Review: 'The Amazing Maurice,' adapting Terry Pratchett's children's story, is a funny attempt at a fractured fairytale

Loaded with clever animation and droll British wit, the animated “The Amazing Maurice” is a charming sendup of the fairytale genre that revels in the act of storytelling itself.

Adapted from the late Terry Pratchett’s “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,” part of Pratchett’s expansive “Discworld” series, the story starts with a talking cat, Maurice (voiced by Hugh Laurie). 

Maurice works a clever scam alongside a human, Keith (voiced by Himesh Patel), and a group of talking rats — where the rats “infest” a town, the cat urges the townsfolk to hire a piper, Keith, who lures the rats away while Maurice collects the money. Then they go to the next town and do the whole thing again.

The scam works until they reach the market town of Bad Blintz, which already has its problems: There are no rats visible, but something is stealing all the food. The town rat catchers seem to be doing too good a job, under the command of the mysterious Boss Man (voiced by David Thewlis), who has a dark secret up his sleeves.

It also doesn’t help that Maurice’s cover is blown when he’s found out by Malicia (voiced by Emilia Clarke), the daughter of the mayor (voiced by Hugh Bonneville). Malicia loves telling stories so much that she’s telling this one — she’s the narrator, and explains to the younger viewers such concepts as “framing device” and “backstory.” 

The plot boils down to whether the rats can solve the mystery and thwart Boss Man’s nefarious, and whether Maurice can overcome his cat instincts — to be selfish and run away from danger — to help his rat friends find their sanctuary, described by the wise rat called Dangerous Beans (voiced by David Tennant) as a place where animals and humans co-exist peacefully, without poisons or traps.

Directors Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann keep the pace lively, and mount some clever action set pieces that are exciting without being too violent. The screenplay, by “Shrek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” co-writer Terry Rossio, captures a lot of Pratchett’s dry humor as the story deconstructs its tropes and rebuilds them in interesting ways — and gives “The Amazing Maurice” more bite than the average kids’ movie.

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‘The Amazing Maurice’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 3, in theaters. Rated PG for action/peril and some rude material. Running time: 92 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2023, when the movie appeared at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Knock at the Cabin' is a solid thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, but Dave Bautista is the reason to watch

As he has done so often in his career, director M. Night Shyamalan deploys his abundant skills as a film craftsman to uncertain ends in “Knock at the Cabin” — a tough-minded horror thriller that keeps the audience clenched in anticipation all the way to a finale that will have as many interpretations as it has viewers.

(I’ll try to keep the synopsis out of spoiler territory — other than what Universal has already divulged in the movie’s trailer. But If you want to go in cold, read this after you’ve seen it and we can compare experiences.)

The story begins with Wen (Kristen Cui), almost 8 years old, out in the woods catching grasshoppers in a jar and diligently cataloging them in her notebook. Then she notices a man some distance away in the woods — and, before long, the man is walking right up to talk to her.

The man, played by Dave Bautista, is large and, at first, intimidating. He talks in a quiet, reassuring voice. Wen is wary, telling the man that she’s not supposed to talk to strangers — and the man agrees that is a wise policy. He tells Wen that “I’m here to be your friend,” and introduces himself as Leonard. Then he says his heart is broken, “because of what I have to do today.”

This scares Wen, as it should, and she runs back to the rental cabin she’s sharing with her two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). They lock the doors and windows, and wait until Leonard pounds on the front door.

Leonard’s not alone. He has three people with them, all carrying makeshift weapons — clubs with large blades attached, mostly. They fight their way into the house, and in the short battle Eric is knocked out and given a concussion. Both dads are tied to chairs, which is when Leonard and the others explain themselves.

Leonard insists that he and the others are ordinary folks — Leonard’s a schoolteacher from Chicago; Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) identifies herself as a post-op nurse from California; Adriana (Abby Quinn) says she works as a line cook in a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C.; and Redmond (Rupert Grint) works for a utility in Boston. 

The four say they all have seen visions of the apocalypse, and are convinced that the only way to prevent the end of the world is for Eric, Andrew and Wen to choose for one of them to be sacrificed, killed by someone in their family. The longer they wait to make that choice, Leonard tells them, more people on Earth will die.

The script — written by Shyamalan and the rookie writing team of Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, adapting Paul Tremblay’s novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” — moves to a fairly familiar rhythm, as the four invaders plead with the two dads, who don’t believe their talk of apocalypse. There also are some well-placed flashbacks that establish the dads’ relationship and how they adopted Wen as a baby from China to become this loving family.

The remarkable moments in the film belong to Bautista, who’s become more of a true actor than one would expect from a 6-foot-4 ex-wrestler. Bautista has previously shown he’s got action and comic chops, in his role as Drax in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. Here, though, he brings a soulfulness and a quiet intensity to the pre-apocalyptic proceedings.

The question mark, as with most Shyamalan movies, is how he sticks the landing. In his masterpieces, “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable,” the ending is where all the pieces fall perfectly into place, and you see the clockwork precision of his design. More recently, though, in movies like “Split,” “Glass” and “Old,” the ending is where everything goes haywire, and the springs of the clockwork fly out of the mechanism.

With the ending to “Knock at the Cabin,” the ending just  … happens. There’s no brilliant summation, and no disaster. It ends like a solid thriller is supposed to end, as if Shyamalan’s biggest twist is to deliver a movie that is well-constructed and goes pretty much where you expect it to go.

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‘Knock at the Cabin’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Living' is quietly emotional, and a Oscar-nominated showcase for Bill Nighy

Like the main character that has given Bill Nighy his long-deserved Academy Award nomination, director Oliver Hermanus’ “Living” is elegant and emotionally restrained — but with a massive heart beating underneath that placid surface.

Nighy plays Rodney Williams, a civil servant who has worked for decades in the public works department in London. The movie starts somewhere around 1950, after World War II, and Williams — having received a diagnosis that he has a terminal cancer — is realizing that his life of filing away papers and wrapping proposals in red tape isn’t fulfilling.

First, he decides to flee London, his work, and his son Michael (Barney Fishwick) and his daughter-in-law Fiona (Patsy Ferran), for the seaside, with half of his life’s savings with him. In a coastal town, he is befriended by a garrulous playwright (Tom Burke), who gives him a tour of the arcades and burlesques of the town. That turns out to be unsatisfying, too.

Back in London, he continues to play hooky from work, and spends a pleasant afternoon with a young woman, Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), who recently left Williams’ office for another job. She ultimately cajoles him to return to the public works department — but he’s a changed man, his colleagues notice, suddenly eager to push forward projects he used to bury.

If this story sounds familiar, then you’re a fan of classic arthouse movies. It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru,” adapted with precisely controlled emotions by novelist Kazoo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), who also got an Academy Award nomination this week.

Hermanus and Ishiguro establish with a few light brushstrokes the stifling conformity in which Williams has lived much of his life — riding the same train every morning that his junior staffers do, sitting at the same desks and forming what Miss Harris calls “skyscrapers” of bureaucratic files. It’s all painstakingly realized, and the perfect cage from which Williams so desperately wants to escape.

Nighy does give a career-high performance here, going from quiet acceptance to melancholy to a resolve to make something of his life, no matter how short that life will be. Nighy makes “Living” a story that will move the viewer to tears — and to examining what one is doing with their life.

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‘Living’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 27, in select theaters. Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Missing' is a tight cyber thriller, where some big ideas play out on small screens

The cyber thriller “Missing” works — as its predecessor, “Searching,” did — because it keeps all its action on a computer screen, and finds an endless supply of tricks to make that visual premise work on our nerves for nearly two hours.

At 17, June (Storm Reid) barely lifts ahead above her laptop to acknowledge her mom, Grace (Nia Long), who’s getting ready to leave on a week’s vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung). June doesn’t think she has to look up, because everything she needs is on her screen, or on her phone. She’s got video to remember her late father (Tim Griffin), FaceTime to keep in touch with Grace’s longtime friend Heather (Amy Landecker), chat platforms to converse with her friends, and Google to research ways to get booze for a party she and her friends are going to throw as soon as Grace’s plane is airborne.

When June goes to LAX a week later to pick up her mother, Mom is a no-show. June learns, from the FBI’s man at the Bogota embassy, Agent Park (Daniel Henney) that Grace and Kevin’s luggage is still at their hotel in Cartagena, but no one knows what happens to them.

June is worried, but not without resources. She hacks into Kevin’s Google account to dig up information from his emails. Remotely, she hires Javi (Joaquim de Almeida), a day laborer in Cartagena, to go to Grace’s hotel to follow her trail. And she monitors surveillance cameras at Cartagena landmarks, in hopes her mom suddenly shows up.

June’s computer savvy uncovers some bombshells of information, which the story drops at steady intervals, creating some white-knuckle tension and some hairpin turns in the narrative.

Directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick — who were editors on “Searching” — and co-screenwriter Sev Ohanian (who also co-wrote “Searching”) — create a cleverly rendered thriller, loaded with red herrings, switchback narratives, and some effective plot twists that keep June, and the audience, on their toes.

“Missing,” like “Searching” was before it, is an eye-opening commentary about the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, smartphones and easily hackable data — and a reminder that one’s personal data doesn’t necessarily remain personal for long. Wrapping that message up in a slick, fast-paced thriller just makes the message go down faster.

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‘Missing’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, language, teen drinking, and thematic material. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'The Son,' despite its strong cast, is a willfully dreary piece of pandering Oscar bait

Sometimes you have to trust the system — and the system has rightfully rejected the Oscar-season pander-monster that is “The Son,” a pedigreed sadness machine that is as phony as can be.

Reading the names in the movie’s credits would make you think this is something special. It’s directed by French playwright-turned-filmmaker Florian Zeller, based on one of his plays, adapted for the screen by Zeller and Christopher Hampton. Those are the same people, and circumstances, that in 2020 produced “The Father,” the justly acclaimed drama about Alzheimer’s that won Oscars for Anthony Hopkins’ gut-wrenching performance and for Zeller and Hampton’s adapted screenplay.

The cast is loaded with dramatic heavy-hitters: Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, for starters, along with Oscar winners Laura Dern and, again, Hopkins — playing, despite the title’s suggestions of a sequel, a markedly different role than he did in “The Father.” 

What could go wrong? Plenty, as Zeller explores some serious topics — parental abandonment, teen depression and suicide — with none of the sincerity and sensitivity that “The Father” displayed.

Jackman plays Peter Miller, a successful New York lawyer with everything going for him: A beautiful young wife, Beth (Kirby), a new baby they share, and the potential for a high-powered job in a D.C. congressional office. That perfection gets upended when Peter’s first wife, Kate (Dern), calls up with a big problem: Their teen son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), has been skipping school and showing signs of self-harm. Kate is at her wit’s end, and asks Peter to let Nicholas live with him for awhile.

Peter tries to connect with Nicholas with some old-school moves of guys hanging out and doing stuff. But Peter finds he’s ill-equipped for being father to a troubled teen — and the steps he attempts are too much in line with how his cold father (played by Hopkins) treated him.

All this might work in a stage play, but onscreen it dissolves into a hackneyed, overcooked melodrama in which the main characters each are given two emotional settings, and the audience has to guess which way the switch has been flipped. Is Peter a loving dad or a short-tempered one? Is Nicholas truly suicidal or just manipulative? Is Kate trying to be a good co-parent or is she secretly trying to win Peter back? Is Beth jealous of her stepson or rightly protective of her baby? The way Zeller leaves the options open feels like a writer playing a capricious God.

That said, the actors work to produce human-scaled performances — especially Dern and Kirby, as the mothers trying to protect their children. But there’s too much of a stacked deck in “The Son” to let the performances overcome Zeller’s shameless handling of the subject matter.

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‘The Son’

★★

Opens Friday, January 20, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving suicide, and strong language. Running time: 123 minutes.

Review: 'Women Talking' is a shattering drama about women isolated by religion and liberated by faith

Few movies tell their stories as economically and as emotionally as “Women Talking,” writer-director Sarah Polley’s quietly powerful drama about women confronting the terrors of their life, the pain of their religion and the joys of their faith.

Polley’s beautifully spare script, adapted from Miriam Toews’ novel, doesn’t tell us at first when the events in this movie happen. Among the women of this Mennonite community, cut off from the outside world, it seemingly could be any time. 

What we’re told at the outset is that many of the women have woken up over the past few years in pain, bruised all over their bodies, and frequently bleeding from their private areas. Some of them find out later that they became pregnant. When the women reported this to the menfolk, the men said the women had imagined it, or were being punished for not having sufficient faith.

Then the truth comes out, that one of the men had drugged the women and raped them. The male leaders of this community go into town to bail out the perpetrator, and give the women orders when the men get back: Forgive the rapist, or be banished from the community that has been the only life they or their children have known.

The women, clad in their neck-to-floor prairie dresses, gather in the hayloft and vote for their three options: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the community. Here’s where the “talking” of the title happens, as the women weigh their vote.

Salome (Claire Foy) is the most militantly angry of the group, while Mariche (Jessie Buckley), after years of abuse from her husband, is cynical that anything can change. Salome’s unmarried sister Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant after being raped, is more thoughtful, as she works to understand how men who are the pillars of their faith could commit such horrific acts.

Among the older women, Greta (Sheila McCarthy), Mariche’s mother, seeks to find answers from the metaphor provided by her carriage horses, Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand) boycotts the whole discussion, and Agata (Judith Ivey), Salome and Ona’s mother, advises the women to find forgiveness — if not for the men, than for themselves that they could be put in this situation.

The women’s words are taken down by the one man left behind on the compound, the shy schoolteacher August Epp (Ben Whishaw), who went away from the colony for his education but reluctantly came back. Ona, who has known August for years, asks August to transcribe the women’s meeting, so there will be a record of their thoughts — as conflicted as they are.

Polley haș transformed so gracefully from child actor to sensitive filmmaker that it feels completely proper that she should take on this difficult material. The “action” is entirely in the dialogue, as the women work to talk through the ramifications of their decision. At its heart, the discussion is about faith, which is one’s relationship with God — as opposed to religion, defined here as a construct of men, designed to maintain power and control in God’s name.

Picking a “best” performance out of this ensemble is impossible, as each of the women support each other, and it’s the accumulated power of their portrayals that makes the movie so compelling. (Perhaps this is why awards groups such as the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild — unable to choose among Mara, Foy, Buckley, Ivey or McCarthy — have not nominated any of them individually. The Screen Actors Guild did nominate the movie for best ensemble, their equivalent of a Best Picture category.)

Together, the women of “Women Talking” pull at our hearts, make us understand their pain, and allow us to marvel at their grace and stamina to carry on in spite of what they have endured. These women onscreen — and the one, Polley, behind the camera — also give us enough to think about, and talk about, long after the film is over.

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‘Women Talking’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content including sexual assault, bloody images, and some strong language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Plane' is a brawny, but often brainless, throwback to the airplane disaster dramas of old

Like most movies that have the name Gerard Butler above the title, the action thriller “Plane” is, like the characters Butler usually plays, tough and single-minded and not always that bright.

Here, Butler plays airline pilot Brodie Torrance, who’s flying a late-night run from Singapore to Tokyo. His co-pilot, Samuel Dele (Yoson An, the romantic lead in the live-action “Mulan”), is new to Brodie, giving screenwriters Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis room to lard up on backstory: How Brodie is Scottish (saving Butler the work of affecting an unconvincing accent), flew with the RAF, and is a widower with a college-age daughter, Daniella (Haleigh Hekking), waiting in Hawaii for a New Year’s Eve reunion.

The plane soon is loaded up with Brodie’s personal story, the flight crew and 14 passengers — one of them a handcuffed fugitive, Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter). Brodie and Dele put the plane in the air, and right into a storm that Brodie warned the flight officer in Singapore would be trouble. When lightning hits the plane and knocks out the computer-run flight systems, Brodie has to crash-land, and finds a remote island in the Phillippines. Only two people die before the landing: A flight attendant Brodie knew, and the air marshall chaperoning Gaspare.

On the ground, lead flight attendant, Bonnie Lane (Daniella Pineda), tries to get the passengers organized, while Brodie and Dele look at the maps and figure out where they are. They realize they’re on an island not controlled by the Philippine government, but by a group of separatist rebels whose No. 1 hobby is taking foreigners hostage and killing them when they don’t get their ransom demands. Brodie picks Gaspare — who has military training — to help find a way to contact the airline.

At the airline’s corporate offices in New York, the CEO and his crisis team is working to find the plane and minimize the public-relations fallout. At this point, the CEO (Paul Ben-Victor) says in a very important voice — and I swear I’m not making this up — “Get me David Scarsdale.”

David Scarsdale — played by Tony Goldwyn because Lloyd Bridges is no longer with us — walks in, starts ordering people around, and declares that the only way to get the passengers and crew home safe is to send in mercenaries with lots of guns and a bag of cash to pay off the rebels. This is the closest thing the suits in New York have to a plan, and because some studio executive thinks it’s time to reboot the “Airport” franchise, that’s what they do.

Of course, this being a Gerard Butler movie, Brodie has another idea: Shoot, stab or beat up every rebel he sees. Gaspare can’t talk Brodie out of this plan of attack, so he joins in the mayhem.

French director Jean-François Richet, who made the 2005 remake of “Assault on Precinct 13,” stages some passable action sequences, with a lot of handheld camera work to make the action seem more jittery and exciting. The problem is that it takes a long time to get to the meat of the action, leaving Butler in unfamiliar territory: Trying to act like a human being, rather than the one-man wrecking crew the audience paid to see. The result in “Plane” is a bloody action movie that’s as generic as its title implies.

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‘Plane’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Broker' is a tenderly rendered tale of illegal adoption, and the makeshift family brought together by desperation

The Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu hops over to Korea to make his latest film, “Broker,” but he keeps what has worked for him before: A sly intelligence and an empathy for people living on life’s margins and creating a found family.

The story begins when So-Ahn (Lee Ji Eun) leaves a baby on the sidewalk outside a church in Busan. Then another woman, Soo-jin (Doona Bae), gets out of a car, and puts the baby in a “baby box” — a sort of night depository for abandoned babies. Two volunteers inside the church, Sang-hyeon (Song Kang Ho, the poor dad from “Parasite”) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong Won), decide to take the baby, with the intent of finding a couple to adopt the kid outside legal channels.

Kore-eda, who also wrote the script, soon reveals that this isn’t the first time Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo have done this. Soo-jin knows this, because she’s a police sergeant who’s staking them out, with a junior detective, Lee (Joo Young Lee), in hopes of busting them for human trafficking.

This time, though, something’s different in the pattern. This time, the baby’s mother, So-Ahn, comes back to talk to the church workers. So-Ahn tells the men that she wants in, to get a cut of the money — 10 million won, a shade over $8,000 — that will come from selling the baby to a wealthy couple.

The three of them hop in a beat-up delivery van, from Song-hyeon’s laundry business, and drive to meet a prospective couple. Something about them, though, feels fishy about the couple’s haggling, so So-Ahn unilaterally rejects the deal. And the three reluctant business partners hit the road.

The group arrives at an orphanage, which is where Dong-soo grew up. Song-hyeon tells So-Ahn that Dong-soo aged out of the orphanage, because no one would adopt him — because his mother left a note saying she would someday come back for him. So-Ahn left a similar note with her baby boy, whom she named Woo-Song, and wonders aloud whether she really meant it.

Leaving the orphanage, the group realize they have a stowaway, the soccer-loving Hae-jin (Im Seung Soo). With the kid added to the mix, this group starts coalescing into a sort of makeshift family. But Soo-jin and Detective Lee are still staking them out — which is complicated when Soo-jin learns from HQ that a local mob boss has been murdered, the baby is the mobster’s child, and So-Ahn may be a suspect in the boss’s death.

As he did with “Shoplifters” (which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2018), Kore-eda paints a rich portrait of people living on society’s edges, trying to get by with what they can scrape together — even if those methods aren’t legal. Yes, it’s weird to have a movie where you’re supposed to empathize with black-market baby brokers, but as Kore-eda peels away the layers of the onion, we start to empathize with Dong-soo’s orphan background and So-Ahn’s desperation to save her baby from a bad life. 

In “Broker,” Kore-eda is blessed with a strong ensemble of actors, who capture the quirks of each character and manage to meld them into a powerful unit — a family, for lack of a better world.

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‘Broker’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language.  Running time: 130 minutes; in Korean with subtitles.