Review: Disney's 'Strange World' is a good-looking but all-too-familiar science fiction tale

Disney’s latest animated movie, “Strange World,” is a visually wondrous but narratively slight movie, a collection of ideas cobbled together from classic adventure tales like “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “The Lost World.”

The prologue introduces us to the explorer Jaeger Clade (voiced by Dennis Quaid), whose thirst for adventure and glory propel him to try to climb over the circle of mountains that isolates his nation of Avalonia. He also raises his son, Searcher, to join him on these expeditions — but as a young adult (voiced by Jake Gyllenhaal), Searcher would rather study the strange energy-producing plant life he finds during Jaeger’s latest push over the mountains. The two argue, and Jaeger continues toward the mountains alone.

Cut to 25 years later, and Searcher is in his 40s, married to Meridian (voiced by Gabrielle Union), a crop-duster pilot — and they have built a successful farm, growing that energy-producing plant, now called Pando, which has turned Avalonia into a technologically advanced country, like Wakanda but with more puffy airships.

Searcher and Meridian also have a teen son, Ethan (voiced by Jaboukie Young-White), who has more of the explorer gene than his dad finds comfortable. (Ethan also has a crush on a teen boy, which makes him the first major character in a Disney cartoon who’s gay. This has nothing to do with the plot, but it’s good to have in there because it will make all the wrong people lose their damn minds.)

Searcher gets a visit from Callisto Mal (voiced by Lucy Liu), the president of Avalonia and a former crewmate of the Clades in their exploring days. Something is affecting the Pando, which is all connected through the roots (just like the real pando, the 107-acre aspen stand in central Utah). Callisto is leading an expedition to save Avalonia’s power supply, and wants Searcher, as the leading expert on Pando, to join her. Soon all the Clades are on the trip — including Jaeger, who they find in this underground world.

Co-directors Don Hall (who’s co-directed “Big Hero 6” and “Raya and the Last Dragon”) and Qui Nguyen (who co-wrote “Raya”) create some stunning visuals for this underground world — a place where everything is both amazing and trying to kill people.

The weak spot is the screenplay, credited to Nguyen, which recycles some well-worn science-fiction conventions (including some I can’t identify without spoiling the film) and then falls back on way-too-familiar father-son tropes. As visually great as “Strange World” is, the story underneath isn’t as strange as it needs to be.

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‘Strange World’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril and some thematic elements. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Bones and All' is a bloody and beautiful horror-romance, about young cannibals in love and on the run

In the long list of movies about lovers on the run — from the sweetly innocent (“Moonrise Kingdom”) to the homicidal (“Natural Born Killers”), with “Breathless,” “True Romance,” “Queen & Slim” and countless others in between — it’s hard to think of one that is simultaneously as romantic and as horrific as “Bones and All.”

And, because it’s directed by Luca Guadagnino, who has done both romance (“I Am Love,” “Call Me By Your Name”) and horror (“Suspiria”) exceedingly well, it’s no surprise that the movie is by turns beautiful and chilling.

When we first meet Maren (Taylor Russell), she’s a shy new girl at a Virginia high school in the early 1980s. She’s happy to be invited to a slumber party by one of her classmates, and all seems to be going well, until she starts biting the finger off one of the girls.

Racing back home, Maren’s father (André Holland) tells her to start packing, and within hours they have crossed into Maryland. They’re not there long before Maren discovers her father has abandoned her — leaving behind some cash, Maren’s birth certificate, and a cassette tape in which Dad tries to explain what he’s kept hidden from his daughter.

In short, Maren is a cannibal, and feels the compulsion occasionally to feed on the flesh of her fellow humans. Left on the streets, Maren learns two important facts: 1) She can smell other cannibals from a long distance, and 2) they can smell her, and there’s an underground community of them. The first one she encounters, a creepy dude named Sully (Mark Rylance), explains that they call themselves “eaters.”

After sharing a meal with Sully, Maren hops onto a bus heading to the Midwest — in hopes of finding her birth mother, listed on her birth certificate, and last known to be living in Minnesota.

Maren meets other eaters — even though they tend to maintain their distance from one another, to keep from drawing suspicion. One of them is Lee (played by Timotheé Chalamet), a handsome drifter, and the two soon go from traveling companions to lovers.

The scenes with Russell and Chalamet are hauntingly beautiful, as they travel through the heartland in moments that evoke Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” two young people in love and occasionally killing people.

Guadagnino, working with screenwriter David Kajganich (who wrote “A Bigger Splash” and the “Suspiria” remake) to adapt Camille DeAngelis’ novel, follows the road-movie playbook to stirring effect. Maren and Lee meet some chilling characters, and Guadagnino employs actors he’s worked with before — including Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper and Chloë Sevigny — to create some white-knuckle moments. None are more blood-curdling than Rylance’s performance, though.

“Bones and All” is not for the squeamish, but for those who can go the distance with it, it’s bloody brilliant.

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‘Bones and All’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'Devotion,' a story of Navy fliers in the Korean War, is a combat movie at its most sincere

The air-war drama “Devotion” is as sincere as a movie can get, an old-fashioned story of friendship under fire, inspired by true events.

It’s 1950, and a new Navy pilot has arrived at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, to train for the most dangerous flying available: Landing on aircraft carriers. The pilot, Lt. Tom Hudner (Glen Powell), proves himself in the air immediately, keeping up with the best aviator on the base, Ens. Jesse Brown (Jonathan Majors), when they’re paired up for the first time.

Brown is the only African-American pilot in the training squad, though the movie doesn’t show any of his squad remarking on his race other than noting the novelty of having a Black pilot. Later, when the squad is assigned to a carrier, some of the ship’s junior officers harass Brown because of his skin color — but Brown keeps cool, tamping down any urge to fight back.

In another important respect, Brown is different from the other squadron pilots: He’s married, to Daisy (Christina Jackson), with a small child. When the squadron is called up to fly missions in Korea, at the start of the conflict there, Daisy asks Hudner to watch her husband and “be there for him.”

Director J.D. Dillard — whose last two movies, the thrillers “Sleight” and “Sweetheart,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival — is quite dutiful in the military training sessions, which resemble what “Top Gun” would have looked like if it was made in 1951. The wartime scenes are more breathtaking, with the ratatat feel of aerial combat footage.

Majors (“Lovecraft Country”) and Powell (“Top Gun: Maverick”) have strong bro-chemistry, as Powell’s Hudner becomes eager to jump into the racism battles that Majors’ Brown struggles to avoid. The other notable performance is Thomas Sadowski as the squadron’s commander, who speaks quietly and philosophically about the horror and necessity of war.

The last image in “Devotion” is a dedication to Dillard’s father, who served in the U.S. Air Force (as my father did). Dillard’s earnest war movie does his family, and the military, proud.

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‘Devotion’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language, some war action/violence, and smoking. Running time: 138 minutes.

Review: 'She Said' is a gripping account of the reporting that brought down Harvey Weinstein — and a smart look at how journalism gets done

It’s been years — maybe as far back as “All the President’s Men” in 1976 — that a movie has captured the craft and the passion of journalism as precisely and as smartly as director Maria Schrader’s “She Said.”

And, like that Redford/Hoffman movie about Watergate, “She Said” chronicles the real-life efforts of two journalists painstakingly investigating a story about a corrupted leader and the enablers who allowed him to avoid accountability.

The prologue introduces the concept, as New York Times reporter Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) works to follow up on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that almost — key word there, almost — derailed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign to become president. Twohey is working this story while she is pregnant for the first time.

After the election, the story moves ahead five months, with news that right-wing host Bill O’Reilly was leaving Fox News over multiple sexual harassment accusations. The Times’ editors urge their reporters to start looking around for other instances of workplace harassment, and, as one editor, Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson), puts it, “interrogate the whole system.”

Reporter Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) starts with a tip that Harvey Weinstein, the powerful Hollywood mogul who led two companies — first Miramax, and then The Weinstein Company — had sexually harassed, abused and intimidated women, from famous actresses to lowly assistants. Kantor talks to a skeptical Twohey, who has seen women go public with such claims only to be dismissed, and convinces her to join her in investigating the story.

The two reporters work slowly, methodically, through dead ends, calls that end abruptly, and even a moment where a door is closed in their faces. Some women are willing to talk about their experiences, but for the longest time, no one will speak on the record. 

The way Schrader (who directed the German comedy “I’m Your Man” and episodes of the series “Unorthodox”) and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (“Disobedience,” “Colette”) adapt Kantor and Twohey’s book (based on their reporting with Corbett) is a gripping demonstration of narrative restraint. The movie never re-enacts the scenes of sexual violence, but sometimes shows the location — an empty hotel room, usually — where those events took place. 

The telling of the stories is in the hands of the actresses playing those women, delivering chilling monologues about their encounters with Weinstein and the legal and personal hell that followed. The audience is learning the stories just as Kantor and Twohey did, by listening to them talk about what happened.

Some of those conversations are the best moments in the movie. Samantha Morton steals her one scene, as a former studio assistant who provides crucial documents to Kantor, and Jennifer Ehle is devastating as a woman looking back on what Harvey did to her 25 years earlier. And I have to mention Ashley Judd, who plays herself here, making the accusation that saying “no” to Weinstein in the ‘90s derailed her career.

Mercifully, the film makes no attempt to have an actor perform a full impersonation of Weinstein, which would have been comical and appalling in equal measure. Instead, a voice actor portrays Weinstein in phone calls, trying to cajole an unmoved Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher), the Times’ editor-in-chief, to give more time for Weinstein’s response to the accusations. The only time we see an in-the-flesh Weinstein is when he shows up in the Times’ newsroom, and we see only the back of his head.

In that scene, Mulligan shows extraordinary poise as Twohey, and she maintains that unflappable journalistic calm through the film. (There’s a notable exception, where she blows up at a guy trying to pick them up at a bar.) Kazan matches Mulligan well, as she gently interviews one woman after another, chipping away at the wall of silence surrounding Weinstein.

Together, Mulligan and Kazan make a strong reporting duo — as good as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in “All the President’s Men” — with an important difference: As women digging into a story about women being harassed and abused and worse, Kantor and Twohey are allowed to show some empathy toward their subjects, and to allow their shared experiences as reporters and moms to let some emotion seep through. Their humanity doesn’t interfere with their journalism; it enhances the story, and reminds us that reporters are people, too.

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‘She Said’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and depictions of sexual assault. Running time: 128 minutes.

Review: 'Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio,' gloriously done in stop-motion animation, is a dark and beautiful variation on a classic tale

Stop-motion is the artisan-crafted branch of the animation genre, and seldom is it as finely crafted as it is in “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a sumptuously dark and twisted take on the Carlo Collodi classic.

In this telling, the kindly woodcarver Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) is first shown in happy times, with his son, Carlo. But when Carlo is killed when a bombing run hits their village, during World War I, Geppetto is distraught. He buries Carlo next to the boy’s mother, and plants a tree over the grave. 

Some time later, when the tree falls, Geppetto carves a puppet from the wood — and that night, the Blue Fairy (voiced by Tilda Swinton) gives life to the puppet (voiced by Gregory Mann). The puppet-turned-boy also gets a conscience, in the form of one Sebastian J. Cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor), who also becomes our narrator.

Pinocchio’s first appearance in the village, during Sunday Mass, elicits screams from the townsfolk and a nasty sneer from the town’s Fascist prosecutor, Podesta (voiced by Ron Perlman). When Pinocchio declares that he’s not a puppet, his nose grows into a good-sized tree branch, a sign that when he lies, the evidence is clear.

Del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson, a veteran animator, throw Pinocchio through some familiar misadventures — including working for a greedy showman (voiced by Christoph Waltz) and being swallowed by a terrible sea creature. What’s new here, in a script del Toro co-wrote with “Adventure Time” scribe Patrick McHale, is that Pinocchio also has to contend with the realities of war and the rise of Benito Mussolini.

The animation is painstakingly created, the stop-motion figures are incredibly detailed, and the story carries a surprising amount of weight for this oft-told story. This is a version of “Pinocchio” that makes one believe that this boy is both completely wooden and completely real at the same time.

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‘Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 18, at some theaters; starts streaming December 9 on Netflix. Rated PG for dark thematic material, violence, peril, some rude humor and brief smoking. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: 'The Menu' leaves a bad taste in the mouth, in spite of strong performances by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy

A dark comedy that’s not quite as clever as it thinks it is, “The Menu” is a scathing takedown of foodie culture and the shared obsessions of megalomaniacal chefs and the diners who demand to eat their food.

The dinner guests hop onto a yacht headed to a remote island, where they are paying $1,250 a head for the most unique dining experience of their lives, at The Hawthorne. We follow one couple, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult), and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), as they sample the amuse-bouche, an oyster with some kind of foam and lemon pearls. Tyler, who obsesses about fine cuisine, shows off his knowledge by informing Margot that the “pearls” are made with alginate. Margot isn’t particularly impressed.

Tyler, Margot and the other diners — who include a fading movie star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), an imperious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her editor (Paul Adelstein), a rich older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who are regulars, and three expense-account dude-bros (Rob Yang, Arturo Castro and Mark St. Cyr) — are led on a tour of the island’s garden, seafood harvesters, chicken coop and smokehouse by the head waitress, Elsa (Hong Chau), before entering the dining room.

Once inside the restaurant, where the kitchen is in plain view of everyone, Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) starts the show. The movie gradually reveals, course by course, that Slowik has meticulously planned not only the menu but the guest list — and that everyone has some past tie to the chef. Everyone, that is, except Margot, a last-minute fill-in for Tyler’s ex-girlfriend. Slowik recognizes that Margot doesn’t belong, and takes her aside to ask a question: “Are you with us or are you with them?” Margot soon realizes the question has deadly implications.

Director Mark Mylod (a veteran of “Succession” and “Game of Thrones”) works off a script, by comedy writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, that seems wedged between being a dark comedy and being a thriller — and not quite working as either. The comedy elements run toward heavy-handed absurdity, and the thrills are telegraphed too early and often.

The central conflict — between the devilish Slowik and the quick-thinking Margot — brings out some sly acting both from Fiennes and Taylor-Joy, whose cat-and-mouse moments almost sustain “The Menu.” Unfortunately, almost isn’t enough.

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‘The Menu’

★★

Opens Friday, November 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: In 'Bardo,' director Alejandro G. Iñárritu takes us on a tour of Mexico and his demons.

In his latest movie, “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” director Alejandro G. Iñárritu returns to his native Mexico to tell an apparently personal story about family, friends and the overwhelming desire to pick up a camera and capture the world.

Iñárritu’s emotional stand-in here is Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a former journalist who has become an acclaimed documentarian, one who uses re-enactment and other narrative techniques to crystalize his take on history and other topics. He lives in Los Angeles, but is returning to Mexico to receive a prestigious award — the first Mexican ever to receive the honor.

The award comes not long after his wife, Lucia (Griselda Siciliani), gives birth to their son. While still in the birthing room, though, the baby declares it doesn’t like this broken world and wants to go back into the womb — so the medical staff obligingly stuffs the kid back into Lucia. (We later learn the baby died a day after being born, and Iñárritu’s symbolism comes to represent the dead child as recurring memory.)

Iñárritu and cinematographer Darius Khondji bounce from vignette to vignette, sometimes critiquing Mexico’s history and its relations to the United States, from the Mexican-American war to current migrant crossings. At other times, Silverio encounters the ghost of his own father, who imparts the advice to “Take a swig of success, swish it around and spit it out, otherwise it will poison you.”

Silverio’s journey through his life has some familiar strains — it’s clear that Iñárritu has watched Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2,” both famous movies about filmmakers mining their pasts for fodder. It doesn’t always work here, but watching Iñárritu and his “Birdman” collaborator Nicolás Giacobone try to figure it all out over nearly three hours is intriguing.

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‘Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 18, in some theaters, and streaming on Netflix. Rated R for language throughout, strong sexual content and graphic nudity. Running time: 159 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Spirited' wastes a good 'Christmas Carol' twist and the comic talents of Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell

The holiday comedy “Spirited” offers a promising twist on “A Christmas Carol,” featuring two really funny leading actors who riff well against each other — and, yet, it’s a damp squib of a Christmas cracker.

The story starts at what looks like the end of the story, as a neighborhood busybody (Rose Byrne, leading the parade of cameos) gets shown her sad, lonely death, and then comes out of her house on Christmas morning a changed person. It’s another triumph for the four ghosts — Jacob Marley (Patrick Page), and the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), Present (Will Ferrell) and Yet-to-Come (Loren G. Woods in the suit, voiced by Tracy Morgan) — and their massive magical support crew.

There’s not much time to celebrate — though they do break for a musical number, because (as we’re told early) the afterlife is a musical — before they start planning for next year’s awful person to turn good. Christmas Present finds a particularly nasty target, a publicity consultant, Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), whose a one-man controversy-generating industry. When we first see him in action, he’s advising a trade group of Christmas tree farmers how to start whisper campaigns to make buying plastic trees un-American.

Marley objects to the choice, because Clint is labeled “unredeemable” — and only one other “unredeemable” case was ever turned good. But Christmas Present is adamant, so the effort to re-create parts of Clint’s past, present and future gets underway.

When Christmas Eve rolls around, the spirits discover something they haven’t encountered before: Clint doesn’t want to change his life, and starts needling Christmas Present about why he took this job in the first place. 

What follows are some intriguing twists, including putting Clint’s assistant, Kimberly (Octavia Spencer), as his reluctant accomplice and a potential love interest for Christmas Present. Unfortunately, the plot is either heavily reliant or stopped dead in its tracks by the musical numbers, with songs written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the team who wrote more memorable numbers for “La La Land,” “The Greatest Showman” and “Dear Evan Hansen.”

The most consistent pleasures in this uneven movie are when Ferrell and Reynolds are onscreen together, comically insulting each other. Reynolds’ wise-acre verbal delivery turns out to be a good counterweight to Ferrell’s blustering goofball, and their friction does generate a few comedic sparks. So does Mani (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) as a very funny Christmas Past, her usual ethereal calm thrown for a loop when she starts lusting after Clint.

Director Sean Anders (“Instant Family,” “Daddy’s Home”), working with regular co-writer John Morris, can’t keep the premise afloat long enough to make it work, and he lets Reynolds’ and Ferrell’s refreshingly sour chemistry melt away into maudlin bro-love. It’s too bad, because “Spirited” had a chance to be the next great off-the-wall Christmas comedy.

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‘Spirited’

★★

Opens Friday, November 18, at some Megaplex theaters, and streaming on Apple TV+. Rated PG-13 for language, some suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 127 minutes.