Review: 'Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken' has gorgeous animation and a puny story to go with it

DreamWorks’ new animated tale, the skimpy but colorful “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” is another example of a genre whose technical expertise has outpaced its storytelling abilities.

Ruby, voiced by Lana Condor (from the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies), wants to be a typical teen hiding in plain sight in her high school in Oceanside. It’s not easy to do when you, and your family, are kraken, “the monsters of the sea.” Ruby’s parents, Agatha (voiced by Toni Collette) and Arthur (voiced by Colman Domingo) moved onto land when Ruby and her brother Sam (voiced by Blue Chapman) were little — and Ruby is under strict orders never to go to the ocean.

Ruby’s high school life involves hanging with her friends, and pining for Connor (voiced by Jaboukie Young-White), the skater boy to whom she’s teaching math. Connor’s the reason Ruby wants to go to prom, something Agatha won’t allow because prom is on a cruise boat on the ocean. 

One day, while trying to arrange a prom-posal, Ruby accidentally knocks Connor into the water — and when she goes in to save him, she discovers the sea water gives her powers, and makes her gigantic. This is the talent of the female kraken in her family, something Agatha has kept from Ruby since babyhood. Ruby also learns that she has a grandmother (voiced by Jane Fonda), who’s the warrior queen of the kraken, and eager to train Ruby to defend the oceans and eventually inherit the throne.

It’s Grandmamah who tells Ruby that the kraken have been in a generations-long war with the evil mermaids – and that the humans have the roles switched, thinking mermaids are friendly and kraken are monsters. But when Ruby finds out that her school’s popular new girl, Chelsea (voiced by Annie Murphy, from “Schitt’s Creek”), is a mermaid who wants to be Ruby’s friend, Ruby’s not sure who to believe.

Director Kirk DeMicco, who helmed “The Croods” and “Vivo,” and co-director Faryn Pearl (a story artist on “The Croods: A New Age” and “Trolls World Tour”) create a rich, colorful palette, both of Oceanside’s bustling human population and the ocean wonders Ruby encounters as her learns of her family’s history.

If only the story could match the visuals. The script — credited to “South Park” veteran Pam Brady and the team of Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi (who co-wrote “Lucy in the Sky”) — is a by-the-numbers coming-of-age story that, like Pixar’s “Turning Red” before it, equates female puberty to transformation into a giant creature. It’s a sturdy foundation for an animated movie, but the story needs more meat on the bones to truly engage the audience. 

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‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action, rude humor and thematic elements. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Asteroid City' shows the heartbreak under the whimsical surface of Wes Anderson's offbeat worlds

So much time and TikTok real estate has been spent lately mocking the director Wes Anderson for his whimsical, symmetrical visual esthetic — with parody sketches showing the Anderson versions of “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings,” among others — that it takes Anderson’s real work, like the melancholy “Asteroid City,” to remind viewers that it’s not the artifice that counts but what’s going on beneath it.

(Besides, TikTokers, “Saturday Night Live” beat you to it by 10 years, with their Anderson-style horror movie “The Midnight Coterie of Strange Intruders.”)

Asteroid City is a town in the Arizona desert, population 87 — as the sign leading into town informs us. It’s a place of pastel skies and red-rock formations, and Anderson lets us know he’s in on the visual joke by having an actual roadrunner dart past. Aside from the occasional cops-and-robbers chase speeding through town without stopping, not much happens here.

Something did happen some 5,000 years ago: A meteorite landed here, creating the crater in which the town sits. This summer, sometime in the Cold War-obsessed 1950s, the town is visited by a convention of junior stargazers, showing off their inventions in hopes of a scholarship, bankrolled by a defense contractor and handed out by an officious military man, Gen. Gibson (Jeffrey Wright). Meanwhile, the stargazers seek to impress a scientist, Dr. Hickenlooper (Tilda Swinton), who’s studying the meteorite.

During all this, war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) has brought his teen son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), a stargazer himself, and his three younger daughters, to the town. The family is still coming to grips with the death of Augie’s wife, the kids’ mother, and were supposed to meet the children’s grandfather, Stanley Zak (Tom Hanks), when their car broke down in Asteroid City. While the Steenbecks are stuck here, Augie makes a connection with an actress, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), whose daughter is also a stargazer.

Through all this, Anderson adds another layer. The story of Asteroid City, we are told early, is a Broadway play — and we’re viewing it through the lens of a TV documentary about the production, with Bryan Cranston as the TV anchor following the playwright (Edward Norton) through the steps from typewriter to auditions to rehearsal to stage.

As with any Anderson ensemble, there are more subplots and characters, and a sprawling cast that includes Maya Hawke, Rupert Friend, Steve Carell, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Steve Park, Live Schreiber, Matt Dillon, Adrien Brody and a few it’s best you not know about before watching.

It may feel overstuffed, as Anderson’s movies often do — about three of the five interlocking stories in “The French Dispatch” really came together — but it works. The pieces fit like a jigsaw, and Anderson’s toggling between the widescreen color vistas of Asteroid City and the boxy screen ratio of the black-and-white TV segments ensure that the foreground story and the background commentary never get confused.

And through the droll humor of Anderson’s surface details, he finds the ragged heart of the story. That heart is the shared grief of Augie, his kids, and Stanley, over the loss of Augie’s wife, seen only in a photograph — and how Augie, as a photographer in one plane of existence and as an actor in another, tries to come to terms with that loss in ways that no one on Earth, even the playwright, can answer for him.

“Asteroid City” may be Anderson’s most resonant work since the innocent preteen romance of “Moonrise Kingdom.” It’s a movie that disguises its seriousness within layers of playful humor — but the emotion is always hiding in plain sight. 

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‘Asteroid City’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'No Hard Feelings' is a raunchy sex comedy that skates by on Jennifer Lawrence's considerable talent and charm

Apparently, when Jennifer Lawrence gets material that’s beneath her — and the raunchy sex comedy “No Hard Feelings” is definitely beneath her — her response is to raise it up closer to her own level, through the sheer force of her talent and magnetism. 

Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, a 32-year-old Uber driver who’s a full-time resident of Montauk, a summer resort town on the farthest end of Long Island. On the morning we meet her, she’s fighting to keep her car from getting towed over nonpayment of house taxes — and the tow truck driver, Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a guy she once ghosted, isn’t in the mood to hear her pleas for leniency.

In need of a car, so she can earn enough money off the summer tourists to see her through the year, Maddie gets desperate. Then her pregnant best friend Sara (Natalie Morales) shows Maddy a Craigslist ad, from a rich couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who offer a lightly used Buick Regal in exchange for “dating” — and the quotation marks are key here — their introverted 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), before he leaves for Princeton. Maddie agrees to “date his brains out,” under the instructions that Percy’s not supposed to know the deal.

At first, Maddie comes on too strong, like when she finds Percy volunteering at an animal shelter, tending to a dachshund, and asking, “Can I touch your wiener?” After a few false starts — including an incredible scene where Maddie and Percy are skinny-dipping, and some drunk teens steal their clothes, only to get beaten up by Maddie, fully nude — Maddie starts to figure out that the way to fulfill her contract is to make friends with Percy. And when emotions come into play, everything gets complicated.

Director Gene Stupnitsky and co-screenwriter John Phillips, who previously made the kids-discover-porn comedy “Good Boys,” know their way around a dirty joke, and the movie has plenty of those. They’re less sure of themselves when the story turns tender, but by then the audience has built up enough goodwill for messed-up Maddie and painfully shy Percy to go with it.

None of it works, though, without Lawrence deploying her charm and forsaking her dignity in pursuit of a laugh. Lawrence shows a flair for physical comedy we haven’t seen much of, and she draws strong laughs with Maddie’s clumsily slutty attempts to woo Percy. When the movie turns sappy, though, Lawrence reminds us why she’s Oscar-caliber good, and gives “No Hard Feelings” some genuine feelings.

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‘No Hard Feelings’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual content, some graphic nudity and brief drug use. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'The Flash' is a monster mash of references to other superhero movies, with only a dash of originality

Do you remember in the first “Ant-Man” movie, there was a cameo by Garrett Morris — who, as die-hard fans would know, portrayed Ant-Man in a sketch on “Saturday Night Live” in the ‘70s? Now imagine a whole movie of callbacks like that, and you have DC’s “The Flash” in a nutshell.

Ostensibly, director Andy Muschetti (“It” and “It Chapter Two”) is telling the story of Barry Allen, aka The Flash, the lightning-fast young superhero of Central City. In reality, though, Muschetti and screenwriter Christina Hodson (who wrote DC’s “Birds of Prey”) are reworking a catalog of DC’s intellectual property, throwing in elbow-to-the-ribs references to the DC-related movies of Tim Burton, the Snyder-verse and other eras — in an effort to show how clever it all is, at the expense of anything approaching a human emotion.

Barry, like most DC superheroes, is leading a double life. As The Flash, he works with his Justice League colleagues to thwart disasters, such as an early set piece where a hospital is crumbling and he catches babies as they fall out of the maternity ward. As Barry, he works in Central City’s police forensics labs, while trying to find the evidence to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who has served 20 years for the stabbing death of Barry’s mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú).

Barry realizes that he has the power, thanks to his rapid running, to travel back in time — something his mentor, Bruce Wayne, aka Batman (played by Ben Affleck), warns him will have unforeseen consequences. But Barry is determined to go back and make a tiny, prosaic change that will change the circumstances that preceded Nora’s death.

The effect Muschetti uses to depict Barry’s time traveling is visually arresting — like a giant zoetrope with images of the past duplicated and spun around him. But the effort, and a monstrous figure caught in the time stream, forces Barry out of time traveling, and he lands five years too soon, where he encounters himself as an obnoxious 18-year-old. 

And while Nora is still alive, there are other problems in this timeline. For starters, General Zoe (Michael Shannon), the world-dominating Kryptonian, is back on the scene — but there’s no sign of Superman, Wonder Woman or the other “meta humans” that are Barry’s super friends. When the two Barrys go looking for Bruce Wayne, they find him, but he isn’t Barry’s Bruce. He’s a scraggly, hermit living in Wayne Manor, and played by Michael Keaton.

Barry is determined to fix the timelines he broke, and make the universe normal again. But the movie, after a while, lets Barry come to the inevitable conclusion that for the universe to survive, Nora must be allowed to die.

Muschetti is saddled with inheriting the worse aspects of Zack Snyder’s influence on the DC movie universe — the drab color palette, the grim action sequences, and the poor use of the movie’s female characters, namely Barry’s crush, young reporter Iris West (Kiersey Clemons), and the emergence of the Kryptonian woman Kara (Sasha Calle), better known as Supergirl.

The bending of the timelines is convoluted, though anyone who’s a fan of time-travel scenarios will recognize the concepts immediately. Playing with time and having multiple actors play the same character?  “Doctor Who” does that with regularity. And after the dimension-hopping possibilities explored in “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the options of the multiverse shown here — even in the grand finale, which resurrects three deceased actors through CGI — feel pedestrian.

The best thing about “The Flash” is the thing Warner Bros. can’t mention too loudly in its marketing: Its star, Ezra Miller. In the double role of both Barrys, Miller (whose offscreen bad behavior has eclipsed his onscreen talent) captures the comedy and drama of the situation, and gives a strong, empathetic performance that goes right even when so much else in this overamped movie goes wrong.

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‘The Flash’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some strong language and partial nudity. Running time: 144 minutes.

Review: Pixar's 'Elemental' is a gorgeously animated story of earth, air, fire and water — and a romance and an immigrant story, all in one

“Elemental,” the latest animated gem from Disney-Pixar, is an entertaining, tender look at cultural crossover, a romance that’s also the tale of a second-generation daughter trying to follow her heart and honor her family at the same time.

The action is set in Element City, a place where the inhabitants each represent, and are made from, one of the four classic elements — earth, air, water and fire — and display traits distinct to those identities. Air people can be a little dazed (head in the clouds, as it were). Earth folks are eco-conscious. Water people just “go with the flow,” and fire people can be, well, hot-headed.

That’s certainly the case with Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), who lives in Freetown with her parents (voiced by Ronnie Del Carmen and Sheila Omni) and is working to keep her temper in check so the family can see she’s worthy of inheriting Dad’s store, the Fireplace, in the heart of Freetown.

Ember and her family are strong metaphors for the immigrant experience. Ember has seen the struggles in her lower-class neighborhood, and the discrimination against fire people. And when Ember meets Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie), whose water people are Element City’s upper-income bracket, everyone around them make it clear that elements should never mix.

Director Peter Sohn, who made Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur,” and his three screenwriters let this fanciful story play out, as Ember works to hide Wade from her parents, while also hiding her feelings for him on the inside. And, as Ember prepares to take over Dad’s store, Wade helps her see that she needs to pursue her own path, even if it upsets her father.

The visuals are, as is common with Pixar, gorgeous. Pay special attention to the way the characters’ elemental nature is manifested in the complicated animation. Ember looks like she isn’t just a plastic figure covered in fire; no, with this animation, Ember is pure fire — and so is the movie surrounding them.

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‘Elemental’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some peril, thematic elements and brief language. Running time: 104 minutes, plus a 7-minute short film, “Carl’s Date.”

Review: 'It Ain't Over' is an overdue appraisal of Yogi Berra's baseball talent, beyond his light-hearted personality

How can someone who earned 10 World Series rings, and was named Major League Baseball’s MVP three dimes, be underrated? That’s the question “It Ain’t Over,” a heartfelt if somewhat soft-edged documentary, works to answer with regard to Lawrence Peter Berra, known to the world as Yogi Berra.

The movie starts with Berra’s granddaughter, Lindsay Berra (who’s the film’s executive producer), recalling a night in 2015, during the pre-game rituals of the MLB All-Star Game. Four men, billed as the four greatest living baseball players of all-time, walked out onto the field in Cincinnati that night: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. Lindsay, watching on TV, looked at her grandpa, and wondered why he wasn’t included.

From there, writer-director Sean Mullin makes a strong case why Berra was one of the best players in baseball history. His career as a catcher for the New York Yankees, during which time the Bronx Bombers won the World Series 10 times, is proof of that. The film tells how Berra would use a long bat, swinging at balls other players would think were outside the strike zone — and often he connected to get a hit. As catcher, he was a master tactician, a skill that guided Don Larsen, during the 1956 World Series, to pitch the only perfect game in the World Series.

So why didn’t Yogi get the acclaim he was due? The film argues that Berra’s small frame — he was 5-foot-7, a small fry next to the lanky Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle — made other teams, and the New York sportswriters, underestimate him. He also was known as a clubhouse comedian, a reputation that grew as his mangled syntax blossomed into the paradoxical phrases that became known as Yogi-isms. Some examples were “you can observe a lot by watching,” “when you come to a fork in the road, take it,” and “it’s déjà vu all over again.” (The one that gives the movie its title — “it ain’t over ’til it’s over” — is one that Yogi may not have ever actually said.)

Mullin gathers interviews from several of Berra’s surviving ‘50s and ‘60s teammates, as well as the Yankees who played when he managed the team. Throw in commentary from announcers and observers, such as Bob Costas and the late Roger Angell and Vin Scully, as well as lifelong Yankees fan Billy Crystal and Berra’s family.

But the best words about Yogi are uttered by the man himself, and there’s plenty of news footage and archived interviews to capture Berra’s charm. “It Ain’t Over” shows how Berra was a one-of-a-kind human being, on the diamond and off. As Yogi said once, “if you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him” — and when it comes to Yogi, nobody can.

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‘It Ain’t Over’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 16, in theaters. Rated PG for smoking, some drug references, language and brief war images. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Flamin' Hot' tells an entertaining — if fanciful — story of a striver and an iconic food brand's origins

As “based on a true story” movies go, the rags-to-riches tale in “Flamin’ Hot” is equal parts amusing and inspirational — even if the “true” part isn’t so true.

Richard Montañez — played as an adult by Jesse Garcia — tells his story, which starts growing up in migrant farm camps, learning from his grandpa (Pepe Serna) that the only thing he has of value is his family name. Richard’s life takes some hard turns, running with gangs as a teen and dealing with the abuse from his father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera). The bright spot in his young life is falling in love with Judy (Annie Gonzalez); they get married and have kids, but must deal with double shifts, unemployment and a refrigerator on the fritz.

With some luck and a gift for talking his way into situations, Richard lands a job as a janitor at the Frito-Lay plant in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. He works to impress his supervisor, Lonnie (Matt Walsh), and quickly learns the plant’s pecking order — executives on top, followed by the managers, then the engineers, and at the bottom are the janitors, most of them Mexican, like Richard. Still, Richard persists, convincing a senior engineer, Clarence C. Baker (Dennis Haysbert), to show him how the machines work.

Richard finds inspiration from, of all people, Roger Enrico (played by Tony Shalhoub), the CEO of Frito-Lay’s parent company, Pepsico. Richard sees Roger’s pep-talk videos in the cafeteria, and takes to heart the plea for employees to “think like a CEO.” With the snack business sinking, Richard makes an observation: Mexicans like him don’t like bland flavors like Cool Ranch Doritos. So Richard and Judy experiment with different hot peppers to get the “good burn” they love in elote and other Mexican foods. The result: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. 

The screenplay, by Lewis Colick (“October Sky,” “Charlie St. Cloud”) and Linda Yvette Chávez (who co-created the web series “Gentefied”), manages to be authentic and phony at the same time. The phony part is the story, because reporters in 2019 discovered that Montañez’s story that invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos wasn’t actually true. The authentic part is how the movie captures the many facets of Mexican American culture that influenced the Montañez family along the way.

Director Eva Longoria makes an assured feature debut, breezily taking the audience through the highs and lows of Richard’s life and the fierce, open-eyed devotion Judy shows throughout their marriage. She finds the humor and heart in this story, and gets committed, passionate performances out of Garcia and Gonzalez.

“Flamin’ Hot” joins a recent spate of movies inspired by corporate origin stories — Nike shoes in “Air,” a computer game in “Tetris,” a PDA in “Blackberry” — that find nostalgia in success stories of the recent past. Whether or not the story behind “Flamin’ Hot” is entirely true, it’s entertaining and charming, which is a tasty combination.

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‘Flamin’ Hot’

★★★

Starts streaming Friday, June 9, on Hulu and Disney+. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and brief drug material. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' puts some welcome humanity in the pounding Autobot action

To say “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is an improvement over the overblown franchise monstrosities directed by Michael Bay isn’t saying a lot — but it’s saying enough for this intermittently entertaining story of giant machines and tiny humans joining forces to save the universe.

The human part of the movie starts in Brooklyn in 1994. Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is looking for a job, so he can bring money into the family and pay off some of the medical bills the family owes treating his kid brother Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez), who has sickle cell disease. When legit work seems out of reach, Noah agrees to help the neighborhood crime boss, Reek (Tobe Nwigwe), steal a mint-condition Porsche.

The moment Noah gets in the Porsche, something strange happens: A booming voice comes out of the car stereo, saying “Autobots, assemble!” Then the car, seemingly with a mind of its own, speeds away with Noah an unwilling passenger. When he’s finally dumped out, he learns that the Porsche is actually an alien robot in disguise, named Mirage (and voiced by Pete Davidson). And that booming voice is the Autobots’ leader, Optimus Prime (voiced, now and forever, by Peter Cullen).

Meanwhile, on Ellis Island, another Brooklyn resident is having her own adventure. Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) is an intern in an archaeology museum, but knows more about ancient artifacts than even her bosses. So when a bird figurine arrives, she recognizes that its origins are mysterious — and when she pokes around after hours, it reveals to be a glowing rod of unknown origin.

Thanks to massive amounts of talky exposition, we know that the glowing rod is the trans-warp key, something the Autobots could use to get back to their home world. It’s also something that must not fall into the hands of the evil Unicron (voiced by Colman Domingo), a planet-eating mechanical creature who has sent his main henchman, Scourge (voiced by Peter Dinklage), across the universe to find it. 

Optimus Prime, who’s been hiding on Earth with his Autobots, is distrustful of humans, but he reluctantly agrees to let Noah and Elena help with their mission — because, being humans, they can go unnoticed in places where a Freightliner-sized robot would not. Eventually, and after more exposition, the mission lands in Peru, where we meet another group of Transformers: The Maximals, who look like ferocious animals and are led by the gorilla-looking Optimus Primal (voiced by Ron Perlman).

Director Steven Caple Jr. (“Creed II”) wades through a lot of exposition and ponderous dialogue — five writers are credited on the screenplay — to explain Unicron, the Autobots and Maximals relate to each other, and how humans got in the middle of all this. (The screenwriters also slip some lines in for the diehard fans, including a reference to former franchise star Mark Wahlberg.)

For most of us, the windy dialogue is filler for the robot battles — but it’s those battles that are the reason to see “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.” The finale, like most blockbusters, unleashes a torrent of computer-animated action — but here, the stakes and emotional connections are drawn out well, and Ramos and Fishback bring a welcome dose of humanity to the well-staged mechanical mayhem.

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‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence, and language. Running time: 127 minutes.