Review: 'Vivo' again shows Lin-Manuel Miranda, even as a furry animated creature, is a vibrant musical force

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s winning streak, one would think, can’t keep going forever — but the creator of “Hamilton” and “in the Heights” shows no signs of slowing down with “Vivo,” a surprisingly fun and heartwarming animated musical in which Miranda provides both the songs and the voice of the title character singing many of them.

Vivo is a kinkajou, a “honey bear,” an improbably cute tree-climbing creature from the Amazon, transplanted to the streets of Havana, Cuba. There, he performs for his human partner, Andrés (voiced by Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos), an organ grinder, for spare change in the plaza.

It’s a good life, and the musically adept Vivo sees no reason to mess with it. So Vivo — whose speaking voice is heard by us, but not the humans around him — objects when Andrés makes plans to travel to Miami to see the final concert of the singing star Marta Sandoval (voiced by Gloria Estefan). Andrés and Marta were partners, musical and personally, but Andrés never told Marta how he felt about her before she got on the plane for Miami and a stellar career.

When Andrés dies overnight, Vivo makes it his mission to deliver to Marta a piece of sheet music — with the song Andrés wrote to declare his love for her. Vivo must team up with Gabi (voiced by newcomer Ynairaly Simo), Andrés’ boisterous 10-year-old great-niece, visiting Cuba from Key West with her mom, Rosa (voiced by Zoe Saldana). Gabi and Vivo conspire to make the trip from Key West to Miami before Marta’s farewell concert that night — and the journey takes an unexpected detour through the Everglades.

Director Kirk DeMicco (“The Croods”) co-wrote the screenplay with Quiara Alegría Hudes, Miranda’s writing partner on “In the Heights,” so it’s nicely attuned to Miranda’s songwriting rhythms. The songs are loaded with Miranda’s fast-talking wordplay (he even works in a “Back to the Future” reference), and are infused with the composer’s love of Cuban music. Miranda sings most of the songs, sometimes duetting with young Simo, and his expressive voice works on the material — though Estefan, in the lovely final act, steals the show with her beautiful voice.

With a candy-colored palette to capture sunny Havana and neon-lit Miami, and some charmingly funny supporting characters — including a python voiced by Michael Rooker — “Vivo” is an animated movie that gives the grown-ups as much to enjoy as the kids. 

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‘Vivo’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, August 6, on Netflix. Rated PG for some thematic elements and mild action. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Nine Days' is a wondrous and thoughtful look at life before birth, and the choices that make each of us human

Bold in its vision and heartbreaking in its humanity, writer-director Edson Oda’s “Nine Days” is a brilliant, beautiful story that asks the simplest and hardest question there is: What does it mean to be human?

In a house in the middle of a severe alternate reality — OK, really, in the middle of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats — a man named Will (played by Winston Duke) spends his days watching a wall of dozens of TV screens, each of them showing the point-of-view of someone living on Earth. Will dutifully keeps journals and tapes of what’s on these screens, and puts them a file cabinet. 

On these screens, Will and his friend Kyo (Benedict Wong) watch entire lives play out — including a bride-to-be, a man in a wheelchair, and a high school kid being bullied. Will’s favorite screen shows Amanda, a violin virtuoso about to perform in an important concert. Then Amanda dies in a car crash, possibly a suicide, and Will is at a loss for explaining why someone with such promise could be dead.

Will has a more pressing problem: He has a screen to fill. So he brings in a handful of souls, for want of a better word, who are applying for the opportunity to be born as a human being. These souls come to the house to start a 9-day selection process.

The applicants are an eclectic bunch, including a happy-go-lucky party type (Tony Hale), a sensitive artist (David Rysdahl), and a ruthless pragmatist (Bill Skarsgard). But Will becomes most intrigued by a late arrival, whom he dubs Emma (Zazie Beetz), who takes an optimistic and artistic approach to being a potential human — the same traits that made Amanda a perfect choice and may have doomed her, and possibly the ones Will possessed in his years-ago stint as a human.

Oda has created an endlessly inventive movie, one that embeds the great philosophical question about what a human being is into a wealth of thoughtful visual signals. He claims Hirokazu Kore-Eta’s “After Life,” Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” as influences, and they’re definitely all here. And, heeding the rule that the greatest filmmakers steal from the best, there are shots that mimic classic images from “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Searchers.”

The ensemble cast is endlessly sharp, with Hale’s comic performance lightening what could be a somber tone. But it’s Beetz and Duke who shine brightest in “Nine Days,” as they engage in a running tete-a-tete about the answers Will expects and the ones she’s willing to give. From bleak beginning to triumphant end, “Nine Days” is an artful and tender examination of humanity’s worst fears and highest aspirations. 

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‘Nine Days’

★★★★

Opens Friday, August 6, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 124 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 28, 2020, when the film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Annette' is a dark romance, propelled by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard's performances and the emotionally direct music of Sparks

It’s unlikely that audiences at this year’s Cannes Film Festival had seen anything quite like “Annette,” director Leos Carax’s boundary-breaking romantic musical drama — and now that this bizarre, borderline magical movie is making its way to theaters (and, in two weeks, to Prime video), moviegoers everywhere can scratch their heads while tapping their feet.

The movie opens with Ron and Russell Mael, the brothers who comprise the legendary art-pop band Sparks (recently immortalized in Edgar Wright’s documentary “The Sparks Brothers”) in the studio. They’re singing the opening track of the musical, “So Now Let’s Start,” which they wrote, along with the other songs in the film. 

The Mael brothers then walk to the exits, still singing, and onto the Los Angeles streets, their back-up singers following behind. Then they’re met by the movie’s stars — Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and Simon Helberg — not yet in character, singing the song. It’s an exhilarating opening, reminiscent of the musical break in Carax’s whacked-out 2012 anthology “Holy Motors.”

Driver plays Henry, a stand-up comedian whose confrontational style is embodied in the boxer’s robe he wears when he takes the stage at the Orpheum. Not far away, at Disney Hall, Cotillard’s character, an acclaimed opera star named Ann, is preparing for her performance. Henry and Ann love each other so much — in fact, they sing those words to each other in one number, while riding a motorcycle and later during sex.

Marriage and pregnancy follow, and Henry and Ann’s relationship appears blissful. But then it starts to fall apart, with Henry facing accusations of sexual misconduct — as he spirals out of control, drinking at home, growing jealous of Ann’s accompanist (Helberg), and blowing up his act with increasingly rage-filled rants.

Then the baby, Annette, arrives. I dare not say more about that, other than to praise Carax for a strangely compelling way to depict the alien nature of parenthood.

The songs are the script, and the Mael brothers aren’t exactly masters of clever wordplay. Their lyrics rely on repetition and directness, but they work because they leave room for the performers’ raw emotion to burst through — and with Driver’s muscular intensity and Cotillard’s ethereal grace, there’s no shortage of emotion.

Whether it’s Henry ordering his audiences to laugh or Ann reflecting on her ability to die onstage night after night, “Annette” wraps its romance and its music around an exuberant reflection on the psychic toll of an artistic life. Such a life, Carax and the Mael brothers seem to say, isn’t easy — but, when the result is a stimulating, question-raising work like this, worth the effort.

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‘Annette’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 6, in theaters; available for streaming starting August 20 on Prime Video. Rated R for sexual content including some nudity, and for language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'John and the Hole' is a maddeningly obtuse drama of suburban alienation that never gets to the point

A teen-ager’s white privilege runs amok in “John and the Hole,” a maddeningly obtuse psychological thriller centered on a family terrorized by a demon seed.

John (Charlie Shotwell) is a quiet 13-year-old rich kid, living with his parents, Brad and Anna (Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Ehle), and older sister, Laurie (Taissa Farmiga), in a big, modern house in the Massachusetts woods. He practices tennis, to prepare for an upcoming qualification tourney, and can play the piano.

What, then, to explain why he gives the family gardener (Lucien Spelman) a glass of lemonade laced with a knockout drug? That turns out to be a dry run for his big plan: To move his parents and sister, while sleeping off their Mickey Finn, into a deep hole left behind on their property by previous occupants who started constructing a bunker.

The family wakes up asking the same question the audience is left pondering for the next hour or so: Why is John doing this?

Director Pascual Sisto, making his feature debut, and screenwriter Nicolás Giacobone — who co-wrote two Alejandro Iñárritu films, “Biutiful” and “Birdman” — never make an attempt to answer the big “why?” of the story (which is adapted from Giacobone’s short story), much to the audience’s frustration. Instead, they show us the would-be comic moments of John trying to keep up the pretense to Anna’s tennis partner (Tamara Hickey) and John’s video-game rival (Ben O’Brien) that everything’s fine.

Equally aggravating is a framing story, with another mom (Georgia Lyman) and a daughter (Samantha LeBretton), that’s wedged in with no explanation or payoff. And then there’s the ending, which is where that white privilege hits its zenith.

If you can imagine “Home Alone” remade as a pretentious art-house movie where Macaulay Culkin is playing both Kevin and the Wet Bandits simultaneously. you get a sense of what’s happening in “John and the Hole.” Meanwhile, some talented actors are left in a hole, more confused than the audience.

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‘John and the Hole’ 

★★

Opens Friday, August 6, in select theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 98 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2021, when the film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Green Knight' is a visually brilliant version of the Arthurian tale, boldly modern and timeless

Boldly modern in its visual sweep and carrying the heft of an ancient folk tale, writer-director David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” is an epic take on a centuries-old story.

The story Lowery draws from is more than 600 years old, and takes place another 900 years before that. It starts at a round table one Christmas Eve, as the king (Sean Harris) and his queen (Kate Dickey) are partying with Arthur’s knights — the youngest, and most earnest, being Sir Gawain (played by Dev Patel).

The revelry is interrupted by the arrival of a fearsome, and silent, knight on horseback. The knight hands over a letter with a “Christmas game”: He will allow one of the king’s knights to strike with a weapon — but, next Christmas, that knight must find the visitor at his home, the Green Chapel, so the interloper can return the blow.

Gawain offers to take up the challenge, and the king gives him his sword. The stranger does not fight back, and instead kneels down to offer his neck for the cutting. When Gawain strikes, decapitating the knight, the knight picks up his head and rides away — and Gawain knows his goose is cooked one year hence. (None of this is really a spoiler — it’s in the trailer, has been told in numerous other movies, and is from the 14th century.)

So Gawain leaves behind his mother (Sarita Choudhury), who might be a witch, and his lover, a brothel maid named Essel (played by an almost unrecognizably deglamorized Alicia Vikander), to meet his destiny. Along the way, Gawain has several encounters — which is where Gawain’s mettle is tested, and where Lowery creates moments of pure visual splendor.

I don’t want to say much more, because what Lowery and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (who shot Lowery’s “A Ghost Story”) is so arresting — creating images that will sear into the viewer’s brain. Another reason to keep quiet: There are actors who pop up along Gawain’s journey who are genuinely surprising to encounter, as they force Patel’s Gawain to face his fears on the way to his moral reckoning.

Patel (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Personal History of David Copperfield”) once again proves he’s among the finest leading men of our era, capturing Gawain’s headstrong nature and the hard-won life lessons collected on his grueling journey. Patel provides the humanity that anchors the dreamlike, sometimes surreal images that Lowery produces, a dose of old-soul wisdom that makes “The Green Knight” a story for the ages.

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‘The Green Knight’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 30, in theaters. Rated R for violence, some sexuality and graphic nudity. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'Stillwater' lets Matt Damon dive deep into a compelling American character, under the guise of a crime thriller

It’s odd that the actor Matt Damon and the director Tom McCarthy haven’t made a movie together before “Stillwater,” because their styles are remarkably similar: Simple on the surface, but with dark currents roiling underneath.

McCarthy, who directed the 2015 Best Picture Oscar winner “Spotlight,” starts here with something that feels ripped from the headlines. An American college student, Allison (Abigail Breslin), is in prison in Marseille, France, convicted of killing her roommate.

The movie starts five years later, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Allison’s home town. That’s where her father, Bill (played by Damon), an unemployed oil-rig worker who finds odd jobs in construction and wherever else he can. He makes the trip to Marseille when he can, usually with financial help from his late wife’s mother, Sharon (Deanna Dunagan).

On this trip, Allison asks Bill to deliver a letter to her lawyers, but not to read it. Bill reads it anyway, and learns Allison is clinging to the slim hope that the lawyers can find someone with a lead to the person Allison is sure killed her roommate. The lead attorney (Anne Le Ny) advises Bill to give up the search, and try to convince Allison to accept the verdict — which will make it easier for Allison to be paroled.

Bill decides, stubbornly — a very American attitude, he’s told often while in France — to do his own sleuthing. He asks for help from Virginie (Camille Cottin), a Frenchwoman he met semi-randomly at his hotel, to help him navigate the language when he finds a lead. That information leads Bill to a rough part of town, where he gets beaten up badly. When he lands in the hospital, he calls the only person he knows: Virginie.

The script — by McCarthy and Marcus Hinchey (“Come Sunday”), with French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain (“A Prophet”) and Noé Debré (“Dheepan”) sharing writing credit — jumps ahead a few months at this point. Bill works construction in Marseille, and also finds work as a maintenance man in Virginie’s apartment building. He rents a room from Virginie, a stage actress, and helps look after her 9-year-old daughter, Maya (Lilou Siauvaud). 

Bill seems to be settling into a new life, and even possibly romance with Virginie. But thoughts of Allison’s case are never too far away from Bill’s mind — and when he sees a chance to clear Allison’s name, he must decide whether it’s worth risking his relationship with Virginie and Maya.

Though McCarthy and his co-writers salt “Stillwater” with elements of a crime thriller, that’s just the decoration for a deep character study. Bill is the ultimate innocent abroad, a roughneck who finds himself in a place where the culture and language are unfamiliar to him, but he manages to find a lifeline through his fatherly concern for Allison and his quasi-paternal relationship with Maya.

It’s a tricky character to pull off, and Damon does it with understated grace. Damon neatly underplays Bill’s working-class gruffness, which serves as armor for the tender heart beneath. Nearly every important scene has Damon playing against one of his female co-stars, a dynamic that invites blustering machismo — but Damon and McCarthy subvert expectations by letting Bill’s softness emerge in unexpected ways.

Within that strong supporting cast, the standouts are Cottin, whose Virginie shows Bill the life he could have on the other side of the Atlantic, and Breslin, who has matured admirably since her “Little Miss Sunshine” days into a ferociously emotive actress.

“Stillwater” springs some surprises in the final 30 minutes, but this isn’t a movie that lives or dies on a twist ending. The work by Damon and McCarthy to establish Bill as a man caught between two worlds is where this drama gets its considerable strength.

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‘Stillwater’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 30, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Jungle Cruise' turns the Disneyland ride into a serviceable action movie, though there's no spark between stars Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt.

If you can imagine Dwayne Johnson, the artist formerly known as The Rock, filling in for Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, you have a pretty solid idea of how Disney’s “Jungle Cruise” is going to go.

Again. Disney has retooled one of its Disneyland theme-park rides into a fun, if formulaic, action adventure with lots of stunts, creepy special effects, and the comic byplay between a roguish hero and a headstrong Englishwoman — though, unlike the 22 years between Depp and Keira Knightley, the nine-year gap between Johnson and co-star Emily Blunt isn’t quite so noticeable.

Blunt is introduced first in this tag-teamed script (five writers are credited), as noble adventurer Lily Houghton, bucking patriarchal convention in 1916 by procuring an arrowhead from a stuffy explorers’ organization. She’ll use that arrowhead in the Amazon, to find something called the Tears of the Moon, a tree that legend says produces flower petals that can cure all forms of sickness. 

Lily tells her effete brother MacGregor (played by comedian Jack Whitehall) she plans to find this magic tree, using the maps their late father once used, and use its powers to benefit mankind. On the other hand, the villain, Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons), wants to use the arrowhead to find the tree and harness its powers to make the Kaiser’s Germany invincible.

Lily and MacGregor get to a small town along the Amazon, and hire the one boat pilot foolhardy enough to go up the Amazon and desperate enough to take their money. That’s Johnson’s character, Frank Wolff, who’s in hock to the local river-cruise overlord (Paul Giamatti) and scratches out a meager living by taking tourists along the river — setting up staged “thrills” and telling corny jokes, in homage to the original Disneyland ride.

After a few chases to elude Joachim’s goons in the river town, Lily, MacGregor and Frank are on their way up the river, where more thrills and spills await. So, too, does a 16th century conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) and his cohorts, trapped near the Amazon by an ancient curse — or by a surplus of computer-generated effects. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (whose resumé includes the Blake Lively shark thriller “The Shallows” and four Liam Neeson vehicles) keeps things moving briskly, with a fairly good balance of humor and awe-inspiring spectacle.

Separately, Johnson and Blunt are nicely cast. Johnson applies his WWE-grown charm to the gruff, rakish Frank, conceived as some combination of Harrison Ford’s two most iconic roles, Han Solo and Indiana Jones. And Blunt, certainly no damsel in distress, conveys Lily’s sense of adventure and her noble heart.

The problem with “Jungle Cruise,” though not a fatal one, is that the stars have zero chemistry, so the transition from reluctant partners to people who might actually have feelings for each other is unconvincing. Of course, Johnson is too clean-cut to approach a younger Depp’s scruffy Captain Jack charisma, and too earnest to pull off the Bogart to Blunt’s Katharine Hepburn in the moments when Collet-Saura and company are attempting some “African Queen” saltiness. The kids don’t want lovey-dovey stuff anyway, so they’ll be content with the fireworks the effects teams display in place of the sparks the leads don’t generate.

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‘Jungle Cruise’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 30, in theaters, and streaming on Disney+ Premier. Rated PG-13 for … Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Old' shows M. Night Shyamalan's skills at building suspense remain strong, but his ending doesn't deliver the goods

In his latest puzzle-box thriller “Old,” writer-director M. Night Shyamalan does some of his best work in years setting up the premise — and then undercuts his efforts by failing to stick the landing.

The story starts with a Philadelphia family arriving at a tropical resort for a much-needed vacation. Guy (Gael García Bernal) works as an insurance actuary, calculating risks; his wife, Prisca (Vicky Krieps) is a museum curator and expert on anthropology; daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton) is a painfully shy 11-year-old; and son Trent (Nolan River), 6, is an inquisitive kid who asks strangers what they do for a living. Tensions between Guy and Prisca are hinted at early, and it seems unlikely the marriage will survive past this vacation.

The family is greeted by the manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) and his assistant, Madrid (Francesca Eastwood), with custom-made cocktails. Later on, the manager clues the family in on a secret beach, in a cove away from the rest of the resort, that would be a perfect spot for a picnic.

When the family gets in the resort’s van (driven by Shyamalan, of course), they discover they’re not the only ones who received the manager’s special tip. Along for the ride are: Jarin (Ken Leung), a nurse, and his wife, Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a psychologist who suffers from seizures; and Charles (Rufus Sewell), a surgeon, who has brought along his leggy trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee, from “Lovecraft Country”), their 6-year-old daughter Kara (Mikaya Fisher), and Charles’ mother, Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant). Once they arrive, they find someone else on the beach: A rap star (Aaron Pierre) suffering a nosebleed.

The day trip starts perfectly, with the famiiles soaking up the sun and surf. The spell is broken when young Trent is swimming in a grotto, and a woman’s body floats up behind him. The woman is someone the rapper met the night before, and brought to this beach. The rapper proclaims his innocence, but Charles has his suspicions.

Soon something else strange happens: Trent tells his mom that his swim trunks feel too tight. The next thing you know, Maddox appears to be about 16 (and played by “Jojo Rabbit’s” Thomasin McKenzie) and Trent has similarly grown into puberty (played as a teen by Alex Wolff from “Jumanji”). And, for some reason, no one can get off the beach the way they came.

Shyamalan, adapting a French comic book called “Sandcastle,” expertly doses out dollops of plot exposition at appropriate intervals, while dropping one bombshell after another to increase the suspense and decrease the number of actors left in the movie. It’s a solid ensemble, topped by Krieps (“Phantom Thread”) and García Bernal as a couple putting aside their past disputes when their family’s survival is at stake.

The problem with “Old” comes with the part where Shyamalan usually excels: The ending. The resolution here is needlessly drawn out, and calls on the audience to accept a lot on faith that Shyamalan’s talent for deception hasn’t really earned. 

I spotted two points in the final half hour where the movie could have ended sooner, and more satisfactorily — one a moment of melancholy, the other a darkly cynical scene that would have provided the same sense of dread as the paranoid thrillers of the ‘70s (examples: “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Parallax View” and “The Stepford Wives”). With either of those endings, instead of an unearned Shyamalan “twist,” “Old” could have been something timeless.

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‘Old’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language. Running time: 107 minutes.