Review: 'Robot Dreams' is a deceptively simple and wonderfully charming animated tale of friendship between a dog and his robot companion.

As a writer, it’s always a cop-out to say “words fail me” or that something is “indescribable” — that’s our job, after all — but it’s hard not to fall back on such language when reviewing the Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams,” a movie whose magic lives far beyond its synopsis. 

Berger, adapting American writer-illustrator Sara Varon’s graphic novel, starts with Dog, who lives a lonely life in a New York apartment sometime in the 1980s. One night, after microwaving his TV dinner, he turns on the TV and comes across an ad for the Amica 2000, a robot companion. 

Dog orders one, and soon the mail carrier — a bull, because this New York is populated with anthropomorphic animals — delivers a giant box. Dog opens it up and starts assembling the parts, and that’s how Robot becomes part of Dog’s life. The two spend a wonderful, fun-filled summer together, taking in everything New York has to offer, from Central Park to Coney Island. But as summer starts to turn into fall, one slight miscalculation causes Dog and Robot to be separated, with heartbreaking consequences.

Berger — best known for the surreal Snow White adaptation “Blancanieves” — smartly uses no dialogue, removing any language barrier. (Spanish actor Ivan Labanda is credited with the nonverbal vocal work for both Dog and Robot.) The clever, expressive animation does the emotional lifting, and makes it feel effortless.

Just because there’s no dialogue doesn’t mean the movie’s silent. The sound design captures the vibrant New York street life in all its exuberance. A lot of that city energy comes through music — particularly one needle drop that is just too delightful to spoil by revealing it here.

The deceptively simple animation captures Varon’s line drawings and the sunniest, happiest version of New York City possible, in service to a witty, charming story of friendship crossing boundaries of time and hardship. “Robot Dreams” is the summer jam you didn’t know you needed.

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‘Robot Dreams’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 31, in select theaters. Not rated, but probably PG for mature themes. Running time: 102 minutes. 

Review: 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Story' is a masterpiece of rage, fire and octane, with Anya Taylor-Joy delivering a ferocious performance

In an era where creatures, machines and worlds can be pieced together with pixels, the tactile messiness of George Miller’s “Mad Max” movies — where the stunt driving and other outlandish tricks are, for the most part, happening in camera — is astonishing. 

In Miller’s new rendition, “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Miller takes a fascinating detour from the chronicles of Max, the one-time cop now driving across the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic hellscape — to focus on the most interesting character Miller has created: The hardened driver and freedom fighter, Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Furiosa’s story is told in chapters, the first showing her (played by Alyla Browne) as a young girl riding with her mother (Charlie Fraser), a sharpshooter racing to keep marauders from telling the warlord Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) the location of their “a place of abundance.” Ultimately, Furiosa is kidnapped by Dementus, beginning an odyssey where she has to be smart to see the next sunrise.

For awhile, we watch Furiosa as she’s traded around the wastelands, either with the blowhard Dementus and his scruffy biker minions or in The Citadel, led by the masked Immortal Joe (Lachy Hulme) and his boorish and dim sons, Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) and Scrotus (Josh Herman). Dementus controls Gastown, trading fuel for the food Joe’s laborers produce in The Citadel.

It’s nearly an hour before Miller shows us Furiosa as an adult — played by the movie’s star, Anya Taylor-Joy — and by then, she’s a hardened survivor, disguising herself as a young man so she can stay topside and spot opportunities to escape. Such a moment arrives, when Joe’s top driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), is assigned to drive a big rig with supplies on the ambush-prone road to Gastown, in what is the movie’s signature stunt sequence. 

The script, by Miller and Nico Lathouris, doesn’t move as swiftly as the one they wrote for “Fury Road,” but that’s a matter of function. This is an origin story, and must be told in fragments — a mosaic rather than an oil painting, where the pieces come together to create the striking portrait of a woman becoming a warrior in front of our eyes.

Taylor-Joy’s performance is breathtaking, bringing out Furiosa’s years of trauma and rage — and all the more impressive because she has sparse dialogue, and much of her emotion is conveyed in economical movement and those expressive eyes. The fact that Taylor-Joy doesn’t let Hemsworth, who’s quite good in the flashier and talkier villain role, steal the movie out from under her is a testament to her fierce talent.

In a George Miller movie, though, the other star is the world he has built — and, once again, the way Miller and his crew construct the movie’s chrome-plated road monsters, made to look cobbled together from spare parts but actually painstaking in every detail, nearly overloads the viewer’s eyes and brain. Between Miller’s world-building and Taylor-Joy’s ferocious performance, “Furiosa” delivers tons of entertainment and still makes the audience want to know what happens next.

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‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images. Running time: 148 minutes.

Review: 'Babes' is a raunchy, down-and-dirty comedy about pregnancy, with a sweet, warmly sentimental center

As a male human, I recognize that the creators of “Babes” — a raunch-filled comedy about pregnancy, impending motherhood and female friendship — were not thinking of me as the target demographic.

But I am happy to report that I laughed a lot, and got emotional a few times, even though some of the jokes and references and heart-tugging beats are beyond my field of experience — because the movie’s stars, Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau, are too funny and too wonderful not to laugh with and fall for.

Glazer’s Eden and Buteau’s Dawn have been best friends since childhood, growing up in New York and becoming as close as sisters. Their lives are not in the same place, though. When the movie begins, Dawn, a dentist, is about to go into labor with her second child with her loving and nerdy husband, Marty (Hasan Minhaj), living on the Upper East Side. Eden is a single woman, a yoga instructor who teaches in her fourth-floor walkup Brooklyn studio, which is also her apartment. 

The two meet for their annual Thanksgiving morning movie date, but Dawn notices that her theater seat is wet. So is the next one. And the next one. Dawn and Eden quickly realize that Dawn is going into labor. So they hurry to a restaurant, so Dawn can get all the good food she won’t be able to have in the hospital, and then go to the hospital to have the baby.

On the train back to Brooklyn, Eden starts a conversation with a guy in a tuxedo, Claude (Stephan James), who’s making the same transfers as she is. As they talk, they discover they have so many other things in common that it’s only natural that they’d end up back at his place and, eventually, in bed together.

You can guess what happens next: After getting ghosted by Claude, Eden takes a pregnancy test — well, 30 actually, since she’s on ‘shrooms at the time — and discovers she’s pregnant. What’s more, she decides she’s going to have the baby, an announcement that Dawn doesn’t greet with all the enthusiasm a supportive best friend is supposed to muster. Dawn knows what’s coming, and isn’t sure Eden is emotionally ready for motherhood.

The script, by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz (who has a funny cameo as a nervous waiter), digs deep into the gross details of pregnancy and childbirth, finding humor in everything from the length of the amniocentesis needle to the different… er, fluids that come out of a woman at different stages of the gestational process. Women, particularly women who have been through it, will likely laugh and nod in sympathy — at, for example, the scene where Dawn and Eden do to Dawn’s breast pump what the guys in “Office Space” did to a printer. Men, at the very least, will get a long-delayed education.

“Babes” is the directing debut of Pamela Adlon, but that doesn’t mean she’s an untrained rookie. Adlon directed 44 of the 52 episodes of her acclaimed series “Better Things,” in which she played an actress who’s also a single mom of three teen daughters. Here, Adlon displays a very dry wit and a well-tuned sense of the absurdities women endure to be mothers, lovers and friends.

Glazer gets massive amounts of credit for writing herself a wonderful role, and for perfectly embodying Eden’s fumbling journey toward maturity. Bureau is equally delightful, as she conveys the warmth and exasperation of being Eden’s best friend as well as the bone-deep exhaustion of being a supermom. Together, they make “Babes” a buddy-comedy that’s scathingly funny and truly heartfelt.

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‘Babes’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material, language throughout, and some drug use. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'The Garfield Movie' treats America's favorite fat feline like just another cat

I can’t think of the last time I saw a movie as bland and generic as “The Garfield Movie,” which crunches Jim Davis’ misanthropic comic-strip cat into one more piece of pre-digested intellectual property. 

The first sign of this movie’s lack of imagination is the casting of Chris Pratt as the orange cat with the lasagna fixation. Once upon a time, Pratt brought a naive charm to the voice work on “The Lego Movie.” But as was apparent with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” Pratt has become a name producers write down to voice the main character until they can think of somebody better — and then forget to think of somebody better.

Unfortunately, the same can be said of Samuel L. Jackson, who provides the voice here to Garfield’s wayward father, Vic. Jackson is a gifted actor with a legendary career, so it’s up to him whether he phones in a voice performance like this.

In the movie’s prologue, the kitten Garfield is abandoned in an alley, but follows his nose to an Italian restaurant — where he finds Jon Arbuckle (voiced by Nicholas Hoult) dining alone. The two bond instantly, over their shared loneliness and Garfield’s discovery of pizza, spaghetti and lasagna. Soon, Garfield makes a home for himself with Jon and his other pet, Odie, who quickly becomes the cat’s 24-hour servant. (Harvey Guillen performs the “voice” of the nonverbal dog.)

Then two thuggish dogs — Roland (voiced by “Ted Lasso’s” Brett Goldstein) and Nolan (voiced by “Saturday Night Live’s” Bowen Yang) — kidnap Garfield and Odie, on the orders of Jinx (voiced by Hannah Waddingham, another “Ted Lasso” alum). Jinx, she reveals in her villain monologue, is after Vic, who used to lead the criminal gang that Jinx ran with, until she got caught and spent years in the pound. Jinx wants Vic, Garfield and Odie, to finish the heist that got her caught: Stealing thousands of gallons of milk from a high-security dairy operation.

When Garfield gets there, he tries to befriend Otto (voiced by Ving Rhames), an aging bull who’s one-half of the dairy’s trademark logo. The other half, Ethel, is locked up tightly within the dairy’s industrial operation — so Otto agrees to help Garfield, Odie and Vic steal a milk truck if they help free Ethel.

It’s abundantly clear early into the story that this movie has wandered far afield of everything we know about the character of Garfield. Very little is said, outside the opening narration, of the cartoon cat’s laziness, or his disdain for his human and his dog — and his infamous hatred of Mondays is raised awkwardly in the dialogue and just as quickly forgotten.

Director Mark Dindal — who hasn’t helmed a movie since “Chicken Little” in 2005 — and a trio of credited writers serve up a few good laughs here and there. But they, and the plot, could have been about any random cat character, not the grumbling, sleep-deprived hater of cute kittens and Mondays that we’ve grown up to love. This is not my Garfield (and finding out that I had a Garfield is disturbing). 

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‘The Garfield Movie’

★★

Opens Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril and mild thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes.

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.