Review: 'The Best Christmas Pageant Ever' is a charming family drama that remembers what Christmas is all about

If all Christian-themed movies were as kind, as caring and as joyful — in short, as Christian — as “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” the world would be a much nicer place.

Adapted from Barbara Robinson’s much-loved short story, the movie centers on a church in the small town of Emmanuel, known far and wide for its Christmas pageant — a depiction of the birth of Jesus, carried out by the congregation’s children. It’s a wordless and solemn affair with only one line of dialogue, spoken by the kid playing the angel Gabriel.

For years, the stern Mrs. Armstrong (Mariam Bernstein) has directed the pageant with a set list of rules. When Mrs. Armstrong gets injured at home, someone in the congregation has to take on the burden of directing the kids. That someone is Grace (Judy Greer), one of the church’s moms — who only volunteers when she gets belittled by the snootier moms around her.

Grace tries to keep a lid on the chaos of directing a bunch of kids. Then she makes a decision that everyone expects to add to the chaos — casts the six unruly kids of the Herdmann family, known for bullying, thievery and all manner of bad behavior. They are, declares Grace’s daughter Beth (Molly Belle Wright), “the absolutely worst kids in the history of the world.” (An adult Beth, played by Lauren Graham, narrates the story.)

The snooty moms, and the convalescing Mrs. Armstrong, question Grace’s move. But she senses that this is right, and in introducing the Herdmanns to the story of the baby Jesus, is doing what a Christian should be doing. “Jesus was born for the Herdmanns as much as he was for us,” Grace tells Beth. “We’ll be missing the whole point now if we turn them away.”

As that dialogue illustrates, director Dallas Jenkins — known for creating the TV series about Jesus’ life, “The Chosen” — doesn’t shy away from putting Christ in this Christmas pageant. The message is clear, but also genuine. In adapting Barbara Robinson’s short story, screenwriters Ryan Swanson, Platte F. Clark and Darin McDaniel manage to deliver the same childlike wonder about the Nativity that Linus does in “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which is as good as one can get with this kind of movie.

The cast’s charm carries a lot of the load. Greer’s been a reliable supporting player forever, and seeing her shine in a lead role is delightful. Pete Holmes gets some nice moments as Grace’s understanding husband, Bob. But the standout is a comparative newcomer: Beatrice Schneider, who plays Imogene, the oldest and most fiercely protective of the Herdmann kids. 

“The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is a rare thing, indeed — a movie that shows its Christian heart, in all its warm and generous humility, with complete sincerity and goodness. God bless us, everyone.

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‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic material and brief underage smoking. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Memoir of a Snail' is a beautiful, melancholy story of a woman retreating into her shell, told in poignant animation

The Australian animated drama “Memoir of a Snail” is hand-crafted stop-motion animation that feels like something grown organically, like mushrooms in a bog — but a bog where only sad, profound and painfully beautiful things are supposed to live.

The “snail” here is Grace Pudel (pronounced like “puddle”), a lonely woman (voiced by “Succession’s” Sarah Snook) who, when the story begins, has held the hand of her elderly best friend and surrogate mother, Pinky (voiced by Jacki Weaver), in her dying breath. As Grace sits in Pinky’s garden, she releases the jar of snails she has raised for years, and in the process tells one snail, Sylvia (named for her late mom’s favorite author), her life story.

It’s a harrowing one. Born prematurely and with a cleft lip, Grace was a twin — her brother, Gilbert, was born shortly after her, after which their mother promptly died. They lived with their father, Percy (voiced by Dominique Pinon), a former street performer in Paris who emigrated to Australia and became a paraplegic and an alcoholic. 

Gilbert protected Grace from bullies, who teased her for the funny hat she wore. Gilbert had dreams of becoming a great street performer, like his dad was, and practices fire-eating and other pyrotechnic tricks — often getting singed in the process. 

When their father died, Child Services forced the twins to live apart with foster parents. Grace had a reasonably OK draw: A pair of supportive if clueless parents in Canberra with an obsession with self-help books and positive reinforcement — who also discover a penchant for all-nude cruises. Gilbert got it worse, being sent to an apple orchard near Perth run by a sternly Christian couple who work him like a slave. 

While the twins exchange letters, in which Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) vows to escape the orchard and rescue Grace from her mundane life, Grace finds comfort in collecting snails — both real ones and tchotchkes representing them. Grace also meets Pinky, who has lived the kind of adventure-filled life that Grace can’t even dream about.

Writer-director Adam Elliot has a distinctive animation style, molding pasty, doughy characters with giant, soulful eyes. (If you’ve seen his 2009 feature “Mary and Max,” or his 2003 Oscar-winning short “Harvie Krumpet,” you have some idea of this.) They’re a bit alien, but as outsiders they’re even more relatable and sympathetic — particularly when we follow Grace through a lifetime of pain and regret.

Be advised, “Memoir of a Snail” earns its R rating. The animated depictions of nudity and sexuality are strongly done — though they’re also the least sexy human figures ever rendered by animation. And the themes of loneliness and despair are moments that even adults will have trouble processing without tears.

“Memoir of a Snail,” with its grim color palette and harrowing narrative, may not seem the most obvious choice for animation. But the care with which Elliot approaches the story, and brings Grace’s hard-knock childhood and lonely adult years into focus, is a perfect melding of artistic fancy and emotional connection.

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‘Memoir of a Snail’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for sexual content, nudity and some violent content. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Here' — where Robert Zemeckis reunites with his 'Forrest Gump' stars and screenwriter — wallows in nostalgia, and a framing gimmick that gets old really fast

Director Robert Zebecks loves melding technology with his storytelling — and that has brought him glory and ignominy.

This can produce good movies, like the animated wonders of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” or the history-bending drama of “Forrest Gump” or the time-tripping antics of the “Back to the Future” trilogy. It can also overwhelm the story in a dump truck of gimmicks, like with the creepy animation of “Welcome to Marwen” or the stifling single-location conceit of his new drama, “Here.”

The setting for “Here,” taken from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, is the living room of a house. Zemeckis and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth (his collaborator on “Forrest Gump”) start in 2024, as an old man arranges with a real estate agent to set up a couple folding chairs. 

Actually, the movie starts in the same spot, millions of years earlier, before there’s a house, and dinosaurs are running wild. Then we see a meteor, and fire, and an ice age — as if Zemeckis saw Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and decided he should try to top it.

After the ice age, the movie shows us this spot as indigenous people hunt deer. Then American colonists — one the son of Benjamin Franklin, the dialogue tells us — have built a mansion in the distance. And, around 1900, a crew is building a sturdy brick house on the spot the cameras, and considerable computer graphics work, is showing us. 

The main period the movie shows us stretches from 1946 to around 2015, give or take. We see Al (Paul Bettany), a G.I. just back from World War II, and his young wife, Rose (Kelly Reilly), deciding whether to buy the house. They do, of course, and start their family. Their oldest, Richard, grows up to be a nice young man — played by Tom Hanks, often with the assistance of computer-aided de-aging — who brings a nice young woman, Margaret (Robin Wright), to meet his parents. 

Richard, the movie shows us, is an aspiring artist. His father is skeptical of his son’s sketching, and advises him to pursue a career that pays. When Richard, at 18, tells his parents that Margaret is pregnant, the living room plays host to a quick wedding, and Margaret moves in for the next few decades — though, as the narrative drones on, she grows increasingly unhappy there.

These scenes of Al and Rose, and Richard and Margaret, are intercut with other families who have lived in the house over the decades: In the 1910s, a would-be aviator (Gwilym Lee) and his plane-phobic wife (Michelle Dockery); an inventor (David Fynn) and his dance-happy wife (Ophelia Lovibond) in the early 1940s; and a prosperous Black couple (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their teen son (Cache Vanderpuye) in the 2020s, coping with COVID and the “Black Lives Matter” protests. These supporting stories are drawn as fleeting sketches that don’t connect with each other or the audience.

Zemeckis relies too heavily on nostalgia — and not just by reuniting with the co-writer and two main stars of his Oscar-winning movie, “Forrest Gump.” It also pops up in the endless stream of musical cues to shorthand the date of each scene. (For example, the backdrop of Richard and Margaret’s wedding is The Beatles’ 1964 performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” which is also a reference to Zemeckis’ 1978 directorial debut, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”)

Zemeckis applies much attention to pulling off the technology to make the transitions between eras, including the extensive de-aging to show Hanks, Wright, Bettany and Reilly over decades. Unfortunately, the conceit gets tedious in about 20 minutes, leaving the moviegoer alone with a bland and cliche-filled story of Baby Boomer anxiety and thwarted ambition.

In “Here,” Zemeckis aims to show us slices of a normal life over centuries. The problem is that the movie misses the point that life is about moving forward — or moving anywhere at all, rather than staying anchored in the living room.

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‘Here’

★★

Opens Friday, November 1, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material, brief strong language and smoking. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Emilia Pérez' is an exuberant, heartbreaking drama about a drug lord and a lawyer going through radical changes — and singing through it all

It’s hard to say what’s most compelling about “Emilia Pérez,” the heartbreaking Mexican drama from the French director Jacques Audiard: The story that it tells, or the way that story is being told.

Audiard’s script, adapted from Boris Razon’s novel, starts with Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a brilliant but unappreciated attorney at a major law firm in Mexico City. She’s working on a defense argument for a client — a rich man accused of murdering his wife — that her boss (Eduardo Alfaro) will read in court. Rita laments how she puts in all the work, getting a guilty man off the hook, and never gets the credit for it.

It’s how Rita pours out her heart that’s surprising: She sings her woes, in Spanish, while the people in the city — from the food-cart cooks to street protesters — acting as her chorus. It’s maybe the least likely scenario for a musical, but it works, thanks to the powerful emotions evoked by songwriters Camille Dalmais (who goes by her first name) and Clément Ducol. 

Rita gets a mysterious phone call from an anonymous client, one offering enough money that she would never have to work for another unappreciative boss again. She’s taken, with a bag over her head, to meet this client — and learns that he’s a powerful and threatening drug lord, Manitas Del Monte.

Manitas hires Rita to fulfill his plan to disappear from the cartel life, by arranging the work necessary to let Manitas transition to a woman. Rita goes to Bangkok and Tel Aviv to research the plastic surgery options, and hires a doctor (Mark Ivanir) to perform the complex procedures. Later, Rita escorts Manitas’ wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two sons to Switzerland for their safety. Rita assures Jessi that the separation is temporary, so Jessi is shocked when the news reports that Manitas was killed in a fiery shootout.

The movie then cuts ahead four years, finding Rita living the high life in London. One night, at a dinner party, she’s engaged in conversation with a woman, Emilia Pérez — and it takes Rita a moment to realize the Emilia used to be Manitas.

Both Manitas and Emilia are played by the Spanish-born Mexican trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, whose incredible performance gives the movie a ferocious energy. As Emilia reveals to Rita why she’s come out of hiding — she wants to bring Jessi and her sons back to Mexico, taking the role of a favorite aunt — Gascón reveals both a romantic charm and an underlying rage. (Gascón shared the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival with Saldaña, Gomez and Adriana Paz, who plays a woman who becomes Emilia’s love interest late in the film.) 

Audiard (“The Sisters Brothers,” “Rust and Bone,” “A Prophet”) creates an earthy, gritty drama that isn’t afraid to wear its bruised heart on its sleeve through its melancholic musical numbers. With a quartet of dynamic, fascinating actresses, “Emilia Pérez” is a potent, touching look at the parts of one’s self that can change and the parts that remain constant.

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‘Emilia Pérez’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 1, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, some violent content and sexual material. Running time: 132 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Hitpig' is a sorry excuse for children's entertainment, an animated movie with no humor or soul

The makers of the animated kids’ movie “Hitpig” list experience working for Illumination Animation, the folks behind the “Despicable Me” franchise — and if this is what they make on their own, one might predict that the next “Minions” movie will be much better without their involvement.

The title character of this terrible slog of a movie, Hitpig (voiced by Jason Sudeikis), is a wise-cracking  animal bounty hunter, working for the reward of returning recalcitrant animals to their owners. In the early scenes, we see Hitpig take down a radioactive polecat (voiced by RuPaul) and a surly koala (voiced by Hannah Gadsby) — and run into his nemesis, an animal-rights protester, Leticia dos Anjos (voiced by Anitta), who works to set free the animals Hitpig captures.

When Leticia hacks into Hitpig’s bank account, he needs a big score. He finds one when a nasty Vegas animal trainer, Leapin’ Lord (voiced by Rainn Wilson), needs someone to retrieve his prized pet elephant, Pickles (voiced by Lilly Singh). 

Hitpig finds Pickles, who’s naive enough to think that the pig is trying to rescue her and take her home to India. Hitpig goes along with the lie, but soon finds himself wanting to help Pickles out rather than bring her back to Lord. It’s like “Midnight Run,” only with anthropomorphic animals and no jokes.

Directors David Feiss and Cinzia Angelini, who have long IMDb pages of their credits as animators and storyboard artists, create animated set pieces that go flat on the screen, even when the backgrounds and animation get bouncy and colorful. The script, by Illumination alums Dave Rosenbaum and Tyler Werrin, is thin on plot and heavy on incidental one-liners — enough of them not synced up to any character’s mouth to make one suspect someone was brought in to punch things up, which they fail to do.

I should mention that “Hitpig” is based on a story by Berkeley Breathed, the author who created the ‘80s comic strip “Bloom County.” Breathed also wrote the book that was the basis for “Mars Needs Moms,” an animated movie so bad it ended director Robert Zemeckis’ fascination with motion-capture computer animation. The fallout for “Hitpig” won’t be so severe, because no one is going to notice when it fails. 

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‘Hitpig!’

★

Opens Friday, November 1, in select theaters. Rated PG for action/peril, rude humor and some thematic elements. Running time: 84 minutes.

Review: 'Your Monster' mixes rom-com charm with horror thrills, not always smoothly, but Melissa Barrera works both genres wonderfully

The ingredients of writer-director Caroline Lindy’s debut feature “Your Monster” — big city rom-com, Broadway musical, breakup drama and bloody horror movie — don’t always blend smoothly, but there’s more going right here than not.

Laura Franco, played by the lovely and lyrical Melissa Barrera, is a mess right now. Her cad of a boyfriend, Jacob (Edmund Donovan), recently dumped her because he couldn’t handle the emotional strain of her cancer treatments. When they were together, Jacob was writing a musical, and relying on Laura as his muse — and promising her that when the show went to Broadway, she’d play the lead, which is based on her. Now, though, Jacob has started auditions on the musical without her. 

Laura is reduced to crying in her mom’s New York apartment, while Mom’s off traveling. Her best friend, Mazie (Kayla Foster), is too flighty to hang around a lot, so the only human connection Laura’s had is the Amazon driver dropping off more shipments of tissues. 

But Laura isn’t so alone after all. One night, chasing down a mouse in her closet, she discovers there’s something else living in there. It’s a monster — specifically, the monster that lived under her bed when Laura was a child. The monster (played by Tommy Dewey) is scary at first, but then he’s just rude. The monster has grown accustomed to living alone in the apartment, and gives Laura two weeks to pack up and leave.

However, since Lindy is employing the time-honored tropes of romantic comedy, that’s not what happens. Laura and Monster start to tolerate and even like each other, as Monster helps Laura find the strength to bluff her way into the audition for Jacob’s musical and get hired as understudy to star Jackie Denton (Meghann Fahy). One night, at the cast’s Halloween party — the one time Monster can venture out of the apartment without terrifying the masses — they even get to dance.

Barrera is familiar with the various genres being mashed together here. She’s been in such horror movies as “Abigail” and “Scream VI,” danced in Benjamin Millepied’s variation on “Carmen,” and sang with Anthony Ramos in “In the Heights.” Barrera is the total package, and Lindy’s knowing take on modern romance and musical theater helps her highlight her talents for belting out a song and enduring buckets of blood.

Dewey — who popped up on my radar playing legendary “Saturday Night Live” writer Michael O’Donoghue in “Saturday Night” — is quite charming as the Monster. He tackles a Shakespeare soliloquy, trades sarcastic barbs with Laura, and shows he can be funny and fiercely protective of his roommate-turned-paramour. (Dewey delivers the movie’s single funniest line, when the Monster offers to help Laura deal with Jacob: “I could threaten to eat him, if it would help. I mean, I could eat him. It would take literally two seconds.”)

Even with lines like that, and the early suggestions of the Monster’s menace, it’s not enough to set us up for a pretty bloody and completely deserved ending. Thankfully, Barrera and Dewey have already won us over with their screwball charm, until the audience is ready to follow “Your Monster” wherever it may go.

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‘Your Monster’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 25, at the Cinemark Century Salt Lake (South Salt Lake), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan). Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief bloody violence. Running time: 102 minutes. 

Review: 'Rumours' is a deadpan and sometimes surreal satire of global diplomacy, as world leaders wander in the woods when a real crisis is upon them

The humor in “Rumours” is so dry that one should not approach it with an open flame, lest it burst into flames — which is actually something that happens in this oddball satire of modern diplomacy.

In a castle somewhere in Germany, a summit of tthe G7 is getting started. The leaders of the world’s leading democracies — the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, the United States and the host country, Germany — are tasked with drafting a joint statement that will speak decisively, but not too controversially, to all nations about the ongoing crisis the world is facing.

It won’t escape the audience’s notice that none of these world leaders ever talk about what the crisis is. Instead, these world leaders more preoccupied about the process they should follow in drafting their joint communique — and the content-free verbiage they will put into their statement. The most interesting thing that happens on the castle grounds is an archaeological dig, where the experts have unearthed an ancient corpse of something called a “bog body,” from an era when leaders were sacrificed because they didn’t keep bad weather from destroying the crops.

As the summit’s first working dinner gets underway, in a gazebo without any aides, we start to see the personalities of the seven world leaders:

• The German chancellor, Hilda Orimann (Cate Blanchett), is laboring to be a welcoming host. 

• The UK prime minister, Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), is all business, her laptop at the ready. 

• The American president, Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance), tells war stories and falls asleep a lot (and, for no adequately explored reason, has an English accent).

• The Italian prime minister, Antonio Lamorle (Rolando Ravello), is attending his first G7, and is happy to let others speak. 

• The Japanese prime minister, Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira), says little, and appears smarter than the rest for that reason alone. 

• The French president, Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), is happy to do all the talking. 

• And the Canadian prime minster, Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), is a charming rogue, and we’re led to believe had a one-night stand with the British P.M. at the last summit.

As the sun goes down, the seven leaders notice that they can’t reach their aides on their cellphones, and that everything around the gazebo has gone eerily quiet. At one point, Maxime leaves the group, and when Sylvain tries to find him, he runs back terrified. “I believe we’re in a crisis,” Sylvain gasps — a real one, not a geopolitical one — and these world leaders are at a loss what to do next.

The movie is directed by the Canadian surrealist Guy Maddin (“The Saddest Music in the World,” “Brand Upon the Brain!”) and his collaborators for the last decade, the brother team of Evan and Galen Johnson. What they depict, by way of Evan Johnson’s loopy script, is a group of world leaders forced by their unexpected circumstances to, as they used to say on MTV’s “The Real World,” stop being polite and start being real.

Since being real isn’t something these politicians do well, the attempts set them wandering into complete weirdness. At one point, as the leaders wander through the woods, they encounter two discoveries: A brain the size of a VW Beetle, and a representative from the EU, Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander), who has come under the brain’s influence — and has reverted to making apocalyptic pronouncements in Swedish.

As the evening devolves into strangeness, viewers get to enjoy a deadpan ensemble of actors playing world leaders accustomed to acting like they’re in charge. The standouts among the group are Blanche,tt’s unflappable German, Amuka-Bird’s tightly wound Brit, and Dance’s blustering American — and, yes their personality quirks seem to be meant to mirror the stereotypical traits of the countries they represent, with varying degrees of success.

Can I pretend I understood what was happening in “Rumours” from start to finish. No, I cannot — especially with that ending. I can recognize that Maddin and the Johnsons are saying something profound and biting about the hollow contradictions of world leaders, people willing to sacrifice anything for global unity — anything, that is, except for their next election back home.

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‘Rumours’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexual content/partial nudity and violent content. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Exhibiting Forgiveness' is a difficult, but rewarding, story about breaking the cycle of toxic fatherhood

A tough watch but an ultimately beautiful one, “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is an emotional story of the ugly cycle of abusive fatherhood and the difficult work of breaking it.

Writer-director Titus Kaphar’s film is deeply informed by his own experiences, though calling it semi-autobiographical seems inadequate. The main character, Tarrell (André Holland), is a painter, like Kaphar (in fact, Kaphar painted Tarrell’s canvases). Tarrell is quickly becoming an acclaimed young Black artist, and his agent, Janine (Jamie Ray Newman), wants him to mount another gallery show, hot on the heels of his last one. But Tarrell has a deal with his musician wife, Aisha (Andra Day), that he’ll stay home and take care of their son while Aisha records her next album.

Tarrell is also working to help his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), move out of the house where she raised him — a move Joyce is reluctant to follow through on. Further complicating Tarrell’s life is the sudden return of his father, Laron (John Earl Jelks), a recovering crack addict who treated Tarrell badly as an adolescent, as he applied what he learned from his own father.

It would be easy for Kaphar to lapse into the storytelling clichés of addiction and abuse, and there are moments, particularly in the flashbacks, where the movie comes perilously close to falling into those traps. The cast — Holland, Day, Jelks and particularly Ellis-Taylor — keep the emotions real and raw, and the layers of art, between Tarrell’s paintings that evoke the old neighborhood and Aisha’s music (Day wrote or co-wrote many of the songs here), provide a depth usually not achieved in this type of story.

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‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and brief drug material. Running time: 117 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 20, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.