Review: 'The Boy and the Heron' is Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki at his impassioned, surrealist best

It’s been 10 years since Hayao Miyazaki, who at 82 remains the unparalleled master of Japanese animation, has released a feature film — and if “The Boy and the Heron” is his final masterpiece, we all should be thrilled and awed that we have it in our collective lives, creating marvel and wonder.

From the opening moments, it feels like Miyazaki is pushing himself to invent new ways to use animation. The first scenes, of the boy Mahito racing through his village to get to the hospital where his mother works because it’s on fire, are breathtaking — the images of flames seemingly radiating with their own heat.

The story — an original script written by Miyazaki — picks up a short time later, in the middle of World War II, as Mahito and his father move from Tokyo to the country. Dad is managing a factory (we learn that he’s making plane parts for the Japanese military), which is also near the ancestral home of Mahito’s late mother. Dad has moved on, having married his wife’s sister, Natsuko, who is pregnant. Mahito is still getting used to the idea of his aunt becoming his stepmom.

When he arrives at his new house, Mahito does get an unusual greeting: A friendly fly-by from a gray heron. He’s never flown into the house before, Natsuko tells Mahito.

The heron later taunts Mahito to venture out of the house, and toward a mysterious tower on the grounds nearby. The heron’s appearance subtly changes — first with teeth visible within his beak, then a gargantuan schnozz, then an entire head. 

What happens next I can’t really say — both for spoiler purposes, and because the movie’s imagery becomes so bizarre that descriptions could be chalked up as a matter of interpretation. Generally, the story takes on some of Miyazaki’s favorite themes: The permeable border between the spirit world and this one (as seen in “Spirited Away”), the supernatural forces of nature (shout-out to “Princess Mononoke”) and the possibility of transformation (as seen in “Ponyo,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and others).

However, just because Miyazaki is exploring familiar themes doesn’t mean he’s skating on his reputation. The animation here is among the best he’s ever produced, as Mahito’s quest to save Natsuko on “the other side” puts the boy on a path where nothing is exactly what it appears, but everything is strange and full of wonder.

(I saw the movie with its original Japanese voice cast and subtitles. There is an English-language version also hitting theaters, with a voice cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Dave Bautista, Mark Hamill, Florence Pugh and Christian Bale.)

One can read “The Boy and the Heron,” with its themes of coming to terms with death, as Miyazaki’s farewell — and a last chance to show his many fans that he’s still an artist of the finest kind. If this is Miyazaki’s final film, it’s a beautiful way to go out.

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‘The Boy and the Heron’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 8, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for some violent content/bloody images and smoking. Running time: 124 minutes; dubbed in English, or in Japanese with subtitles, depending on the theater.

Review: In 'Maestro,' Bradley Cooper, as director and star, captures the contradictory loves of Leonard Bernstein

The musical biography “Maestro” is a tour de force for its director and star, Bradley Cooper — which one imagines would suit the person he’s playing, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, down to his socks.

Cooper and his writing partner, Josh Singer (“Spotlight,” “The Post”), take the cradle-to-grave approach with Bernstein — well, nearly — introducing the audience to the young conductor in 1943, living in an apartment with other musicians. Bernstein catches his first break in 1943, as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, when a guest conductor gets the flu and Bernstein, with no rehearsal, is sent in to lead the orchestra at Carnegie Hall, making Bernstein a national sensation.

Some time later, at a party where his friends — the songwriting duo of Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) and Adolph Green (Nick Blaemire) — are entertaining, Bernstein meets an actress, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). There’s a connection and an attraction, based on shared passions for music and art. In short order, they’re in bed together, and not long after they’re married.

Felicia soon realizes, though, that if she’s going to be married to Leonard Bernstein, she will be forced to share him — both with a series of lovers, some women but mostly men, and with the world as his fame continues to grow.

In performance, Cooper captures so much of Bernstein’s charm and stage presence. One of the showstopping moments in the movie comes when Bernstein is conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor in Ely Cathedral in 1976 — a nearly unbroken scene in which cinematographer Matthew Libatique zeroes in on Cooper’s re-creation of Bernstein’s conducting style, capturing the precision, the exuberance and the respect for the music that he brought to every performance.

(Yes, if we must, let’s talk about the nose. Cooper deploys makeup artist Kazu Hiro — who has won Oscars for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for “Darkest Hour” and Nicole Kidman into Gretchen Carlson in “Bombshell” — to create prosthetics to give the handsome actor a schnozz like the conductor’s. Though there were initial complaints about the nose, in the context of the movie, it’s unobtrusive and seems to give Cooper something around which to ground his performance.)

For all that, though, the best thing Cooper does in “Maestro” is to make room for Mulligan’s beautiful portrayal of Felicia. It’s a complex role that takes in her shared joy for creativity, her sorrow and acceptance over her husband’s extramarital encounters, and a poignant portrayal of Felicia’s health problems. Mulligan doesn’t just touch all the bases, but she provides an emotional compliment to Cooper’s showier performance. (Kudos to Cooper for graciously giving Mulligan top billing, too.)

The other highlight of “Maestro” is, of course, the music. Except for a few needle drops (including R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” which famously name-checks Bernstein), the entire soundtrack is music composed by or conducted by Bernstein himself — including passages from “West Side Story,” “Candide,” his “Mass” and “Kaddish.” The music does as much to make “Maestro” feel like you’re watching the master at work as Cooper’s soulful performance does.

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‘Maestro’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 8, in theaters; starts streaming on Netflix on December 20. Rated R for some language and drug use. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'Eileen' is a noir thriller bolstered by strong performances by Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie

Two powerhouse actresses — Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie — are the reason to watch “Eileen,” a noir drama with a lot of atmosphere and a long fuse.

McKenzie (“Jojo Rabbit,” “Last Night in Soho”) plays Eileen Dunlop, a mousy clerk working in the offices of a Massachusetts prison in the winter of 1964. When she’s not filing papers or overseeing the mothers and girlfriends who come on visiting day, Eileen is caring for and enabling her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), the retired police chief.

Things get interesting at the prison when the staff psychologist retires and is replaced by Dr. Rebecca St. John (played by Hathaway). Rebecca quickly befriends Eileen, who starts to become quite interested in this glamorous new co-worker. Rebecca and Eileen also share an interest in the fate of one young prisoner, Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), whose mother, Ann (Marin Ireland), reacts harshly to Rebecca’s methods.

The screenplay by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh, based on Moshfegh’s novel, starts to descend into some dark places — particularly some quick daydream sequences where Eileen imagines herself killing herself or someone else — before a whopper of a twist fairly late in the game.

Director William Oldroyd (“Lady Macbeth”) steeps the story in shadows, like a dark version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama — or, if you want a more recent reference, similar to Todd Haynes’ “Carol.” The treatment gives McKenzie and Hathaway, as the young woman starting to claim her power and the older woman serving as an enigmatic role model, several opportunities to seize the screen.

“Eileen” isn’t perfect — the twist is a knockout, but takes several minutes to recover from, and the ending is a bit abrupt. But for a rare platform for two actresses of equal talent to go head-to-head, this movie is worth the effort.

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‘Eileen’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violent content, sexual content and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 22, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Oath' is an overwrought melodrama that tries — and fails — to hide its Latter-day Saint roots

The historical drama “The Oath” is quite a mess, a jumble of abbreviated action and stilted storytelling that, I’m guessing, will leave neither the movie’s built-in audience — members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who will recognize the source material — or anyone else satisfied.

As the title cards inform us, the story begins with a grudge, with two groups of people continuing an ancient war that has left one side down to a solitary survivor, called “the hunted one.” The title cards also tell us that it’s the fourth century A.D., in ancient America. And, we are told, the survivor’s name is Moroni.

OK, a quick bit of Latter-day Saint information, because it’s not said outright in the movie: Moroni was a prophet, son of Mormon — for whom the Book of Mormon is named. The movie does mention that this Moroni is named after Captain Moroni, but doesn’t mention the captain’s prominence in the book.

This movie’s Moroni — played by Darin Scott, who’s also the movie’s director and, with his wife, Michelle, the screenwriter — says he was a fearsome military commander for the Nephites, who have battled the Lamanites for centuries. But Moroni is now the last Nephite, trying to stay out of the clutches of the Lamanite leader, King Aaron (played by “Titanic” bad guy Billy Zane).

The bulk of the movie centers on Moroni finding a woman in the woods. She is Bathsheba (Nora Dale), who has recently escaped the Lamanite camp, where she was forced to be one of King Aaron’s concubines. Moroni nurses the battered Bathsheba back to health, and slowly gains her trust. Over time, she falls in love with Moroni for his gentleness, and his promise never to hurt her.

Bathsheba is curious about the strange golden plates Moroni hides in his cave, but he keeps them from her. He does show her a scroll, on which is written a log of Moroni’s ancestors.

Meanwhile, King Aaron has sent his best tracker — Bathsheba’s older sister, Mahigana (played by Karina Lombard, from “Legends of the Fall”) — to bring back the wayward Bathsheba. 

Scott’s direction can be described best as overdramatic, which nearly compensates for how underwhelming he is as an actor. That’s not to say he’s subtle, as every emotional beat is telegraphed well ahead of its landing. That said, the movie looks lush, thanks to cinematographer Brian O’Carroll’s work capturing the beautiful scenery; the movie was filmed in upstate New York, in the vicinity of where this story is said to have happened.

The confounding part of “The Oath” is that the script seems to be written in code. The name of the source material, the Book of Mormon, is referred to as “the fourth most influential book in American history” — but mentioned by name only in small type in the closing credits. It’s like Scott is trying to put something over on his audience, but he doesn’t have the confidence or skill to hide it cleverly. 

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‘The Oath’

★1/2

Opens Friday, December 8, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Renaissance' lets Beyoncé take her fans on tour with her, and shows them the work behind the magic

The magnetic force of nature that is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter — also known to the world simply as Beyoncé — is on full display in “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” a documentary that captures the performer’s high-energy stage show and the hard work behind the scenes to make it happen.

As Beyoncé says early in the film — which she directed, wrote and produced — process is as important to her as the final product, and she includes plenty of backstage and rehearsal footage to capture that process. Through those scenes, fans witness the circle of acceptance that envelops her dancers and musicians, her love for her home town of Houston, and how she recovered from knee surgery while rehearsals were underway.

Some of those moments dovetail with the songs. For example, several gay and trans dancers — veterans of the dancehall and vogue movements — talk about how they got to incorporate their styles into Beyoncé’s concert, and then we see them perform “Break My Soul” with its sampling of Madonna’s “Vogue.”

About a third of the movie’s nearly three-hour running time is taken up with interesting stuff not happening in performance. But when the cameras are aimed at the stage, Beyoncé and crew make it worth the wait with a sensual, sensational series of performances.

Beyoncé’s film crew apparently filmed every show on this year’s “Renaissance” tour, and she and her team of editors stitched them together, even when she and her dancers were wearing different costumes in different cities. There are moments when the choreography and the camera movement are so exact that it appears everyone has switched clothes in the blink of an eye.

Inevitably, comparisons will be made between “Renaissance” and “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” the concert documentary released seven weeks earlier that captured a different 2023 stadium tour. (We have Ye, and his asinine “I’ma let you finish” rant at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, to thank for the artificial and sexist feud narrative involving Beyoncé and Swift.) Both deliver the goods for the performers’ respective fans — they just do it in different, and equally fascinating, ways. 

Swift’s movie shot several shows at one location and put together a seamless document of one complete concert. With “Renaissance,” Beyoncé is going for a different effect — she doesn’t want to give us one show; she wants us to feel what it was like to be on the entire tour.

“Renaissance” is, Beyoncé says early in the film, “more than a concert. It’s a culture, it’s a state of mind, it’s a release, it’s a fantasy come true.” A concert it definitely is, in all its glory. Whether it’s everything else she promises is up for fans to decide.

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‘Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 1, in theaters everywhere. Not rated, but probably R for language and suggestive lyrics. Running time: 169 minutes.

Review: 'The Shift' mixes biblical allegory with science-fiction flash, with some interesting but not satisfying results

The Old Testament meets old-school science fiction in “The Shift,” an interesting if not entirely successful attempt at retelling the story of Job — a tale of faith tested to the limit — in a modern setting.

When we’re introduced to Kevin Garner — played by Kristoffer Polaha, who has a lot of Hallmark movies on his resumé with the word “Christmas” in the title — he’s having a bad day. He just lost his high-paying Wall Street job when his firm collapsed under him, and he’s contemplating drinking his first beer after years of sobriety. Then a young woman, Molly (Elizabeth Tabish), on a dare from her girlfriends, sits down at the bar and starts to flirt with him. They get talking, and in short order move to dating, marriage and parenthood.

Then Kevin has an encounter with an enigmatic figure (played by veteran character actor Neal McDonough), a well-dressed, suave, blue-eyed gentleman. He is identified as The Benefactor, though he comments that title is one of the nicer ones he’s been given over the millennia. We figure out pretty quickly that The Benefactor is none other than the Devil.

The Benefactor has seen that Kevin’s current reality isn’t perfect — he and Molly are in a rough place, because of a tragedy that’s explained later in the movie — so he decides to yank Kevin into a different one. The Benefactor and his minions, called “shifters,” have the ability, through a keypad device on their wrists, to shift people around the multiverse (though they never use that word). 

The Benefactor makes an offer to Kevin: Renounce his so-called God, who has been conspicuously absent during Kevin and Molly’s bad times, and The Benefactor will give Kevin a life of wealth and influence. When Kevin says no — becoming the first Kevin in the multiverse to do so — The Benefactor plunks him down in a dystopian parallel world where there’s no faith and, importantly, no sign of Molly.

Writer-director Brock Heasley, adapting his 2017 short film for his feature debut, isn’t at all subtle in presenting this biblical allegory. The ham-fisted attempts to drive the message home get in the way of some strong storytelling and solid performances by Polaha, Tabish and Sean Astin as a nonbeliever who starts to get swayed by Kevin’s remembered scripture passages.

“The Shift” is the first work of fiction to be released by Provo-based Angel Studios — unless you count their Tim Ballard biopic “Sound of Freedom,” which hasn’t aged well in the last few weeks, and their sketchy documentary “After Death.” The company is employing the same marketing gimmick those other films used, a to-the-camera appeal to viewers over the closing credits to buy tickets to future screenings, with the pitch that it will “send a message” to make more movies like this one. Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe the best way to get filmmakers to make more of one type of movie is to make a better movie.

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‘The Shift’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence and thematic elements. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Napoleon' captures the epic scale of the French emperor's exploits and the petty jealousies of his psyche

Unlike its title figure, director Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” isn’t small — but, like the French emperor, it’s ambitious.

Scott — who has created worlds of history (“Gladiator,” “Kingdom of Heaven”) and the future (“Alien,” “Blade Runner”) — takes us into the trenches with the Corsican-born gunnery officer (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who figured out that the judicious use of cannons could take down an enemy from a reasonable distance. It nearly happens to him in one of the movie’s first battles, when he charges toward a fortress on his horse, and a cannonball hits the steed square in the chest. (Presumably, this was special effects, because one can only imagine the uproar if Scott did it for real.) 

The script, by David Scarpa (“All the Money in the World”), dutifully takes us from high point to high point, as Napoleon Bonaparte rises through the ranks during the French Revolution and after, taking advantage of the chaos brought by the guillotine and the “Reign of Terror” to position himself as a strongman. Ultimately, in a country that just got rid of its king, Napoleon works himself into the job of emperor.

Early on, Napoleon meets a noblewoman recently sprung from the Bastille — Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby). Their story isn’t the fairy-tale romance, since Joséphine had other lovers while Napoleon was away shooting cannons at the Egyptian pyramids and such. Napoleon’s attitude toward Joséphine is more of a spoiled child, jealous and sniveling, than ostensibly the most powerful man in Europe. Things come to a head when Napoleon pressures Joséphine to bear him a son and heir.

Phoenix’s performance is a curious mix of bravado and petulance, capturing both his military smarts and his personal foibles. He’s nicely matched by Kirby, who quietly manages her emperor’s mercurial moods with a diplomatic tone and a tigress’ purr. 

Much of Scott’s movie focuses on Napoleon’s military prowess and his hubris — both in his invasion of Russia, where he started with 600,000 soldiers and limped home with 40,000, and the climactic battle of Waterloo, where he was completely outclassed in tactics by the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett).

It’s in those battle scenes where “Napoleon” earns our attention. There are few directors still working who can bring the spectacle, the sheer bigness of a war epic like this, the way Scott does. He makes every cannon blast hit home.

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‘Napoleon’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, November 22, in theater everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and brief language. Running time: 158 minutes.

Review: In 'Leo,' Adam Sandler finds humor and heart as the voice of an elementary-school lizard

It seems that Adam Sandler has found his niche in animation — first with the “Hotel Transylvania” series, and now as an insightful lizard in the quietly charming “Leo.”

Sandler voices the title character, a lizard who has lived for decades as the class pet to a rotating series of fifth-graders in a Florida elementary school. It’s a delicate time for these kids, the last year of childhood before graduating to the semi-adult world of middle school.

At parent-teacher night, Leo and his terrarium cohabitant, a turtle named Squirtle (voiced by Bill Burr), overhear two dads say that lizards live to be 75 years old. After checking with some of the other class pets — since fifth-graders don’t learn subtraction; they’re already on to fractions — Leo realizes that he’s 74. So he decides he has to escape now, and get his last bit of living done while he can.

Things don’t work out that way, though. With the teacher, Mrs. Salinas (voiced by Allison Strong), taking maternity leave, the kids are stuck with a cranky old substitute, Ms. Malkin (voiced by Cecily Strong). Ms. Malkin takes away the kids’ laptops, gives them massive textbooks, and tries to instill some old-school discipline on the kids. One way to do that is to assign one child each weekend to take Leo home and care for him.

At the house of Summer, an insecure chatterbox (voiced by Sunny Sandler, the star’s daughter), Leo breaks the cardinal rule of school pets: He talks to her. Once the shock wears off, Leo gets Summer to promise not to tell anyone — and that only she can hear him. Leo gives Summer a life lesson, about the importance of letting other people talk, by asking them questions and showing an interest in them.

The next weekend, Leo stays with Eli (voiced by Roey Smigel), whose helicopter mom (voiced by “SNL” star Heidi Gardner) has a drone watching her son’s every move. Leo breaks his no-talking rule with Eli, and advises him to break up with his drone. And so it goes at the next kid’s house. And the next. And so on.

The script — credited to Sandler, comedian-writer Robert Smigel (aka Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog) and regular Sandler scribe Paul Sado — has some holes in it, namely in its dithering about how to treat its adult characters, particularly Ms. Malkin, who goes from cartoonishly evil to sympathetic a bit too easily.

Oh, and have I mentioned this is a musical? Smigel — who co-directed with animators Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim — wrote the songs, which have a spiky wit and even will prompt a tear or two.

“Leo” is a simple, yet effective, animated movie, whose gentle humor disguises a sweet parable about learning from one’s elders — even the scaly ones. 

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‘Leo’

★★★

Starts streaming Tuesday, November 21, on Netflix. Rated PG for rude/suggestive material and some language. Running time: 108 minutes.