Review: Pixar's 'Turning Red' is a funny, warm-hearted take on a 13-year-old girl's journey growing up

Even with the fantastical element at the center of its plot, a viewer will be hard-pressed to find a coming-of-age story that can match the wit, empathy and honesty of “Turning Red,” Pixar Animation Studios’ newest gem. 

The specificity of director Domee Shi’s story has the air of autobiography. Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a 13-year-old girl of Chinese ancestry, living in Toronto, Canada, in 2002. She is a devoted daughter to her perfectionist mom, Ming (voiced by Sandra Oh), working her afternoons in the family’s temple, dedicated to their ancestor Sun Yee. At school, though, Meilin hangs out with her besties — Miriam (voiced by Ava Morse), Priya (voiced by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (voiced by Hyein Park) — crushing on their favorite boy band, 4*Town, and trying to figure out how to attend their upcoming concert in the Rogers SkyDome.

One morning, caught up in her adolescent emotions from her mother embarrassing her in front of a boy on whom her daughter has a crush, Meilin wakes up to find she’s changed. No, not “the red peony,” as her mother puts it (recording, for the first time in Pixar history, a mention of menstrual cycles and maxi pads). Meilin finds that she has become an 8-foot-tall red panda — and she’s desperate to hide this from her parents.

What happens next? It’s best for viewers to find that out for themselves. Though, like another Pixar story of a young woman with red hair — “Brave” — the story takes off in a fascinating and surprising direction.

Shi (who directed the Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao”), who wrote the screenplay with Julie Cho (a playwright and former story editor on “Big Love,” making a strong movie debut), finds in Meilin’s panda transformations a perfect metaphor for adolescence and the ever-shifting emotions of discovering one’s own path — and, in particular, figuring out whether that path is parallel to or away from one’s parents.

Somehow, by whatever alchemy of animation wizardry and storytelling magic, Pixar nearly always manages to find that sweet spot of smart humor and tear-inducing honesty. That’s no different with “Turning Red,” which is as clever with its visuals as with its story. 

My favorite touch is the anime-inspired look of the teenage characters, where their big grins and eyes that shine when they smile. Another great detail comes from 4*Town’s songs, written by musical siblings Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell, which play just like anything you remember from the Backstreet Boys or your other favorite boy bands.

“Turning Red” is perhaps the best take on adolescence since Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade.” It’s a funny, charming and emotional ride through a 13-year-old girl’s journey, and it’s a pleasure to take that ride with her.

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‘Turning Red’

★★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, March 11, on Disney+. Rated PG for thematic material, suggestive content and language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Ascension' is a thoughtful, impressionistic look at the 'Chinese dream' of consumerism and capitalism

What does it look like when millions of people try to dive into consumer culture and capitalist acquisition all at the same time? It looks a lot like China in the 21st century, as captured by filmmaker Jessica Kingdon in the endlessly fascinating documentary “Ascension.”

Kingdon spent two years, 2018 and 2019, filming at more than 50 locations around China, getting an close look at an economy of making and selling, buying and earning, playing and working. It’s called the “Chinese Dream,” and it’s as elusive and difficult to define as the “American Dream.”

The first scenes show recruiters on the street of a big city, trying to get workers to sign up to work in one of the different factories that are manufacturing goods for the rest of the world. The come-ons involve wage hikes, bonuses, and the perks of cafeterias, dormitories and other amenities. 

Then the recruits board buses to the factories, where they make spray-bottle tops, processed poultry, blue jeans, plastic Christmas trees, Ralph Lauren jackets, “Keep America Great” merchandise and — in one unsettling and weirdly appealing sequence — life-sized and lifelike sex dolls.

But for many Chinese people Kingdon features are striving to sell another product: Themselves. Kingdon follows social-media influencers as they teach seminars on how to turn one’s personality into a brand. At other corporate workshops, people are picking up the tricks of “business etiquette” or being a security guard.

At every step, Kingdon depicts an economy in which nearly everyone is striving to make money, buy stuff, and fill up high-tech amusement parks. They are trying to unlock the secret of capitalism through the trappings of Western business. They follow Thomas Edison’s maxim about invention being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration; they’ve worked up the perspiration, and are just waiting for the inspiration.

Kingdon doesn’t apply a particular narrative to what she’s showing; her snapshots are more observational, like a Frederick Wiseman documentary that strings together moments to examine system processes. The result is an eye-popping mosaic portrait of a nation on the move, though unsure of what exactly it’s moving toward.

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‘Ascension’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for images of sex dolls being manufactured. Running time: 98 minutes; in Mandarin, with subtitles.

Review: 'Huda's Salon' is an uneven, but still absorbing thriller about an occupation, from both sides of the divide

The Palestinian-made thriller “Huda’s Salon” has perhaps the most nail-biting first 10 minutes in a movie recently — and follows that with a plot that can’t keep pace with that opening.

When we meet Huda (Manal Awad), she’s hard at work at her hair salon in Bethlehem, in what writer-director Hany Abu-Assad identifies as “occupied Palestine.” Huda is washing the hair of her customer, Reem (Maisa And Elhadi), and chatting while Reem’s baby coos in a nearby carrier. Then Huda slips a drug into Reem’s drink — and when she passes out, Huda moves Reem into a back room, strips her naked, and takes Polaroids of her with a naked man.

When Reem wakes up, Huda reveals that she works for the occupying country’s secret service. (The word “Israel” is never uttered in Abu-Assad’s script, but everyone can read the between the lines.) Huda shows Reem the Polaroids, which she uses to blackmail Reem into becoming an informant, passing along information of the Palestinian resistance. Reem refuses to cooperate, and leaves the salon with her baby.

Once Reem gets home, she’s not sure what to do. Her husband, Yousef (Jalal Masarwa), already doubts her fidelity, and she’s sure he won’t believe her if she tells him the truth. And she’s terrified that the Polaroid will fall into his hands.

While Reem stews over her dilemma, Huda gets kidnapped by resistance fighters. The resistance leader, Hasan (Ali Suliman), interrogates Huda in a dark room — and a cat-and-mouse game develops between them, with each justifying their actions in the never-ending guerrilla war between occupier and occupied.

Abu-Assad — who’s recent films range from the Palestinian drama “Omar” to the American survival drama “The Mountains Between Us” with Kate Winslet and Idris Elba — bounces between Hasan’s interrogation sessions with Huda and Reem’s increasingly frantic efforts to evade Hasan’s men and retrieve that photo. The script structure is too confining, never allowing either part of the story to fully develop. But the main performances, by Awad and Elhadi as women trapped in opposite ends of a repressive system, and that dynamite opening are enough to keep audiences invested.

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‘Huda’s Salon’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for disturbing violent content and graphic nudity. Running time: 91 minutes; in Arabic, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Batman' presents a grim, operatic version of Bruce Wayne's evolution from vigilante to hero

In the never-ending debate about comic-book movies, about what kind of tone works best for action stories about people in tights, fans can usually find something to suit their tastes.

Do you like light and breezy, like when Christopher Reeve played Superman? How about inspirational and heroic, like Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman? Or essentially noble and epic with an overlay of jokey and sarcastic — which largely is where the Marvel Cinematic Universe, God love it, has settled?

The one comic-book character who has inspired the most vicious mood swings is Batman, the black-caped defender of Gotham City, the invention of Bob Kane and Bill Finger for DC Comics. There’s the sitcom-silly Adam West of the ‘60s TV series, the semi-seriousness of Michael Keaton in the Tim Burton films, the neon garishness of Joel Schumacher’s films with Val Kilmer and George Clooney, the tormented urban guerrilla that Christian Bale portrayed in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, or the weary warrior Ben Affleck played in whatever Zack Snyder was trying to do in “Batman vs. Superman” and “Justice League.”

Now comes another contender, director Matt Reeves’ grim and operatic “The Batman,” with Robert Pattinson playing the Caped Crusader as a battered anti-hero who makes Bale and Nolan’s collaboration look like a lark.

Reeves and co-screenwriter Peter Craig start well into The Batman’s tenure as a crime fighter. He still identified as an instrument of vengeance, focused less on cleaning up Gotham City than on finding the people responsible for his parents’ death 20 years earlier. The Gotham City Police still consider him a vigilante and a menace, though one police detective, Lt. Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), trusts him — and has started making nightly calls using a searchlight with a bat silhouette. (We’re not calling it the Bat-Signal just yet.)

“Fear is a tool,” Wayne’s alter ego says in a noir-level narration. “When that light hits the sky, it’s not just a call. It’s a warning.”

But it’s not the garden-variety thugs and thieves Batman is battling as the movie starts. Someone is killing some of Gotham City’s leading figures, starting with the mayor (Rupert Penry-Jones), and leaving cryptic clues in cards addressed “to The Batman.” Because these clues often come in the form of questions, the killer gets a nickname: The Riddler. (It’s safe to reveal that this character is played by Paul Dano, who is shown in the movie’s marketing even though it’s well into the film before Reeves shows us his face.)

Batman tells Gordon he suspects that the city’s criminal underworld is involved — namely, crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and his right-hand man, Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin (played by Colin Farrell, though one wouldn’t know it because of some impressive prosthetic work). The suggestions that the mayor, who we see fighting for his political life in a race against a young anti-corruption reformer (Jayme Lawson), and his cronies are in deep with Falcone. 

Batman soon discovers someone else is sniffing around Falcone’s operation: A sly burglar, Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) — who shares Batman’s gifts for form-fitting black suits and stealthy entrances. She also has a lot of cats. ”I have a thing for strays,” she tells Batman, during their cautious dance of seduction.

As the case drags him deeper into Gotham City’s dark secrets, Batman aka Bruce Wayne learns some uncomfortable truths about his late parents — and about his loyal butler, Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis). Mercifully, Reeves doesn’t give us the same flashback cliches we often get with Batman movies; it’s a positive sign that we don’t have to watch another shot of Martha Wayne’s pearls falling to the alley floor.

Reeves — whose credits include the last two “Planet of the Apes” movies and the alien-invasion thriller ‘Cloverfield” —  digs into the dark worlds of Gotham’s criminal underground and Bruce Wayne’s still-grieving psyche. And sometimes the darkness is literal; one of the most striking action set pieces has Batman fighting armed thugs in a pitch-black entryway, lit only by the occasional flashes of the bad guys’ machine-gun fire. Batman works in the shadows, and the intensity of Reeves’ action sequences work well there over three hours that never feel bloated or unnecessary.

Pattinson is a strong choice to play this version of Batman and Bruce Wayne. I’ve always argued that anyone can be Batman, because the suit does the work, and it’s how an actor captures Bruce’s brooding self-destructiveness and “Scarlet Pimpernel”-inspired callow camouflage that makes the difference. Here, I’m not so sure — because Pattinson shows Bruce’s festering grief and his revenge-driven intensity as much as when he’s wearing the cowl as when he’s not. Pattinson also latches onto Reeves’ subtle depiction of Batman’s evolution, from angry vigilante to the hero Gotham needs.

Reeves sets up “The Batman” as a new beginning of a franchise, though seemingly separate from the other branches of Warner Bros.’ DC Comics movie universes. I wouldn’t expect Pattinson’s Batman to slide comfortably into Snyder’s “Justice League” meetings, and there’s no link to Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of The Joker. But Pattinson should be fighting crime in Gotham again, and I’m looking forward to see how he and Reeves carry his arc forward.

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‘The Batman’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material. Running time: 175 minutes.

Review: 'Cyrano' is a sweetly swoony take on the classic romance, with Peter Dinklage perfect as the tragic hero

If there’s any movie lover left who thinks the Academy Awards are chosen solely on merit — rather than the strength of a studio’s marketing campaign — one viewing of “Cyrano” will forever rid them of the notion.

Costume designers Massimo Cantini Parrini and two-time winner Jacqueline Durran got the movie’s only nomination. But I can’t help but wonder who else would have been nominated if not for a stutter-stepped campaign by its studio, MGM, that borders on movie-distribution malpractice.

Maybe cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s sumptuous, candle-lit camerawork. Maybe Erica Schmidt, on her first screenplay, writing such an elegant adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s famous play. Maybe the stirringly romantic song score by brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner (members of the band The National). And, without a doubt, Peter Dinklage’s heartbreaking tour de force in the title role.

Dinklage doesn’t need a false nose to play Rostand’s tragic romantic, as his 4-foot, 5-inch frame is enough to draw catcalls from strangers. Years of being called a freak — “the insult is ancient, but I’ll accept it,” he says early on — have toughened Cyrano’s hide and sharpened his wit. Cyrano delivers a comical mid-performance takedown of a boorish actor (Mark Benton) in rhyming couplets, and fences expertly when sniveling count (Joshua James) makes the mistake of challenging him to a duel.

Cyrano’s performance, as his comrade-in-arms LeBret (Bashir Salahuddin) notices, is for an audience of one: The beautiful Roxanne (Haley Bennett), whom Cyrano has known for years and loved just as long. “My soul purpose on this earth is to love Roxanne,” Cyrano tells LeBret, adding that because of his small stature, “my fate is to love her from afar.”

When Roxanne seeks a private meeting with Cyrano, he dares to hope that she might feel the same. But soon he learns that Roxanne has fallen in lcve with someone else — a recruit in Cyrano’s regiment, Christian Neuvilette (Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Christian is handsome and good-hearted, but his tongue and pen are nowhere near as agile as Cyrano’s. Cyrano offers to write Christian’s love letters to Roxanne, and literature’s most eloquent love triangle begins.

There is a fourth character that the other three must deal with: A vain duke, De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn), who wants Roxanne for his property. When De Guiche sees Christian and Cyrano as obstacles between himself and Roxanne, his jealousy leads to the story’s third act — as the regiment is sent to the front in an endless war.

The Dessners’ songs are lilting, fittingly romantic tunes, and the lead cast — notably Bennett (“The Girl on the Train”) with her breathy soprano and Dinklage’s gravely speak-singing — make the most of them. Their voices aren’t Broadway-musical perfect (even though Dinklage and Bennett played the roles together onstage), but the vulnerability of their voices suits the material better.

The most touching song doesn’t involve the leads, though. “Wherever I Fall” is a mournful, soulful number about soldiers preparing for a battle from which they know they will not return. (One of the three soldiers who sings it is Glen Hansard, the Irish singer for The Frames and The Swell Season, and the co-songwriter and star of director John Carney’s 2007 musical masterpiece “Once.”) 

Director Joe Wright channels the same swooning period style that made his 2005 “Pride & Prejudice” and the 2012 version of “Anna Karenina” work, and he gives his stars the space to get comfortable with the songs through which they must express so much emotion.

Dinklage, one of our most consistently expressive and surprising actors, uses his gruff persona as Cyrano’s armor — a way to fend off the slings and arrows of the world, while protecting his heart for Roxanne. It’s an impassioned performance, one that deserves more attention.

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‘Cyrano’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, thematic and suggestive material, and brief language. Running time: 123 minutes.

Review: 'Studio 666,' a horror comedy starring the Foo Fighters, is slapdash but still fun

I can’t say “Studio 666” is a good movie — at times, it reaches Troma-esque levels of cheapness and incompetence — but it’s a fun movie, as over-the-top horror comedies go.

Conceived by Foo Fighters guitarist/drummer/frontman Dave Grohl, the story starts with the Foo Fighters contemplating how they’re going to record their 10th album, which their record-company boss, Shill (Jeff Garlin), desperately needs to release to pay off the label’s debts. Grohl wants to record somewhere unique, and Shill’s friend in real estate, Barb (Leslie Grossman), knows just the place: An isolated mansion in Encino.

What Barb doesn’t mention — and Dave and the band find out too late — is that the last band to record in this house, Dream Widow, was horrifically murdered there. The band doesn’t get the hint when one of their techs is gruesomely electrocuted when plugging in the sound board, the first of many comically gory set-ups that director BJ McDonnell (“Hatchet III”) and writers Jeff Buhler (who wrote the “Pet Sematary” remake) and Rebecca Hughes serve up.

There are a few celebrity cameos, like Whitney Cummings as an oversexed Encino neighbor and Will Forte as a food-delivery driver trying to impress the Foos — and, as a real sign of the filmmakers’ respect for this genre, an out-of-left-field appearance by the legendary director John Carpenter (“Halloween,” “The Thing,” “Escape from New York,” “Big Trouble in Little China”) as a sound engineer.

But most of the humor comes from watching Grohl and bandmates Taylor Hawkins, Rami Jaffee, Nate Mendel, Chris Shiflett and Pat Smear try their hand at acting, with hilariously woeful results. They know it’s all a goof, like a “Scooby-Doo” episode with buckets of fake blood, and that self-deprecation is charming enough to let the movie skate by.

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‘Studio 666’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore, pervasive language, and sexual content. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: This year's short-film Oscar nominees offer a strong slate, thought the animated work doesn't impress as much as usual

I have often referred to the annual compilations of the nominees in the short-film Academy Award categories as akin to Forrest Gump’s mama’s box of chocolates — in that you never know what you’re going to get — but this year, that sentiment is really true.

The variety assortment proves to be a bit of a disappointment with the animated shorts. Three of the five nominees are adults-only, with animated genitalia and — in the Chilean ceramic stop-motion work “Bestia” — a bit of off-putting animal-on-human contact. The comical British/Canadian hand-drawn “Affairs of the Art” has some funny moments, but is sometimes shrill. And “The Windshield Wiper,” an American/Spanish production, is a series of rotoscoped interludes, some of them sexual, without much resolution.

The one G-rated work in the bunch is “Robin Robin,” a delightful stop-motion work from the folks at Britain’s Aardman Studios. (I think it was a Christmas offering on one of the British TV channels; it’s available on Netflix now in the states.) It’s a charming story, rendered with wonderful tactile felt characters, of a young robin raised by a family of mice, but utterly lacking in mousy stealth. Richard E. Grant voices a preening magpie, and Gillian Anderson purrs menacingly as a cat on the robin’s scent.

If I was an Academy voter, my pick might have gone to the wordless Russian “BoxBallet,” director Anton Dyakov’s line-drawn story of a pencil-thin ballerina who finds a surprise protector in a gruff boxer. As I write this, news bulletins are arriving about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so selecting this one as a favorite feels off in the current climate — but I don’t know whether Dyakov, as a filmmaker, should be punished for decisions made in the Kremlin.

The choices in the live-action short category are unequivocally top-drawer. 

The Danish “On My Mind” is a heartwarming tragedy that starts as comedy, with a guy walking into a bar on a Tuesday morning and asking the bartender to fire up the karaoke machine so he can sing “Always on My Mind” — for reasons that will have viewers tearing up. 

“The Dress,” from Poland, and the filmed-in-Kyrgyzstan “Ala Kachuu (Take and Run)” are harrowing and well-staged stories about women left at the whims of men — respectively, a four-foot-tall Polish motel maid (Anna Dzieduszycka) seeking love and a Kyrgyz student (Alina Turdumamatova) kidnapped into a forced marriage. 

And the last two are incendiary takes on injustice and systemic racism. “Please Hold,” directed by K.D. Dávila (who won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for the comedy-drama “Emergency”), follows a Latino man (Erick Lopez) in a slightly futuristic dystopia where he’s arrested, jailed and nearly convicted all by drones and automated machines. It would be my favorite, if not for the intensity of the British/Dutch production “The Long Goodbye,” written by its director, Aneil Karia, and its star, Riz Ahmed, in which a South Asian family’s wedding preparations are interrupted by a brutal paramilitary raid — ending with Ahmed’s character delivering a to-the-camera rap with devastating power and immediacy.

The documentary slate features two inspiring and entertaining sports stories: “Audible,” which follows members of the successful football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf; and “The Queen of Basketball,” a profile of Lusia Harris, who was probably the best women’s basketball player in the 1970s, but an era when there wasn’t much one could do with that talent after college. (She was drafted by the New Orleans Jazz, which is an interesting footnote.)

Two more films chronicle seemingly intractable problems. In “Three Songs for Benazir,” married filmmakers Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei follow a newly married couple living in a camp for displaced people in Afghanistan, as youthful hope curdles into something else. And in “Lead Me Home,” filmmakers Pedro Kos (“Rebel Hearts”) and Jon Shenk (“Truth to Power: An Inconvenient Sequel”) capture life among those experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle — finding touching individual stories and tragic common threads.

My favorite among the documentaries is the most inward-looking, Jay Rosenblatt’s “When We Were Bullies,” in which the director revisits his old elementary school in Brooklyn — and reunites with another old classmate to examine a bullying incident from 50 years earlier. Rosenblatt’s narrative never goes where you expect, and raises intriguing questions about memory, guilt and complicity.

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Oscar-nominated animated shorts

★★★

Opens Friday, February 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, though probably R for animated full-frontal nudity, strong sexuality and some violence in some of the films. Running time: 97 minutes; two of the films are in Spanish, with subtitles.

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Oscar-nominated live-action shorts

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, though probably R for violence and some sexuality in some of the films. Running time: 125 minutes; one film is in Danish, another in Polish, and a third in Kyrgyz, with subtitles.

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Oscar-nominated documentary shorts

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, though probably PG-13 for suggestions of violence and substance abuse, and discussions of suicide in some of the films. Running time: 160 minutes; one film is in American Sign Language, another in Pashtu and Dari, with subtitles. 

Review: 'Dog' is a touching story of two soldiers — one human, one canine — trying to heal from the emotional scars of war

Between a chaotic opening 30 minutes and a marketing campaign that pretends the rest of the movie never happened, a moviegoer might be forgiven for thinking “Dog” is going to be a frisky comedy — rather than what it turns out to be, a dark and surprisingly thoughtful drama about war and its aftereffects.

Screenwriter Red Carolin and star Channing Tatum team as co-directors on this film, which focuses on Tatum’s character, Jackson Briggs, a former Army Ranger — yeah, I know, once a Ranger, always a Ranger — who’s living in Washington state and still dealing with the scars, physical and emotional, of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Briggs is broke, and hopeful a new job as security for U.S. diplomats will ease his financial problems. To get the job, he must get his former commander, Capt. Lewis (Luke Forbes), to sign the paperwork that shows he’s medically cleared to serve — three years after a traumatic brain injury that still disrupts his sleep and causes seizures if he doesn’t take his meds.

Capt. Lewis tells Briggs that he’ll sign the papers if Briggs performs a favor: Transport a dog, a Belgian Malinois that served in Iraq, from Fort Lewis (near Tacoma) to Arizona, for the funeral of the dog’s handler, and Briggs’ Ranger pal, Riley Rodriguez. The dog, named Lulu (and played by three dogs), is a handful — reacting badly to loud noises, liable to bite anyone who gets too close, and especially anyone who tries to touch her ears. 

In short, Lulu is suffering from post-traumatic stress, much as Briggs is. But where one can’t say what’s wrong, the other won’t.

Carolin, who wrote both “Magic Mike” movies in which Tatum starred, wrote the screenplay here (sharing story credit with Brett Rodriguez). The road trip goes through some meant-to-be-humorous antics,most of them mocking the off-kilter residents of Portland, Ore., that aren’t as hilarious as the makers think they are. The always-wonderful Jane Adams pops up for some choice minutes as an amateur clairvoyant married to a blustering pot grower (Kevin Nash), but that’s about it for effective comedy — and that includes the uncredited appearance of Bill Burr as a San Francisco cop.

As the road trip continues, though, things get far more serious — as Tatum’s Briggs starts bonding with Lulu, and begins to confront his own problems as a survivor of war. The second half of the film has some moments of heartfelt emotion, and Tatum shows his mettle as he portrays Briggs’ growing realization that being tough can sometimes delays efforts to become whole.

“Dog” ends up being a solid drama about loyalty and loss, and a certain kind of audience will appreciate it for those strengths. I’m just concerned that an audience expecting the lighthearted comedy the marketing promises may not be as receptive.

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‘Dog’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for language, thematic elements, drug content and some suggestive material. Running time: 100 minutes.