Review: Animation improves on 'Sonic the Hedgehog," but the real show is the return of maniacal Jim Carrey

The good news for fans of Sega’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” is that the computer-animated character in this animation/live-action hybrid looks more like what fans expected than the weirdly muscular, surprisingly toothy figure they saw in early trailers last May.

The bad news is that three months’ added work may have improved the animation, bur the filmmakers couldn’t use that time to make the cliche-riddled script more interesting.

Screenwriters Patrick Casey and Josh Miller (and God knows how many script doctors) start with Sonic’s backstory. Our blue buddy is from another planet, but had to escape through a dimensional portal — created by those gold rings the video game character grabs on his speedy travels — to Earth, specifically the tiny town of Green Hills, Montana. He stays in hiding, mostly, though he does observe the townspeople, particularly the local sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), and his veterinarian wife, Maddie (Tika Sumpter).

But when Sonic lets loose with his super-speed, and blowing out power across the Pacific Northwest, the Pentagon springs into action. The generals send in their top expert: Dr. Ivo Robotnik, played by Jim Carrey — a.k.a., the reason to watch this movie.

It’s been six years since Carrey had a starring role in a comedy, in “Dumb and Dumber To,” and his take on Dr. Robotnik is a reminder of what he can do. Playing a fast-talking, condescendingly superior tech wizard with an arsenal of drones, Carrey deploys his manic comedy gifts well as the genius obsessed with catching this blue blur.

Alas, director Jeff Fowler and the script only give us regulated doses of Carrey’s insanity. Instead, we get long passes where the childlike Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) riding shotgun with Sheriff Tom on a road trip from Montana to San Francisco — where Sonic’s bag of magic rings landed through a portal mishap. Yes, the script exhausts all the “we’re not partners, and we’re not friends” tropes somewhere around Oregon, which leaves a lot of downtime before the big chase finale.

Fans of the “Sonic” franchise will appreciate the Easter eggs laid in the mid-credit scenes, which seem to have received more thought and attention than the actual movie. Everyone else gets to laugh along with Carrey, who seems to be having fun diving head-first into the mind of a cartoon villain.

——

‘Sonic the Hedgehog’

★★1/2

Opening Friday, February 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, some violence, rude humor and brief mild language. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Downhill' is a dark comedy that showcases Julia Louis-Dreyfus's serious side

The marital comedy “Downhill” is billed as a showcase for two of the biggest comic talents we have, Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus — but, as it goes along, it’s possible the stars weren’t aligned.

Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus play Pete and Billie Staunton, a long-married couple on a ski vacation in the Austrian Alps with their teen sons (Julian Grey and Ammon Jacob Ford). Things seem fine, though it’s clear Pete is preoccupied, texting with his officemate, Zach (Zach Woods), who is backpacking around Europe with his girlfriend, Rosie (Zoë Chao).

After one ski run, the Stauntons are sitting at a cafe table outdoors, when a controlled avalanche starts looking a little out of control, and barreling right towards the terrace. Pete jumps up, grabs his cellphone, and runs away — leaving Billie and the boys screaming in panic. The threat turns out to be nothing, just a dusting of snow. But the fear, and the anger at Pete’s reaction, burn in Billie’s brain long into the vacation.

Directors Jim Rash and Nat Faxon (“The Way, Way Back”), who rewrote a script by Jesse Armstrong (the creator of HBO’s “Succession”), make a significant nod to their source material: Ruben Östlund’s 2014 Swedish film “Force Majeure.” They even cast Kristofer Hivju (“Game of Thrones”), who played the Zach Woods character in the original, as a ski-resort official who shoots down Billie’s threat of legal action: “This isn’t America, where you can sue if your coffee is too hot.”

The key difference between the films is that Östlund focused mostly on the husband, and his growing sense of shame and emasculation at his decision in the avalanche. In “Downhill,” Ferrell gets a bit of that emotion to work with, but the real focus is on Louis-Dreyfus’ Billie and what will she do now that she sees her husband, the rock on which she has built the foundation of her life, isn’t as solid as she thought.

Putting the weight on Billie is a good call, because Louis-Dreyfus modulates these emotions beautifully. Ferrell has handled serious stuff before (“Everything Must Go” and “Stranger Than Fiction” come to mind), but he doesn’t get the big emotional moments his co-star does.

It’s fascinating that for the first 40 minutes of “Downhill,” Louis-Dreyfus is not even doing comedy. Her struggle to hold it in, when she wants to scream at Pete, is the stuff of high-caliber drama, and Louis-Dreyfus plays it perfectly. Eventually, Dreyfus cuts loose, in scenes with a sexually voracious concierge (Miranda Otto) or a hunky ski instructor (Giulio Berruti), and her ability to deploy Billie’s rage through comedy is as cathartic as it is funny.

——

‘Downhill’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 86 minutes.

Review: Israeli thriller 'Incitement,' which follows a student's radicalization into an assassin, feels all-too current

I can only imagine the experience of watching “Incitement” in an Israeli theater, where Yigal Amir’s name likely is as familiar as Lee Harvey Oswald’s name is in America.

Israeli audiences would know well ahead of American viewers how this movie tragically ends — with the 1995 assassination of Israel’s prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. They wouldn’t be looking, as I did for awhile, for some indication that Amir might step away from the brink. But director Yaron Zilberman’s relentless ratcheting of the grim tension tells even a naive viewer that no such relief is coming.

The story begins in 1994 in Israel, and the TV and radio are filled with the reports of Rabin meeting with Yassir Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, at Bill Clinton’s White House. They are there to sign the first of the Oslo accords, the tenuous first steps toward a Middle East peace solution.

Back home, the Oslo agreements are quite divisive, and several conservative politicians — Ariel Sharon and the current PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, are seen here in well-purposed news footage — and religious leaders are speaking out. Some reactionary rabbis go so far as calling Rabin a traitor to the Jewish people.

Such arguments find a receptive audience with Yigal Amir (Yehuda Nahari), a young law student with a lot of unresolved anger. He takes in the rhetoric he hears from some extremist rabbis — that Rabin is betraying the Jewish people, so a Jew would be justified in killing him — and starts plotting. First he wants to organize a militia to replace the Israeli Defense Forces units standing down in Gaza and the West Bank. Then, goaded on by his brother Hagai (Yoav Levi) and others, he considers how one could assassinate Rabin.

Zilberman and his co-writer, Ron Leshem, don’t glorify or justify Amir’s actions, but they do detail the escalation of his radicalization. Some are rooted in psychology — like how his mother (Anat Ravnitski) regularly assures Amir that he is “destined for greatness,” or when his girlfriend, Nava (Daniella Kertesz), becomes uncomfortable with his extremist views. Others come from soaking in the media, like the talk radio hosts who predict violence or the utterances of Rabin’s rivals (Netanyahu’s rhetoric is particularly bellicose),

The inevitable ending is handled brilliantly, as Zilberman films Nahari in crowd scenes and edits them deftly with real footage of the rally where Rabin was speaking before Amir killed him. The attention to detail, and the intensity of Nahari’s performance, make for a devastating ending.

What’s most disturbing about “Incitement” is that it doesn’t feel like a period piece. The cumulative effect of the demonization of Rabin and Amir’s descent into being radicalized feels frighteningly of the moment, something we see on our news feeds every day. “Incitement” feels like a foreign-language film for which we’re seeing the American remake in real time. 

——

‘Incitement’

★★★1/2

Opened January 31 in select cities; opens Friday, February 14, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence and some language. Running time: 123 minutes; in Hebrew, with subtitles.

Review: 'Citizen K' captures a Russian oligarch in the act of reinventing himself as an anti-Putin activist

How does a documentarian know when his subject is lying? In filmmaker Alex Gibney’s latest, “Citizen K,” it’s hard to tell sometimes — which is what makes the film, and Gibney’s approach, so interesting.

The subject whose veracity is under scrutiny is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once — or at least people say he was — the richest man in Russia. Khodorkovsky was one of the oligarchs who made mad cash when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and they took over many of the businesses that used to be run by the government.

Khodorkovsky, now living in London, talks rather openly about how he and the other oligarchs made their money, sometimes fleecing poverty-stricken Russians. The government gave vouchers to everyday Russians, good for a share of the government-owned businesses. Oligarchs bought up those vouchers, exchanging shares for cash that the people could use to satisfy immediate needs. What those people lost was, as it turns out, a piece of major industries — which, in Khodorkovsky’s case, was oil.

Then, as Gibney describes not just through Khodorkovsky’s account but that of journalists and others in Russia at the time, Khodorkovsky did the one thing you never do in Russia: He made the president, Vladimir Putin, look bad on television.

Soon, Khodorkovsky found himself and his oil company, Yukos, being investigated. Eventually, Khodorkovsky was sent to a Siberian prison for more than a decade. Eventually freed and exiled to London, Khodorkovsky faces a murder charge — a trumped-up one, based on no evidence, he says — if he ever sets foot in Russia.

Gibney, with his usual efficiency and intelligence, lays out the timeline of Khodorkovsky’s rise and fall with a ton of research, arresting visuals, and rock-solid interviews. The most fascinating interview is Khodorkovsky himself, who is very matter-of-fact about his role in the outlaw capitalism of post-Soviet Russia. He’s also self-effacing about his stint in prison, and his newfound activist zeal with his anti-Putin group Open Russia.

Is Khodorkovsky sincere? Or is it an act, a calculation from a man who sees advantage in playing the angel against Putin’s devil? Gibney lets Khodorkovsky say his piece, and let the audience judge. That’s more than the Putin-controlled Russian media, where Khodorkovsky and Open Russia are attacked regularly, would do for him.

——

‘Citizen K’

★★★1/2

Opened January 15 in select markets; opens Friday, February 14, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and suggestions of violence. Running time: 126 minutes; in English and Russian, with subtitles.

Review: Utah-made 'Romance in the Outfield: Double Play' strikes out in the rom-com department

Contrary to popular belief, most critics don’t rub their hands in glee at the prospect of writing a review for something bad — especially when the work, like the Utah-made “Romance in the Outfield: Double Play,” is as earnestly intended as it is clumsily made.

Directors Randy and Becky Sternberg mostly recycle the formula from their 2015 movie “Romance in the Outfield” (called “Pitching Love and Catching Faith” in some markets), of potential lovers dealing with some mixed signals. It’s the sort of rom-com that is overloaded with musical montages of the main couple hanging out, and of far too many characters walking in on two other characters at the worst possible moments and turning away without waiting for the usually innocent explanation.

Tyler (Derek Boone) is a one-time big-league baseball player who’s coaching a high-school softball team while waiting for word if his injured shoulder is healing enough for him to play again. His rival coach is Kenzie (Monica Moore-Smith), who treats Tyler with such contempt that it’s clear they had a thing once. Flashbacks confirm this, and tell us that it was the pursuit of his baseball career that thwarted the relationship then. 

What’s keeping them apart now? Still baseball, and his unexplained rule against kissing. (Huh?) But even more, the obstacle is his memory of his deceased girlfriend, Heather — who is seen only in flashbacks from the first movie, when she was played by Lauryn Kent (who now goes by Lala Kent, and is a reality star on Bravo’s “Vanderpump Rules”).

While all of this infield romantic banter is going on, the Sternbergs and screenwriter J.J. Randolph divert us with a subplot of a runaway bride, Tiffany (Shae Robins), jumping into an Uber outside a church and wanting to get away from there fast. The driver, Chase (Dan Fowlks), who looks like he stepped off the cover of a romance novel, tries to become Tiffany’s confidante — which is how we learn that Tiffany is Tyler’s twin sister, and that she was about to elope with Tyler’s best buddy Brandon (Shawn Carter) before getting cold feet.

Rather than wallow in the rom-com cliches and hamfisted execution, let me concentrate on the positives. The filmmakers aren’t afraid to show the main characters as committed Christians, something most romantic movies dance around. And Moore-Smith — a homegrown talent who’s come up through such local productions as “Saturday’s Warrior” — is an engaging leading lady who could have bigger and better things in her future.

——

‘Romance in the Outfield: Double Play’

★1/2

Opens Friday, February 14, in Megaplex Theatres locations. Not rated, but probably PG for mild suggestiveness and language. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Birds of Prey' becomes a vehicle for Margot Robbie's happily maniacal turn as Harley Quinn

It’s always fascinating how DC Comics looks at what Marvel does and tries to copy it. If Marvel can do a fantasy-driven action movie in “Thor,” DC can do the same in “Aquaman.” If Marvel can get the band together in “The Avengers,” DC will try it with “Justice League.” 

And if Marvel’s “Deadpool” can become a hit with a fast-talking anti-hero in a hyper-violent R-rated movie, then DC can try their luck doing the same with “Birds of Prey,” a kaleidoscopic combination of superhero origin stories and a wisecracking commentary track on the same.

First thing, the title “Birds of Prey” is misleading, since the heroes of that DC title are supporting players to the main character, the psychotic criminal Harley Quinn. In fact, the movie’s unwieldy full title is “Birds of Prey, and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.”

Margot Robbie, who played Harley in the overstuffed “Suicide Squad” (2016), returns but with a different attitude. She declares strongly that she has broken up with her longtime boyfriend, the arch criminal The Joker — and punctuates the sentiment by blowing up “their place,” the Ace Chemical plant in Gotham City, where Harley once jumped into a pool of chemicals to prove her love to “Mr. J.”

The problem for Harley is that being The Joker’s girlfriend afforded her some protection in Gotham’s underworld — and without him, she’s an open target for everybody she ever wronged, with is a sizable list. Topping the list is the crime boss Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor), who is consolidating his power around Gotham. and to do it he needs a particular diamond that contains the key to unlock the millions of the massacred Bertinelli crime family.

Other people figuring into this story include: Dinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), aka Black Canary, a singer in Roman’s club; Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), a rogue cop trying to build a case against Roman; Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco), a teenage pickpocket who steals something she shouldn’t; and a mysterious assassin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), dispatching her victims with a crossbow. (Giving the character’s name would spoil a well-staged reveal later in the movie.)

Director Cathy Yan (“Dead Pigs”) and screenwriter Christina Hodsen (“BumbleBee”) have to download a whole lot of information into the audience’s brains in a hurry. The vehicle of choice is Harley’s motormouthed narration, introducing new characters and sanding over rough spot with the most pronounced cartoon New York accent this side of that other Warner Bros.’ icon, Bugs Bunny.

Once a person gets dialed into Yan’s frenetic wavelength, he or she appreciates the humorously anarchic touches Yan adds to the proceedings: the female-forward soundtrack choices (Joan Jett, Heart and Patsy Cline among them), the casual sexism lobbed by cops and crooks alike, and the way the copious fight scenes view its woman combatants as warriors, not just eye candy. (Bonus points for how Harley, mid-fight, offers a hair tie to Dinah, and then how Dinah bunches her braids into a ponytail while still kicking butt.)

It seems clear Yan & Co. are piling on every joke they know to turn “Birds of Prey” into DC’s “Deadpool” franchise. As realized by Ryan Reynolds, the movie Deadpool drops one-liners as fast as he takes down villains — and in “Birds of Prey,” Robbie does the same thing but with psychotic enthusiasm. Even when the plot his a few sour notes, Robbie concocts a winning performance out of the hammer-swinging anti-hero.

——

‘Birds of Prey, and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 7, in theaters everywhere. Rate R for strong violence and language throughout, and some sexual and drug material. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Invisible Life' is a beautiful, heartbreaking tale of sisters separated by a brutal father

The bonds are sisterhood are stretched, by the forces of time and patriarchy, in “Invisible Life,” a sumptuously constructed melodrama that pulls viewers in to its poetic beauty and heartache.

Euridice (Carol Duarte) is 18, and Guida (Julie Stockler) is 20, sisters living in Rio de Janeiro, circa 1950. The sisters both know what they want in life: Guida wants romance, a husband and a family; while Euridice wants to be a famous pianist. The main obstacle for both young women to achieve these dreams is their rigidly conservative father, Manuel (António Fonseca).

One night, Guida sneaks away from the house, and writes that she has eloped with a Greek sailor. She returns a few months later, single and pregnant, and is cast out into the streets by her father. What’s more, Manuel tells Guida a lie — that Euridice has left to pursue her dream, to study in a famous music conservatory in Vienna.

The truth is that Euridice, intimidated by her brutal father after Guida’s elopement, married Antenor (Gregorio Duvivier), an up-and-coming businessman, and settled for a traditional life as a homemaker and mother. But Euridice’s passion for music remains intense, gnawing at her to do more with her life than cook and clean and raise their child. Guida, on the other hand, must rebuild her life from the bottom, maintaining dignity as a single mom.

Rio is a big city, but the idea that these long-separated sisters could reunite is a tantalizing one. It leads director Karim Aïnouz to a gloriously tense scene where both sisters are in the same restaurant, but miss each other by moments — though their young children, who don’t know each other, share a moment talking and looking at the restaurant’s fish tank.

Aïnouz and screenwriter Murilo Hauser (adapting Martha Batalha’s novel) deftly capture the sweep of years, even decades, as the two sisters live physically apart but spiritually together, their lives a rebuke to the patriarchal system that separated them. Aïnouz is blessed with two powerful lead actresses in Duarte and Stockler, two halves of a gorgeous, heartbreaking whole that makes “Invisible Life” a delight to watch.

——

‘Invisible Life’

★★★1/2

Opened December 13, 2019, in select markets; opens Friday, February 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for strong sexual content/graphic nudity and some drug use. Running time: 139 minute ; in Portuguese with subtitles.

'The Song of Names' is a Holocaust-adjacent drama that's too sedate to pack a punch

Like a mournful tune on the world’s saddest violin, “The Song of Names” is sometimes beautiful, but so uniformly downbeat that a viewer may feel like switching to something else.

The movie starts in 1951 London, as a 23-year-old violin sensation is about to take the stage for his international debut. That’s Dovidl Rapoport (Jonah Hower-King), a Polish-born Jew who was raised in London during the war. When Dovidl is a no-show at his own concert, it’s a blow to Gilbert (Stanley Townsend), the music producer who took Dovidl in, and Gilbert’s son, Martin (Gerran Howell), who grew up with Dovidl as an adopted brother.

Cut to 1986, and Martin (now played by Tim Roth) is living in London with his wife, Helen (Catherine McCormack), and judging a music competition in Newcastle. That’s where Martin sees something remarkable: A teen violinist kissing his rosin pad for luck before performing. It’s a move Martin remembers Dovidl doing when he played. Martin starts asking the kid about the move — and begins following a trail of breadcrumbs in hopes of finding Dovidl, whom he hasn’t seen since before that cancelled concert 35 years earlier.

It’s a trail that takes Martin to Warsaw and New York, and through flashbacks that span from 1939 to 1951, and another set of actors — Luke Doyle as Dovidl and Misha Handley as Martin — to play the leads as pre-teens. The flashbacks show how Dovidl and Martin slowly became friends, and how Dovidl’s happiness as a budding violin prodigy was tempered with memories of his family, presumably caught in the unspeakable (or, at least, not spoken about directly in this movie) horrors of the Holocaust.

Director François Girard has explored the intersection of music and history before, in “The Red Violin” (1998) and the masterful “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” (1993). Here, though, Girard is stymied by a mystery plot — adapted by Jeffrey Caine (“The Constant Gardener”) from Norman Lebrecht’s novel — that takes a long and dispiriting road before coming to an unsatisfying solution.

That solution also leaves the film’s main actors, Roth and Clive Owen, with little to work with in what should be a dramatic conclusion. There’s lots of talk, about death and legacy, but nothing that either actor can make a genuine connection. In the end, “The Song of Names” is too timid to deliver the gut-punch such a topic deserves.

——

‘The Song of Names’

★★

Opened December 25, 2019, in select cities. Opens Friday, January 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some strong language, brief sexual material, thematic elements, and smoking. Running time: 113 minutes.