Review: 'Aline' is a weird, and oddly touching, fictional biography 'freely inspired' by the life of Celine Dion

The French comic actress and filmmaker Valérie Lemercier has invented something new with “Aline”: A fictional musical biopic that’s more true to its subject than a documentary would be. And that’s not the weirdest part of this fan letter to one of the world’s biggest singing stars.

We don’t meet the title character of Aline Dieu right away. First, Lemercier, as director and co-writer (with Brigitte Buc), introduces us to her parents, Sylvette and Anglomard, as they fall in love, marry, vow not to have children — and then proceed to raise a family of 14 kids, with Aline the youngest, with a sock drawer as her crib.

The Dieu children, growing up in a small house in Quebec in the 1970s, form a singing group — and eventually the family learns little Aline has the most beautiful, and most powerful, voice of all. Her parents (Danielle Michaud and Roc Lafortune) and older brother Jean-Bobin (Antoine Vézina) record a demo tape of Aline at age 12, and send it to a record producer, Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel).

If you’re up on your Quebecois-born megastars, you may have deduced that this all sounds like the life story of Celine Dion. Lemercier makes no bones about that: There’s an opening title card saying the film is “inspired by the life” of Dion, but told as fiction. Why Lemercier changed the names of the main figures is never fully explained, as the plot points match as closely to Dion’s life as the scripts for “Walk the Line” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” or most any Hollywood-produced biopic does of their subjects.

But the bigger mystery comes when Lemercier, who’s 58, appears as Aline at age 12 — through a combination of forced-perspective angles, body doubles and computerized face-swapping. The effect is eerie, in an uncanny-valley sort of way, and darn near takes us out of the narrative.

That narrative continues with Kamar becoming Aline’s manager and guiding her early career. After some success with French songs, for audiences in Quebec and Paris, Aline follows Kamar’s advice to take a break, fix her crooked teeth, and learn English so she can conquer the American and British markets — and, eventually, the world.

As the teen Aline becomes a rising star in Europe, she also falls deeply in love with Kamar, who is more than twice her age, and twice divorced. Kamar, with Mama Sylvette watching like a hawk, does the gentlemanly thing and avoids giving any indication that he reciprocates Aline’s feelings. After winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest at age 20, Aline is old enough to act on her feelings — and Kamar finally admits that he loves her, too.

Kamar is a stand-in for Dion’s real-life husband/manager, René Angélil — and the movie follows the version of the story Dion tells in her autobiography, holding that he resisted her advances until she was of age. Having Lemercier and Marcel, who were born in the same year, play the roles doesn’t make it feel less weird, especially when Lemercier is playing Aline between 17 and 21 in those scenes.

The rest of the movie hits the high points of Celine, er, Aline’s life: World tours, years in Vegas, battles against infertility, a stretch where she has to rest her vocal cords, and the opportunity to sing a song for a movie about the Titanic. (In an amusing scene, Kamar plays the instrumental for the “Titanic” score, and a temporarily mute Aline writes on her pad, “I don’t like it.”)

Lemercier’s sincerity in depicting the larger-than-life story of a major pop star doesn’t keep her from embracing the kitschiness of such a life — the sequins, the limousines, the whole nine yards. Also, any movie that tells of a musician’s life, even a fictionalized take like this, must contend with the long shadow of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” which parodied all the cliches this movie employs without shame.

“Aline” can’t be dismissed, in part because the cast is so winning — particularly Marcel’s Kamar and Jean-Noël Brouté as Fred, Aline’s makeup artist and confidante. And a shout-out to Victoria Sio, who provides the singing voice to which Lemercier lip-syncs, belting out Celine-style covers of “All By Myself,” “River Deep / Mountain High” and other hits.

The driving force of “Aline,” in front of the camera and behind it, is Lemercier. Her past work as a director have all been light French comedies, and she sprinkles in some light-hearted moments (like when Aline gets lost in her own mansion), but keeps it serious when needed. Lemercier’s performance shows how completely she embraces Celine Dion, as a performer and an icon. Lemercier puts her whole heart into “Aline,” and that heart will go on.

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‘Aline’

★★★

Opening Friday, April 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and brief language. Running time: 126 minutes; mostly in French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Dual' is a droll and deadpan look at a woman deciding to live again — and deciding whether to kill her clone.

The idea that someone has to be dying to appreciate what it means to live is a Hollywood trope that goes back to “Dark Victory” — but writer-director Riley Stearns takes it to absurd lengths in his dark comedy “Dual.”

Set in the near future, the story starts when Sarah (Karen Gillan) throws up blood one night, and is ultimately told she has a rare terminal illness and will die soon. She is offered one option, “replacement therapy,” in which she is cloned, and then trains the clone to live out her life after she’s gone.

Not that Sarah’s life is going that well, otherwise. Her boyfriend, Peter (Beulah Koale), is away on business and inattentive in their FaceTime calls. And she’s made an art of avoiding calls and texts from her mom (Maika Paunio). But Sarah goes through with the cloning, and starts training her double in what she likes and doesn’t like.

Ten months go by, Sarah hasn’t died yet, and she learns that her double is living her life better than she is. Peter enjoys the double’s company more, and the double is much more attentive to Sarah’s mother. Then Sarah is told that her supposedly terminal illness is in remission and she’s not going to die. 

Normally, she’s told, the clone would be “decommissioned” — but the double demands to remain alive. In such cases, the solution is a televised duel to the death between original and clone. Sarah has one year to prepare, and hires a trainer (Aaron Paul) to get her ready.

In some ways, “Dual” follows some of the contours of Stearns’ last movie, 2019’s “The Art of Self-Defense,” another story of a lonely character finding purpose through personal combat. Stearns’ comic style here is deadpan to the extreme, and some of the humor is bone-dry.

Gillan, known to many for her stint on “Doctor Who” and her role as Nebula in the Marvel universe, throws herself into the double role — the jaded Sarah and her inquisitive double — with relish. She locks into Stearns’ droll wavelength, while deepening and humanizing the two Sarahs as they go through this odd experience.

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‘Dual’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 15, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for violent content, some sexual content, language and graphic nudity. Running time: 94 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 23, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' is a dazzling trip through one woman's multiverse, full of invention and heart

The dazzlingly discombobulating “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is so moving, so funny, so emotional, so inventive, so crazy, so all-encompassing in its strangeness and heart that verbal descriptions are insufficient. You’re going to have to take this critic’s word for it: Go see this movie, preferably on a big screen, and then we can compare notes about what the coolest parts were.

It starts with Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeah), a Chinese-American laundromat owner whose business is in trouble. Evelyn has a ton of receipts spread out on her dining table, trying to prepare for a meeting with a frumpy IRS caseworker, Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis). With her dithering husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) and her doddering father (James Hong) along for moral support, Evelyn is given the bad news that her receipts are a mess, and Deirdre is contemplating tax-fraud charges.

Then something happens, and Evelyn is dragged into a nearby storage closet with such force it seems to split her reality. She’s dragged there by Waymond — except he explains he’s not Evelyn’s husband. He’s a Waymond from a parallel universe, and has inhabited this universe’s Waymond to get a message to Evelyn. The universes are being overrun by an evil force called Jobu Tupaki, and Waymond is scouring the multiverse to find the one Evelyn who can fight it.

Evelyn gets a glimpse of her other lives in the multiverse. In one, she’s a teppanyaki chef in a Benihana-style restaurant. In another, she’s a Chinese opera singer. In yet another, everyone has evolved hot dogs for fingers. And in each one, Jobu Tupaki is wreaking havoc.

When Evelyn eventually meets Jobu Tupaki, she looks an awful lot like Evelyn and Waymond’s daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Jobu’s growing menace seems to be in proportion to Joy’s exasperation at her mother — for everything from commenting on Joy’s weight to being reluctant to accept Joy’s girlfriend, Becky (Tallie Medel), into the family.

The directing-writing team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known collectively as Daniels, follow up on their feature debut — “Swiss Army Man,” the infamous Sundance title that featured Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse — with something that redefines the proper level of weirdness in a movie. Believe me, the description so far barely scratches the surface of what happens in this genre-twisting, timeline-bending, reality-warping story.

Not surprisingly, Michelle Yeoh is brilliant as all the many Evelyns this movie requires her to be. She shows the ferocity of her Hong Kong action career, the tenderness of a frazzled Everywoman, the grace of a movie star, and every other emotion that crops up.

The surprise is Quan, who must play an uncountable number of Waymonds and brings a hero’s demeanor to all of them — while delivering some kung-fu moves reminiscent of Jackie Chan in his prime. Quan has experience as a stunt coordinator and choreographer for martial arts movies, after his years as a child actor. Yes, the kid who played Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is 50 years old now, and delivers the most demanding, most poignant movie performance in a generation.

For all I’ve said, and I feel like I’ve given away too much, I’ve barely begun to describe the insanely creative imagery that fills this movie — including a moment so funny and inventive that I still can’t believe I saw it. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” serves up exactly what the title promises, and then some.

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‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’

★★★★

Opens Friday, April 8, in Utah theaters. Rated R for some violence, sexual material and language. Running time: 139 minutes; in English and Mandarin with subtitles.

Review: 'Ambulance' is gritty and down-to-earth, but just as chaotic as any other Michael Bay movie

What happens when Michael Bay, the guy who makes gazillion-dollar blockbusters like the “Transformers” franchise, only gets a measly $40 million to play with? You get an action movie like “Ambulance,” which isn’t as bloated as Bay’s usual work, but isn’t much more coherent, either.

On an overheated Los Angeles day, Will Sharp (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is on the phone arguing with a health insurance company — his wife, Amy (Moses Ingram), has cancer and needs an experimental procedure, we’re told. He then leaves the house to meet his brother, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal), who followed in their father’s footsteps into a life of crime. (Since Will is Black and Danny’s white, it’s explained early and often that Will was adopted.)

Will wants to borrow some money from Danny, but Danny has another idea. He wants Will to join the crew that’s about to perform a major bank heist, with a promised haul of $32 million. Will, an ex-Marine who fought in Afghanistan, is the best driver anywhere, Danny says — another example of the script, by Chris Fedak (who created the Michael Sheen series “Prodigal Son”), telling rather than showing.

Of course, Bay is too busy showing off what he and cinematographer Roberto de Angelis (making his feature debut) can do with drone cameras that swoop up and down and all around L.A. City Hall and the old Los Angeles Times offices — the location of the bank Danny and his crew are hitting. (I’m not 100%, but I think it’s the same downtown L.A. street where Michael Mann staged the main gun battle in “Heat” — which makes me wonder why Bay would open himself up to comparison to one of the most kinetic action sequences every filmed.)

The robbery happens, things go haywire, and Danny and Will are in a parking garage with a rookie cop (Jackson White) bleeding out with two bullet wounds. An ambulance makes its way into the garage, with a newbie driver, Scott (Colin Woodell), and a jaded veteran EMT, Cam Thompson (Eiza González), riding shotgun. Danny sees the ambulance as his getaway vehicle, putting Will in the driver’s seat, and taking Cam and the cop as hostages to get past the swarm of law enforcement surrounding the building.

It takes quite a while to get to this point in the story, which is the point of the whole movie: To start what one side character calls “the most expensive car chase” ever. It’s here where Bay seems to be most comfortable, putting cameras on cars as they race, jump and crash — while also capturing Cam’s attempts to keep the cop alive in a vehicle going 60 mph with two squabbling criminals in front.

The three leads — Gyllenhaal, Abdul-Mateen and González — are all better than the material they’re given. The same can be said for Garrett Dillahunt, as the lead LAPD detective who’s been trying to bring Danny’s crew to justice for ages, despite being saddled with too many personality quirks, including a funky old car with a massive drooling dog in the back seat.

The other problem with “Ambulance” is that it’s a movie that appears to be moving quite fast, but with a running time of 136 minutes (nearly an hour longer than the Danish movie it’s remaking), it takes forever to get anywhere. Even without Transformers to play with, Bay apparently can’t help but spin his wheels.

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‘Ambulance’

★★

Opens Friday, April 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout. Running time: 136 minutes.

Review: In 'Sonic the Hedgehog 2,' the blue hero and Jim Carrey's crazed villain return for sporadic laughs

In the first “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie, they fixed the problem of how to animate a fast-moving blue video game character — but in “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” they’re still having problems delivering a story that is as fleet-footed as its young hero.

Before we’re reunited with Sonic, the movie checks in on the villain, Dr. Ivo Robotnik, aka Dr. Eggman, played by Jim Carrey, who applies his comic gifts to this absurdly cartoonish bad guy with the massive mustache. Robotnik is trapped on the Mushroom Planet, until he sees a portal, through which emerges a fierce red fighter, who is later identified as Knuckles the Echidna (and is voiced by Idris Elba). 

Eventually, both Robotnik and Knucles make it to Earth — where Sonic (voiced again by Ben Schwartz) is working hard to live a normal life in Green Hills, Montana, with his adopted human parents, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), the town’s sheriff, and his veterinarian wife, Maddie (Taika Sumpter). On this particular weekend, Tom and Maddie are off in Hawaii for the wedding of Maddie’s sister, Rachel (Natasha Rothwell), and super hunky Randall (Shemar Moore). Rachel has warned Tom that if he messes up the wedding with any hedgehog-related hijinks, she will end him.

Cue the hedgehog-related hijinks, as Sonic learns that Robotnik has joined forces with Knuckles to find something called the Master Emerald — a source of ultimate power that definitely should not be in the hands of somebody like Robotnik. Sonic has someone on his side: Tails (voiced by Colleen O’Shaughnessey, a veteran voice actor), a two-tailed fox with a backpack of gadgets, flying capability, and a devotion to Sonic that knows no bounds.

So the chase lurches from Montana to Siberia to, inevitably, Hawaii — where Tom, Maddie and Rachel get drawn into the craziness.

A trio of writers — Pat Casey and Josh Miller, who wrote the first one, and John Whittington (who contributed to “The Lego Batman Movie” and “The Lego Ninjago Movie”) — keep the gags coming fast and frenzied. Director Jeff Fowler, back from the first movie, understands his two missions: Keep the CG effects humming along, and stay out of Jim Carrey’s way whenever he’s mugging and augmenting his dialogue, which is frequently.

As with the first “Sonic,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” is watchable only because of Carrey, as he applies offbeat shadings to an already ridiculous character and makes them fascinating. Not even Carrey has enough spice to justify the two-hour running time that will leave kids as bored as their grownup chaperones. 

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‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, some violence, rude humor, and mild language. Running time: 122 minutes.

Review: 'Mothering Sunday' is a sensual, sensitive tale of a woman channeling love and grief into writing

Love, lust and grief mix freely in director Eva Husson’s “Mothering Sunday,” which is simultaneously thoughtful and sensual in its telling of a writer’s recollections of her youthful and not-so-youthful romances.

It’s 1924 on an English estate, and Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) is looking forward to her day off. Jane works as a maid for the Nevins, Sir Godfrey (Colin Firth) and Clarrie (Olivia Colman), and they’re spending this day — the equivalent of Mother’s Day — with friends at another noble house. The Nevins will be toasting the upcoming wedding of two children of family friends: Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) and Emma Hobday (Emma D’Arcy).

Jane will be spending her day at the Sheringham’s estate, for a rendezvous with Paul, for sex and cigarettes, just days before he’s scheduled to marry Emma. For Paul, his marriage to Emma is an obligation, something to please his parents, like his plans to become a lawyer. Emma was intended to marry the Nevins’ son, James — but he was killed in the Great War, as was Paul’s two brothers.

The screenplay by Alice Burch (who wrote the Florence Pugh drama “Lady Macbeth”), adapting Graham Swift’s novel, is at its best when Jane, an orphan, briefly considers the life of luxury she witnesses in the Nevins’ and Sheringham’s homes. A fair portion of the story happens after Paul leaves Jane for the luncheon party with Emma and the Nevins — as Jane explores the Sheringhams’ opulent home, from its library to the kitchen, fully nude.

The scenes from 1924 are intercut with two other timelines. One features a slightly older Jane working in a bookshop and starting out as a novelist, married to Daniel (Sope Dirisu), a writer of philosophy. The other shows a much older Jane — played by the legendary Glenda Jackson, who’s 85 now and still a steely presence.

Husson and Birch explore the dividing lines between love and lust, working-class and idly rich, and how the specter of death cuts through those divisions. They also, through Young’s quietly moving performance, show how a writer processes all of those emotions, turning every part of their lives into words on a page.

“Mothering Sunday” doesn’t always work — the scenes not set in 1924 tend to drag the rest of the story down a bit — but when it does, when Jane tiptoes naked through a manor house to gather every sensation she can, the movie achieves a graceful kind of power.

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‘Mothering Sunday’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity and some language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'The Secrets of Dumbledore' moves the Wizarding World forward a bit, but is mostly spinning its wheels

One imagines director David Yates, who with “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” has now helmed seven movies in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy realm — er, Wizarding World™ — with diminishing returns, waking up from a butterbeer hangover and mumbling to himself, like Martin Sheen’s character in “Apocalypse Now,” “I’m still only in Hogwart’s.”

The third installment in the prequel series to Rowling’s “Harry Potter” saga has fixed some of the problems of the terrible second chapter, “The Crimes of Grindelwald” — but still has a way to go to justify its existence beyond a money machine aimed at the fans who will shell out for anything that drops the word “Hufflepuff” in the script occasionally.

The new film picks up pretty much where the last one did, with Gellert Grindelwald amassing his army of wizards and witches, to carry out his plot to give magical folk dominion over the Muggle-centered world. Key to this plan is to groom brooding young Credence (Ezra Miller) for a mission to kill the one wizard Grindelwald cannot act against himself: Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law). 

A note here about the casting of Grindelwald. At the end of the first “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” and through the second film, the villain was played by Johnny Depp. After headlines about Depp’s private life (which people can argue about on their own time), he was replaced by the great Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who brings a pleasantly patrician air to the character’s evil scheming.

Alas, the series is still saddled with Eddie Redmayne, mumbling and stumbling through the role of “magizoologist” Newt Scamander. Newt is again enlisted by Dumbledore, his old Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, to help thwart Grindelwald’s plans. For reasons that are overexplained eventually, a creature that Newt pursues early in the film becomes a significant part of the story.

Joining Newt in Dumbledore’s Army 1.0 are his brother, Theseus Scamander (Callum Turner), American charms professor Eulalia “Lally” Hicks (Jessica Williams), Newt’s lovestruck assistant Bunty (Victoria Yeates), French-Senegalese wizard Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), and New York baker — and Newt’s no-maj friend — Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler). Their plan is to have no plan, to attack in as many surprising ways as possible to keep Grindelwald from predicting their next move. 

Complicating their efforts is Grindelwald’s newest minion, telepath Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol) — who is also Jacob’s lost love. (The whereabouts of Queenie’s sister Tina — the American auror played in the first two films by Katherine Waterston — are left a mystery for most of the movie.)

The script — by Rowling, with a severe rewrite by Steve Kloves, who adapted most of the Potter books — works double-time to insert Newt and his animal expertise into the story, though his scenes tend to be goofier than anything else happening. The main story, which deals with Grindelwald’s rise to power, is laden with allusions to current authoritarian politics, while Kloves finally lets Dumbledore make a declaration of love that Rowling never permitted in her books.

The series, though, is still circling when it needs to get to the point. If Warner Bros. lets the franchise wrap up the story according to canon — starting the First Wizarding War, which means the eventual rise of Lord Voldemort — maybe we’ll get movies that are more payoff than set-up.

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‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some fantasy action/violence. Running time: 142 minutes.

Review: 'Better Nate than Ever' is pure Disney cotton candy, with a surprising twist

On one level, the new Disney Channel — I mean, Disney+ — all-ages comedy “Better Nate than Ever” is the sort of low-budget, slapped-together affair the House of Mouse cranks out when it isn’t spending 100 times as much on the next live-action adaptation of one of their animated classics.

On another level, though, “Better Nate than Ever” fits in the Disney mold of fun, uplifting stories about charming underdogs overcoming adversity. But with an important twist: The 13-year-old protagonist, played winningly by newcomer Rueby Wood, is gay.

OK, so Nate Foster never says he’s gay, and no one else calls him that. But what Nate does say leaves no doubt in his or anyone else’s mind. Also, writer-director Tim Federle — who’s the showrunner for “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series” — has embedded cultural signifiers that, in another era, would be all that was necessary to spell it out: Nate’s obsession over Broadway musicals, the framed photo of Bernadette Peters on his dresser, the rainbow rabbits foot that dangles from his backpack.

Nate, in middle school in Pittsburgh, desperately wants a lead role in the school play, but barely makes the chorus — where he’ll get to hang out with his best friend, the remarkably zen Libby (Aria Brooks). It’s Libby who discovers an open audition on Broadway for child roles in “Lily & Stitch: The Musical.” (Somewhere in a cubicle in Disney’s corporate offices, some bright bulb is going, “Say, that’s not a bad idea.”)

Nate and Libby hatch a plan to sneak out of their homes and catch a Greyhound to New York, so Nate can audition. The stars align to help them: Obnoxious big brother Anthony (Joshua Bassett, from “HSM:TM:TS”) will be away at a track meet, and their parents, Sherrie and Rex (Michelle Federer and Norbert Leo Butz), are taking an anniversary spa trip. 

Once Nate and Libby hit New York, things so in unexpected directions. (Well, unexpected for them. The audience knows where this is all going.) One unexpected incident is that Nate and Libby run into Nate’s Aunt Heidi (Lisa Kudrow), a constantly striving stage actress and cater waiter. We’re told that Heidi and Sherrie haven’t spoken to each other in years — because Heidi skipped Sherrie and Rex’s wedding because she got a callback.

So the story is as straightforward as can be. What makes it fun is how Federle (who wrote the middle-school-level novel on which this is based) delivers the goods. Nate dreams in musical numbers that show him the best- and worst-case scenarios for how his New York adventure will go. And his audition scenes are bravura turns of stage-kid inventiveness. (My favorite is his monologue, quoted verbatim from an episode of “Designing Women.”)

What makes this all work are the two kid leads, Brooks (who appeared in Nickelodeon’s recent revival of its sketch show “All That”) and especially Wood, making his screen debut. (He’s not completely green, though — he played Charlie in a national tour of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” before the pandemic.) Wood gives Nate the proper levels of gumption, grit and desperation that propel him from Pittsburgh embarrassment to Big Apple hopeful. He makes “Better Nate than Ever” better than it probably deserves to be.

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‘Better Nate than Ever’

★★★

Starts streaming Friday, April 1, on Disney+. Rated PG for thematic elements, a suggestive reference and mild language. Running time: 92 minutes.