Review: 'PAW Patrol' sequel, 'The Mighty Movie,' gives our dogs superpowers, but doesn't give them anything interesting to do with them

One of the most insulting things you can do to a kid — and I know I’ve done it a few times in my life — is to talk over their heads, speaking to other grown-ups as if the little ones can’t hear you. It’s something the makers of the kid-targeted “PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie” do repeatedly, and it makes for one annoying little movie.

It starts when the seven heroic dogs of the PAW Patrol are called to rescue the owners of a junkyard, who have been locked in their office trailer as a fire rages amid the wrecked cars. One of the junkyard operators, Janet (voiced by Kristen Bell), describes the PAW Patrol in one line of dialogue: “They’re dogs who drive cars. Just go with it.”

Isn’t that funny? It’s like the filmmakers are saying, “Hey, we know this is stupid crap — but it’s OK because your little monsters like the pretty colors and think dogs are cute.” Not thinking about the fact that those kids are listening, and can feel the derision oozing from every frame.

The culprit in the fire is an evil genius, Victoria Vance (voiced by Taraji P. Henson), who needed the junkyard’s electromagnet to complete her tractor beam, which she aims to use to pull a passing asteroid to Earth, so she can use its power for — well, that part’s kind of vague, as if Victoria, or the screenwriters, haven’t thought things through that far.

When the asteroid lands, the PAW Patrol gets there first, and seven power crystals emerge to latch onto the pups’ dog tags. The dogs discover that the crystals give each of them superpowers. For example, the resident pilot, Skye (voiced by Mckenna Grace) gains super-strength — a big boost to her self-esteem, which is rather battered because she’s the smallest of the group.

Director Cal Brunker and co-screenwriter Bob Barlen, who collaborated on the first “PAW Patrol” movie in 2021, set up a series of confrontations with the dogs on one side and the scheming Victoria — aided by the returning Mayor Humdinger (voiced by ) — on the other. Our heroes face some adversity, as well as a flashback sequence practically stolen from “Toy Story 2” (with Christina Aguilera providing the sad ballad instead of Sarah McLachlan), on the way to a happy ending.

Adults in the audience will wonder why some actual famous people — Bell, James Marsden, Chris Rock, Lil Rey Howery, Serena Williams and Kim Kardashian — signed on to supply voices here, sometimes just for one line of dialogue. The answer’s simple: What better way to make your kindergarten-aged kid think their parents are cool than to snag tickets to the premiere, or (in the case of Kardashian) spots in the voice cast?

Everyone in the audience, adults and kids alike, will be wondering how something this slight and inconsequential became a franchise capable of producing a TV series and two (soon to be three) theatrical films. Adults and all but the most polite kids will be squirming in their seats, wishing some cute dogs could rescue them from boredom.

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‘PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie’

★★

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild action/peril. Running time: 85 minutes, plus a 7-minute short, “Dora and the Fantastical Creatures.” 

Review: 'Fair Play' is a trashy sexual drama in Wall Street trappings, hiding a thin plot behind rough sex scenes

Except for one strong performance, there’s little to find appealing in “Fair Play,” a lurid exercise in corporate backstabbing that disguises its thin plot with extravagantly nasty sex scenes.

Emily (Phoebe Dynevor, from “Bridgerton”) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich, from “Solo”) are young, prosperous and very much in love — so much so that Luke proposes to Emily in the most awkward way possible (after sex in a bathroom at a relative’s wedding). Aside from family, though, they can’t tell anyone, because they work at the same high-stress New York financial firm, where the employees aren’t supposed to fraternize.

It’s the sort of place where millions can be made or lost with a single decision, and analysts like Emily and Luke are taking apart the data and making pitches to their managers — called PM’s — to inform those decisions. When one PM implodes after a stock purchase gone wrong, the big boss, Campbell (Eddie Marsan), has to promote a new one. And, despite a rumor that Luke will be the new PM, instead Campbell gives the job to Emily.

At first, Luke is congratulatory and supportive. But it’s not long before the late nights, the confabs with Campbell, and the pressures of answering to Emily as his boss start to grind on Luke’s masculinity.

Writer-director Chloe Domont — whose work directing episodes of “Ballers” and “Billions” prepared her for such fragile manhood — seems to argue that love, like Wall Street, is a place where there are no winners without losers. Whether this is true or not, it’s a depressing way to think about life, and this movie wallows in that depression, turning its lead characters more repulsive by the minute.

It doesn’t help that the mismatch of the lead actors is even wider than that of their characters. Dynevor is a stellar actress, and she finds gradations of rage and desire that poor Ehrenreich can’t begin to achieve. In “Fair Play,” it’s an unfair comparison between them.

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‘Fair Play’

★★

Opens Friday, September 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City); starts streaming October 6 on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, some nudity, and sexual violence. Running time: 113 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 26, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Creator' builds a fascinating world of robots and humans, and sets an epic journey within it

In a movie landscape of pre-imagined franchises, director Garth Edwards gives us “The Creator” to remind us how hard — and how rewarding — it can be to watch a world being made from scratch.

It’s the year 2065, and we’re told that humanity is fighting for its very survival against an army of A.I.-guided robots. The robots were supposed to be our friends, welcomed as laborers, housekeepers, babysitters and colleagues — until, we’re told, the robots nuked Los Angeles 10 years ago. 

A.I was outlawed in the United States and most of the world, except for New Asia (a nation-state that seems to stretch from India to Vietnam), where they’ve been fully integrated into society. Today, the anti-robot side has a massive space station, U.S.S. Nomad, that can target locations in New Asia and obliterate them.

What the American military can’t do, it seems, is find the mysterious creator of New Asia’s A.I. technology, known only by the code name Nirmata. That’s why the military brass seek out a former undercover operative, Sgt. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) to go into New Asia and find Nirmata.

Taylor, we know from the prologue, has a history in the A.I. war. His undercover mission five years earlier led him to woo and start a life with Maya (Gemma Chan) — which ends with Taylor and a pregnant Maya in a secluded beachside house that becomes a battle ground between the New Asia A.I. guerrillas and Nomad’s targeted missiles.

Taylor is put on a commando unit infiltrating New Asia, led by the no-nonsense Col. Howell (Allison Janney) and her grizzled sergeant, McBride (Marc Menchaca). Through a series of action set pieces, Taylor eventually gets into Nirmata’s secret lair, where the U.S. military intel says the New Asian secret weapon is being developed. That weapon, Taylor discovers, is a robot in the shape of a 5-year-old human (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Taylor takes the robot, whom he names Alphie, on the road, hiding from both sides to learn Alphie’s origins.

Edwards (who directed “Rogue One”) co-wrote the script with Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”), and together they create a fascinating world that, like the robots, seems constructed from spare parts — a little “Terminator 2,” a bit of “Aliens,” a dollop of Isaac Asimov. But in Edwards’ rough-and-tumble telling, the world-building feels fresh and lively. The coolest effect is the mechanism of the robots themselves, an empty cylinder through the neck where Frankenstein’s bolts would be.

Helping flesh out this world is an ensemble cast that includes Janney, Chan, Ken Watanabe as a noble robot warrior and Sturgill Simpson as an underground A.I. factory operator. Washington, as he did in “Tenet,” carries an action thriller without appearing to be doing any heavy lifting.

The revelation in “The Creator” is young Voyles in the central role of Alphie, able to transmit the shifting emotions of this child A.I. character — giggly one moment, Zen-like calm the next. Her journey is the one that we, as viewers, want to ride along with.

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‘The Creator’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 29, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, some bloody images and strong language. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Dumb Money' finds humor, and an underdog story about the rigged roulette wheel of Wall Street, in the GameStop stock mess

The mostly true-to-life financial comedy-thriller “Dumb Money” is being sold as a David-vs.-Goliath story — but really it’s an example of how Goliath sometimes can be taken down by a bunch of Davids stuffed in a trench coat.

The movie is a period piece, capturing that far-off era of three years ago — which you know because of people wearing KN-95 masks and being largely isolated from each other. That isolation plays a key role, because it was in that pandemic-induced separation that people sought out other ways to connect, such as looking at stock tips on Reddit.

From his basement, a minor financial functionary named Keith Gill (played by Paul Dano) posts videos, under the web name Roaring Kitty,” talking about stocks he thinks are undervalued and could perform better than Wall Street expects. One company he’s particularly bullish on is GameStop, the video game retailer. Gill thinks it’s underperforming because some Wall Street players are gaming the system (forgive the pun), expecting to short-sell it — cashing out and tanking the stock, which will make the players money but destroy GameStop and leave its employees out of jobs.

Gill’s recommendation is broadcast on the Reddit forum Wall Street Bets — yes, the casino allusions are deliberate, describing a system that’s more gambling than investing — and many people follow his advice. They do so in part because they feel like rebels, sticking it to the Wall Street fat cats, but mostly because the price keeps going up, and they’re making money off their small investments.

The script — by former Wall Street Journal reporters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, adapting a book by Ben Mezrich (whose previous books formed the basis for “The Social Network” and “21”) — introduces us to some folks around the country who took up Gill’s advice and became retail investors. There’s Jenny (America Ferrara), a nurse driving a barely functional car. There’s Marcus (Anthony Ramos), who actually works in a GameStop in a shopping mall. And there’s Harmony (Talia Ryder, from “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”) and Riri (Myha’la, from “Bodies Bodies Bodies”), dating college students who see their investment becoming big enough to pay off their student loans.

But if these folks are making money, somebody must be losing. Those are the Wall Street operatives, the ones who do billion-dollar deals before breakfast and call retail investors “dumb money.” When GameStop’s stock price goes up, their short-sell plans go down — and soon, hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) is seeking help from billionaire Steve Cohen (Vincent D’Onofrio), and then from even bigger billionaire Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman).

Director Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”) occasionally has to stop and explain some of the more arcane parts of the story — like how a couple of populist-sounding tech bros, Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota), went from acting in the retail investors’ behalf to shutting off trading seemingly to benefit the billion-dollar traders. (Griffin denied collusion at the time and to this day — though the movie adds some information in its postscript that is … interesting.)

Much of the drama focuses on Keith Gill, trying to keep his composure when the GameStop stock price goes soaring, making him and his infinitely patient wife, Caroline (Shailene Woodley), millionaires on paper — and drawing commentary from his slacker brother (Pete Davidson) and their parents (Clancy Brown and Kate Burton). Eventually, it all ends up in front of a congressional hearing, which Gillespie cleverly captures by having the fictionalized versions of Gill, Plotkin, Tenev and Griffin being grilled by the real-life members of Congress — making Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the 11th-hour hero of the piece.

Gillespie neatly captures the weird online frenzy of the GameStop affair, as well as the breathless commentary on the 24-hour news cycle and the endless supply of memes and response videos that have become the soundtrack of our modern lives. Taken as a whole, “Dumb Money” is a pretty smart dissection of how messed up the financial system is, and why some very rich people prefer it that way.

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‘Dumb Money’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual material and drug use. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'It Lives Inside' is effective as a horror movie, but better as a peek into India's culture and creepy folklore

In the meta horror thriller “Cabin in the Woods,” scientists watch on monitors as various countries apply their traditions of horror to the shared problem of vanquishing a world-destroying demon — serving as a commentary on how cultures may take different, though parallel, approaches to the fine art of scaring the crap out of themselves. 

Indian American director Bishal Dutta, in his debut feature “It Lives Inside,” quite effectively and inventively shows how the folklore of India can give us a terrifying monster that attacks at the most vulnerable spot: A teen girl’s self-esteem.

Everyone at suburban Wooderson Grove High School (bonus points for the “Dazed and Confused” reference) has noticed that Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) hasn’t seemed well lately. She’s brooding, sullen, and hiding out during lunch hour under the bleachers. The one teacher who seems to care, Joyce (Betty Gabriel), asks another Indian American student, Samidha (Megan Suri), if she knows what’s wrong. Samidha and Tamira used to be best friends but have grown apart — and Sam, as she prefers to be called, doesn’t want to get involved.

One day, Tamira approaches Samidha, asking for help. Tamira is holding a Mason jar, and begs Samidha to help contain whatever it is that’s inside. Thoughtlessly, Samidha rejects the plea, and knocks the jar out of Tamira’s hands. When it hits the locker room floor and shatters, all hell breaks loose. Literally.

The script, by Dutta and Ashish Mehta, is better in the set-up than in the payoff. The depiction of Sam’s efforts to be American — speaking English when her first-generation mom (Neeru Bajwa) speaks Hindi, preferring to hang out with potential boyfriend Russ (Gage Marsh) than celebrating an Indian holiday with family — is painfully honest, and connects to the conflict with Tamira that leads to the nasty appearance of the movie’s monstrous evil. Once that happens, the horror-thriller formula is more cut-and-dried, though there are a few interesting surprises.

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‘It Lives Inside’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violent content, bloody images, brief strong language and teen drug use. Running time: 99 minutes; in English, and Hindi with subtitles.

Review: 'The Origin of Evil' is a twisted thriller with some sharp 'Succession'-style commentary on the super-rich

The eccentric behavior of the very rich — and the lengths some people will go to join or fleece them — is at the heart of “The Origin of Evil,” a deliciously twisted, and twisty, French/Canadian thriller.

We’re introduced to our main character, a woman who goes by the male name Stéphane (Laure Calamy), at a crisis point. She has a smelly job packaging sardines in a cannery. She’s got a girlfriend (Suzanne Clément) in prison, who sometimes doesn’t come out when she visits. And her landlady is about to kick her out, because the landlady’s daughter is moving back into her room.

With seemingly nowhere to go, she calls the one number she thinks might be able to help: Serge (Jacques Weber), the father who abandoned Stéphane as a baby. Serge is a billionaire, having built up a fortune in hospitality. Will he hospitable to a long-lost daughter?

She gets an invite to Serge’s villa on a remote island (the movie was shot in western France). Serge introduces himself as a lover of many women over his life — and everyone besides him in the villa is a woman: Louise (Dominique Blanc), Serge’s shopaholic wife; George (Doria Tillier), Serge and Louise’s daughter, who runs the family businesses; Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell), George’s teen daughter, who snaps photos and wants to go to art school far away from her family; and Agnès (Véronique Ruggia Saura), the family’s stern housekeeper.

Each of these women take a look at their new visitor and try to figure out what she wants. She observes them, and notices they each have their claws into Serge, who has been recovering from a stroke and often seems on the verge of another one. 

But as writer-director Sébastien Marnier unfolds this complex and sometimes acidly comic story, we learn everyone has some big secrets — particularly our main character.

Marnier mines humor from the oddball behavior of these rich women — like Louise’s obsession with home shopping — and the “Succession”-like maneuvering around Serge’s bouts of ill health. And when the thriller elements kick in, he handles the Agatha Christie-style reveals, the crosses and double-crosses, masterfully.

The highlights in the ensemble cast include Weber as the volatile patriarch and Ruggia Saura as the officious servant. But it’s Calamy, subtly shifting from wry observer to central mover in this sly thriller, who gives “The Origin of Evil” its sting. 

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‘The Origin of Evil’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), AMC West Jordan 12, Megaplex 20 at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi) and Megaplex at Legacy Crossing (Centerville). Rated R for language, nudity, some sexual content and violence. Running time: 123 minutes; in French with subtitles.

Review: In 'Cassandro,' Gael Garcia Bernal pins the emotional heart of an iconic Mexican wrestler

The Mexican actor and heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal gives a tour-de-force performance in “Cassandro,” an absorbing biopic of perhaps the most unlikely icon in the world of lucha libre, or Mexican wrestling.

Garcia Bernal plays Saúl Armendáriz, an American-born wrestler performing in the 1990s in the low-end circuit of lucha libre in Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from the home he shares with his mother (Perla De La Rosa) in El Paso, Texas. Because he’s small — Armendáriz is 5-foot-5-1/2, Garcia Bernal is 5-foot-7 — Saúl usually plays the runt who has to go up against the hulking brutes; his stage name, when we meet him, is “El Topo” aka The Mole.

Saúl wants to improve as a wrestler, so he get a trainer, Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), who suggests he wrestle as an exotico, a popular lucha libre figure who dresses in drag and makes exaggerated effeminate gestures. Saúl, taking the stage name Cassandro, agrees, though he plans to be different than other exoticos — one, because most exoticos are straight, where Saùl is gay; and two, that he will win his matches, which under the traditions of lucha libre, they’re not allowed to do.

In his first matches as Cassandro, Saúl endures the crowd’s jeers and the other wrestlers’ disrespect. But when he shows he can take down the bigger wrestlers, and win the crowd over to his side, he starts getting notice. And with the help of a well-connected promoter, Lorenzo (Joaquín Cosío), Saúl gets better gigs and bigger paydays.

With his success comes lots of partying, booze and cocaine. After being rejected by Lorenzo’s fixer, Felipe (Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), he has an affair with another wrestler, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo, from “The Inspection”), though they keep it a secret from Gerardo’s wife and kids.

Director Roger Ross Williams, a documentarian making his feature debut, and his writing partner, David Teague, hit the high spots of Cassandro’s career — culminating in his biggest match, against the legend of lucha libre, El Hija del Santo (who plays himself). They take some emotional short cuts in the script, concentrating on his relationship with his supportive mother and the absence of his father, a born-again Christian who rejected his son because he’s gay.

Garcia Bernal captures the flamboyance of Cassandro’s persona in the ring — his craftiness as he takes down bigger opponents by using their size and their homophobia against them — and the battered survivor in private, taking his rejections to fuel his art. It’s a performance that makes “Cassandro” a winner.

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‘Cassandro’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City); begins streaming September 22 on Prime. Rated R for language, drug use and sexual content. Running time: 107 minutes; in English and Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Sundance Short Film Tour 2023' serves up seven small gems about love, family, grief, and the economic wisdom of majoring in Viking history

One constant in the history of the Sundance Film Festival has been the dedication to screening short films — some of which are boldly experimental, or showcase an up-and-coming talent. (Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash” were shorts at Sundance before they were features.)

The Sundance Short Film Tour 2023 features seven strong short films, all between 8 and 14 minutes long, that screened at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Two of them were award winners. All of them are intriguing, if not sometimes heartbreaking.

“Help Me Understand” • The first short in the program is the most conventional, a straight-forward comedy — with bits of pathos — in which six women in a focus group (Kate Flannery from “The Office” is the most recognizable) are asked by an unctuous marketing executive (Ken Marino) which of two flasks of detergent smells better. The deliberations break down into animosity, and eventually understanding, in writer-director Aemilia Scott’s sure-handed takedown of modern advertising.

“Parker” • In this documentary by directors Sharon Liese and Catherine Hoffman, three generations of a Black family in Kansas City, Mo., discuss the decision to change their names to match the family name of the eldest, Adolphus Parker. Within this simple, direct film springs a wealth of issues about Black identity, complicated family dynamics, enduring love, and the long shadow of American slavery.

“Take Me Home” • Korean American writer-director Liz Sargent delivers the most heart-tugging film in the batch, casting her sister, Anna Sargent, as a young woman with cognitive disabilities — who must team with her estranged sister (Jeena Yi) to deal with the aftermath when their mother (played in flashbacks by Joan Sargent, Liz and Anna’s mom) dies unexpectedly. The Sargent sisters, in front of and behind the camera, get to the raw emotions of siblings coming together in the worst of times.

“Les Liaisons Foireuses (Inglorious Liaisons)” • The uncertainties of young love play out in this animated Belgian coming-of-age comedy, my favorite of this collection. It’s set at a high school party where alcohol, hormones and a game of spin-the-bottle reveal some tender truths. Directors Chloé Alliez and Violette DeIvoye employ an engaging stop-motion animating style, with each character depicted with light switches for faces and electrical plugs for legs — a visual metaphor for the live-wire intensity of teen emotions.

“Rest Stop” • Writer-director Crystal Kayiza received the Jury Award for U.S. Fiction for this immigrant tale, of a woman and her kids arriving in New York from Uganda and taking a long bus ride to the woman’s husband in Oklahoma. Seen mostly from the P.O.V. of the older daughter, the story unfolds naturally and gracefully, showing the hardships this family endures to secure an uncertain future.

“Piscine Pro” • A broad and profane comedy from Quebec, centering on a recent college graduate (Louis Carrière) who finds his degree in Viking history is of little use in his dead-end job at a pool store. 

“When You Left Me on That Boulevard” • This year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for short films at Sundance, this slice-of-life story captures the generation gap between a Filipino woman (Melissa Arcaya), trying to look right for their family Thanksgiving gathering in San Diego circa 2006, and her daughter Ly (Kailyn Dulay), who bristles at her mom’s rigidity and would rather get stoned with her cousins. Funny, aggravating and warm-hearted — just like any encounter with your family would be.

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‘Sundance Short Film Tour 2023’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but some shorts probably R for language and some mature content. Running time: 91 minutes; two shorts are in French, another is in English and Swahili, all with subtitles.