Review: 'My Penguin Friend' is an animal adventure that's lightweight, light-hearted and light on the facts

There may not be a more sinister phrase to start a movie than “inspired by a true story” — because it’s a con, one employed in the timid adventure drama “My Penguin Friend,” that seduces the audience with a kernel of truth into ignoring how fanciful the rest of the popcorn bucket is.

The story is set in Ilha Grande, a fishing village on an island off the coast of Brazil. We meet Joao (Pedro Urizzi), a fisherman happily married to Maria (Amanda Magalhães), with a smiling young son, Miguel (Juan José Garnica). One day, Joao and Miguel are out on their small rowboat, a storm comes, and Miguel is thrown overboard and drowns.

After that tragic prologue, director David Schurmann picks up decades later, with Joao — now played by the French actor Jean Reno — hanging out near his old fishing buddies, or at home with Maria (played by Adriana Barraza, from “Babel”). Miguel’s death still weighs heavily on him.

At the same time, we’re shown a Magellanic penguin nesting in Patagonia, some 5,000 miles south in Argentina. The penguin joins his colony for their long migratory swim, but gets separated and caught in an oil slick. He’s nearly dead when Joao pulls him from the water and starts nursing him back to health. After a few weeks, the penguin heads to the water and swims away — and Joao and Maria think that’s the end.

Meanwhile, back in Patagonia, a trio of marine biologists (Alexia Moyano, Nicolás Francella and Rochi Hernández) are studying the rookery of penguins, and they spot one who’s a little different — because he’s seemingly not put off by human contact. They put a tag on his flipper and send him on his way.

Sure enough, the penguin returns to Ilha Grande, and to Joao and Maria, who are less surprised by his return than by the red plastic tag on his flipper. This being a family-friendly movie, the penguin — named DinDim (which is a type of ice pop in Brazil) — goes on wacky misadventures, like having the penguin waddle away from Joao and Maria’s beachside home into town, where someone shoots video on their phone that quickly goes viral. The video attracts both a TV reporter (Ravel Cabral) and those marine biologists.

Here’s where Schurmann and screenwriters Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi let that “inspired by a true story” label go to their heads. Seemingly unsatisfied with a gentle story of an elderly man who finds a penguin entering his life, the filmmakers inject artificial drama that’s laughably manipulative as it turns its human characters into idiots for the sake of its plot devices.

Generally, though, “My Penguin Friend” is a harmless enough diversion for kids, a throwback to the cheaply produced live-action “Wonderful World of Disney” entries of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Just don’t believe half of what’s in it, even after the movie shows footage of the real Joao and DinDim. 

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‘My Penguin Friend’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 16, in theaters. Rated PG for thematic content. Running time; 97 minutes.

Review: 'Alien: Romulus' puts a young cast through a nail-biting encounter with familiar xenomorphs for a thrilling extension of the franchise

The newest movie in the “Alien” franchise — “Alien: Romulus” — is a three-course meal of science-fiction horror: A tantalizing appetizer, a meat-and-potatoes main course, and the most outrageous cinematic dessert.

The set-up places the new movie in the franchise’s timeline, shortly after the events of the 1979 original “Alien” — as a dark spaceship recovers something from the wreckage of the Nostromo, the freighter that was destroyed in an effort to battle back against the H.R. Giger-designed xenomorphic creature. What they’ve recovered, we see before the opening credits are over, is that xenomorph. 

Cut to a forever-dark mining colony, where a group of young indentured laborers are trying to escape the company — Weyland-Yutani Corp., the mega-corporation that is the franchise’s true villains — and get to a free planet nine years away. To survive the trip in their rickety space cruiser, they need cryogenic chambers, and think they can steal some off of an abandoned ship that’s hovering close to the colony. 

The ringleader, Tyler (Archie Renaux), says they can get in and out in short order, before the ship — really a floating space lab — in an hour. Tyler needs help from a friend, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), because she has a “brother,” Andy (David Johnson), who’s a synthetic and therefore can talk to the space lab’s computer and get them through locked doors onboard.

The crew of the cruiser — besides Rain, Tyler and Andy, there’s the foul-mouthed Bjorn (Spike Fearn), optimistic Kay (Isabela Merced) and hotshot pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu) — get to the space lab, and discover it wasn’t abandoned, but attacked. 

This is where director Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the “Evil Dead” reboot) and his writing partner, Rodo Sayagues, shift into the movie’s second act. Here’s where the terror starts, as the creepy-crawly face huggers start going after our crew. There’s also another surprise in the lab: A half-destroyed synthetic, Rook, who — spoiler alert! — strongly resembles someone familiar to fans of the original movie. 

Then, after the cast thins out some, comes the third act, which I will not describe other than with one word: Whoa.

Among the solid ensemble, Jonsson gives a nicely calibrated performance as the synthetic Andy, navigating the character’s plot-driven personality shifts. And Spaeny — who’s having a good year after “Priscilla” and “Civil War” — is the strongest protagonist in the franchise since Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley.

Alvarez creates some nail-biting tension, though with more jump-scare tricks than Ridley Scott did in the original. (Scott remains an executive producer here.) He also proves himself a master of effects work, particularly in some clever zero-gravity sequences and the motion-capture work for that messed-up synthetic character. Alvarez is clearly a fan of the franchise (and includes a couple Easter eggs in the dialogue to prove it), and he makes “Alien: Romulus” a thrilling addition to it.

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‘Alien: Romulus’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violent content and language. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Borderlands' a by-the-numbers videogame adaptation without a trace of creative energy, even from Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis

It’s become a cliché to say that movies based on video games are terrible, but director-writer Eli Roth seems determined to go out of his way to make “Borderlands,” an adaptation of a popular first-person-shooter franchise, as bad as he can.

In some ill-defined future where corporations have taken over planets, as Roth’s jumbled opening scene-setting tells us, there are hordes of ragtag mercenaries going to a place called Pandora to find a mysterious vault that legend says a race of aliens called the Elyrians left behind, holding untold treasure and technology. (Note: the first “Borderlands” game hit store shelves a couple months before James Cameron’s “Avatar” was released, so the claim on the name “Pandora” for a planet is a complicated one.)

The first action we see is in a space station orbiting Pandora, where an ex-soldier named Roland Greaves (played by Kevin Hart) is attempting a prison break, to spring a young woman, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, from “Barbie”), out of custody and return her to her father, a mega-industrialist named Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). During the breakout, Tina also releases her protector, the hulking Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and the three hide out on Pandora.

Atlas enlists Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a tough-as-nails bounty hunter with dynamically angled red hair. I don’t mean to reduce the two-time Oscar winner’s performance here to her hairstyling, but Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie don’t leave me — or the actors — much to work with. Lilith, she tells us in a voiceover that approaches “Blade Runner” levels of superfluousness, regards Pandora as a “s- - - hole,” and hates the idea of going there again. Anyone who’s ever seen a movie can soon guess that Pandora is also her homeworld.

Lilith constantly tells people on Pandora that she’s not a “vault hunter” — one of the hordes of fortune seekers trying to locate and ransack the lost Elyrian treasure. But after a few shootouts and chases with Atlas’ private army, the Crimson Lance, Lilith finds Roland, Krieg and a not-so-helpless Tina and ends up joining them on their quest to find the lost keys to the legendary vault. Along the way, they also pick up an eccentric xenoarchaeologist, Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a wisecracking robot who goes by the name Claptrap (and is voiced by Jack Black).

The movie’s producers wouldn’t mind if you compared “Borderlands” to another franchise about ragtag treasure hunters, Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which Roth & Co. are blatantly ripping off. The difference is that Marvel is drawing upon years of comic book narrative that has helped flesh out its oddball characters, where “Borderlands” only has a few video games — a genre where character development is usually sketchy, so each game player can treat the character they’re playing as themselves. 

It’s hard to say whether Roth is delivering underwritten characters to emulate the video game style, or because he just doesn’t care. Judging by the underdeveloped world-building — the sets look like someone dumped the leftovers from “Furiosa” in a canyon and told the crew to make do — and the cheap special effects, I’m opting for “just doesn’t care.”

“Borderlands” isn’t just one of the worst movies of the year. It’s something even more discouraging — it’s a movie completely devoid of creative energy, and without a reason to exist.

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‘Borderlands’

★

Opens Friday, August 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, language and some suggestive material. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'It Ends With Us' leans into its passionate romance, while softening the depiction of domestic violence

In a previous Hollywood era, movies like “It Ends With Us” were more common — dreamily registered romantic dramas about weighty topics featuring impossibly gorgeous leading ladies being put through hell, eventually triumphing before the closing credits.

Director Justin Baldoni and screenwriter Christy Hall have adapted Colleen Hoover’s novel, published in 2016 and revived on BookTok during the COVID-19 pandemic, into a love triangle among beautiful actors — with the ravishing Blake Lively as the focal point — whose romantic moments have the unfortunate effect of blunting the story’s depiction of domestic violence. 

Lively’s character, Lily Bloom, acknowledges upon first meeting neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by Baldoni), that her name is a bit ridiculous — a situation compounded by her pursuit of her lifelong dream of opening a flower shop in Boston. After some flirting, Lily tells Ryle she wants a commitment, while Ryle is merely interested in casual sex.

As Lily starts creating her flower shop, she gets her first employee, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who’s married to a finance guy, Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), and decides to work for Lily out of boredom. Allysa introduces Lily to her brother — who turns out to be Ryle, and the sparks start flying again.

As Lily and Ryle get closer, Hall (whose directing debut “Daddio” debuted earlier this year) writes up a flashback, to when a high-school Lily (newcomer Isabela Ferrer) had her first romance, with classmate Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter), who at the time was homeless, thrown out by his mom for getting between her and an abusive boyfriend. Lily, whose father (Kevin McKidd) hit her mother (Amy Morton), can relate.

Back in the present, Lily and Ryle are taking Lily’s mother out to dinner, and Lily recognizes their server is Atlas (now played by Brandon Sklenar), who’s a chef and restaurant owner. Almost immediately after that, an incident at home, in which an enraged Ryle strikes Lily and gives her a shiner, gets Lily considering whether she’s going down the same path as her mother.

Baldoni, as director, captures the romantic moments between Lily and Ryle as passionately as a PG-13 rating will allow. But the moments of domestic abuse are deferred, shown either fleetingly or discreetly off-camera, dulling the power those scenes might have had to propel Lily’s transformation from victim to fierce survivor. (It’s not exaggerating to say that Lively probably takes more punches onscreen in her cameo appearance in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” administered by real-life husband Ryan Reynolds in one of that movie’s spasms of comedic violence, than she does here.)

Lively gives a fully inhabited performance as Lily, demonstrating that even someone with movie-star beauty and the grit to launch a small business can fall prey to violence from a mercurial figure in her own home. Even when the story beats are at their most predictable — several shots are devoted to Lively’s Lily looking in a mirror and applying concealer to an injury to her face — Lively brings her enormous empathy to them.

One might wish Baldoni and Hall would tackle the topic of domestic violence as forcefully as Hoover’s novel, with its rallying cry of a title, apparently did. The filmmakers hedge their bets, guessing that moviegoers don’t want to pay $15 to seek Lively get hit realistically by her co-star, and deprive their star of the chance to show her acting chops and deliver a stinging message about domestic abuse.

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‘It Ends With Us’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language. Running time: 130 minutes.

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.