Review: The 'Hunger Games' prequel is overly busy and can't escape the long shadow of Katniss Everdeen

The prequel “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” rises and falls on one important question: Is “The Hunger Games,” the movie series spawned from author Suzanne Collins’ dystopian young-adult novels, a viable franchise without the presence of the magnetic Jennifer Lawrence, who became a star playing tribute-turned-rebellion leader Katniss Everdeen?

Ultimately, the answer is “no,” but there’s a lot of opportunity along the way for new stars Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler to make their presence felt.

This adaptation of Collins’ novel is set 64 years before Katniss first competed in the games. Then, Panem’s districts were being barely held together by the ruling Capitol’s occupation army, euphemistically called “Peacekeepers.” Back at the Capitol, they’re getting ready for the 10th annual Hunger Games, though the designer of the Games, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) — a mad scientist with different colored eyes and a shock of frizzed white hair — is concerned that the ratings are dwindling, for the lack of spectacle.

An ambitious young student in the Academy has some suggestions. He’s Coriolanus Snow (played by Blyth), and he’s motivated to win a prestigious school prize so he, his grandma’am (Fionnula Flanagan) and his sister Tigris (Hunter Schafer) don’t get evicted from the home Coriolanus’ famous father, Gen. Crassus Snow, built for them before the Dark Days.

The prize usually goes to the best Academy student, but the dean, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) — credited as the co-creator of the Hunger Games — has a new wrinkle. The prize, and all the money, will go to the student who is the best mentor to one of the 24 tributes chosen from the Districts to compete in the Games. 

Snow finds out his trainee is Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler, from “West Side Story”), a feisty singer from District 12. She impresses the audiences at the Reaping, the day the tributes are selected, by singing a rebellious folk song, This inspires Snow to suggest to Dr. Gaul some changes to boost the ratings — to appeal to audience attention for not just a fighter, but a personality.

Director Francis Lawrence, who directed all but the first of the “Hunger Games” movies, takes a screenplay (credited to Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt) that hews quite closely to the book. That’s a problem, both in the second of the three acts, which spends too much time in the Games, and the third act, which takes us away from the Capitol altogether. Both choices sap the tension from the narrative, and contribute to a bloated running time of more than 2 1/2 hours.

There’s a lot of time spent with what feels like generational foreshadowing. We know who Snow grows up to become — he was the president played menacingly by Donald Sutherland in the series — so there’s not a lot of suspense there. Jason Schwartzman gets some laughs as Lucretus “Lucky” Flickertail, a weatherman-turned-emcee (and, it’s heavily suggested, the father of Stanley Tucci’s flamboyant character in the originals). Unfortunately, those moments mostly remind us of what the previous movies had that this one lacks: A drive of its own.

Blyth is a solid actor, and will be really interesting when his pretty-boy phase is behind him. We know Ziegler’s talents from “West Side Story,” and here she gets to demonstrate her singing and her charisma — even when hamstrung with an unfortunate choice of a hillbilly accent.

“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” has a decent number of exciting, breathtaking moments, as the Games play themselves out. But they can’t sustain that intensity for the full movie, which finds itself borrowing from the past — even dropping a “Katniss” reference that feels forced. The odds, alas, are not in this movie’s favor.

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‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material. Running time: 157 minutes.

Review: 'Trolls Band Together' is a bunch of bad jokes and song cues, in search of a reason to exist

Three movies into the “Trolls” animated franchise, and someone finally figured out that voice star Justin Timberlake — the guy to took the first movie’s song, “Can’t Stop This Feeling,” to the pop charts and an Oscar nomination — used to be in a boy band.

That’s the premise — and, indeed, the only workable idea — of “Trolls Band Together,” a jumble of overworked plot points, labored gags and song cues in the place where a movie should be.

The story, what there is of it, starts “back in the day,” when the five brothers of the all-troll singing group BroZone is preparing to perform a big show. The most nervous of the five is Bitty B — the diaper-wearing younger self of Branch, Timberlake’s character. The performance, and the attempt to create “the perfect family harmony,” ends in disaster. It also ends with the brothers breaking up the band, all blaming the oldest, John Dory (voiced by Eric André).

Cut to the Trolls’ present day, when Queen Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) is staging the wedding of our ogre-like Bergen friends, Bridget (voiced by Zooey Deschanel) and King Gristle (voiced by Christopher Mintz-Plasse). But the wedding gets interrupted with the surprise arrival of John Dory — a surprise because Poppy didn’t know Branch had brothers, let alone ones who were in her favorite boy band.

John Dory tells Branch that their favorite brother, the sensitive Floyd (voiced by singer Troye Sivan) is being held captive in a diamond perfume bottle, held by the fast-rising singing duo Velvet and Veneer (voiced by Amy Schumer and Andrew Rannells). The V twins are sapping Floyd of his talent to make themselves into famous music stars. John Dory tells Branch the only thing that can free Floyd is the “perfect family harmony,” which is so powerful it can cut diamonds.

So it’s now a road trip with Branch, Poppy, John Dory and the sparkly Tiny Diamond (Kenan Thompson) boarding a caterpillar bus to find the other remaining brothers: Spruce (voiced by Daveed Diggs), the heartthrob; and Clay (voiced by Kid Cudi), the fun one. There’s another important character found along the way, voiced by Camila Cabello, and if you pay attention to Poppy’s unsubtle foreshadowing, you can probably figure out who she is. 

What director Walt Dohrn, co-director Tim Heitz and screenwriter Elizabeth Tippet (who co-wrote the last movie, “Trolls World Tour”) put together here is a hodgepodge of interesting animation styles, an entire “Kids Bop” album’s worth of covers, and a lot of bad boy-band puns. (Example, from when Floyd declares the band’s demise: “We’ve gone from boys to men, and now there’s only one direction to go: The backstreets.”)

And, as the marketing reminds us, “Trolls Band Together” delivers the first new song by Timberlake’s former band, *NSYNC, in 20 years. Is that worth enduring 90 minutes of candy-colored nonsense? Nah, just find it on Spotify.

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‘Trolls Band Together’

★★

Opens Friday, November 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some mild rude and suggestive humor. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'The Killer,' with Michael Fassbender as an anonymous assassin, puts director David Fincher in his cold-hearted element

People who call David Fincher’s movies — from “Fight Club” to “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” to “The Social Network” to “Gone Girl” — cold and calculating are, admittedly, correct, but also reductive, because they’re cold and calculating for a reason, as proven in his latest, “The Killer.”

The title figure here, played by Michael Fassbender and not identified in any other way, is cold and calculating, because that’s his job. He is a contract killer, and when we meet him, he’s on the job — which, for a long time, involves sitting in an abandoned WeWork office in Paris, looking out the window and observing the goings-on in the hotel across the street. He catches some sleep, but never too long. He rolls out a mat and does push-ups. He waits for his moment.

And he monologues, in a near-constant narration, about the tips and tricks of doing what he does. “My process is purely logistical,” he said. “Forbid empathy. Trust no one. Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight.” He also listens to music — songs by The Smiths — because it’s “a useful distraction, a focus tool. Keeps the inner voice from wandering.”

But when the job in Paris goes haywire, and the target (Endre Hules) remains stubbornly alive, the killer has to do the one thing he hates: He has to improvise.

He flies “home” to Santo Domingo, and discovers that someone tried to kill his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte). So now he goes about finding the people responsible — and since the hired-killer business is a tight circle of people, he knows with certainty who they are. So he travels to New Orleans, Florida, upstate New York and Chicago, to extract information and/or kill them, one at a time.

Fincher and screenwriter Andrew Kevin Waller (who wrote Fincher’s 1995 breakout movie, “Se7en”) adapt the French comic book with a clinical precision, for some of the tightest action set pieces you’re likely to see. The tension isn’t in whether he succeeds on his mission — he’s too much cunning to fail — but in watching him confront the various traps and barriers to the completion of his plan. 

The episodic structure allows for the killer’s intended victims some centerpiece moments. Best of all is Tilda Swinton, stealing her scenes as a professional rival who sees Fassbender and calmly remarks on the inevitability of this meeting and its predestined end. She even finds a bit of dark humor in the encounter, commenting about something “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy — which, at the moment, I suppose, is you.”

Fassbender, as cool a performer as can be, is a perfect vessel for Fincher’s take on this methodical, seemingly unfeeling killer. Death, “The Killer” seems to say, is just another commodity — like office space at WeWork or a McDonald’s hamburger — and Fincher depicts Fassbender’s assassin as the Grim Reaper as the ultimate vulture capitalist.

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‘The Killer’

★★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, November 10, on Netflix. Rated R for strong violence, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 118 minutes.

Review: 'The Holdovers' is a teacher/student comedy reheated from the classics, enlivened by strong performances

It’s been 19 years since director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti teamed up to create the indelible portrait of middle-age misery that was “Sideways” — so there is infinite hope that their new collaboration, the  comedy-drama “The Holdovers,” would be a little less formulaic.

It’s December 1970, at Barton Academy, a small Northeastern boarding school. The most universally disliked person at Barton is history teacher Paul Hunham, played by Giamatti as a crank whose uncompromising grading irritates both the students, who are the targets of his withering sarcasm, and the dean, Dr. Woodrup (Andrew German), who worries the rich parents won’t keep writing the checks if Hunham flunks their boys.

Among the students, the least liked is the arrogant Angus Tully (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), who gloats that he’s spending Christmas break in St. Kitts with his mother and new stepfather. Then he gets a call from his mother, who has decided that the Caribbean vacation will be her honeymoon — and tells Angus that he can’t come along. Angus becomes one of the “holdovers,” kids who have nowhere to go home for the Christmas break. The teacher assigned to watch those kids is, of course, Hunham.

Hunham sticks to the school manual, trying to organize lessons and athletic activity for the boys. But when the other boys are given a chance to go off with one classmate’s rich family — who send a helicopter — Angus is left behind, because he can’t contact his mom to give her approval. So the rest of the holiday, it’s just Angus, Hunham and the school’s head cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vie Joy Randolph), who recently lost her son, a Barton alum, in the Vietnam War.

Screenwriter David Hemingson, a TV guy making his feature debut, leans heavily into the “Dead Poets Society”/“Goodbye, Mr. Chips” space — but making the main teacher a grouchy misanthrope who drinks a little too much Jim Beam. There’s a rote predictability to the beats of the story arc, as Hunham and Angus slide from butting heads to grudging respect to camaraderie.

Thankfully, Payne’s deft handling of characters makes the journey worthwhile. Sessa is a real find, deftly capturing the prickly emotions of an abandoned 15-year-old. And Randolph, with a few short strokes, gets the pain of a mother who has lost the only important thing in her life.

But “The Holdovers” ultimately is Giamatti’s show, and he makes the most of it — creating a detailed character who uses his wit and irascibility to paper over a life of failures and lost chances. 

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‘The Holdovers’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 10, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and brief sexual material. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'The Marvels' is a quick-witted and funny entry in the MCU, topped by Iman Vellani's gleeful Ms. Marvel

There are few storytelling ideas more naturally absurd than superheroes — so it’s always been strange that the Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t really lean into full-out comedy. 

Certainly, the MCU isn’t as morose as the DC Comics movies have been, either the urban dystopia of Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy or the bloated self-importance of everything between “Man of Steel” and “Justice League” that didn’t prominently feature Gal Gadot. And sure, there’s plenty of humor, or stabs at it, in such recent Marvel titles as “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Thor: Love and Thunder,” and going all the way back to Robert Downey Jr.’s sarcasm in the first “Iron Man” — but that’s bro-heavy action-movie humor.

But with the possible exception of 2017’s “Thor: Ragnarok,” Marvel hasn’t gotten as consistently funny and light-hearted as it does in “The Marvels,” director Nia DaCosta’s rollicking and charmingly ridiculous variation on Marvel’s superhero action genre.

Something weird is happening around the galaxy, and it’s managed to ensnare three of Marvel’s finest — Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), astronaut Capt. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Harris), and teen Kamala Khan, alias Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani). It’s why Carol, fighting Kree soldiers a long way from Earth, suddenly is zapped into Kamala’s bedroom closet in Jersey City, while Kamala finds herself in a space suit floating outside a space station helmed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).

After a few mishaps and sudden shifts, a pattern emerges. It’s tied to the fact that all three heroes use light energy in their superpowers, and something is causing them to swap places when they use their powers at the same time. The cause of this disruption in the space-time continuum is a Kree, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who is using the galaxy’s space portal network to destroy various planets and get revenge on Captain Marvel — for reasons that I won’t spoil.

DaCosta — who directed Parris in “Candyman” — shares the writing credit with Megan McDonnell, a staff writer for Marvel’s TV series “WandaVision” (which introduced Monica), and Elissa Karasik, a writer both for “Loki” and the Apple TV+ miniseries “Lessons in Chemistry” (which stars Larson). The three put a fun spin on the traditional superhero antics, mainly with the switcheroo scenario, both for comic effect when the trio are haphazardly swapping places and (after the coolest training montage the MCU has ever done) when they get their act together as a smooth fighting unit.

Larson and Parris are solid, but the star of the show is young Vellani — who, to be fair, also was amazing in her “Ms. Marvel” TV series. Vellani plays Kamala as a stalwart superhero, but she’s also a goofy 16-year-old who goes from seriously fangirling on Captain Marvel to respecting her and Monica as friends and universe-saving colleagues. If “The Marvels” generates more movies for the MCU, here’s hoping Vellani’s Kamala Khan is in the middle of them.

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‘The Marvels’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and brief language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Priscilla,' with a star-making performance by Cailee Spaeny, shows the luxurious cage of being married to Elvis

Sometimes biopic subjects get the director they need.

Elvis Presley got Baz Luhrmann, whose flamboyance and excess matched The King’s sequined swagger perfectly in “Elvis.” Conversely, the life of Priscilla Presley, the young bride of Elvis, who was hidden away like a canary in a gilded cage, is a good fit for Sofia Coppola in the beautifully rendered “Priscilla.”

The movie starts in West Germany in September 1959, when the 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu (played by Cailee Spaeny) talks her dad (Ari Cohen), an U.S. Air Force captain, and mom, Ann (Dagmara Dominczyk), into letting her attend a party. She knows that someone will be attending that party: Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), 24 and already a star, though at this point he’s serving in the Army — which, as Luhrmann’s movie told us, was the suggestion of his manager, Col. Tom Parker, as a way to improve his bad-boy image.

Priscilla becomes smitten with Elvis, and seemingly vice versa — though within the restrictions of her parents, which the courtly Elvis appears to follow. By the following March, Elvis’ military service is over and he goes back home. Priscilla, seeing the movie magazine items about Elvis making out with Nancy Sinatra, thinks her brief flirtation with him is over.

But they stay in touch by phone — and in 1962, he invites her to a two-week trip in Los Angeles, where Elvis is filming a movie, and her parents agree. On a later trip, in March 1963, she goes to Graceland, Elvis’ mansion in Memphis, permanently, with her parents’ stipulation that Priscilla attend a Catholic high school to get her diploma, and that eventually she and Elvis get married.

Early on, the movie depicts how Elvis gave Priscilla amphetamines and sleeping pills so she could keep up with his hectic pace of performing and partying. Coppola also shows how Priscilla would stay at Graceland while Elvis went on the road with his buddies or to Hollywood — where the tabloids would report on Elvis’ romantic dalliances with the likes of Ann-Margret, and when Priscilla confronted Elvis, he would always deny the stories and say they were planted for the sake of publicity. (As the movie tells it — and Coppola’s script is based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir, and Priscilla is one of the film’s executive producers, so it’s her sanitized version of history — Elvis and Priscilla did not have sex until after they were married in 1967.) 

Coppola and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd (who shot Coppola’s “The Beguiled”) capture the sumptuous surroundings of Priscilla’s life in Graceland — with ‘60s and ‘70s details meticulously rendered by production designer Tamara Deverell (“Nightmare Alley”). But Coppola, as she did in “Marie Antoinette,” shows this luxury to be a trap, a hideaway where Priscilla is kept like a beloved pet, but then left behind when Elvis wanders elsewhere.

Coppola’s hardest limitation here is the lack of cooperation of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the corporate entity (founded by Priscilla, ironically) that controls every aspect of the rock star’s image. EPE denied the movie the use of Presley’s music — so Coppola took a different tack, employing her husband, Thomas Mars, and his band Phoenix to be music supervisors, picking period songs with great care (with the grating exception of the last song in the movie, which is chronologically off but emotionally too on-the-nose).

The most fascinating part of “Priscilla” is watching Spaeny (“Bad Times at the El Royale,” “The Craft: Legacy”) go through the phases of Priscilla’s life, from 14 to 27, so naturally and sensitively. It’s a star-making performance, and one that gives Coppola’s account its emotional weight.

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‘Priscilla’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, in theaters. Rated R for drug use and some language. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Rustin' shines a light on a hidden figure of the civil rights movement, and gives Colman Domingo a worthy stage to perform

“Rustin” is a movie that’s almost as good as its intentions — which are in the stratosphere, thanks to its subject matter (the civil rights movement) and two of its executive producers (Barack and Michelle Obama, through their Higher Ground Productions).

The title figure is Bayard Rustin, a champion of the civil rights struggle who has not gotten his props until recently. Colman Domingo, recently stealing scenes in “Zola” and “Candyman,” plays Rustin with a cagey mix of flamboyance and world-weariness. He’s been beaten in his life — he’s missing several teeth on his right side from a cop’s nightstick after sitting in the front of a bus as a young man — but not beaten down. He remains resilient, working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen) through the 1950s, in the battle to make segregation go away as the Supreme Court said it should.

The movie starts in 1960, when King and Rustin are on opposite sides of a dispute with the hierarchy of the NAACP — most notably the group’s executive director, Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), who finds Rustin too loud and, though he won’t say the word, too gay to be a public voice in the movement. Rustin thinks King will have his back, and when he doesn’t, there’s a falling out that lasts for three years.

We cut ahead those three years, to 1963, with Rustin floundering in an anti-war group, and seeing the younger Black activists tired of the nonviolence he and King espouse. At a party, one of those young men confronts Rustin, saying, “you’re irrelevant.” Rustin replies laconically, “It’s Friday night — I’ve been called worse.”

Then Rustin has a brainstorm: A two-day march, 100,000 people strong, in Washington, D.C., to demand of Congress and the White House movement on a comprehensive civil rights law. He gathers some eager young activists to help flesh out the idea into a plan. Rustin soon realizes that he will need the NAACP’s support, and to get that — as his old friend, the activist Ella Baker (Audra McDonald), tells him — he needs to make peace with King.

Rustin convinces King to climb on board because he knows this will be the chance, and the place, for King to secure his legacy. And he’s right — because that march in 1963, culminating at the Lincoln Memorial, is where King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech. (It’s not a spoiler if it’s history.)

Screenwriters Justin Breece and Dustin Lance Black each bring different elements to the mix. Breece, who wrote episodes of Ava DuVernay’s miniseries “When They See Us,” channels the passions of the civil rights era — particularly capturing the specific moment when Rustin’s generation was feeling like the old guard and grandstanders, like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright), were challenging that guard. Black, an Oscar winner for “Milk,” highlights the less public part of Rustin’s identity, his homosexuality, with a subplot involving a closeted minister (Johnny Ramey) and several speeches peppered through the narrative, some soaring and others sounding like Black is trying to be the next Aaron Sorkin.

Director George C. Wolfe (who put August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on the screen) is, at heart, a theater guy — and he recognizes that the heart and soul of “Rustin” is intertwined with the theatricality and bravado of Bayard Rustin. Wolfe collaborates with Domingo to bring those qualities, like his rapid-fire wit and silver tongue, front and center. Wolfe provides the platform, and Domingo supplies the fireworks.

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‘Rustin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, in theaters; starts streaming November 17 on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some violence, sexual material, language including racial slurs, brief drug use, and smoking. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'The Persian Version' is a fresh and funny story of an Iranian American trying to reconcile her various identities with her tough-as-nails mom

Sometimes a movie takes a few minutes to settle down and find its groove — which is what happens with “The Persian Version,” writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s warm-hearted and regularly hilarious look at a woman trying to reconcile conflicting cultures and a hard case of a mom.

“Obviously, I’ve had some issues with culture,” are the first words we hear from Leila (Layla Mohammadi) — after we see her entering a Halloween party in half a burqa with a neon-pink bikini under it. “Can you blame me? I come from two countries that used to be madly in love with each other.” Those countries are the United States and Iran, and needless to say, the breakup was epically bad.

Leila explains how her father took the family from Iran to America in the ‘60s, to be a doctor in Brooklyn, and stayed after the revolution back home. Leila was the youngest of nine children, and the only girl — and a constant disappointment to her mother (Niousha Noor). Part of that attitude comes from the fact that Leila is a lesbian, recently divorced because she wanted to pursue her filmmaking career rather than settle down and have kids.

When her father (Bijan Daneshmand) goes into the hospital for a long-awaited heart transplant, and all the brothers go to sit with him, Mom demands that Leila stay home and tend to her grandmother, Mamanjoon (Bella Warda). This turns out to be propitious, because Mamanjoon lets slip that Leila’s parents left Iran because of “the scandal.” Of course, Leila is dying to know what the scandal was — and whether it helps explain why her mother is the way she is.

Keshavarz, whose 2011 Iran-centered lesbian drama “Circumstance” won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic films at Sundance, returns with an exuberant, Technicolor celebration of family — as Leila learns her family’s hidden history and finds connections to her own chaotic life. Leila is often told, “You’re just like your mother,” and even though she denies it vociferously, even she can’t deny the parallels. The story is based on Keshavarz’s own family story, which gives the movie a lived-in authenticity.

Mohammadi is a stunning discovery, beautiful and sharp and wickedly funny, and she commands the movie. She’s nicely matched with Noor and Warda, representing three generations of fierce and loving women — embodying the family bonds that make “The Persian Version” so charming.

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‘The Persian Version’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some sexual references. Running time: 106 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.