Review: Amazing animation propels 'Marona's Fantastic Tale' beyond your standard dog story

In the Romanian-made, French-dubbed “Marona’s Fantastic Tale,” a simple story of a dog’s hard-luck life gets raised to beautiful levels by some of the most imaginative, colorful animation you’re likely to see anywhere.

We meet Marona, a black-and-white mongrel, at perhaps the worst time in her life — when she’s hit by a car in a busy street, comforted by her owner, a teen girl named Solange. Then, as it does in movies, Marona’s life flashes before her eyes.

First, she sees her parents, a strutting purebred father who had a one-time encounter with a lady mutt. Marona — not her name yet — was one of nine puppies, picked from the litter by her father’s owner. But that human quickly abandons the dog in a downtown trash can. That where she’s found by Manole, an acrobat who busks for tips in the day and entertains at a nightclub in the evenings.

The dog and Manole are close, but the animal soon sees that she must leave the performer to pursue his dreams. She winds up at a construction site, and is befriended by Istvan, a gentle giant who works as a security guard. Istvan is nice to the dog, but the same can’t be said for the women in his life: His senile mother, and his shallow wife. Marona escapes their grasp, and after more misadventures is discovered by a 10-year-old Solange.

The script — begun as a story by director Anca Damian and written by her son, Anghel — is right in the tradition of other dog’s-life stories, such as “A Dog’s Purpose” or “The Art of Racing in the Rain.” With the dog narrating (Lizzie Borcheré provides her voice in the French version), we get a dog’s perspective on cities, cars, food, shelter and every dog’s reason to exist: to keep their human happy. 

Each stop on Marona’s episodic journey is rendered gorgeously by Anca Damian and her animators, with a kaleidoscope of styles and colors. The acrobat Manole is always depicted as a yellow figure with red stripes, a flurry of fluid motion in which the stripes have to catch up with his bendy yellow limbs. When Istvan’s mother sleeps, her face becomes an Etch-a-Sketch depicting her dreams, with her facial features returning only when her son wakes her. Each character is rendered with those kind of smart, inventive details, and when they interact, the results are explosive.

It may seem odd that the least expressive character in “Marona’s Fantastic Tale” is Marona herself, a simple black-and-white figure. But it soon becomes clear that Marona is the portal through which we, the viewers, see her world — and it’s an amazing world to behold.

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‘Marona’s Fantastic Tale’

★★★1/2

Begins streaming for rental Friday, June 12, in virtual cinemas, including the Utah Film Center’s platform. Not rated, but probably PG for mild violence and mature themes. Running time: 92 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

Review: Pete Davidson gets personal in funny, and touching, 'The King of Staten Island'

Anyone familiar with Pete Davidson, either as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” or his appearances in the gossip columns during his brief engagement to pop star Ariana Grande, has seen the hints of tragedy behind his stoner-guy comedy persona.

That tragic shadow takes center stage in director Judd Apatow’s comedy-drama “The King of Staten Island,” a sometimes funny, often heartbreaking story that uses semi-autobiography to let Davidson exorcise his personal demons.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: Elisabeth Moss is remarkable in 'Shirley,' capturing a manipulative, vulnerable author

Director Josephine Decker’s drama “Shirley” is part biographical drama, part murder mystery, part sexually fueled fantasy, and part chronicle of madness — and all of it held together by powerhouse acting, particularly by Elisabeth Moss.

Moss plays Shirley Jackson, the famed author of such macabre stories as “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” In the movie’s telling, it’s the late 1940s in Vermont, and Jackson lives with her husband, the literary critic and scholar Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who teaches at that hotbed of passion, Bennington College.

In this story, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, Hyman has just taken on a new assistant, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), who is recently married to Rose (Odessa Young). Rose is fascinated with Shirley, though the author’s brusque manner on their first meeting unsettles her — but not as much as Shirley intuiting that Rose is pregnant.

Stanley asks the Nemsers to live with them for awhile, and asks Rose to help out with housekeeping — but, more importantly, to keep an eye on Shirley, who hasn’t left the house in weeks and sometimes never gets out of bed. Rose’s interest in Shirley grows deeper, particularly when Shirley starts researching the case of a missing college student and contemplates writing a novel based on the case, even though Stanley thinks the subject matter beneath her talents. 

Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins — who explored infatuation with artists by creating the series “I Love Dick” — blur the lines between fact and fantasy, suggesting Shirley as fragile flower and master manipulator, sometimes in the same sentence. Several flashbacks (or are they dream sequences?) take us inside the mind of the missing student, suggesting her desires are the same as Rose’s. The audience is left to question how much of Shirley’s quirks are the product of an unstable mind and how much are calculated to produce good material for her book.

“Shirley” eventually becomes a meeting of the minds between the jaded Shirley and the wide-eyed Rose, and both Moss and Young bring ferocity and vulnerability to the pairing. The result is an intriguing “what if” scenario of American literature. 

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‘Shirley’’

★★★1/2

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language and brief disturbing images. Running time: 107 minutes.

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This review ran previously on this website on Feb. 1, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Willem Dafoe's performance as a tortured soul nearly lifts 'Tommaso' from its director's self-indulgence

Veering between brutal self-examination and head-scratching inscrutability, writer-director Abel Ferrara reveals and conceals equally in “Tommaso,” a movie that keeps audiences hooked despite its deep-seated flaws because of its always-fascinating star, Willem Dafoe.

Dafoe plays the title character, an American filmmaker living in Italy who, we have to assume, is a stand-in for Ferrara himself. Tommaso lives what on the surface looks like a perfect life for a middle-aged artist: Married to the beautiful, and much younger, Nikki (Cristina Chiriac), and their 3-year-old daughter, Deedee (played by Ferrara’s own child, Anna). He spends his days learning Italian, teaching young actors, and developing the script for an existential science-fiction movie.

Not everything is perfect, though. Tommaso — who is six years’ sober, and uses his regular AA meetings as talk therapy — is frustrated is frustrated because Nikki is so invested in Deedee’s care that she never gives him time for romance.

For a creature of passions like Tommaso, enforced celibacy takes its toll — though in Ferrara’s telling, it’s sometimes up to the viewer to decide what’s really happening and what’s in his character’s head. He think he sees Nikki in the park, flirting with a younger man. And when Tommaso goes into a cafe, or his acting class, he’s presented with beautiful young women who are completely naked.

There’s more to Ferrara’s narrative than Tommaso going crazy because he can’t get laid — but what that extra something is open to the viewer’s interpretation. To get to that interpretation, the viewer must have the patience to stick with Tommaso’s mood swings and Ferrara’s oblique storytelling cues. Fans of Ferrara’s past work — most notably his controversial 1992 thriller “Bad Lieutenant” — will know what they’re getting into here, but newcomers may have trepidations about following him diwb his character’s dark path.

Dafoe, as he so often does, makes the trip interesting. As he did as Van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate,” Dafoe climes into the skin of the tortured artist and helps us understand — to some degree, at least — how the mental anguish fuels the creative fire. If Ferrara had given Dafoe a complete arc rather than an incomplete series of dead ends, “Tommaso” could have been their shared masterpiece, rather than an uneven portrait of artistic madness.

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‘Tommaso’

★★1/2

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably R for graphic nudity, sexuality, violence and language. Running time: 118 minutes; mostly in English, but some in Italian with subtitles.

Review: Documentary '2040' gives a hopeful look at climate change, and the solutions that could be available to us now

Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau manages something quite remarkable with his documentary “2040”: He makes a documentary about climate change that isn’t doom-laden and pessimistic, but hopeful and, believe it or not, joyous.

It all starts with the premise. Gameau first shows us his happy home life, with his wife Zoe and their 4-year-old daughter, Velvet. Then he asks, as any father would, what kind of future Velvet will have — and what technologies exist right now that, if fully implemented, could give her a decent future when she’s 25 years old, in the year 2040.

So Gameau travels around the world (all carbon emissions used on his travels are offset by carbon credits, the opening title card tells us) to see what’s being developed. He shows us solar panels on homes in Bangladesh, networked through “microgrid” systems that pay back homeowners for unused electricity. He talks about driverless cars that people will use on an as-needed basis, reducing the need to buy and park their own autos. He shows us regenerative agriculture in Australia and seaweed cultivation in the ocean — both of which can both reduce carbon but also produce healthier food.

In Gameau’s show-and-tell of these forward-thinking technologies, he makes brief mention of the forces arrayed against them — namely, entrenched industries like agribusiness and Big Oil that won’t want to give up their hold on the status quo. But Gameau prefers not to be a downer, instead showing us a lighthearted look at an adult Velvet (Eva Lazzaro) living her best life in a utopian future of self-driving cars, urban farms, coffee cups that can be planted for crops after use, and empowered girls getting their educations.

A little too pie in the sky? Perhaps. But after years of environmental documentaries that are aimed at scaring us into composting and putting coastal cities on stilts, Gameau’s view of “2040” is a welcome approach that shows what positive steps Velvet’s generation can do to make up for what her predecessors have done wrong.

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‘2040’

★★★

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably PG for mature themes.  Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: Music fuels 'The High Note,' but Tracee Ellis Ross' comic turn as a diva makes it sing

Taking an unfamiliar route to a well-traveled destination, the music-fueled comedy-drama “The High Note” is a witty, warm-hearted story about the recording industry seen from the top and the bottom.

On top is Grace Davis (played by “Black-ish” star Tracee Ellis Ross), a superstar singer whose career has spanned more than 30 years, and is facing the prospect of becoming a “legacy” act. Her longtime manager, Jack Robertson (played by Ice Cube), is nudging her toward signing a contract with Caesars Palace for a Las Vegas residency — a sure sign that her hit-making days are over.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: 'The Trip to Greece' rounds up Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for a melancholy final journey

If there was ever a time to live vicariously through the gourmet travelogues Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon present in director Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip” series, it’s now — when we’ve all been stuck at home, unable to travel to fancy hotels or dine at expensive restaurants.

And it’s doubly fitting that the fourth — and, according to the marketing, final — in the series, “The Trip to Greece,” conveys a melancholy air, as the sadness of the outside world starts to infringe on the fun times of extravagant dining and boisterous repartee.

Generally, the formula holds from the three previous installments: Coogan and Brydon tour some region — the north of England in “The Trip” (2010), followed by sequels to Italy (2014) and Spain (2017) — so Steve can write a piece for The Observer. The writing is a cover for the story’s true purpose, which is to get Coogan and Brydon (as fictionalized versions of themselves) on the road, exchanging banter and dead-on impersonations.

This time, the premise is that the lads are following the route of Homer in “The Odyssey,” which causes Coogan to reflect on their own 10-year odyssey of this series. (In the UK, it is a TV series, each trip a six-episode comedy that’s been edited to movie length for the Yanks.)

The two friends do a bit of sight-seeing, which prompts wry or sometimes just silly observations. When they visit ruins where a great army once camped for 10 years, Brydon notes, “I can do a week, tops. With a pillow. I won’t camp without a pillow.”

Soon they run into Kareem (Kareem Alkabbani), who worked with Coogan on another movie filmed in Greece not long before (the satirical comedy “Greed,” which Winterbottom also directed). Kareem played a Syrian refugee in that movie, and in this one he asks for a lift to where he works: A refugee camp. The glimpse of the camp turns the movie serious for a moment, though the conversation quickly moves to Brydon needling Coogan for not being able to remember Kareem’s name.

Coogan’s self-centeredness is, as always, a recurring theme. Somehow, the conversation always turns to subject of the seven BAFTAs Coogan has won, or the rave reviews he got for “Stan & Ollie” — even the review that compliments Coogan’s performance while insulting him as a human being.

The pair regularly try to one-up each other with jokes and, especially, impressions. That’s when “The Trip to Greece” is the most fun, as they pull out their Marlon Brando or James Bond impersonations. For the record, Coogan’s Mick Jagger is amazing, while Brydon delivers a great Dustin Hoffman from “Marathon Man.” (The series’ signature move, when the two deliver contrasting Michael Caines, is skipped over this go-round.)

But there are deeper, darker strains underlying on this “Trip,” as Brydon considers his happy marriage and Coogan faces an impending death in the family. The way Coogan and Brydon try to laugh past the graveyards of antiquity and in their own lives is what makes “The Trip to Greece” such a moving experience.  

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‘The Trip to Greece’

★★★1/2

Debuts Friday, May 22, as a digital rental on various streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for language and mild sexual content. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy' celebrates the irascible British legend of Mexican cooking

The fascinating question that first-time director Elizabeth Carroll asks in this fond documentary “Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy” is: How did an irascible Englishwoman become the world’s leading expert on Mexican cuisine, so revered by foodies that even the Mexican government has honored her?

The short answer is that she worked, and at 97 continues to work, very hard to learn the details of Mexican cooking from the ground up — and did so with respect for Mexico, the land and the people.

Carroll’s camera follows Kennedy around her house in Michoacán, so eco-friendly that the architect built around a VW-sized boulder that was on the property. Carroll then rides shotgun as Kennedy drives her Nissan pick-up — without power steering — into town, and watches her shop in the market to pick up the authentic ingredients to make proper tamales or guacamole. (Her main rule for guacamole: Don’t overmix the avocado, and leave the lumps in.)

Kennedy tells the story of how she came to live in Michoacán. She grew up in Essex, and during World War II was in the Timber Corps; she didn’t have the heart to cut the trees, so she was in charge of measuring the logs — and, to this days, she plants trees where she can. She emigrated to Canada after the war, and on a whim took a trip to Haiti in 1957

It was in Haiti that she met Paul Kennedy, a New York Times correspondent based in Mexico and covering Central America and the Caribbean. They fell in love, got married, and Diana moved to Mexico City to be with him. When he was working, or off on assignment, Diana would roam around Mexican villages and towns, learning from the local women the best recipes and how to find the proper ingredients. She also studied the cookbooks written in Mexico, notably the work of Josefina Velázquez de León.

The Kennedys also entertained diplomats and visiting New York Times colleagues. Once, she tried to get the Times’ famed food editor, Craig Claiborne, to take a Mexican cookbook. Claiborne declined, saying, “I’ll only read a Mexican cookbook once you have written one.” In 1965, the Kennedys moved briefly to New York — where Diana felt lost and alone, except for teaching cooking in her apartment. Paul was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and died in 1966. She returned to Mexico, and researched regional Mexican food for her first cookbook, “The Cuisines of Mexico,” published in 1972.

Carroll clearly admires Diana Kennedy a great deal — and part of that admiration is to capture Kennedy as she is, sometimes surly and often passionate, curious and respectful of her adopted home. This caring documentary shows us all sides of Kennedy’s life and work, and helps us understand what has driven her to make the rest of the world appreciate the many facets of Mexican food.

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‘Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy’

★★★1/2

Debuts Friday, May 22, as a digital rental on various streaming platforms, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 71 minutes.