Review: Disney's 'Raya and the Last Dragon' combines epic scale and a sharp focus on characters to tell a powerful story about trust and reconciliation

Boldly epic and emotionally intimate, “Raya and the Last Dragon” may be the most moving work to come with the Disney label since “Frozen” — and without a catchy ballad to become your next ear worm.

When we first see Raya (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran), she looks like the solitary rider in an old Western or a martial-arts movie. In voice-over, Raya explains the history of her dragon-shaped mythical land, Kumandra — where, 500 years ago, humans lived under the protection of dragons. The dragons sacrifice themselves to ward off an evil force, called The Druun, turning to stone and leaving behind a stone containing their protective magic. Kumandra breaks apart into five regions, each named for a body part of the dragon map: Tail, Talon, Spine, Fang and Heart.

Raya is from Heart, where her father, Benja (voiced by Daniel Dae Kim), carries on their family’s tradition of protecting the magic stone. When Raya is a pre-teen, Benja tells her he believes he can bring the five regions together to restore a united Kumandra — but when he invites the rivals to Heart, the distrust amid the warring factions causes a mob scene in which the stone is shattered, with each group taking one piece. Raya blames her counterpart in Fang, a princess named Namaari (voiced by Gemma Chan), whom she trusted, for setting the disastrous events in motion that bring The Druun to Heart, turning her father to stone.

Directors Don Hall (“Big Hero 6”) and Carlos López Estrada (“Blindspotting”), working off a script by Qui Nguyen (a writer on “Dispatches from Elsewhere”) and Adele Lim (who co-wrote “Crazy Rich Asians”), take only 20 minutes to chronicle all of the above — making for some of the most efficient and elegant world-building since “Black Panther” took us to Wakanda. The film’s set-up soon launches into the main story, which starts six years later, when Raya is a hardened adult traveling through the other four regions attempting to find the one dragon who, according to legend, didn’t turn to stone.

That dragon is Sisu, and yes, Raya finds her — the trailer tells you that much — and the real action starts from there. Sisu is exuberantly voiced by the comedian/actor Awkwafina, who gives the most energetically creative animation performance in a Disney movie since Robin Williams played the genie in “Aladdin.”

The beautiful visuals are steeped in southeast Asian cultures, and the action emulates the fluidity and power of great martial-arts movies. And the voice cast — besides Tran, Kim, Chan and Awkwafina — also features Benedict Wong (“Doctor Strange”), Sandra Oh (“Killing Eve”), Patti Harrison (“Search Party”) and Sung Kang (from the “Fast & Furious” franchise), as well as charming performances by child talents Izaac Wang and Thalia Tran.

There’s more to “Raya and the Last Dragon,” though, than an Asian-based, female-centered story that checks off boxes on Disney’s representation scorecard. That’s just the backdrop for a richly drawn and powerfully told story, a hero’s journey that never loses sight of the characters amid the spectacle. 

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‘Raya and the Last Dragon’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 5, in theaters where open, and as a premium offering on Disney+. Rated PG for some violence, action and thematic elements. Running time: 109 minutes (plus a seven-minute short, “Us Again”).

Review: 'Sponge on the Run' saddles our familiar cartoon friend with creepy 3D animation and a crass plug for a new show

There’s a foul odor of barnacles attached to the latest movie starring that most famous of sponges, SpongeBob SquarePants — and not because “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run” has been sitting on the shelf for a year, another stalled release during the COVID-19 pandemic.

No, the stale, dank smell emanates from the fact that director Tim Hill — who directed “The SpongeBob SquarePants” movie back in 2004, and has gone on to such abominations as “Alvin & The Chipmunks,” “Hop” and last year’s “The War With Grandpa” — is trying to serve his corporate masters more than the fans who truly love the hyper-cheerful sponge.

The new film spends entirely too much time re-introducing us to characters we’re quite familiar with — can you believe it’s been 22 years since Stephen Hillenburg (who died in 2018, and to whom the movie is dedicated) first created little yellow guy? Hill narrates the overlong introduction, where we again meet SpongeBob (voiced by Tom Kenny), his not-too-bright pal Patrick Star (voiced by Bill Fagerbakke), depressed Squidward (voiced by Rodger Bumpass), spacesuit-wearing inventor Sandy Cheeks (voiced by Carolyn Lawrence), greedy burger entrepreneur Mr. Krabs (voiced by Clancy Brown), and Krabs’ scheming competitor, Plankton (voiced by Mr. Lawrence).

When the plot kicks in, finally, it’s a familiar one: SpongeBob’s pet snail, Gary, goes missing, and SpongeBob is beside himself with grief. So he and Patrick hit the road, in a boat-car driven by Sandy’s new robot, Otto (voiced by Awkwafina). Eventually they arrive in the Lost City of Atlantic City, where King Poseidon (voiced by Matt Berry) needs Gary’s slime trail to complete his skin-care regimen.

But it’s not the recycling of old “SpongeBob” plot points that feels off. It’s the computer-generated animation, which gives an unsettling, claymation-like look to characters who were more charming in the flat, simple two-dimensional line animation of the series and first movie.

The new film carries on the franchise’s tradition of offbeat performances by live-action actors — this time with mixed results. Keanu Reeves’ head makes regular appearances as a magical wisdom-granting tumbleweed named Sage, which provides some offbeat humor. But Danny Trejo’s moment as a feared outlaw is underwhelming, coming as it does after a Snoop Dogg cameo that’s weirder than what one imagines for a PG-rated kids’ movie.

Worst of all, just when you think this movie can’t introduce these characters to us again, it does — as little kids at summer camp. These boring flashback scenes are, it turns out, an embedded advertisement for “Kamp Koral,” a new animated series also debuting on Paramount+ when the new streaming network launches on March 4. Just give me the reruns, in glorious flat animation.

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’The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run’

★★

Available for streaming starting Thursday, March 4, on Paramount+. Rated PG for rude humor, some thematic elements, and mild language. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Tom & Jerry' is far from perfect, but the cat-and-mouse act still generates some laughs

The great thing about having zero expectations is that you can be pleasantly surprised — which is what happens watching “Tom & Jerry,” an exercise in dusting off a creaky cartoon franchise and finding that there’s still some charm and humor in it 80 years after it began.

Tom & Jerry, the archetype of the cartoon cat-chases-mouse scenario, have been around since William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created them for MGM in 1940. Usually, Jerry was the plucky David to Tom’s buffoonish Goliath, with Jerry’s wits beating out Tom’s brute force. But there were variations on the theme, or inconsistencies where Tom was the innocent and Jerry was the annoying aggressor. (I’ll admit here that I grew up on Bugs Bunny cartoons, which were more sophisticated than “Tom & Jerry” or Hanna-Barbera’s later creations; my favorite “Tom & Jerry” shorts are invariably the ones Chuck Jones directed in the mid-‘60s, after he left Warner Bros.) 

This new live-action/animated hybrid starts out with Tom minding his own business and Jerry being a bit devilish. Tom is happily busking in Central Park — he plays piano, it turns out — and the scheming Jerry tries to horn in on the act, ruining prospects for both of them. During the inevitable chase, Jerry lands in a five-star hotel, where he pilfers enough items to build a comfortable home behind the wainscoting on the 10th floor. Tom ends up in the alley, picked on by the meaner, tougher cats.

Like Jerry, Kayla — played by Chloë Grace Moretz — is street-smart and a bit of a schemer. She finagles a temp job at the same hotel, assisting the events manager Terence (Michael Peña) as the hotel is set to host a lavish celebrity wedding between Preeta (Pallavi Sharda) and Ben (Colin Jost). To impress Terence’s boss (Rob Delaney), Kayla takes on the assignment of ridding the hotel of a pesky mouse, and her solution is to hire a particular cat to exterminate the mouse.

Director Tim Story (whose last movie was the 2019 “Shaft” reboot) and screenwriter Kevin Costello (who co-wrote the 2017 Kyle Mooney vehicle “Brigsby Bear”) lean into the slapstick comedy of the original cartoons, even if the heavy objects falling on Tom look real. The humans don’t look too cartoonish — Ken Jeong as a high-strung chef is the exception — and Moretz, Peña and Delaney especially try to make the most out of their somewhat two-dimensional characters.

It’s clear Story and crew had fun trying to figure out the funniest way to let their cartoon stars destroy the impressive sets. Mostly, he sticks to the cheapskate animation traditions that Hanna and Barbera championed throughout their careers, though with some winking references to the characters’ history sprinkled in. “Tom & Jerry” isn’t a masterpiece, but it generates more laughs than you’d expect.

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‘Tom & Jerry’

★★1/2

Opening Friday, February 26, in theaters where open, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated PG for cartoon violence, rude humor and brief language. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: Prison drama 'Night of the Kings' weaves a mesmerizing tale that mixes brutal realism and West African mythology

Moving seamlessly from gritty prison thriller to West African folklore, director Philippe Lacôte’s drama “Night of the Kings” is a hypnotic story of power that’s also about the power of a story.

Lacôte starts in his hometown — Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (or Ivory Coast) — where a teen rides in a truck with a guard. The truck is taking the teen (Bakary Koné) to MACA, a prison that’s entirely run by the inmates. The chief guard, Nivaquine (Issaka Sawadogo), watches from a fortified office in the prison, but the real power is one of the prisoners: Lord Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu, last seen in Ladj Ly’s 2019 drama “Les Misérables”). 

Blackbeard is ailing, and by the baroque rituals of MACA, he must kill himself and let a successor take over on the night of the Red Moon. But Blackbeard has one more trick up his sleeve: By the rules of MACA, he can appoint a “Roman” — a storyteller who must entertain the other prisoners all night and into the morning with his story. Blackbeard sees in this teen, a pickpocket, the spark required of a Roman.

While gang leaders in the prison jockey for position to replace Blackbeard, the teen — now just called Roman — begins to unfurl the story of Zama, a street criminal of legendary prowess until his brutal death. As Roman recounts Zama’s legend, Lacôte, as writer and director, oscillates between neo-realist flashbacks and a call-and-response chorus of inmates in sync with the narrative. Roman becomes MACA’s Scheherazade, as he’s warned by a grizzled inmate, called Silence (played by the French star Denis Levant) that he has to keep talking until dawn or else.

Lacôte moves gracefully between the harsh realities within MACA’s walls and the fantasy-like elements of Zama’s story floating gently outside the prison’s confines. The story flows and moves to the rhythm produced by the inmates’ chanting and dancing, and it’s not long until the audience is feeling that rhythm, as well. The juxtaposition of Roman’s yarn-spinning and the rough reality surrounding him is an intoxicating brew that will bewitch an audience.

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‘Night of the Kings’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, February 26, in theaters where open; available as March 5 as a premium video-on-demand. Rated R for some violent material, language and nudity. Running time: 93 minutes; in French and Dyula, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Vigil' is a horror drama, based on Jewish folklore, that's both terrifying and thoughtful

Every culture has its demons, the things that scare people down to their souls — and writer-director Keith Thomas’s moody thriller “The Vigil” finds its intense shocks rooted in the folklore of Orthodox Judaism.

When we meet Yakov Rohen (played by Dave Davis), he’s working very hard to get away from his Orthodox Jewish past. He’s taking part in a support group for former members of the Orthodox community, and gets the attention of an attractive group member, Sarah (Malky Goldman). Outside the meeting, though, his former rabbi, Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig), is very eager to talk to Yakov.

Reb Shulem needs Yakov’s help, and in a hurry. A neighbor, a reclusive Holocaust survivor named Rubin Litvak, has died, and there’s no one available to sit with the body until morning when the morticians arrive — a position called a Shomer. Reb Shulem offers Yakov $400 to be a Shomer for the night, and Yakov, who’s short on rent money, takes the job.

Entering the Litvak home, though, Yakov gets a desperate request to leave from Mrs. Litvak. (She’s played by the legendary Lynn Cohen, who died last year at age 86. You might recognize her as Miranda’s stern housekeeper Magda on “Sex and the City,” or as the veteran tribute Mags in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” or as Golda Meir in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.”) But Yakov stays, and soon realizes the demons that beset Mr. Litvak in his life are looking for a new person to torment — and Yakov, still suffering from a trauma in his past, is a perfect candidate.

Thomas, directing his first feature, has a strong sense of pacing and atmosphere, and he’s able to build up the dread Yakov is experiencing and release the jump-out-of-your-seat scares a good horror movie needs. Thomas also steeps the film in the folklore and rituals of Orthodox Judaism, and uses that authenticity to make the scares somehow meaningful. “The Vigil,” in Thomas’ hands, becomes that rare horror movie that engages the brain while it delivers the terror.

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‘The Vigil’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, February 26, in theaters where open, and as a premium video-on-demand. Rated PG-13 for terror, some disturbing/violent images, thematic elements and brief strong language. Running time: 90 minutes; In English, and Yiddish and Hebrew, with subtitles.

Review: 'Silk Road' is a procedural slog through the plot to bring down a drug-dealing website.

It’s not a requirement that every movie have clearly drawn good guys and bad guys — but, for heaven’s sake, do they all need to be the unrelenting dirtbags we get in the based-on-a-true-story thriller “Silk Road”?

Director-screenwriter Tiller Russell aims to chronicle the rise and fall fo Silk Road, the “dark web” internet site that was called “eBay for drugs.” It was the brainchild of Ross Ulbricht (played by “Love, Simon” star Nick Robinson), a would-be philosopher who decides to put his libertarian views into practice by creating a site where one can go outside the view of the government to buy contraband, deploying untraceable internet routing and the then-trendy new cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

While Ulbricht is growing his illicit cyber business in Austin, Texas, over in Baltimore, washed-up DEA agent Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke) is frustrated. Taken off of undercover narcotics work, after his last assignment ended with him crashing a car and going to rehab for his cocaine habit, Bowden is shunted aside to the DEA’s cyber crimes division — where, because of his limited computer skills, he’s told by way-too-young supervisor (Will Ropp) to sit back and wait until his pension kicks in.

Instead, Bowden enlists one of his old informants (Darrell Britt-Gibson) to show him how Silk Road works, and ends up busting Ulbricht’s one-and-only employee, Curtis Green (Paul Walter Hauser), in, of all places, Spanish Fork, Utah. Along the way, Bowden gets in a text conversation with Ulbricht — under his cool code name, Dread Pirate Roberts — and pinches Silk Road’s Bitcoin escrow account, which is where Bowden starts thinking about taking the money and running.

Freely adapting his screenplay from David Kushner’s 2016 article in Rolling Stone — for example, Bowden is based on two law officers who went bad during the Feds’ pursuit of Ulbricht — Russell presents the twists and turns of Silk Road’s brief existence in plodding detail. What’s missing is any thoughtful examination of why Ulbricht would do all this, other than some self-serving narration about personal liberty that sounds like the most boring manifesto ever.

Attempts at providing motivation are pointlessly cliched, when they’re included at all. Robinson is given little to work with in his scenes where he gets stressed over his creation’s Zuckerbergian success or melodramatically ignoring his too-good-for-him girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp, another “Love, Simon” alum). “Silk Road,” whether as a keyboard-heavy police procedural or a character study of power corrupting, goes nowhere and takes far too long to get there.

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‘Silk Road’

★1/2

Opens Friday, February 19, at the Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and other theaters where open, and as a video-on-demand rental. Rated R for pervasive language and drug content. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: This 'Blithe Spirit' adaptation isn't as light or as substantial as Noël Coward intended.

We don’t usually blame William Shakespeare when a production of “As You Like It” goes off the rails — but Noël Coward doesn’t completely get off the hook for the problems in “Blithe Spirit,” a pale adaptation of Coward’s 1941 farce.

On the other hand, the three credited screenwriters — Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard and Piers Ashworth — who messed around with Coward’s quick-witted dialogue may bear the blame, along with director Edward Hall, who strikes a dull visual tone that makes it hard to differentiate between the living and the recently deceased.

The movie’s ostensible hero is Charles Condomine (Dan Stevens), a crime novelist in 1937 who’s got writer’s block as he tries to adapt his first best-seller into a screenplay. He’s supposed to deliver a script to a demanding producer, Harold (Dave Johns), who happens to be the father of Charles’ prim-and-proper wife, Ruth (Isla Fisher). What Charles can’t admit, to Ruth or to himself, is that he hasn’t written a thing since his first wife, Elvira, died seven years earlier.

After seeing a stage show featuring a klutzy psychic, Madame Arcati (Judi Dench), Charles has the idea of incorporating a medium into his detective screenplay. To learn some of the patter, Charles invites Madame Arcati to the house for a private seance — which ends with Elvira materializing in the living room, visible only to Charles. Elvira is none too pleased with how Ruth has altered her old house, or with how Charles seems to have moved on from their passionate romance just because Elvira is, well, deceased.

Coward’s storyline feels painfully dated, and the efforts by the new writers to goose things up with references to the pre-war equivalent of Viagra seem to go in the wrong direction entirely.

The cast is game to zip through the dialogue and throw themselves into the various pratfalls. Alas, only Mann seems to be enjoying herself as the spectral first wife causing mischief. Next to her, nobody else in this “Blithe Spirit” has a ghost of a chance. 

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‘Blithe Spirit’

★★

Opens Friday, February 19, in theaters where open, and as a video-on-demand rental. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and some drug material. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Test Pattern' is a quietly moving look at sexual assault and its aftermath, and an assured debut for director Shatara Michelle Ford

In its quietly devastating way, first-time writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford’s drama “Test Pattern” cuts to the heart of an important topic — sexual assault and the further assaults suffered through the system.

Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) has just started her new job, as development director for the Austin Humane Society — a far cry from the dull-but-lucrative corporate job she had when she met her devoted boyfriend, Evan (Will Brill), a tattoo artist. It should be mentioned, because it comes up later, that Renesha is black and Evan is white.

After her first day at her new job, Renesha goes to meet her best friend Amber (Gail Bean) for a drink — and Evan begs off going along, sensing Amber is in need of a little girls’ night commiseration.

While Renesha and Amber are talking at the bar, a couple of guys — Mike (Drew Fuller) and Chris (Ben Levin) — start chatting them up, and are soon buying champagne for everyone. 

More booze and a gummy edible later, Renesha is barely staying on her feet. Mike offers to drive her home, and instead we’re in the opening scene of “Promising Young Woman” — without Renesha snapping out of it before it’s too late.

The next morning, Renesha is reunited with Evan, who sets a goal for them: Go to a clinic or hospital to get a rape kit and examination for Renesha. This leads to a Kafkaesque nightmare of health care bureaucracy and antiseptic waiting rooms, one to which Evan responds with more outward anger than Renesha does.

Renesha’s resignation seems to be the point, as Ford makes us bear silent witness to Renesha being victimized a second time by an unfeeling system. It’s quite late in the story, long after Renesha has stopped talking to the increasingly agitated Evan, that anyone — in this case, the nurse (Amani Starnes) who administers the forensic exam — speaks to her like a human being who’s just gone through a horrific trauma.

Ford allows some room to explore Evan’s emotions, predominantly the anger he feels that he can’t fix this, without taking away from Renesha’s story. And the movie includes ample flashbacks, to show how Renesha and Evan became a couple, and what’s at stake if an unspeakable event should shatter their beautiful life together.

In her brave filmmaking debut, Ford and Hall collaborate on a vast catalog of Renesha’s conflicting emotions — shame, anger, frustration at the system and at Evan for not dropping the matter — that inform each steps she takes to make sense out of a senseless act. “Test Pattern” is an intense experience, and an indicator that we should keep an eye on Ford when her next movie comes along. 

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‘Test Pattern’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, February 19, for streaming on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably R for sexual violence, discussion of rape, and language. Running time: 83 minutes.