Review: 'Dìdi (弟弟)' captures its Taiwanese American filmmaker's rough journey through adolescence, in ways both specific and universal

Good coming-of-age stories — and writer-director Sean Wang’s “Dìdi (弟弟)” is a good one — are notable for two things: They are specific to their time and place, and they say something more universal about the pain of growing up.

The time and place for Wang’s semi-autobiographical story is Fremont, Calif., in 2008. It centers on Chris Wang (played by newcomer Isaac Wang), who, like the director then, is a 13-year-old kid of Taiwanese parents. His mom (Joan Chen, who’s wonderful here) works to make a good home, and spends her spare time painting. His dad is never seen, working back in Taiwan and sending money to the family — though Dad’s mother, Nai Nai (played by the director’s grandmother, Chang Li Hua), is there to remind Mom of her shortcomings. The fourth member of the household is Vivian (Shirley Chen), Chris’ older sister, who constantly argues with Chris, but is soon leaving for college at UC-San Diego.

Chris spends this summer before his freshman year of high school hanging out with his buddies, as they pull pranks and shoot video of the results for Chris’ YouTube feed. Chris — known to his buddies as “WangWang” — also pines for a girl in his class, Madi (Mahaela Park), and is thrilled when she asks him to request they be Facebook friends.

Some of Wang’s story details the many different ways Chris is mortified by his mother’s traditional Taiwanese customs — like how she eats a Big Mac by separating the layers and cutting bits off with a knife and a fork. It also shows Chris’ first faltering steps as a filmmaker, when he helps some older teens shoot video of their skateboard tricks.

What makes “Dìdi (弟弟)” so entertaining, and so relatable, is how the specificity of Wang’s adolescent memories — things that could only have happened to him as a Taiwanese American kid in this era — makes them not far off from what everybody dealt with as a 13-year-old: Being mortified by your parents, fed up with your siblings, eager to learn about the opposite sex but terrified about how to do it, and bottling up rage with no good place to put it. Wang’s childhood looks nothing like mine or anybody else’s, but in the broader sense, it looks exactly like mine and everybody else’s.

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‘Dìdi (弟弟)’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 9, in area theaters. Rated R for language throughout, sexual material, and drug and alcohol use — all involving teens. Running time: 94 minutes; in English and in Mandarin with subtitles.

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This review originally ran on this website on January 19, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Trap' is a thriller that melds director M. Night Shyamalan's talent for suspense with his more unfortunate indulgences

When the potboiler “Trap” is really cooking, it reminds you of how talented a craftsman writer-director M. Night Shyamalan can be as he builds up suspense — and it makes the moments where Shyamalan indulges in his more annoying impulses more apparent.

The first hour or so of this thriller all happens in one building: A Philadelphia arena, where a superstar pop singer is performing for 20,000 adoring fans, the vast majority of them teen girls and their moms. There are about 3,000 men in attendance, we’re told at one point — and one of them is Cooper (Josh Hartnett), a firefighter who bought tickets as a treat for his 13-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), for a good report card.

Shyamalan follows Cooper and Riley as they arrive at the arena, catch a glimpse of the pop star, Lady Raven (played by the singer Saleka — aka Saleka Night Shyamalan, the filmmaker’s daughter, who wrote or co-wrote the songs she performs in the concert), entering the venue, and go inside themselves to take their seats at floor level. Cooper can’t help but notice the high security at the arena with cops at every exit.

A few minutes in, Cooper leaves Riley at their seats to go use the bathroom, which is where the movie takes a dark turn. Alone, Cooper looks at his phone, which shows him a closed-circuit camera view of the young man (Mark Bacolcol), chained up in a basement somewhere.

Shyamalan’s script feeds us the necessary supporting information (I’m not divulging anything that’s not in the trailer here) that there’s a serial killer on the loose, called The Butcher, and the concert has been organized as a trap to catch him. And there’s no doubt that Cooper is the guy the cops and a veteran FBI profiler (played by the one-time Disney star Hayley Mills, now 78 years old) are trying to catch, and that neither Riley nor his wife, Rachel (Alison Pill), suspect a thing.

The bulk of the story shows how Cooper has to size up the profiler’s tactics quickly to find an escape route, and listen for any bit of information the police drop that he can use. One of the movie’s weaknesses is that Shyamalan makes the cops and others — like a merch-table vendor (Jonathan Langdon) — too conveniently chatty about important security details.

The other weakness is placing too much of the plot responsibilities, particularly in the second half, on Lady Raven — and trusting the role to Saleka, in the most unfortunate instance of a director casting his own daughter since Sofia Coppola was in “The Godfather Part III.” Saleka’s Lady Raven is fine when she’s onstage, approximating what one might see at, say, an Olivia Rodrigo concert, but when the setting and the stakes abruptly change, Saluki doesn’t handle the shift as well as is needed.

With Hartnett’s high-wire acting, though, Shyamalan gets further on his outlandish premise than he probably deserves. Playing a menacing schemer under the guise of a goofy dad, Hartnett gives a calibrated performance that’s responsible for most of the creepy vibe Shyamalan aims to create and most of the thrillers that “Trap” delivers.

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‘Trap’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content and brief strong language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' scribbles out a chaotic special-effects mess from a beloved children's book.

Usually, I can watch a bad movie based on a good book secure in the knowledge that the book is still available, and that all copies have not been incinerated to leave the inferior movie as the only record of the book’s existence.

Watching the live-action/animated pile of rubbish called “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” it took a lot of internal prodding to stay reminded that I could go back to my copy of Crockett Johnson’s beloved children’s story — the one I used to read to my kids — and erase the mental anguish this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie caused.

The movie begins the way the book did, with a young cartoon hero, Harold, discovering he can create entire worlds, and even his friends Moose and Porcupine, by drawing them with his purple crayon and using his imagination. The movie’s animated opening goes on to show Harold, seemingly grown up but still a cartoon, still hanging out with Moose and Porcupine, in a much larger purple universe.

Harold gets curious about the voice he hears, the narrator (voiced by Alfred Molina), who tells Harold that they can’t meet in person, because the narrator lives in something called “the real world.” Undaunted, Harold decides he can draw a door to the real world, and so he does — and he lands on the other side of the door as a live-action figure, played by Zachary Levi.

His animal buddies follow through the same door, with Moose (Lil Rel Howery) landing as Harold’s sidekick and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) finding her own odd adventures. Harold and Moose are eventually aided by Mel (Benjamin Bottani), a bullied 10-year-old with an imaginary creature as a friend, and Mel’s widowed mom, Terry (Zooey Deschanel). Mel believes Harold’s stories of being able to create anything with his crayon, but Terry thinks Harold is either lying or nuts.

Watching director Carlos Saldanha (who directed the original “Ice Age”) and writers David Guion and Michael Handelman turn Johnson’s spare, whimsical book into a generic sludge pile of chaotic computer graphics is a travesty. It gets particularly offensive when the gentle Harold is put through an action climax involving lava, catapults and a stock comedy villain played by the usually reliable Jemaine Clement.

Levi relies on the same shtick he used in two “Shazam!” movies, playing the clueless man-child with incredible powers, but the routine is getting old. But, because reading books like “Harold and the Purple Crayon” to my kids taught me the value of being positive, I will offer this compliment: Reynolds, as the feisty Porcupine, shows a comic flair that some other director will deploy more cleverly than the folks who landed her here.

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‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’

★1/2

Opens Friday, August 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild action and thematic elements. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'Kneecap' is a messy comedy that provides a faked origin story for an Irish hip-hop trio.

The raucous, raunchy “Kneecap” has difficulty settling on what it wants to be — profane drug comedy, sexy romance, family melodrama, political diatribe about Northern Ireland — but, along the way, it’s a rather funny and nicely offensive look at young punks in modern Belfast.

Writer-director Rich Peppiatt devises a fictionalized origin story for a Belfast hip-hop group, called Kneecap. It starts in 2019, with two teens who call themselves “low-life scum,” Naoise Ó Cairealláin (who goes by Móglaí Bap) and  Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (aka Mo Chara). They spend their days selling MDMA and cocaine, and trying to dodge “the peelers” (their Irish-language name for the British police) and the paramilitary Radical Republicans Against Drugs that aims to drive away the drug trade. 

When Liam Óg gets arrested, he messes with the cops by talking only in Irish.. The police get JJ (JJ Ó Dochartaigh), a high school music teacher who speaks Irish, to act as a translator. JJ gets hold of Liam Óg’s notebook and sees the rap rhymes inside — most of them written in Irish. JJ convinces Liam Óg and Naoise to record those rhymes in the studio in his garage, and after much consumption of drugs, they make some tracks. 

The next step is to perform live, which means finding a willing venue (giving hashish to a pub owner helps) and letting JJ wear a balaclava and taking the name DJ Próvai so his school doesn’t learn of his side gig. 

Each of the lads has personal subplots. Liam Og has a stormy, but sex-filled, relationship with Georgia (Jessica Reynolds), who’s British and is of two minds about songs that treat the British as an occupying army. Naiose is dealing with his mom (Simone Kirby), how hasn’t left the house since Naiose’s car-bombing father (Michael Fassbender) faked his death and went underground a decade ago. And JJ’s wife, Caitlin (Fionnula Flaherty), is deeply involved in a public campaign in support of a law in the Northern Ireland parliament to recognize and protect the Irish language.

Peppiatt’s directing gets a little rough going around the turns of the overstuffed plot. But when the movie is focused on the raw energy of Kneecap’s raps, and the sheer defiance of speaking one’s indigenous language, the emotion hits hard.

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‘Kneecap’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 2, in several Utah theaters. Rated R for pervasive drug content and language, sexual content/nudity and some violence. Running time: 105 minutes; in English and Irish with subtitles.

Review: 'Coup!' is a dark class-warfare comedy set during a pandemic, with an uneven battle of wits and wills at the center

The darkly comic “Coup!” brings class warfare to the mansions of New York’s well-to-do, setting up a less-than-satisfying battle of wits between two mismatched opponents. 

In one corner is Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard), a cook in 1918 New York who takes a job with a wealthy family, the Hortons, in a mansion on an island off the coast of Long Island. In the other corner is the Hortons’ patriarch, J.C. (Billy Magnussen), a muckraking newspaper writer stirring up the masses with his accounts of the Spanish flu epidemic and the panic in Manhattan — from the comfort of his family mansion, far away from the strife of the New York streets.

While J.C. writes diatribes against President Wilson and tells his wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon), about his political ambitions, Floyd begins a series of small acts of defiance against his bosses. J.C. bans alcohol for the servants, which Floyd disagrees with. And J.C. is a pacifist and a strict vegetarian — a stance that Floyd questions, particularly when pandemic panic makes getting produce in town impossible, and the only available food source is the plentiful deer on the property. 

At first, Floyd’s transgressions seem inconsequential, but over time, they feel to J.C. like a plot — possibly orchestrated by President Woodrow Wilson — to undermine him within the family. Julie, who likes Floyd’s attention to her play writing, wonders if J.C. is losing his marbles.

The writing-directing team of Joseph Schuman (directing his first movie) and Austin Stark depict this as a microcosmic power struggle of wealth vs. labor — with Floyd’s rebellions and the support he’s garnered from most of the kitchen staff going up against the money and empty fighting-for-the-people rhetoric of J.C. and his family.

The battle of wits is also a battle of acting superiority, and Sarsgaard — in a rare comic role for the usually morose actor — runs rings around poor Magnussen. But forming a rooting interest is difficult, because neither side offers a completely satisfactory outcome, and the one the movie chooses turns out to be the worst. 

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‘Coup!”

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 2, at the Megaplex Theatres at The District (South Jordan). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for sexual situations, some violence and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Deadpool & Wolverine' gleefully, mercilessly and bloodily spoofs the unified theory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Where does Deadpool, Marvel’s foul-mouthed bad boy mercenary, fit in the stridently PG-13 Marvel Cinematic Universe? Based on his first movie under the Marvel Studios (aka Disney) banner, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” anywhere he bleeping wants to.

Star/producer/co-writer Ryan Reynolds — part of a five-member writing crew that includes director Shawn Levy — doesn’t bring Deadpool in line with the MCU’s sensibilities so much as drags comic-book lore into his sandbox of bloody carnage, scatological humor and elbow-in-the-ribs callbacks. The nerds will love it, and Deadpool even says as much the first time the two title anti-heroes start fighting each other.

Writing a review of how Levy, Reynolds and company do that will be tricky — particularly since Marvel Studios asked critics in advance to “refrain from revealing spoilers, cameos, character developments and detailed story points in your coverage, including on social media.” So here goes, as spoiler-free as I can make it and still give you a sense of the movie’s flavor:

The opening credits show Deadpool, aka Wade Wilson, in a forest dispatching a large contingent of helmeted stormtrooper types in the bloodiest ways possible. We notice that these shock troops wear the logo of the TVA, the Time Variant Authority — an organization introduced in the “Loki” TV series, which is supposed to keep the timelines of all the universes from bumping into each other. 

As fans of the last Deadpool movie, 2018’s “Deadpool 2,” will remember, Deadpool aka Wade Wilson ended the movie with a time device in his possession, playing fast and loose with several timelines. According to a TVA official called Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), that’s not why the TVA is interested in Deadpool. Mr. Paradox wants to eliminate a lot of timelines, including the one where our Deadpool lives, because it’s missing something: Wolverine, who died at the end of 2017’s “Logan.”

Many movie lovers will argue, correctly, that “Logan” gave Hugh Jackman, who by then had played the adamantium-clawed fighter for 17 years, the dignified ending he and the character deserved. It’s fascinating to watch Levy and Reynolds — with Jackman’s willing assistance — mess with that legacy, and do so with the rough-and-tumble humor of the “Deadpool” franchise. And, mostly, it works, because it takes Logan/Wolverine back to how we remember him in the early going: A jaded, angry brawler who seems uninterested in making himself be anything more.

That version of Wolverine, it turns out, matches the Deadpool we find her almost too perfectly. After a brief attempt at joining a superhero team — which sets up both the first significant cameo and the first joke about cameos in a Marvel movie — a dejected Wade tries for a normal life, like his buddy Peter (Rob Delaney, returning from “Deadpool 2”), before the TVA enters the picture.

Levy is a comfortable choice as director, having worked with Reynolds on “Free Guy” and “The Adam Project,” and with Jackman on “Real Steel.” Here he leans into the chaos, knowing that he can throw pretty much anything up on the screen and people will laugh at Reynolds’ antics and the on-the-nose needle drops for every major action sequence.

Having Deadpool meet up with Wolverine isn’t that unusual, though, considering that the character, at least as long as Reynolds has played him, has been in the X-Men orbit. He met two of them, the mighty metallic Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and the sullen Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), in the first two movies, and they show up again here. 

What’s more fun — and, it turns out, the prime reason “Deadpool & Wolverine” exists — is how the movie not only references the MCU and crosses over into “X-Men” territory, but dredges up characters from the pre-MCU Marvel movie roster that some viewers may have forgotten ever happened. I’d tell you more, but Disney asked so politely for me to not divulge too much.

It says everything about Reynolds’ clout that “Deadpool & Wolverine” can be such a reference-heavy valentine to the hardcore Marvel movie fans at the same moment Marvel Studios poohbah Kevin Feige has been saying he wants the MCU films to stand on their own and not refer back so much to other movies (and now TV shows). Reynolds knows the secret sauce is to deliver the jokes fast and the blood in buckets, and it still works.

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‘Deadpool & Wolverine’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, gore and sexual references. Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Humanist Vampire' is a quietly charming dark comedy that shows the human side of sucking blood

The Quebecois dark comedy “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” is a charming, if somewhat slight, story of what happens when desire and empathy interfere with each other.

Sasha (Sarah Montpetit) is a young vampire — well, 68, but looking 17 — who as a young girl (played by Lilas-Rose Cantin) was traumatized by a birthday clown. Well, not by the clown, but by the sight of her family devouring the clown. When she sees blood, the vampire doctors tell her parents (Steve Laplante and Sophie Cadieux), her brain registers compassion for the humans, not hunger. Because of this, her fangs never grow in properly.

When Sasha’s mother becomes impatient with preparing blood baggies for her daughter, the parents send Sasha to live with her cousin, Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), who tries to teach Sasha how to hunt for humans. It’s how, one night, Sasha first sees Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a solitary high-school student who’s picked on by a bully (Arnaud Vachon) and contemplates killing himself. 

When Paul knocks himself out running away from Sasha, she sees the blood on his forehead and starts feeling hungry — and her fangs start growing. Paul soon realizes what Sasha is, but being depressed and willing to end it all, he figures feeding her is as good a way to go as any. But when she brings the boy upstairs to suck him dry, they instead bond over a Brenda Lee song and become friends. 

Director Ariane Louis-Seize, who co-wrote with Christine Doyon, brings a dry wit to her feature debut, capturing the demure Sasha as she gradually turns her phobia into a superpower, teaming with Paul to free him from everything that is making his life miserable. The pairing of Montpetit and Bénard brings out the story’s edgy quirks, as the two shy characters spark in unexpected and quietly moving ways.

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‘Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 26, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence, bloody images and language. Running time: 91 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Twisters' delivers nearly the same visceral thrill as its 1996 predecessor, though the script is more whiny than windy

Like the storms mentioned in its title, “Twisters” hits hard, fast and often — delivering nearly the same visceral movie thrill that its predecessor, “Twister,” did back in 1996, with better visual and sound effects.

Those storms, and the state of Oklahoma, are the only characters that carry over from the first movie to this one, though.

We begin with a ragtag crew of weather scientists, led by Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a Ph.d. candidate trying to show that tornadoes can be tamed — if you release enough of a “super-absorbent polymer” into a cyclone to deprive it of moisture. The pseudo-science explanation that one of the team (Kiernan Shipka) gives is it’s the same stuff found in disposable diapers. The team ends up in a massive tornado, and not everyone survives the experience.

Cut to five years later, and Kate has left tornado chasing for a job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offices in New York, predicting weather patterns from the safety of a computer screen. One of her old teammates, Javi (Anthony Ramos), convinces her to come back to Oklahoma, to help him and his high-tech storm-chasing enterprise try out their new radar array. 

Once back in Oklahoma, Kate is reminded of one reason she left this world behind: The circus atmosphere of reckless storm chasers. The most reckless of the bunch is a group of scruffy YouTube-posting storm chasers, led by self-described “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). 

Because character development hasn’t changed much since “The Taming of the Shrew,” it will surprise no one that screenwriter Mark L. Smith (“The Boys in the Boat”) shows us Kate and Tyler dislking each other at the get-go — though in short order, both develop a grudging admiration for the other’s tornado intelligence. And, admittedly, both Edgar-Jones and Powell are easy on the eyes.

Smith’s script plays like a fancy cuckoo clock, where things pop out at regular intervals to make a lot of noise. In between, there’s some heavy-handed messaging about the double whammy poor Oklahomans face from harsh weather and rapacious capitalism.

Director Lee Isaac Chung, moving up in budget level from his Oscar-winnng “Minari,” keeps the rhythm of the action sequences, pitting tech-augmented pickup trucks against unceasingly loud and blustery nature. He also finds in his leads, Edgar-Jones and Powell, an action-movie power couple, both so determined and heroic that they barely have time to cast suggestive glances at each other — but both charming enough that audiences will imagine a wind-whipped romance anyway.

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‘Twisters’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense action and peril, some language and injury images. Running time: 122 minutes.