolate bunny, and nowhere near as sweet. Ultimately, Noé has the last laugh, by calling his movie “Climax” and failing to deliver one.

——

‘Climax’

★★1/2

Opened Friday, March 1, in select cities; opens Friday, March 15, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Rated R for disturbing content involving a combination of drug use, violent behavior and strong sexuality, and for language and some graphic nudity. Running time: 96 minutes; in French with subtitles.

'Ruben Brandt, Collector'

Art nerds will get the most out of “Ruben Brandt, Collector,” an adults-only animated thriller from Hungary whose visual imagination far outpaces its lackluster plot.

The title character is a psychotherapist suffering from incapacitating hallucinations, all of them involving great works of art. One minute, a girl from a Velasquez painting is biting his arm; the next, a cat from a Manet nude is leaping at him to claw his face. His fear of art may go back to his father, Gerheart, an art historian, but that doesn’t help him solve the problem of how to get rid of the nightmares.

At the institute where he treats patients, he welcomes Mimi, who has the signs of being a kleptomaniac. The audience has already seen the evidence, when she heists an Egyptian artifact from the Louvre while ignoring the massive diamond her mob benefactors sent her to steal. The heist is followed by a breakneck car chase through Paris and along the Seine, with a detective, Mike Kowalski, in hot pursuit.

Mimi is laying low at Brandt’s institute, but she’s touched by his suffering. She comes to believe that the way to cure Brandt is to let him possess the paintings that torment him. So Mimi enlists three of her fellow patients, all career criminals, to stage a baker’s dozen of robberies to acquire the 13 paintings that bedevil him.

The journey allows director Milorad Krstic — who’s also the writer, lead animator, production designer and film editor — to indulge in the visual splendor of art. His characters often have a surplus of eyes or noses, like Picasso figures, and Brandt’s hallucinations allow Krstic to create his own takes on such famous paintings as Andy Warhol’s “Double Elvis” and Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” And since every painting is in a different city, Krstic gets to riff on architecture and urban design, too.

Still, one wishes the story was as rich as the visuals. Instead, the story serves as an extended audio tour of the art history as interpreted by Krstic’s wild palette.

——

‘Ruben Brandt, Collector’

★★★

Opened February 15 in select cities; opens Friday, March 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for nude images and some violence. Running time: 96 minutes.

'Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase'

The real mystery of “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” is why it exists in the first place: A pilot the Disney Channel turned down? A direct-to-video cheapie? A slapdash attempt to extend the film rights of a soon-to-expire intellectual property agreement? The options abound.

This new adaptation of the durable detective series is being released, barely, by Warner Bros. — which, as it happens, also released the last movie adaptation, 2007’s “Nancy Drew,” with Emma Roberts. Warner Bros. also released the first efforts to put Carolyn Keene’s girl detective on the screen, a quartet of films in 1938 and 1939 starring Bonita Granville. (Universal Television added Nancy, played by Pamela Sue Martin, to its “Hardy Boys Mysteries” in the late ‘70s. And in 2002, a “Nancy Drew” TV movie, with Maggie Lawson playing Nancy in college, aired on ABC’s “Wonderful World of Disney.”)

For a franchise that has been so prolific and so popular over the decades, one might expect more screen adaptations. This new version points to a possible reason why: The stories are rather thin.

This version starts with some backstory, of 16-year-old Nancy (Sophia Lillis) and her father, attorney Carson Drew (Sam Trammell, formerly of “True Blood”), just relocated to Chicago to the small town of River Heights. Moving puts the Drews near Carson’s sister Hannah (Andrea Anders) and away from memories of Nancy’s recently deceased mom. But Nancy is bored with small-town life, and needs some excitement.

At first, Nancy creates that excitement through vigilantism. She teams with pals George Fayne (Zoe Renee) and Bess Marvin (Mackenzie Graham) to engineer revenge against the rich jock Derek (Evan Castelloe), who cyberbullies shy Bess. That stunt lands her doing community service for Sheriff Marchbanks (Jay DeVon Johnson), which is how Nancy overhears elderly Flora (the great Linda Lavin) complaining about strange supernatural doings in her big old house.

Nancy enlists George and Bess to help investigate Flora’s house. Also along for the ride, reluctantly, is Flora’s great-niece, Helen Corning (Laura Wiggins), a spoiled rich classmate who is also Derek’s girlfriend. Nancy and Helen dislike each other intensely, but agree to put that aside to help Flora unravel the mystery behind her seemingly haunted house.

Screenwriters Nina Fiore and John Herrera (who work together as executive story editors on “The Handmaid’s Tale”) have fun laying out the detective tropes to a pre-teen generation that may not know them already. Even so, the story feels padded, and director Katt Shea, an alumna of Roger Corman’s B-movie stable and director of the 1992 Drew Barrymore sexploitation movie “Poison Ivy,” can barely find enough action to get the movie over the 90-minute mark.

The saving grace of “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” is Lillis as Nancy. Lillis — who shot to fame as Beverly, the lone girl in the Losers Club in Stephen King’s “It” — was 16 herself when she shot this movie, and she conveys Nancy’s intelligence and spitfire attitude quite well. Too bad Shea couldn’t build a sturdier movie around her. 

——

‘Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase’

★★

 Opens Friday, March 15, in select markets, including AMC West Jordan 12 (West Jordan) and AMC Layton Hills 9 (Layton). Rated PG for peril, suggestive material, thematic elements and language. Running time: 89 minutes.

(Correction: In an earlier version of this review, I mistakenly said George, Nancy’s friend and sidekick, was a boy in the books. I conflated George — short for Georgia — with Ned Nickerson, Nancy’s sometimes-boyfriend.)

'Everybody Knows'

The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has no problems working in a language that isn’t his own, and in the drama “Everybody Knows” he finds marital strife in a Spanish village just as easily as he has in a Tehran apartment building in “A Separation” and “The Salesman.”

Laura (Penélope Cruz) has just arrived from Buenos Aires back to this village in Spain, and her sister Ana (Imma Cuesta) has picked her, along with Laura’s 16-year-old daughter Irene (Carla Campra) and young son Diego (Ivan Chávero), up at the airport. Ana’s getting married, to Joan (Roger Casamajor), and everyone is staying at the family hotel, now run by oldest sister Mariana (Elvira Mínguez) and her husband Fernando (Eduard Fernández).

Being a small town, it’s not long before Laura runs into Paco (Javier Bardem), who runs a prosperous winery just outside of town. Paco is shown giddily in love with his wife, Bea (Barbara Lennie), but its no secret in the village that Paco and Laura were in love with each other when they were teens. 

Also being a small town, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that Laura’s Argentine husband, Alejandro (Ricardo Darîn), didn’t come with his family on this trip.

The wedding goes off smoothly, except for the church bells going off at the wrong time — because Irene is flirting with Paco’s nephew Felipe (Sergio Castellanos) in the clock tower during the service. The reception, in the courtyard of the family hotel, is a boisterous affair with music and plenty of Paco’s wine. But the merriment ends abruptly, when Laura notices Irene has gone missing.

What follows, in Farhadi’s intense script, are recriminations, accusations, old grudges, and one big family secret that’s revealed when Laura is at her most desperate.

Farhadi keeps the tension drum-tight, often with little more than raw, emotional dialogue and a powerful ensemble cast. Leading the way are Cruz and Bardem, as the married-in-real-life Oscar winners grab onto their meaty roles with both hands and extract the maximum dramatic energy from them.

Farhadi plays with the audience’s expectations, right down to the title. In this small town, it’s assumed that everybody knows everyone else’s secrets — but what’s most compelling in Farhadi’s story is how nobody knows what they’ll do when things are at their worst.

——

‘Everybody Knows’

★★★1/2

Opened February 8 in select cities; opens Friday, March 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language. Running time: 124 minutes; in Spanish with subtitles.

'Birds of Passage'

Imagine “The Sopranos” with indigenous Colombians and you get a sense of what’s afoot in “Birds of Passage,” a soulful and hard-hitting crime drama that takes gangster tropes to a new and fascinating place.

Directors Ciro Guerra (“Embrace of the Serpent”) and Cristina Gallego — who divorced during the making of this film — begin in the 1960s in Colombia, specifically in the Guajira region in the north, home to the indigenous Wayuu people. For one clan, the matriarch Úrsula (Carmiña Martinez) who maintains the traditions of her people. 

Úrsula’s the one who advises the young Zaina (Natalia Reyes) before she hears from the suitors seeking to marry her. She’s the one who carries the talisman that protects the family. She’s the one who interprets the dreams that foretell her family’s future. And, jumping ahead a bit, she’s the one who orders a hit on a drug-dealing outsider.

It’s the Americans, specifically a group of hippie-ish Peace Corps volunteers, who put Úrsula’s people on the bloody path of drug dealing. The Americans hear the Colombians have marijuana, and Zaina’s new husband Rapayet (José Acosta) arranges to sell some to them. He soon jumps into the lucrative business of selling a lot of marijuana to Americans, borrowing from his uncle Anibal () to get a foothold, and partnering with his friend Moisés (Jhon Narváez) — an outsider to the Wayuu, an “Alijunas” — to sell bundles of pot and fly it north to America.

Soon Rayapet and Moisés are rolling in money, but with that comes recklessness. When Moisés starts waving guns around, and killing people who get in his way, Úrsula orders the reluctant Rayapet to kill his business partner.

The story moves forward to Rayapet, Zaina and their kids living in luxury, with Úrsula living with them. But there is trouble, when a drunken cousin Leonidas (Greider Meza) commits a grave offense against Anibal’s family. Because of pride and an inability to apologize, a gang war becomes inevitable.

Gallego and Guerra, who handed their story idea to screenwriters Maria Camila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, work in the classic themes of the gangster saga. Small crimes grow to big ones, just as money and power grow into callous arrogance. People talk of the family — in this case, the ways of the Wayuu clans — but those values become corrupted and distorted by greed.

“Birds of Passage” boasts a talented ensemble, including some fascinating character actors — none more intriguing as José Vicente Cote as Peregnino, the craggy “word messenger” who acts as an envoy between the warring families. The cast carries the burden of a people who put their tradition in conflict with their ambition, and who must live with — and die because of — the consequences.

——

‘Birds of Passage’

★★★1/2

Opened February 13 in select cities; opens Friday, March 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for gun violence, nudity, sexual content, drug content and language. Running time: 125 minutes; in Wayuu and Spanish, with subtitles.

'The Kid'

There have been some 20 movie depictions of the outlaw William Bonney, a k a Billy the Kid, but actor-turned-director Vincent D’Onofrio’s up-and-down new Western drama “The Kid” is unique — in that it’s not really about Billy the Kid.

Oh, Billy is a character, played with a scruffy charm by Dane DeHaan. But Billy’s a side character in the fictional story of a boy named Rio (played by newcomer Jake Schur, who’s one of the movie’s producers).

The movie begins with Rio, age 15, and his older sister Sarah (Leila George, D’Onofrio’s daughter), crying in terror, because their drunken father is beating their mother to death. Rio gets hold of a pistol and shoots their father dead. Then their uncle, Grant (Chris Pratt, trying his hand at being the heavy), starts attacking the siblings — and is only held off when Rio slashes his face with a piece of broken glass.

The two make their escape, heading toward Santa Fe. When they seek refuge in a cabin en route, they wake up to find the cabin occupied by Billy the Kid and his crew — and with Billy’s nemesis, lawman Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke) and his posse outside. Eventually, Garrett captures Billy and the members of his gang the posse doesn’t perforate with bullets. Garrett aims to deposit one in Santa Fe for a hanging, and take Billy back to Lincoln, Neb., to face justice.

Rio and Sarah go along for the ride, careful not to confess to Garrett about their father. In Santa Fe, though, Rio and Sarah are ambushed by Grant — who tosses Rio aside and kidnaps Sarah to be a whore for his crew. Rio’s only hope of finding Sarah is Billy, so Rio rides to Lincoln to help him escape Garrett’s custody one more time.

Besides being convoluted in the story department, as evidenced by that travel-heavy synopsis, Andrew Lanham’s script is a ponderous load of speeches. Billy expounds on the nature of being an outlaw, commiserating with Rio as a fellow orphaned soul. Garrett yammers on about the serious business of killing, and how every life a man takes scars the taker. Even Uncle Grant prattles on about bluebirds, for no good reason.

D’Onofrio stages a dynamic gunfight, and the moments of gunplay have a propulsive energy. He also knows good acting talent, and gets strong performances by Hawke, DeHaan and George, while also helping Schur through to a solid debut.

The problem with “The Kid” is that the relationship between Rio and Billy never feels authentic, kindred spirits in a cruel world, feels like a Screenwriting 101 exercise, rather than an organic part of the story. Billy gets his due, but it feels weirdly disconnected from the drama that’s unfolding.

——

‘The Kid’

★★1/2

Opens Friday in select theaters, including the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan) and AMC Layton Hills 9 (Layton). Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 100 minutes.

'Captain Marvel'

How powerful is Captain Marvel? She made the internet’s foulest minds explode, and prompted a major website to alter a longstanding policy — and that was before people saw the movie “Captain Marvel,” easily one of the most fun, exciting and important chapters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

There are fanboys itching to attack me for that last sentence. They’ll say I’m getting paid off by the Disney/Marvel oligarchy. Or they’ll say I’m “virtue signaling,” a repellent insult hurled at liberals by the far right, a shorthand way to call someone a liar and a poser who doesn’t believe in the equality or fairness they espouse.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.