Review: Fans will relish 'The Bob's Burgers Movie,' which delivers the same fast-talking humor as the TV show

Fans of the animated family comedy “Bob’s Burgers” will surely get a kick out of the expanded version, “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” — and comparative newbies, like me, should become converts to the rapid-fire vocal rhythms and inventive gags that creator Loren Bouchard and company have constructed here.

The Belcher family lives in an apartment upstairs from the burger restaurant in a seaside vacation community, not too far from the town pier and amusement park. Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) is the hangdog patriarch, married to the perpetually optimistic Linda (voiced by John Roberts). They have three kids: The reasonable oldest daughter, Tina (voiced by Dan Mintz); the chipper son, Gene (voiced by Eugene Mirman), and the youngest, the sometimes aggressive Louise (voiced by Kristen Schaal). Yes, you observed correctly that in a family with three women or girls, only one of them is voiced by a human female.

As the movie starts, the Belchers are facing a financial crisis, after the bank refuses to extend the loan on the restaurant, leaving Bob and Linda a week to earn enough money to pay off the loan. This is made more difficult when a giant sinkhole opens up in front of the restaurant, blocking the door from customers. While Bob and Linda try to persevere, their main hope is to talk their doddering landlord, Calvin Fischoeder (voiced by Kevin Kline), into letting them delay their rent payment.

Mr. Fischoeder has problems of his own, when Louise — in an effort to prove she’s not a scared little girl, despite her insistence to continue to wear her rabbit-ear knit cap — climbs into the sinkhole, where she finds a rotting corpse. That body turns out to be a carny who’s been missing from the amusement park for six years, and Fischoeder is the suspect in the man’s murder.

Louise cajoles Tina and Gene to look into the killing, and try to prove Mr. Fischoeder’s innocence. The effort leads them to encounter Mr. Fischoeder’s eccentric brother, Felix (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), and their detail-oriented cousin Grover (voiced by David Wain). The kids also find some secrets underneath the amusement park’s pier.

Bouchard, co-directing with Bernard Derriman and working off a script from series writer Nora Smith, doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel. The animation expands from time to time to fit its larger screen, but mostly it stays in the confines established by the TV version. The visual humor is mostly concerned with pun-filled names for the businesses on the burger joint’s street.

The reliable wellspring of humor in “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is the quick-witted banter among the Belchers, particularly when the kids get going. Schaal, Mirman and Mintz are as well practiced as any comedy team — and their overlapping dialogue overflows with wry humor. When these three really get going, the audience will laugh their buns off.

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‘The Bob’s Burgers Movie’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for rude/suggestive material and language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Downton Abbey: A New Era' jams together dozens of familiar characters, and a plagiarized plot line, for a movie only the fans will love

Movie snobs who criticize the Marvel Cinematic Universe for too much “fan service” — throwing in unnecessary characters or references to make the diehard fans swoon — should take a long look at what the folks behind “Downton Abbey” do with their sprawling cast of English upper-crust and their devoted servants.

In “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” the second feature film based on the popular ITV and PBS series, the two dozen or so regular characters — and a few new ones — are bounced around by series creator Julian Fellowes’ script higgledy-piggledy, with all but one making no lasting impression that one didn’t get from the regularity of seeing them on TV for years.

The exception is Dame Maggie Smith, who gets one more opportunity as the Dowager Countess, Violet Grantham, to show everyone how much fun she’s having with droll witticisms and an unmistakeable air of being so much better than the material with which she’s working.

Two plot threads are fighting for dominance in this movie — one maudlin soap opera, the other rank plagiarism.

In the first one, Violet tells the family that she has inherited a villa in the south of France, given to her by a viscount she knew some 64 years previously. Violet’s son, Lord Robert Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), leads a sizable contingent of the family to check out the villa. There, they become embroiled in intrigue, because the viscount’s widow (the great French star Nathalie Baye) doesn’t want to give up the property, while the viscount’s son (Jonathan Zaccal) aims to fulfill his father’s wishes, for reasons that become clear over time.

Meanwhile, back at Downton Abbey, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) — left in charge of the house by Violet at the end of the last movie — weighs an offer to have a British movie production film in the house. Mary accepts, knowing the money could go to fixing the leaky roof. The movie people arrive, bringing with them the expected amount of backstage drama. And that’s where the plagiarism comes into the script.

It’s 1928, you see, and in the middle of filming a silent melodrama about a gambler and a noblewoman, the movie’s producer/director, Jack Barber (Hugh Dancy), gets a call from his studio to call it off — because talkies are now all the rage. Lady Mary suggests they turn the current production into a talking picture, but there’s a snag: The glamorous platinum-blonde leading lady, Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock), has a Cockney accent that could peel paint off the walls.

Yup, you sussed it out: Fellowes is cribbing the plot from one of the greatest movies of all time, 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain.” The only thing missing is knowing which character will take on the Debbie Reynolds role of dubbing their voice over Myrna’s.

You can throw a rock in any direction and hit another subplot, usually involving one of the beloved side characters finding true love. For example, the deep-in-the-closet head butler Barrow (Robert James-Collier) sees a chance at happiness when he catches the eye of the movie’s dashing leading man, Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who’s apparently living in a more luxurious closet. Or former servant Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) gets a chance to propose, finally, to the spinsterish maid Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy). And so on down the line.

With all these characters, director Simon Curtis (“My Week With Marilyn”) has only one job, and that’s traffic control. He manages to avoid any major crashes, but there are enough minor ones to prevent the movie from gaining any sense of rhythm.

It’s hard to imagine a third “Downton Abbey” movie, if only because the writers have a big historic wall ahead of them: The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression to follow. Surely, a household that has to bring in a movie production to pay for a new roof is destined for collapse when the world’s economy tanks — and I can’t believe the Anglophilic audience that eats this show up like crumpets will want to watch Lord Grantham fire the staff and sell off the antiques. “Downton Abbey” fans better soak up the luxury life while they can.

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‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some suggestive references, language and thematic elements. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: Alex Garland's 'Men' starts as an unsettling thriller about trauma, but goes off the rails in the end

Filmmaker Alex Garland’s latest jump down the rabbit hole of perception, titled simply and confrontationally “Men,” is like a Russian nesting doll — a metaphor that pops up in an unexpected and disturbing way in due course — as it takes us layer by layer into something that may not actually be there.

The story starts with Harper (Jessie Buckley), a recent widow who’s leaving London for some alone time in a quaint rural house she’s renting. The country life appeals to Harper, who plucks an apple off the tree in the courtyard and eats it. This earns her a rebuke from the rental manager, Geoffrey (played by Rory Kinnear), who admonishes her: “You shouldn’t do that — forbidden fruit.” He then guffaws, and tells her he was joking.

Harper wonders if she hasn’t stepped into some torturous dark place. When she sleeps, she relives the moment her husband, James (Pappa Essiedu) — moments after punching her in the face — falls to his death from an upper balcony, his look directed at her as he falls past the window. When she’s awake, she’s stalked by a man who has scars on his face and no clothes covering any other part of him.

Harper calls the cops to deal with the scary naked man, and later seeks some comfort from the town’s vicar. The fact that every man — the cop, the vicar, and the scary naked man — has a similar face (and are all, in fact, played by Kinnear) makes Harper’s hold on reality slip a bit more.

Buckley is quickly becoming one of our most reliable young actresses, and here she brings a morbid determination to the usual horror-heroine tropes. Equally adept here is Kinnear, playing the different strains of toxic manhood — the jocular landlord, the condescending cop, the judgmental vicar, and so on — with impressive shadings.

Garland — following up the android dreams of “Ex Machina” and existential dread of “Annihilation” — seems eager to make a point about trauma, and how it creates its own kind of monsters, and that those monsters are usually men. But whatever subtlety and tension Garland built in the first half evaporates into body-horror ickiness, as Harper’s imagined terrors become all too real.

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‘Men’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for disturbing and violent content, graphic nudity, grisly images and language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Emergency' sneaks a serious message about racism into a hard-partying college buddy comedy

Smuggling a lot of importance under the guise of a college buddy romp, director Carey Williams’ acidic comedy “Emergency” generates laughs, tears and a bracing look at the continuing perils of being Black in America.

Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) are roommates and best friends about to graduate from college. Kunle has his future well in hand, with graduate school at Princeton and a budding career as a biologist. Sean is more laid-back, more interested in vaping and drinking than in getting his thesis done. On this Friday night, Sean is determined to get Kunle to join him for the “Legendary Tour,” a run through all the parties at their school’s seven Greek houses.

Sean and Kunle’s party plans hit a snag when they notice a white girl passed out in their living room. Kunle’s first instinct is to call 911 — but Sean vetoes that idea, predicting that the cops would automatically think the worst. Instead, Kunle and Sean, with their dorky third roomie Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), load the vomit-stained girl into Sean’s minivan, to take her to the hospital, and hoping they don’t get pulled over first.

The plan goes awry, thanks to DUI checkpoints and Sean’s pre-function buzz. Also, there’s the matter of the girl’s older sister, Maddy (played by pop star and former Disney Channel icon Sabrina Carpenter), who notices her sister’s missing and goes in hot pursuit, with her BFF Alice (Madison Thompson) and hunky Rafael (Diego Abraham) along for the ride.

Williams (whose “R#J” premiered at Sundance last year) and screenwriter K.D. Da’Vila expanded this story from a short of the same name that won a special jury award at Sundance in 2018. This version has its share of wacky mix-ups — like a gag involving a spiked energy drink — and frenetic bickering among the main characters. But there’s a sharp undertone at work, too, as Kunle, Sean and Carlos (who’s Latino) must deal with the ever-present danger of life of being, as Sean puts it, “darker than a brown paper bag.”

Cyler (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) and Watkins pair up strongly, as their harrowing night reveals their characters’ contrasting attitudes and a few secrets the friends have kept from each other. For all of its sly humor and observations about race in America, “Emergency” is at its heart a buddy picture, and these two make that friendship feel like the real thing.

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‘Emergency’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters; will stream on Prime starting May 27. Rated R for for pervasive language, drug use and some sexual references. Running time: 104 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 21, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Firestarter,' once again, doesn't generate enough sparks for a Stephen King adaptation.

You know how film snobs always say Hollywood shouldn’t remake classics, but remake bad movies that had a spark of potential? That doesn’t work out so well, either — as a new version of Stephen King’s paranoid thriller “Firestarter” shows.

The 1984 version was notable for being the first big movie 8-year-old Drew Barrymore made after “E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial.” It was a random mess of a movie, with anonymous agents chasing down little Charlie McGee and her dad because she has the power of pyrokinesis — starting fires with her mind.

The new version starts much the same way, with college kids Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) going in for some pharmaceutical research and coming out with stunning powers. Vicky has telekinesis, being able to move objects with her mind, though she seldom uses it. Andy can “push” others into doing things and thinking things that would never have occurred to them. Andy once used this power to make two agents — who were stealing their baby, Charlie, from the maternity ward — kill themselves, so the family has been living as fugitives.

In the movie’s present-day, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is 11 years old, and bullied by the other kids at her school. She tries to hold in her rage, which leads to her surroundings getting very hot — enough to draw the attention of Capt. Hollister (Gloria Reuben), head of the shadowy agency known only as DSI.

Hollister calls upon a retired assassin, Rainbird (played by Michael Greyeyes), who has powers of his own. His mission is to bring in Charlie, alive, so Hollister’s agency can start studying her powers and possibly exploiting them. Killing Vicky early in the proceedings is just part of the job.

The bulk of Scott Teems’ script, adapting King’s novel, centers on Charlie and Andy on the road — as the father belatedly tries to train Charlie in the controlled use of her awesome power, and seeing if she can pull off any of her parents’ tricks, too. This could have made for some strong action sequences, along with some tender daddy-daughter time between Efron and Armstrong. But Teems and director Kevin Thomas don’t have the skill to make those scenes work, as evidenced by their attempt to give Armstrong’s Charlie her own sequence, a training montage that plays like a peewee rendition of a Rocky Balboa sparring session.

The acting is serviceable enough for a cheap horror movie, but none of the onscreen performers really make the audience shiver. If anyone does, it’s the guy making spooky music as composer: Horror maestro John Carpenter, working with his son Cody and frequent collaborator Daniel Davies.

So who gets the blame for two lackluster adaptations of the same Stephen King novel? Is it the filmmakers, unable to make an interesting premise work over the course of a full movie? Or is it King, for serving up an undernourished book and hoping the filmmakers will put some meat on the bones? I don’t have an answer, but the argument would be a hotter ticket than anything in “Firestarter.”

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‘Firestarter’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for violent content. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Memoria' is a hypnotic meditation on sound and nostalgia, a fertile field for actress Tilda Swinton's eerie magic

With the filmed-in-Colombia tale “Memoria,” the Palme D’Or-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul proves that his meditative, hypnotic style of filmmaking can cross oceans and retain its alluring power.

The only unsurprising thing in this movie is that Weerasethakul convinced the chameleonic actress Tilda Swinton — who has worked with a constellation of great directors, including Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Lynne Ramsay, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Bong Joon-Ho, Bela Tarr, Judd Apatow, Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodóvar — to star in his first English-language movie. 

Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish archaeologist living in Medellin, Colombia, where an excavation crew building a tunnel recently unearthed human bones that may be millennia old. But something else is distracting Jessica from her work. Early one morning, she hears a loud sound, a “thwack” that she cannot identify or pinpoint.

Early in the film, Jessica goes to meet a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), to ask him to create an approximate version of the sound. Later in the film, in a bit of film symmetry, she goes to the jungle and meets another man named Hernán (Elkin Diaz), who knows the sound from his dreams.

In long, static, evocative takes, Weerasethakul (who won the Palme D’Or for his 2010 memory play “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) captures the locations of Colombia — from the city to the jungle — and Jessica’s small but important place in their midst. Swinton, with her infinite curiosity, gently pokes and prods the contours of this setting and these situations, slowly discovering how much wider this world is than we realize.

“Memoria” should be experienced, if one is comfortable doing so, in a theater with a rich sound system. The journey Weerasethakul takes us on is sonic as well as cinematic, and that takes some extra space.

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‘Memoria’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some thematic elements and brief language. for Running time: 136 minutes; in English and Spanish with subtitles.

Review: 'Happening' is a harrowing — and now frighteningly timely — story of a young woman trying to obtain an illegal abortion

When director Audrey Diwan’s drama “Happening” opened in France last year, it was no doubt seen as a chilling reminder of the barbaric times women faced before abortion was legalized there. Opening this week in the United States, it’s a disturbing look ahead to what many women will likely face when — not if, apparently — Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Diwan and co-writer Marcia Romano have masterfully adapted Annie Ernaux’s novel, a thinly veiled memoir of a three-month period in university that threatened to upend her life as it was just beginning. It’s 1963, and Anne Duchesne (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) is a literature major at a university in Bordeaux, with high grades and a desire to become a teacher.

She’s also, at 22, attracted to young men, and they to her — a completely normal thing for a college student to be. One evening, she writes in her journal that her period is late. A week later, she sees her family doctor (Fabrizio Rongione), who examines her and tells her that she’s pregnant. 

When Anne tells her doctor that she doesn’t want to be pregnant, and wants help to have an abortion, the doctor won’t discuss it. In 1963 France, abortion is illegal — and both Anne and the doctor could go to prison if he performed the procedure. A title card informs the audience that she’s three weeks along.

Diwan shows the audience the next nine weeks of Anne’s life. She becomes closed off to her college friends, dismissive of the young men flirting with her in the bar. She falls behind in her studies, and argumentative with her mother (Sandrine Bonnaire). She also continues to seek a way out of her pregnancy, even if it means taking on the task by herself.

In a solid ensemble cast — which includes Anna Mouglalis in an uncompromising performance cannot be recounted in text — Vartolomei is a stunning revelation. Playing a young woman risking prison and death to put her life back on its path, Vartolomei gives a slow-burn performance of steadily rising tension.

Anne’s journey nears its end with one of the most unsettling scenes a movie is likely to produce this year. It graphically depicts what pro-abortion rights advocates say with regularity: That laws to ban abortions will only outlaw medically safe ones. It’s a scene I wanted to turn away from, but knew I had to watch, to bear witness to what the real Anne likely suffered before abortion was legalized in France — and what many American Annes in the future will face.

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‘Happening’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for graphic nudity, simulated depictions of abortion procedures, and language. Running time: 100 minutes; in French with subtitles.

Review: 'Petite Maman' is a deftly told and quietly moving story of the bonds between mothers and daughters

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma makes a small, perfect gem with “Petite Maman,” a quiet story of a little girl finding connection with her mother — a movie that’s as thematically different and emotionally moving as her torrid period romance, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

This spartan drama centers on Nelly (played by Joséphine Sanz), an 8-year-old girl who’s grandmother has just died. Sciamma, as writer and director, begins with Nelly saying goodbye to the other ladies she’s met in her grandmother’s nursing home. Then she rides along with her mom (Nina Meurisse) and dad (Stéphane Varupenne) to the house where Grandma lived — the house in which Nelly’s mother experienced her childhood.

While exploring the woods behind the house, Nelly finds a hut made out of tree branches — similar to the one her mother said she built when she was a child. Nelly also finds a little girl, about her age (and played by Joséphine’s sister, Gabrielle), in the hut. 

The girl, Marion, invites Nelly to play at her house on the other end of the path from Nelly’s grandma’s home. Marion’s house, where she lives with her mother (Margot Abascal), looks almost exactly like grandma’s — just 20-some years in the past. Nelly figures out, as the audience does, that Marion is her mother as a girl, and that the path between the two houses is really a time portal.

Sciamma doesn’t need expensive movie magic to make this act of time travel work. It’s powered by childhood magic, which is powerful enough for the task. The Sanz sisters — especially Joséphine as Nelly — make this relationship feel as natural as two girls who just met but are fast friends, because of a connection Nelly soon realizes she’s had since before she was born.

Nelly gets to see her mother in a new light, by seeing Marion’s mother — Nelly’s grandmother — as a woman in her 40s, rather than the gray-haired woman she knew from trips to the nursing home. The parallels between Marion and her mom, and Nelly and the adult Marion, are portrayed quietly and subtly, but still pack an emotional wallop.

“Petite Maman” is a marvel of storytelling efficiency, as Sciamma takes us through Nelly’s and Marion’s story, and leaves us in a puddle of well-earned tears, all in a mere 72 minutes. Sciamma pours meaning into every move, every moment, every object, in a beautiful story about two daughters and two mothers, and what separates and bonds them.

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‘Petite Maman’

★★★★

Opens Friday, May 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some thematic elements and brief smoking. Running time: 72 minutes; in French with subtitles.