Review: 'I Saw the TV Glow' digs into childhood fears with an effective story of two teens obsessed with a supernatural television show

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun performs a clever and creepy magic trick in “I Saw the TV Glow”: She makes us completely unsettled by the smallest of details, by zeroing in on the most primal fears of childhood.

When we first meet Owen (Ian Foreman), he’s a lonely seventh-grader in 1996, living with his mom (Danielle Deadwyler, from “Till”) and stepdad (Fred Durst). At his school, he chats with Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who’s reading a book that intrigues him, an episode guide for a TV show, “The Pink Opaque.” 

Maddy explains the show’s premise — two teen girls (played in the show-within-a-show by Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) meet at sleepaway camp and discover they’re psychically linked, and in subsequent episodes they’re battling supernatural terrors from opposite sides of town — and Owen wants to watch, even though his parents don’t allow him to stay up that late on a Saturday. (It’s on at 10:30 p.m., just before the cable channel switches over to sitcom reruns.) So one night, Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s and watches his first episode. From then on, he’s hooked.

When Owen — played as an older teen by Justice Smith — can’t get over to Maddy’s, Maddy starts making him VHS tapes of the episodes. That stops when the show is abruptly canceled, and the same night, Maddy disappears mysteriously, leaving behind the burning embers of her TV set in the backyard.

Schoenbrun (who previously made the disturbing “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair”) taps into the tropes of late-‘90s teen-driven TV — there’s a hint of Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” and at least one sly nod to “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” — and the ominous ways they burrow into a young fan’s brains. They feel real, maybe more true-to-life in our memory than they really were, and call out to something in these viewers, Owen and Maddy, that’s missing in their solitary lives.

Smith (“The American Society of Magical Negroes”) is effectively unhinged as the older Owen, as he’s sucked into the world of the Pink Opaque and not sure where it ends and his world begins. Schoenbrun’s more impressive find, though, is Lundy-Paine, whose internalized fear augments and deepens the existential dread running through the movie.

One more thing about “I Saw the TV Glow” that adds to its doom-filled atmosphere is the soundtrack. The indie rocker Alex G creates several of the songs that play in the score — and there’s one scene in a club where we hear compelling stage performances by the bands Sloppy Jane (featuring Phoebe Bridgers) and King Woman. If teenage nightmares have a playlist, these songs are in heavy rotation.

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‘I Saw the TV Glow’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 17, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content, some sexual material, thematic elements and teen smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Evil Does Not Exist' takes us into the woods, and into a dispute between locals and a corporation that's darker than you expect

I don’t know if evil exists or doesn’t, and I don’t know why writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi put the title “Evil Does Not Exist” on his new movie — but I’m glad that he and the movie exist, to let viewers like me chew over such questions.

The movie is set in a rural village in the mountains, which is a short drive from Tokyo but feels quite alien from those city sensibilities. Hamaguchi first introduces us to Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), who’s maybe 8 years old. A typical day has Takumi chopping firewood and performing odd jobs around the village, then picking Hana up from daycare, and the two of them exploring the woods near their house. Takumi knows everything about every tree and is imparting that wisdom to Hana.

One day, Takumi is among the locals attending a town meeting, where two corporate representatives are presenting details about a plan to build a “glamping” campsite in the woods near the village. The reps — Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) — think they can impress the locals with talk of the economic benefit of rich Tokyo tourists coming to their area. But the residents, Takumi included, are unhappy about the details, like whether the tourists will make noise late at night and start wildfires, or whether the septic tank will spill pollution into the groundwater and taint the drinking water downstream. (Among his many odd jobs, Takumi collects stream water for his friends who run an udon restaurant, so the pollution issue is also about his livelihood.)

Ultimately, the residents catch on that the reps have no authority, and were actually hired by a talent agency to act out the roles of competent glad-handers. When Takahashi and Mayuzumi report back to the slick CEO and his condescending consultant, the CEO has an idea: Try to hire Takumi as caretaker for the clamping site. So the reps head back to the village to try to convince Takumi.

I won’t say much more about what happens next — except to say that the ending is confounding and will have me thinking about things for a long time. The ending also doesn’t fit the mold of your typical story of city slickers discovering the hidden wisdom of the folks living in the sticks. Actually, it doesn’t fit any mold at all.

Hamaguchi wowed the world with “Drive My Car,” a three-hour drama about grief and theater that won the Oscar for international feature film in 2022. Though “Evil Does Not Exist” is radically different from that one, but one can feel how in both films Hamaguchi is resetting the audience’s expectations and even the way we’re supposed to experience the passage of time. The opening shot of this movie is an unbroken four-minute pan, looking up through the trees at a gray sky. Hamaguchi is telling us to be patient, to let the movie work on its own schedule and rhythms — and when it does, the results are genuinely moving and fascinating.

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‘Evil Does Not Exist’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some violence and language. Running time: 106 minutes; in Japanese with subtitles.

Review: Children's fable 'IF' is loaded with invention, but never comes together as a cohesive story

There are a lot of nice little moments in “IF,” a children’s fable about a 12-year-old girl relearning how to embrace her childhood, but writer-director John Krasinski — laboring with the might of a dad trying to make his little girl happy — doesn’t build them up to anything bigger. 

The premise of “IF” sounds like something out of a Pixar movie: What if all the imaginary friends — those various beings conjured up by children to fend off loneliness — got together and talked about their feelings? In that way, Krasinski, helming his first movie since the “A Quiet Place” films, gets quite inventive in showing us an array of creatures: A giant purple furball named Blue (voiced by Steve Carell, reuniting Krasinski with his boss from “The Office”), an English woman who resembles a ‘30s cartoon character names Blossom (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a wise old teddy bear named Lewis (voiced by the late Louis Gossett Jr.), and so on.

The movie’s human protagonist is Bea, wonderfully played by Cailey Fleming, who’s been through a lot in her young life. In the opening montage — reminiscent of another Pixar movie, “Up” — we see Bea growing up with her loving parents (played by Krasinski and Catharine Daddario) in a New York apartment. The audience soon notices that Mom is wearing a kerchief on her head, and that the scenes have moved to a hospital room, and then Mom’s gone.

The action picks up with Bea, at 12, staying with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) while Dad is in the hospital for an undisclosed surgery. Dad is a jokester, constantly trying to keep Bea’s spirits up by, for example, turning his IV rig into an impromptu dance partner. Bea is too serious for such frivolity, especially when she’s once again bringing flowers to her parent in a hospital.

One night, while Grandma is falling asleep watching an old movie (it’s “Harvey,” which is a big tipoff for those who know it), Bea hears something upstairs in the apartment building. She investigates, and finds Calvin (Ryan Reynolds), who we learn is the reluctant caregiver to all the imaginary friends who have been left behind when their kids grew up and forgot about them. Bea offers to help Calvin and the imaginary friends (or IFs for short) by either finding them new kids — like Benjamin (Alan Kim, from “Minari”), another patient in the hospital — or reuniting them with the adults who used to be their kids.

Much of “IF” is clever and creative — from the Coney Island setting for the IFs’ retirement home to the way needle drops are used to evoke memory — but after a while one realizes that they’re not really going anywhere. Krasinski has all the elements for a charming childhood fable, but can’t make the pieces fit into a satisfying whole.

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“IF”

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements and mild language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' is a slow burn, but it ignites into strong sci-fi and a solid allegory about power

It takes a while to grow on you, but “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” eventually emerges as an intelligent and moving entry in the durable science-fiction franchise.

The movie starts with the death of the character the franchise has been following for years, the ape leader Caesar. He’s given a funeral fit for a king, which is what he was when we saw him seven years ago, in “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

The movie then jumps forward “many generations later,” a title card tells us, and shows us a world where the skyscrapers of the human race are rusted and overgrown with vegetation — and the climbing grounds for the current inhabitants, the apes. We’re introduced to the Eagle Clan, whose members train birds of prey to serve them. For young adults, it has become a coming-of-age ritual to pilfer an egg from the eagles’ nests and care for the resulting chick. For Noa (performed by Owen Teague), there’s added pressure because his father is the clan’s “master of birds.”

But there are others who pose a danger to the Eagle Clan — namely the gorillas, and their ruler, Proximus (performed by Kevin Durand), who are working to enslave all the smaller apes for his grand purpose. When the gorillas attack and enslave the Eagle Clan, Noa vows to free them, and gets on his horse to find where Proximus’ forces have taken them.

On his journey, Noa makes two allies. One is Raka (performed by Peter Macon), an orangutan who is the last member of the Order of Caesar, who devoted their lives to the teaching of their great leader — and who believe tyrants like Proximus are misusing Caesar’s name in their quest for power. The other is a human woman (Freya Allan), who has been following Noa from a distance, apparently hungry and freezing. 

Raka intuits that the woman — whom he calls Nova (“i call all of them Nova,” he says,a sly nod to the franchise’s history of women characters — is smarter than most humans, who mostly have turned mute and feral over the decades.

What happens from this point on is definitely in spoiler territory — and also genuinely cool, so I don’t want anyone to lose out on experiencing the surprise my fellow audience members felt watching it all unfold. I will say there’s an actor whose late-in-the-game appearance made me smile broadly.

Director Wes Ball (who made the three “Maze Runner” movies) and screenwriter Josh Friedman perform some stunning acts of world-building, creating varied ape communities in the ruins left behind by humanity. (Friedman knows a thing or two about world-building, having worked with James Cameron on the “Avatar” movies.) The performance-capture work is seamless, propelling the illusion that they got actual apes — not just computer-animated faces manipulated by human actors — to emote and fight through these scenes.

It does take a few minutes for our human brains — and in this universe, humans are in cognitive decline — to sort out which character is which. Once a viewer gets over that threshold, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” reveals itself to be a stirring piece of science fiction, as well as a deft allegory about the dangers of power and the conundrum of knowing who to trust. 

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‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence/action. Running time: 145 minutes.

Review: 'The Fall Guy' is a fun meta-homage to stunt performers, and a showcase for the onscreen chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt

Among the many ways director David Leitch’s fizzy action rom-com “The Fall Guy” pays tribute to the work of Hollywood’s stunt community is its very structure — by making something that’s intricately thought out in every detail look effortlessly tossed out there for our entertainment.

Verrrry loosely inspired by the ‘80s TV series starring Lee Majors, “The Fall Guy” centers on Colt Seavers (played by Ryan Gosling), a veteran stunt performer whose steady gig for the last six years has been as stunt double for one of Hollywood’s biggest and most arrogant stars, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). 

That ends when Colt is injured on a stunt — a long fall in a hotel foyer that Leitch seems to carry off in one unbroken take, with Gosling is doing the falling. However, as the movie teaches us later, the latest technology is “deep fakes,” in which the star’s head can be transposed onto the stunt performer’s body. It’s just the first of many examples of how screenwriter Drew Pearce (“Iron Man 3,” “Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation”) anticipates everything we think we know about moviemaking — specifically, making an action blockbuster — and toys with those ideas.

Before his fall, Colt was well into a wonderfully romantic interlude with one of the film’s camera operators, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt). After the fall, though, Colt withdraws from the industry, the world, and Jody — and 18 months later is parking cars at a Mexican restaurant in L.A.

Then Colt gets a call from Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham), the hard-charging producer of Ryder’s films. Gail tells Colt she needs him to perform some stunts on Ryder’s current shoot, an action-packed science-fiction love story being filmed in Australia. Colt declines, until Gail tells him that the director is Jody, who specifically asked for him to work on her first film as a director.

Colt arrives, reteaming with stunt coordinator Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), and soon learns that Gail was lying — Jody didn’t know he was coming, and doesn’t want him on her set. Seems that Jody is still nursing some pain over their abrupt break-up. But before they can resolve those issues, Gail delivers Colt some disturbing news: Ryder has gone missing, and she needs Colt to find him before Jody and the studio find out.

This mission sets Colt off on a pursuit of the spoiled actor, and a line of clues — and, this being an action movie, a series of breakneck stunt pieces in which Colt (or, more accurately, Gosling’s stunt double) is shot at, punched, tossed around, dragged behind vehicles, thrown through windshields and put through other death-defying events.

Leitch (“Deadpool 2,” “Atomic Blonde,” “Bullet Train”) was a stunt man and stunt coordinator before he became a director, and it’s abundantly clear in this film how much he loves the stunt community and the crazy things they do for our entertainment. (Yes, there’s a none-too-subtle mention of how stunt performers don’t have a category at the Oscars.) He shows us the sweat and precision that goes into creating such stunts, without detracting from how fun they are to watch onscreen.

What burns even brighter than the movie’s pyrotechnics is the movie chemistry between Gosling and Blunt. We’ve had hints of their shared appeal recently, in their joint appearances on the Academy Awards and “Saturday Night Live.” Here, the combination is perfection, producing both comedic and romantic sparks. (To be fair, I’d love to see a rom-com starring the actors’ real-life spouses, Eva Mendes and John Krasinski, just to balance things.)

“The Fall Guy” works because the stars, like the action pieces, are giving their all without looking like they’re trying too hard. It’s as much a balancing act as any stunt in the movie, and the results are breathtaking.

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‘The Fall Guy’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action and violence, drug content and some strong language. Running time: 126 minutes.

Review: 'The Idea of You' elevates the romantic drama, with Anne Hathaway radiant as a single mom in a surprising relationship with a young pop star

The swoon-worthy drama “The Idea of You” performs a double service by reminding viewers of the intrinsic value of two much-maligned aspects of the movies: Anne Hathaway and the very notion of romantic movies for grownups.

Hathaway, who’s one of the movie’s producers, stars as Solène Marchand, an art gallery owner in Los Angeles’ Silverlake neighborhood, living with her 16-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin). Solène is looking forward to a solo camping trip while her ex, Daniel (Reid Scott), takes Izzy and her friends to Coachella for a VIP meet-and-greet with the boy band August Moon. But when Daniel flakes out, Solène suddenly has to chaperone Izzy instead.

While chilling in the VIP area, Solène goes looking for a bathroom — and ends up accidentally in the trailer of August Moon’s charming lead singer, Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine). It’s an awkward meet-cute, but it’s hard to ignore the sparks flying between them. For Hayes, it’s a rare instance where he’s meeting a woman who isn’t a fawning fangirl. Solène, on the other hand, intuits that there’s more to Hayes than good looks and a charming English accent.

So it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise when Hayes shows up at Solène’s gallery and offers to buy every item on display. Solène stands up to that rich-boy arrogance, and speaks eloquently of the labor and thought that her artists expended to create these works. Hayes wants to see more art, so Solène takes him to the studio of one of her artist friends — sneaking him out of the neighborhood through the paparazzi and August Moon fans who amass wherever he’s spotted.

It doesn’t take long before the two are kissing. Not long after that – after Solène conveniently drops Izzy off at summer camp — Hayes invites her to New York, where they spend a day or two in a hotel having some excellent sex. (Or so we assume. The bedroom scenes are tastefully shot, and usually cut away before anything that would scare the Prime Video viewers.) By the end of the weekend, Hayes invites Solène to join the band on their European tour, and she says yes.

Director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick”) and co-screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt (“Kissing Jessica Stein”), in adapting Robinne Lee’s novel, find more meat than is typical in modern romance movies. The script tries to tackle some hard emotional issues — about divorce, trust issues, the choice to lean into a new love, and both characters’ reluctance to open up about what they’re really feeling — and does so with intelligence and a full heart. Only in the last half hour do the plot mechanics kick in, with Solène and Hayes dealing with the reality of the entire internet learning of their relationship.

Galitzine is definitely a charmer, and digs into a character who’s broader and deeper than the boy-band stereotype. And, as those who saw him as Camila Cabello’s prince in 2022’s “Cinderella” can attest, he can sing, too.

But it’s Hathaway who carries the movie’s emotional weight, and does so gracefully. She delivers Solène’s full range of feelings — the surprise and joy of a new relationship, the self-doubt when it seems to be going too well, and the guilt at keeping the relationship secret from Izzy — in a fully realized performance. Hathaway makes “The Idea of You” one of the sharpest, most honest romances you’ve seen in a long time.

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‘The Idea of You’

★★★1/2

Starts streaming Thursday, May 2, on Prime video. Rated R for some language and sexual content.  Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Challengers' presents a sexy love triangle that shows why Zendaya is the star of her generation

It was only a matter of time — after scoring two Emmys for “Euphoria” and playing the girlfriend roles in three “Spider-Man” movies and “Dune: Part Two” — before Zendaya would get a movie to shine as the powerful star that she is.

“Challengers,” a sexy love triangle set in the world of professional tennis, is that movie. And Zendaya is spectacular in it, matched well with male stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, all helmed by director Luca Guadagnino — who finds in his leading lady the perfect person to act out his sexual power dynamics.

Zendaya plays Tashi Donaldson, who we meet at a tennis tournament where her husband, Art Donaldson (Faist), whom Tashi coaches, is the odds-on favorite to win. But there’s a surprise at this tournament: A late entry by a journeyman player, Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). And to say Tashi, Art and Patrick have some history is understatement.

The script, by first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, takes us back 13 years, when Art and Patrick are best friends, on the rise in the juniors tennis circuit. At one tournament, they meet Tashi, a phenom player who’s on her way to be one of the greats. After the tourney, the three of them are together in a hotel room and … well, if you’ve seen the trailer, you have some idea of what happens next.

In the intervening years, Guadagnino shows us how the guys’ competitive nature spilled off the court and onto their dealings with Tashi, who goes from dating Patrick to marrying Art. The boys, though, aren’t Tashi’s primary focus — she doesn’t think love means nothing, as the old tennis joke goes, but the game means more. And when her dreams of Grand Slam titles are sidelined by a knee injury, she becomes determined to channel her tennis knowledge and drive into Art. 

In the movie’s terms, Zendaya is the champion in every way. Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who also collaborated with the director on “Call Me By Your Name” and “Suspiria”) gravitate toward her at every opportunity — who wouldn’t? — and she matches that attention with a performance that’s blazing with intensity. The intimate scenes she shares with O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”) are fiery and passionate, and not for a moment is she not in control.

I can’t say much about the ending, the rare sports showdown where the winner isn’t pre-ordained. It’s for sure going to get people talking. Some may find it a cheat, but I believe it’s the only way — knowing what we know about these characters and what matters to them — it could have played out, and it gives “Challengers” an added delightful twist.

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‘Challengers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity. Running time: 131 minutes.

Review: 'Boy Kills World' is a bloody mess of an action movie, whose brains don't quite match its bravado

The blood-drenched action orgy of “Boy Kills World” should be everything a lover of over-the-top mayhem could hope for — breathtaking martial-arts moves, copious violence and bodies splattering like ketchup bottles dropped from a great height.

So why does this exercise in excess by rookie German director Moritz Mohr feel so draining? I think it’s because the movie can’t resist nudging the viewer in the ribs every five minutes to point out how clever it thinks it is.

The movie’s title hero, known to us only as Boy, is interoduced as a child (played by Nicholas and Cameron Crovetti), ruthlessly trained by a character known as Shaman (played by the Indonesian martial-arts star Yayan Ruhian) to be a killing machine. Boy is taught, quite brutally, to sacrifice all comfort and emotion to train his body to kill Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen), the oligarch who runs the nearby city-state. 

Boy believes that Hilda is responsible for killing his mother and forever separating him from his sister, Mina (Quinn Copeland), whom Boy sees as a hallucination or imaginary friend. Boy is deaf and mute, but can understand people by reading their lips — though it’s an imperfect skill. Boy also listens a lot to a voice in his head, his inner narrator, a voice based on a video game character (provided for the movie by H. Jon Benjamin, known for his roles in “Bob’s Burgers” and “Archer”).

Boy grows up under Shaman’s regimen, and as an adult (played by Bill Skarsgard) is determined to get close enough to Hilda to kill her. That’s easier said than done, with Hilda locked away somewhere in the city, surrounded by a security squad led by the toughest fighter of all, known as June 27 (Jessica Rothe). Boy finds help from two resistance fighters, Basho (“Bullet Train’s” Andrew Koji) and Bennie (Isaiah Mustafa). 

The plan is to get to Hilda through the Culling, the semi-annual ritual Hilda uses to maintain her reign of terror, where dissidents are rounded up to fight in a televised death match. Hilda’s son Glen (Sharlto Copley) is the Culling’s on-air emcee, though the brains of the operation are his wife, Melanie (Michelle Dockery), who produces the spectacle, and his brother Gideon (Brett Gelman), who writes the scripts.

There should be plenty of room in all this choreographed madness for some biting satire of the Van Der Koy’s fascist rule, the corrosive effect of TV violence or, you know, any of the targets writers Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers devise in the set-up. But the movie misses major opportunities to show it’s got brains behind the bashing.

Eventually “Boy Meets World” disappoints, delivering lots of punches but never landing a moment that’s a true knockout.

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‘Boy Kills World’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, language, some drug use and sexual references. Running time: 115 minutes.