Review: Disney's fairytale prototype 'Wish' is gorgeous to watch, but skimpy as a storytelling vehicle

Disney’s newest, “Wish,” takes its inspiration from a century of Walt Disney’s animation genius — though “inspiration” is a big word for what feels like an empty exercise in corporate branding.

“Wish” sets itself up not just as a Disney animated movie, but an amalgam of every Disney animated movie, from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” to “Encanto.” Unfortunately, though the animation studio is at the top of their game in terms of animation technology and artistry, in this case the movie labors mightily and brings forth a mouse.

In Rosas, a benevolent city-state on a Mediterranean island, we meet Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose), a tour guide who shows arrivals how wonderful their new home is. One reason it’s wonderful, Asha explains, is that everyone, on their 18th birthday, reveals their most precious wish — and gives that wish to their ruler, King Magnifico (voiced by Chris Pine). The King, who is also a sorcerer, keeps all the wishes safe, and on rare occasions grants one to come true.

Asha — who is applying to be the King’s apprentice (a sorcerer’s apprentice, get it?) — hopes that, on this occasion, Magnifico will grant the wish of her grandfather, Sabino (voiced by Victor Garber), who is turning 100. When the King denies this request, and reveals the secret that he denies nearly every wish because they might threaten his throne, Asha runs to the tree where she and her late father used to look at the stars, and she makes an unauthorized wish on a star.

This time, the star answers. It comes down to earth as a cute luminescent blob, spreading stardust around in its wake. When that stardust touches animals, it makes them able to talk — and one of the first animals we see this happen to is Asha’s pet goat, Valentino (voiced by Disney’s reliable voice actor, Alan Tudyk). When it happens to the woodland creatures, we learn there’s a deer named Bambi and a bear named John (possibly a reference to the Balou-like Little John in Disney’s “Robin Hood”).

Diehard Disney fans will watch “Wish” when it appears on home video and go through it frame-by-frame, with a checklist of Disney animated movies and seeing how many are referenced. Maybe, just maybe, this gambit will keep viewers from noticing how slight the main story is. The script is credited to Jennifer Lee (“Wreck-It Ralph,” “Frozen”) and Allison Moore (a TV writer making her movie debut), but it feels like the entire corporate structure of Disney gave notes. It’s as if Disney learned from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that you can construct an entire movie out of Easter eggs.

The song score, by lyricist Julia Michaels and composer Benjamin Rice, includes the scene-setting opening (“Welcome to Rosas”), Asha’s “I want” song (“This Wish”), and a great villain song for Magnifico (“This Is the Thanks I Get?!”), just as the formula demands. Thankfully, DeBose and Pine are talented singers, and deliver a lot of intense emotion.

The good part of “Wish” is the way directors Chris Buck (“Tarzan,” “Frozen”) and Fawn Veerasunthorn (a story artist on “Zootopia,” “Ralph Breaks the Internet” and “Raya and the Last Dragon”) deploy 100 years of Disney animation magic to make every frame pop off the screen. If you can overlook the skimpy story, “Wish” is a visual treat.

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‘Wish’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, November 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements and mild action. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'May December' is a tough drama that looks at a tabloid-famous marriage, and the different filters that see it

The stories we tell — in movies and to ourselves — are explored and exploded in “May December,” director Todd Haynes’ fascinating drama about the blurry line between truth and reality.

Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) is preparing for a family barbecue in their coastal Georgia town, so her husband Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) has put a bunch of hotdogs on the grill. Gracie wanted everything to look perfect, because they’re entertaining a guest: Actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman). Elizabeth, who plays a veterinarian in a popular TV series, has a specific reason to meet Gracie: She’s portraying her in an independent movie that recounts how Gracie, at age 36, began a sexual relationship with Joe, who was in 7th grade at the time.

At her hotel, Elizabeth has a stack of tabloid clippings that tell the story of Gracie going to jail for taking advantage of a teenager — and having a baby while in prison. She also watches the cheap TV movie made about the case shortly after Gracie went to prison.

Elizabeth wants to know what kind of person Gracie really is. She tries to do learn about Gracie, both by talking with her about meeting Joe and by watching her do everyday things like baking cakes and applying her makeup. Elizabeth also wants to go to the places where Gracie and Joe began their relationship, like the stockroom of the pet shop where they worked. 

Elizabeth also meets Gracie’s ex-husband, Tom (D.W. Moffett), and their son Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), whose relationship with his mom is strained at best. And she spends time with Gracie and Joe’s kids: Twins Charlie (Gabriel Chung) and Mary (Elizabeth Yu), who are about to graduate from high school, and older daughter Honor (Piper Curda), who was born in prison and is now 24 — and not thrilled with a Hollywood actress poking her nose in the family’s business, and possibly opening old wounds.

Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch (making her feature debut) set up a fascinating story that asks us to witness Gracie and Joe’s daily life, and the self-consciousness that sets in when an outsider puts that life under the microscope. Haynes, who last examined a relationship with a substantial age gap in the hyper-melodramatic “Carol,” turns Elizabeth’s visit into a hall of mirrors — there are multiple scenes of Gracie and Elizabeth regarding each other in mirrors, whether in a bathroom or while watching Mary try on graduation dresses.

Moore — who has collaborated with Haynes on “Safe” (1995), “Far From Heaven” (2002) and “I’m Not There” (2007) — depicts Gracie as someone who tries to treat her long-ago predation of a teenager as a far-off mystery, not seeing how she treats Joe and their children now are a variation on the manipulation that put Gracie and Joe together in the tabloids and in real life. Portman is equal to Moore here, as something of a manipulator herself: An actor trying to use her talents to coerce more information out of her source. The combined heat buns slowly at first, but generates an unbearable heat. 

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‘May December’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 17, in theaters; starts streaming December 1 on Netflix. Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language. Running time: 117 minutes.

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.