Review: Disney's live-action 'Pinocchio' gets tied down by corporate and technological limitations

The wooden almost-boy Pinocchio sings “I got no strings to hold me down” in the 1940 Disney animated classic movie “Pinocchio” — and here, too, in a live-action/computer-animated hybrid that’s tied down, unfortunately, by Disney’s vault-raiding corporate strategy and director Robert Zemeckis’ addiction to technological whiz-bang spectacle over everything else.

The story, based on Carlo Collodi’s classic novel, is familiar to everyone by now, particularly the Disney variation. The kindly woodcarver Geppetto, lonely for companionship, carves a wooden boy that he names Pinocchio. The Blue Fairy hears the wish of Geppetto’s lonely heart, and brings Pinocchio to life — with the advice that if he’s brave, honest and unselfish, he will turn from wood into a real boy. Since Pinocchio doesn’t have a conscience to tell him right from wrong, the fairy assigns him one: Jiminy Cricket, a vagabond insect who becomes Pinocchio’s traveling companion and voice of wisdom.

What do Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”) add to this mix? A lot of surface details, and some familiar casting. Tom Hanks — Zemeckis’ stalwart collaborator in “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away” and “The Polar Express” — is cast at Geppetto, apparently continuing the weird-accent run he started in  “Elvis.” Jiminy Cricket is voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who starred in Zemeckis’ “The Walk.” The Blue Fairy is portrayed by Cynthia Erivo, who brings some elegance and hits the high notes on “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

Other than that, the only new wrinkle so far is the winking references to the Disney catalog in Geppetto’s collection of cuckoo clocks — which re-enact such classics as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and Zemeckis’ own “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” among others.

The story continues down the familiar path, as Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) enters the big world and discovers its dangers. On his way to school, Pinocchio is distracted by Honest John, a fox (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key), and his silent cat companion, Gideon, with promises of fame and fortune — if Pinocchio joins the traveling puppet show put on by the nasty promoter Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston). Pinocchio becomes star of Stromboli’s show, but also Stromboli’s prisoner. From that mess, Pinocchio lands in another, thanks to the Coachman (Luke Evans), on his way to Pleasure Island with a new caravan of wayward boys and girls (yup, Pleasure Island is now an equal-opportunity trap). 

The computer animation that Zemeckis loves to play with (see “The Polar Express,” “Welcome to Marwen” and other motion-capture monstrosities on his filmography) becomes a trap in itself. It produces lifelike visuals that approximate the animated wonders we remember from the 1940 version. But relying on them denies the audience the experience of seeing the happy ending we wait for, to see Pinocchio finally become a real boy — because it’s impossible to hire a young actor who’s going to look enough like the Disney-copyrighted puppet we’ve been watching for the previous 90-plus minutes. 

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‘Pinocchio’

★1/2

Starts streaming Thursday, September 8, on Disney+. Rated PG for peril/scary moments, rude material and some language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.' takes on evangelical hypocrisy, with strong performances by Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown

The mock-documentary satire “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” — a punctuation-heavy title — takes some hard swings at hypocrisy and selfishness in a Southern Baptist megachurch, and get in a few good licks thanks to their talented stars, Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown.

Brown and Hall portray Lee-Curtis Childs and his wife, Trinitie, the pastor and “first lady” of a prominent Baptist church in a Georgia city. A documentary crew has been hired to chronicle the preparations for the church’s reopening on Easter Sunday, to return to Lee-Curtis’ suave, charismatic sermons extolling the virtues of following Jesus and warning against temptation — mostly against the “sin,” in Lee-Curtis’ view, of homosexuality.

Lee-Curtis and Trinitie don’t want to discuss with the documentarian about the circumstances that prompted their church to close and their flock to abandon them for other preachers, notably the up-and-coming Shakura and Keon Sumpter (played by Nicole Beharie and the one-named actor Conphidance). But a few clues emerge, slowly at first, that Lee-Curtis was involved in a sex scandal involving young men.

As the opening approaches, both pastor and first lady start to unravel, shifting from passive-aggressive — like when Trinitie re-baptizes Lee-Curtis in the church’s baptismal pool and holds him under a few seconds longer than necessary — into just plain aggressive. The documentarian’s camera (as well as some moments that seem like a documentary crew wouldn’t have been privy to) show how Lee-Childs is out to prove all the doubters wrong, while Trinitie is determined to regain the status that her husband’s misbehavior has cost her.

Writer-director Adamma Ebo (her sister, Adenne, is first among the many producers) captures the telling details of the megachurch life — all the conspicuous spending justified in the name of shipping souls to Jesus, the thinly veiled contempt for other pastors, and the quietly accepted misogyny and hypocrisy that undergirds it all. The observations generate laughs, though with a sting to them that occasionally feels a little too much like shooting fish in a barrel.

The actors playing the not-so-holy Childses make the movie work. Brown’s slick portrayal captures the confidence, bordering on arrogance, that Lee-Curtis can reclaim his spot in the pulpit without ever truly facing up to his sins. And Hall goes even further, showing the lengths to which Trinitie will go — the indignities she will endure — for a chance to get back on top. It’s Brown’s and Hall’s perfectly paired instincts to find the humor and heart in this absurd situation that gives “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” Its power.

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‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 2, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'The Good Boss' is a dark comedy with a bite, and a showpiece for Javier Bardem's acting skills

Is it possible that Javier Bardem — like his talented wife, Penelope Cruz — does his best work in their native language? That’s one takeaway from the dark comedy “The Good Boss,” in which Bardem plays a CEO slowly unraveling.

Bardem plays Blanco, the CEO of Blanco Scales, and running a well-oiled factory that produces equipment to weigh and balance anything from people to cattle. Blanco tells his employees they’re all his family, and that the loyalty and camaraderie of his employees is one reason the company is a finalist for a major award. But with the inspection committee coming to visit the factory in the next few days, problems emerge to tarnish Blanca’s sterling reputation.

There’s José (Óscar de la Fuente), an accountant recently fired by the company, who sets up a one-man protest outside the front gate. There’s Miralles (Manolo Soto), the factory’s floor manager, whose marriage is falling apart — because his wife, Aurora (Mara Guil), is sleeping with the company’s head of logistics, Khaled (Tarik Rmili). And there’s a new intern, Liliana (Almudena Amor), whose beauty becomes a distraction for Blanco.

Blanco is the sort of boss who thinks he can solve any problem. When one of his machinists, Fortuna (Celso Bugalio), comes to him because his son, Salva (Martin Páez), gets arrested, Blanco arranges to have the lad work for Blanca’s wife, Adela (Sonia Almarcha), in her dress shop. But as the awards committee’s visit looms nearer, Blanco gets the hard lesson that he can’t fix everything.

Writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa — who worked with Bardem previously on the unemployment drama “Mondays in the Sun” and the Pablo Escobar biopic “Loving Pablo” — builds up the tension, and the wry humor, gradually, which just heightens the discomfort at Blanca’s expense. 

The key to that tension is Bardem’s slow-burn of a performance. His Blanco starts off as avuncular and easygoing, but when the going gets tough, his teeth ultimately come out. It’s a strong, nuanced performance, and gives “The Good Boss” its ferocity.

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‘The Good Boss’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality, some violence and language. Running time: 116 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Breathless' is back, a fascinating landmark of the French New Wave that feels as fresh as ever

How can a movie be more than 60 years old and look so fresh, cool and timely? See "Breathless," Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 debut now refreshed in a new print, and you'll be asking the same thing.

"Breathless" -- along with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour" -- heralded the start of the French New Wave, which shook up stodgy European filmmaking (and later the U.S. movie world) with bold visuals, taboo-shattering subject matter and rule-breaking camera movement and editing.

Godard centers "Breathless" (the French title, "Á bout de souffle," means literally "at breath's end") around Michel Poiccard (played by the hunky Jean-Paul Belmondo), a none-too-bright petty criminal who's obsessed with Humphrey Bogart and other American gangster icons. He graduates to the top of the most-wanted list when he steals a car in Marseilles and kills a motorcycle cop.

Michel drives to Paris with two goals: Retrieve money owed him by a gangster, and hook up again with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student he romanced a few weeks earlier in Nice. He finds her in the street as she's selling newspapers and tries to persuade her to run away with him to Italy — not knowing that he's on the run from the law.

In "Breathless," Godard revealed the obsession with Hollywood iconography — the cigarette dangling from Bogie's lips, the fast cars and cool guns — that fueled the French New Wave. In transferring those icons, Godard made some of his own, from Belmondo's smoldering stare to the alluring sight of the pixie-haired Seberg in her New York Herald Tribune T-shirt.

And while emulating Hollywood cool, Godard also invented a much-copied form of filmmaking. Relying on hand-held camerawork, shooting guerrilla style on the Paris streets, and moving the action with impatient jump-cuts, Godard rewrote the rules of cinema -- rules that sparked the visions of generations of maverick filmmakers.

Minus the French subtitles and the credits (what little there are, besides the title, a distribution visa number and a dedication to Monogram Pictures), you could thread "Breathless" through a projector during any given day of the Sundance Film Festival and half the audience would think it was the work of some new 20-something filmmaker — rather than a film made by a guy who's now in his 90s. Even now, with its rough-and-tumble feel, "Breathless" can still take your breath away.

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‘Breathless (Á bout de souffle)’

★★★★

Opens Friday, September 2, for a one-week run at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for sensuality, violence and language. Running time: 90 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

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This review originally appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on November 11, 2010, to mark the film’s 50th anniversary.

Review: 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' puts Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in an intriguing but claustrophobic story

Two great actors, a director who never seems to put a foot wrong, and a story brimming with visual possibilities — so why is “Three Thousand Years of Longing” not quite the slam-dunk it should be?

The protagonist here is Alithea Binnie, played by Tilda Swinton. She’s a narratologist, a scholar of storytelling, and it’s safe to say she’s heard them all — which may be why she’s unimpressed with notions of romantic tales. She lives alone, as she tells the audience in the somewhat overdone narration, and she once had a husband. She’s content with her books and her studies, and traveling to conferences to meet academics like herself.

While attending such a conference in Istanbul, she goes shopping in one shop, and encounters an unusual glass bottle — blue and white stripes, and quite beautiful as found objects go. But when she gets to her hotel room and tries to unstick the stopper, something escapes the bottle: A djinn, or a genie, played by Idris Elba.

After sorting out the language barrier — the djinn has been in that bottle for centuries — he offers Alithea what most djinns offer to people who free them from bottles: Three wishes. There are some limits, like not wishing for extra wishes or wishing to be immortal, but otherwise the djinn’s purpose is to give Alithea whatever her heart desires.

Alithea isn’t going for it, though. She has studied all the stories about wishes, and she knows that they always are cautionary tales about wishes that go badly. (Heck, anybody who watches a season of “Fairly OddParents” knows that.) Alithea’s refusal to play along frustrates the djinn, who tries to prove his sincerity and his need to grant wishes by telling stories of his experiences as a wish-granting genie.

It’s in these stories where director George Miller — the man who made the “Mad Max” movies — really shines. After being cooped up in Alithea’s Istanbul hotel room for a fair stretch of the movie, it’s a relief to travel ancient lands with this djinn, who describes falling in love with the Queen of Sheba, trying to help another court’s concubine (Megan Gale), and other instances where his devotion sometimes overrode his good sense.

Miller and co-writer Augusta Gore (adapting a short story by A.S. Byatt) have their biggest problems balancing the claustrophobia of the scenes in Alithea’s hotel and the ornate palaces of the djinn’s stories. Even Swinton’s Alithea seems to buckle from the tight quarters, as she finally reveals a wish that upends the entire movie and guarantees a melancholy ending no matter how things work out.

Watching Swinton and Elba banter for the hour before that radical storytelling shift is worth it, no matter what the movie throws at us after the fact. Their back-and-forth — between the all-powerful begging to be of use and the story expert whose lifetime of contentment leaves little room for life-changing wishes — is delicious, and gives “Three Thousand Years of Longing” the bite it needs.

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 26, in various theaters. Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'The Invitation' is a horror thriller with some clever twists, as Nathalie Emmanuel shows she's not just a 'final girl.'

A haunted house horror-thriller takes an odd turn or two in “The Invitation,” a movie that’s often clever but sometimes too clever for its own good.

The main figure here is Evie Jackson, a New York-based ceramic artist who makes ends meet by working as a cater waiter. She’s played by the talented and insanely beautiful Nathalie Emmanuel, known for playing the translator Missandei on “Game of Thrones” and the ace computer hacker in the “Fast & Furious” series.

After working one corporate event for a genealogy company, Evie gets one of their DNA testing kits and takes it. When the results come back, Evie — who is a single child whose parents are dead — learns that she has a distant cousin in the U.K., Oliver Alexander (Hugh Skinner). Oliver is thrilled to find a new relative, and offers to pay to bring Evie to England for a family wedding, so she can meet the rest of the family. Impulsively, and because there’s no movie if she doesn’t, Evie agrees.

Evie enjoyed the taste of the super-rich life at the Yorkshire mansion where the wedding is to take place, and she’s intrigued when the two maids of honor — Victoria (Stephanie Corneliussen) and Lucy (Alana Boden) — befriend her. But she’s really taken by the lord of the manor, Walter DeVille (Thomas Doherty), who’s dreamy and charming.

Still, there’s something off about the place. It could be the arrogance of the manor’s butler, Mr. Fields (Sean Pertwee). Or it’s the line of newly hired maids wearing numbers on their aprons and collars. Or it’s the fact that she’s there for a couple days and doesn’t know who’s getting married at this family wedding.

If Evie had read a certain work of 19th century literature, she would have taken a hint from the name of Walter’s estate — and understood exactly what kind of horror movie she was in.

Director Jessica M. Thompson (whose debut “The Light of the Moon” won at SXSW) and screenwriter Blair Butler (whose first movie, “Polaroid,” got buried by the Harvey Weinstein scandal) create some strong atmospherics in the creepy old castle. They also play some intriguing games with the uneven gender dynamics — for most of the film, the only women present are Evie, her new friends Victoria and Lucy, her stern maid Mrs. Swift (Carol Ann Crawford) and a rapidly depleted line of short-term maids.

What makes “The Invitation” watchable is Emmanuel, in what’s essentially her first leading role in a movie. Emmanuel shows charm and romance-movie chops in the early scenes with Doherty, and gets righteously nasty when she learns what’s really going on with this wedding. If there is a sequel to “The Invitation,” and an epilogue scene sets up that possibility, let Emmanuel have anything she wants to make it.

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‘The Invitation’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violent content, some strong language, sexual content and partial nudity. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Samaritan,' starring Sylvester Stallone as a superhero in decline, is an idiotic mess of an action movie

The idiotic action movie “Samaritan” is proof that “straight to streaming” is this generation’s “direct to DVD” — an indicator that a famous face on the box art isn’t enough to guarantee anything interesting within.

The famous face here is Sylvester Stallone, who plays Joe Smith, a garbageman who tries to keep to himself in his neighborhood on the seedier side of the fictional Granite City. One person who does notice Joe is Sam Cleary (Javon “Wanna” Walton), a 13-year-old kid who spends his days trying to dodge a gang-banging weasel, Reza (Moises Arias) and his cohorts — who all work for the area crime boss, Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek, formerly of “Game of Thrones”).

When Joe finds Sam getting beaten up, and tosses Reza and his pals to the farthest walls of the alley, Sam has an epiphany: That Joe must be Samaritan, the Granite City superhero who disappeared from the scene 20 years earlier, after reportedly killing his brother and main nemesis, called Nemesis, to prevent an evil plan being launched on the city. Joe denies that he’s Samaritan, but the feats of strength and tolerance for pain are telling a different story.

Meanwhile, Cyrus is amassing big weaponry for an evil plan of his own. A key to that plan is stealing Nemesis’ old mask and his weapon, a sledgehammer that is supposed to be the only thing that can kill Samaritan.

The script, by Bragi F. Schut (who co-wrote “Escape Room”), is loaded with placeholder characters — people with a handful of traits in search of a well-rounded personality. The prime example is Sam’s mom (Dascha Polanco), who we know only as an emergency-room nurse who’s always pulling a double shift. That’s about all the script gives Polanco, or us, to work with, and it’s a credit to Polanco that she can keep from laughing at the string of cliches she’s supposed to project.

Director Julius Avery (“Overlord”) manages to string together a few solid action sequences, which is no small feat when your star is 76 years old and not moving like he did in his Rocky Balboa days. 

But any sophistication in the production side is undercut by sketchy plot mechanics and some astoundingly bad performances — namely from Asbaek, but also Arias and Martin Starr as a bookstore owner with his own red-stringed wall of Samaritan sightings. One wonders what it might have taken to bring the material up to snuff, but the answer is the difference between a streaming service and a real movie studio.

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‘Samaritan’

★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, August 26, on Prime. Rated PG-13 for strong violence and strong language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Breaking' gives John Boyega a meaty character in a veteran at his low point, but there's too much going on around him

A strong ensemble cast — led by John Boyega, Nicole Beharie and the late Michael K. Williams — can’t quite overcome the narrative confusion of director Abi Damaris Corbin’s “Breaking,” which tries to examine a real-life hostage incident from a few too many angles.

Bodega plays Brian Brown-Easley, who walks into a Wells Fargo branch in Marietta, Ga., one summer morning in 2017 to withdraw some cash. He banters, charmingly and politely, with a teller, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva) — but the banter stops when Brian hands Rosa a note with four words on it: “I have a bomb.”

Across the bank floor, manager Estel Valerie (Beharie) sees something is brewing, and starts quietly telling customers and coworkers to get out of the building. By the time Brian gets loud with his demands, only Estel and Rosa are left in the bank, and the police are on their way.

Outside the bank, the predictable scene unfolds. Squad cars, followed by SWAT teams, the police chief (Robb Derringer) talking to reporters, helicopters flying overhead, and a sniper looking for a clear shot. The officer leading the response, Maj. Riddick (Jeffrey Donovan), argues with the lead negotiator, Sgt. Eli Bernard — played by Williams in one of his last movie roles; he died in September 2021 — who eventually talks to Brian and learns they have something in common: They both served as Marines.

Brian explains to Estel and Rosa, and to anyone who will listen, that he doesn’t want the bank’s money. Rather, he wants the monthly disability check he gets from the Veterans Administration, which was unfairly diverted to pay down a debt he said he had already paid.

Through the ordeal, the phone is a lifeline for Brian. He tries to reach his ex, Cassandra (Olivia Washington), and their daughter, Kiah (London Covington). And he gets in touch with a local TV producer (played by Connie Britton), who sympathetically tries to interview Brian and hook up to Eli and the police.

Boyega gives a dynamic performance as the ex-Marine at the end of his rope, and he’s best matched with Beharie as the bank manager trying to keep her fear in check, and Williams as the negotiator trying to make sure everyone gets out alive — no sure thing when most of the people outside the bank are cops with guns.

The problem with “Breaking” is that Corbin and her co-screenwriter, playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, try to cram all those side stories into the film, and only a few of them rise above the cacophony. In the process, the movie’s message — something about how systems can crush people’s spirits, particularly when those people are of color — gets lost in the noise.

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‘Breaking’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 26, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content, and strong language. Running time: 102 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 23, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival (under the title “892”).