Review: 'Wolf Man' has its moments, but it isn't the smart throwback to Universal's monster franchises that 'The Invisible Man' was.

Heaven help the horror movie, like director Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man,” that has 45 minutes’ worth of good ideas bouncing around in a 100-minute running time. 

This half-killer, half-filler body horror thriller comes from the fertile mind of writer-director Leigh Whannell — one of the most influential names in horror, on the strength of creating the “Saw” and “Insidious” franchises. Alas, this effort to pump some new energy into one of Universal’s classic monster franchises isn’t as smart or as shocking as his first attempt, 2020’s “The Invisible Man.”

Blake and Charlotte, played by Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, are a San Francisco couple with what looks like a good life. She’s a journalist, and he’s a writer who’s between jobs — so he’s stay-at-home dad caring for their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake tells Charlotte he’s worried they’re becoming distant, so when he receives a legal notice that his father has been declared dead, he suggests the family go to the remote Oregon farm they’ve just inherited.

In an overlong prologue, we get a taste of the uneasy father-son dynamic. Young Blake (Zac Chandler) accompanies his strident father (Sam Jaeger) on a hunting trip, where they encounter something in the woods — something the townsfolk chalk up to “hills fever” but the Indigenous people in Oregon label “the face of the wolf.”

The family doesn’t even get to the house when trouble starts, when their rental moving truck goes off the road and crashes. As they escape the upended truck, something puts a deep scratch in Blake’s arm. After that, Blake slowly feels sick, and starts turning into something beastly — something everyone in the theater figures out well ahead of the three people on the screen.

The script — co-written by Whannell and his wife, Corbett Tuck — moseys along with this slow transformation, predictably hitting its gruesome milestones. Blake’s fingernails chip off, revealing the claws emerging underneath. His jaw starts jutting out. Some hair starts falling out, while other hair starts cropping up. And so on.

Whannell does add some fascinating elements — the best of which is moving from Charlotte and Ginger’s view of the infected Blake to Blake’s sensory-overload view of them now that he’s in this new physical state.

Abbott (“Poor Things,” “Possessor”) makes Blake’s transformation feel lived-in, and he brings out the character’s humanity even through the prosthetics. Garner gives a sharp performance that reflects real fear without becoming a “scream queen” stereotype. These actors give their all, which makes it even more disappointing that there weren’t enough interesting moments around them.

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‘Wolf Man’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violent content, grisly images and some language. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'Better Man' puts a computer-animated chimp in the place of British singer Robbie Williams, for a cheeky reset of the musical biopic

The musical biographical drama “Better Man” is a straightforward warts-and-all account of the life of British singing star Robbie Williams. Except for one thing in the telling that occasionally makes the movie spectacular.

Director Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) takes us through Williams’ story, from a poor, bullied kid growing up in Stoke-on-Trent, the last kid picked for soccer and the cheekiest boy in class. He lives with his doting Nan (Alison Steadman), his hard-working mum (Kate Mulvany), and his policeman dad (Steve Pemberton) — who worships Frank Sinatra and harbors a desire to be a lounge singer. One day, Robert (as he’s called by his family) sees Dad leave on a football-supporters bus for London and never return.

Robert auditions for a spot in a boy band, but his singing doesn’t impress the producer, Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman) — but his cheekiness does. Nigel selects Robert for his pop quintet, Take That, changes the lad’s name to Robbie, and sets them off on the road to stardom. Gracey puts his music-video skills to good use with one energetic number, to the band’s hit “Rock DJ,” cycling through several levels of fame in a couple of minutes.

Robbie’s story proceeds through success and excess, mostly through alcohol and cocaine — until Robbie is forced out of Take That and works to reinvent himself as a solo artist. There’s a lovely interlude in which Robbie meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), from the girl group All Saints, and they dance a duet on a yacht to Williams’ cover of World Party’s “She’s the One,” that encapsulates the highs and lows of their two-year relationship.

The script — by Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey — follows the contours of a standard musician biopic. It’s less ploddingly literal than the Freddie Mercury film “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and more prone to flights of fancy like Elton John’s biographical drama “Rocketman.” And, except for that one thing that’s different, that’s all “Better Man” depicts.

That one thing is how Robbie says he sees himself, at all the stages of his life: As an animal, something unevolved. So Gracey shows Robbie, from beginning to end, as a chimpanzee in human clothing — seamlessly realized through computer animation, with Williams providing his own voice to accompany Jonno Davies’ performance-capture movements. 

Robbie as chimp, we’re told, symbolizes Williams’ long bouts with depression. It’s explained that, because of his father’s influence, Robbie grew up thinking the only way to measure his self-worth was by how many other people knew who he was. He pursued fame relentlessly, and when he caught it, it still didn’t fill the hole in his soul.

Seeing Williams as something not himself is a creative way around a problem that most musician biopics face: The wide gulf between subject and performer. In a more routine biopic, some actor would be cast who would either struggle to imitate the singer’s voice — or, worse, lip-sync to Williams’ tracks. Not every movie can get Timothée Chalamet to be their Bob Dylan, and Gracey and Williams are smart enough to try something else.

Sometimes, Gracey’s metaphorical depictions of Williams’ life are a bit on the nose — like a sequence where he literally battles his judgmental past selves, or a finale in which he sings “My Way.” But the experiment, or gimmick if you prefer, generally works, and makes “Better Man” rather better than the average biopic.

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‘Better Man’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for drug use, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and some violent content. Running time: 134 minutes.

Review: 'The Last Showgirl' is a thin drama about an aging Vegas performer, but Pamela Anderson dazzles in the title role

Like its due-for-a-comeback star and the faded character she plays, “The Last Showgirl” is flawed and undeniably fascinating, a fractured mirror held up to our obsessions with beauty, age and the outwardly beautiful but inwardly cruel place known as Las Vegas.

Kate Gersten, a TV writer making her feature-film debut here, centers her story on Shelly, one of the performers in “Le Razzle Dazzle,” a Vegas stage show featuring dozens of female performers wearing rhinestones, feathers, G-strings and sometimes not much else. Shelly has been with the show for 30 years, and is fully immersed in the legacy such shows have on The Strip. So she’s in the hardest position when the show’s quietly gruff stage manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista), announces that the casino’s new owners plan to close the show in two weeks.

Shelly — played by the former “Baywatch” icon Pamela Anderson, now 57 — is at a loss to handle the news. She refuses to audition for the raunchier striptease fare, the way her younger co-stars, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Josie (Kiernan Shipka), have. She’s not thrilled with the idea of a demotion to cocktail waitress, though her gambling-addicted best pal Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) tells her she can get Shelly a job easily. 

Shelly finds her decision complicated by the arrival of Hannah (Billie Lourd), her college-age daughter. Hannah’s arrival reminds Shelly of the choices, not all of them good, she made to stay on the stage for as long as she did — and what she sacrificed, like a close relationship with her daughter. 

There’s a delicately cracked beauty in the way director Gia Coppola (Francis’ granddaughter, and Sofia’s niece) captures the surface radiance of Vegas. Many of the outside shots happen just before sunset and after sunrise, as the low sun gorgeously catches the sights at their own level. 

Likewise, Coppola’s gentle, unhurried camera takes in its actors naturally, not falsifying the chintzy glamor n which they live. Curtis gets one of the movie’s best moments, as Annette takes a break from serving watered-down drinks to slot-machine stuffers and performs an impromptu dance to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” — a moment of defiance and defeat all at once.

“The Last Showgirl” belongs to Anderson, even when Gersten’s pared-down script lets her down. The role may be narrowly tailored for Anderson’s talents, but it fits her like a catsuit. Anderson finds the optimism, and maybe the self-delusion, in Shelly’s attempts to carry on like the performer she was 30 years earlier — and the battered but unbroken spirit that still believes the rhinestone glitz of Las Vegas has some sparkle.  

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‘The Last Showgirl’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters. Rated R for language and nudity. Running time:  89 minutes.

Review: Wallace & Gromit are back in 'Vengeance Most Fowl,' and so is an old nemesis in this lively, clever return to form.

It would be difficult to find two characters on film who provide more pure entertainment, more laughs and smiles, than the two blobs of modeling clay who go by the names of Wallace & Gromit — and their latest adventure, “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” shows exactly how well they carry a movie.

Now, it’s been about 20 years since movie audiences got to see W&G in action, in “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” so maybe an introduction is in order. Wallace is a kindly inventor, clever enough to create brilliant gadgets but not so observant to see that it’s his silent partner, his dog Gromit, who is the brains of the outfit.

Together, they have gone to the moon (in their first short, “A Grand Day Out,” in 1989), thwarted a jewel thief using “techno trousers” (“The Wrong Trousers,” 1993) and faced off against a robotic sheep-rustling bulldog (“A Close Shave,” 1995). 

The duo’s creator, animator Nick Park, returns to direct this new adventure, with co-director Merlin Crossingham — and the results are as delightful as ever.

The story starts with Wallace surprising Gromit with his latest invention, an eager robotic garden helper called a SmartGnome. The gnome is eager to do any chore, even the ones that Gromit has reserved for himself. Wallace is so impressed that he builds an army of helpful gnomes and hires them out to perform odd jobs around the community.

The only thing that could go wrong is if someone with malicious intent were able to reprogram the gnomes for evil purposes. Fans of W&G know who that someone is: Feathers McGraw, the felonious penguin who tangled with our heroes in “The Wrong Trousers.” Once again disguised as a chicken (with a red rubber glove on his head), Feathers devises a scheme to bust out of jail — actually, the zoo — and frame Wallace for his many crimes. But what is Feathers’ ultimate goal? That would be telling.

Park and co-writer Mark Burton devise a wickedly clever story to run our heroes through, devising more complicated inventions that would make Rube Goldberg smile, toward a breakneck finale. 

For all the inventive animation and colorful scenes, the most spectacular effect in “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” is the series’ best weapon: Gromit’s wordless reactions to the chaos going on around them. Park has clearly studied the great silent comics — particularly Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton — and transferred that expressiveness and economy of movement to his clay-molded dog. Gromit and his cheerily oblivious human partner cement their status as one of the great comedy duos in movie history.

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‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl”

★★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, January 3, on Netflix. Rated PG for some action and rude humor. Running time: 79 minutes.

Review: 'Porcelain War' profiles two artists trying to maintain their work and their souls amid the destruction of the war in Ukraine

We measure war by the losses we can count — people killed, injured or displaced, or square miles of territory affected. But in the documentary “Porcelain War,” directors Brendan Bellow and Slava Leontyev show what the current war in Ukraine has cost the people in it in less tangible but still deeply felt ways.

Slava is one of the subjects in the movie, along with his wife, Anya Stasenko, and their friend, Andrey Stefanov. Slava and Anya live in Kharkiv, a city that is routinely hit by shells and missiles fired by Russian forces. They persevere in their apartment with their tiny dog, Frodo, and try to carry on with their art — sculpting and painting small porcelain figurines.

Porcelain, Slava tells viewers in a voice-over, is easily broken but never destroyed — which makes it an apt symbol for Ukraine as it nears the end of the third year of the Russian invasion.

The film shows Slava and Anya making their sculptures, and the division of labor involved. Slava creates and pours the molds to create the delicate porcelain figurines, while Anya paints them — often with intricate images of flowers and insects that she’s observed walking in the woods and meadows outside Kharkiv.

The couple takes the time to make art in the middle of a war because they firmly believe that Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, wants to destroy Ukraine’s culture. Keeping hold of one’s culture — the art, the literature, the language — is how one keeps a country alive, Slava and Anya say, so they must keep making art.

Slava also serves in a Ukrainian special forces unit, all former civilians like him, who are tasked with flying drone aircraft over Russian-occupied areas. The drones are used for surveillance, and also to drop small bombs on Russian troops and their vehicles. 

One shot in the film, in which a drone drops an incendiary bomb precisely through the top hatch of a Russian tank, is particularly harrowing. We know there are soldiers inside that tank, and so does Slava. The fact that this man, whom we have met as a peace-loving artist, would be able to cause another human’s death shows how much Ukrainians like Slava have accepted the need to commit violence to save their country.

The bulk of the movie’s documentary footage was shot by Slava, often on his iPhone, and by Andrey, who is the cameraman for Slava’s special forces unit. Other footage is captured by the unit’s drones, and by GoPro cameras mounted on their colleagues’ shoulders. 

That footage captures the destruction of the war, as well as the boredom the unit has to fight off between operations — and the fear they try to hide as they get to work. The filmmakers also use the porcelain figures, with animation inspired by Anya’s painting, to illustrate Anya’s dreams for a life after the war. 

“Porcelain War” shows, in intimate detail, the sacrifices Slava, Anya and Andrey have made and continue to make to defend their little piece of Ukraine. It’s also a sharp reminder that wars are fought by armies, but the living and dying is done by people just like us.

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‘Porcelain War’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language. Running time: 87 minutes; in Ukrainian, with subtitles. 

Review: 'A Complete Unknown' lets Timothée Chalamet explore the enigma of Bob Dylan, in a movie that nicely captures his turbulent times

Come gather ‘round, people, wherever you roam, because director James Mangold has an engrossing story to tell in “A Complete Unknown.” about the impending revolution in music and the nation in the early 1960s, and the man who personified by it — a young singer-songwriter who goes by the name of Bob Dylan.

What Mangold, co-writing the script with Jay Cocks, figures out pretty quickly — as any rock critic of the era could probably tell you — is that getting a definitive profile of Dylan is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. Dylan wriggles out of such a biographical movie treatment, even one where Timothée Chalamet so perfectly captures his performance style and vocal tics. (Chalamet actually sings Dylan’s songs on the soundtrack here.) Chalamet’s Dylan is a vessel for what others try to make of him, until he rebels against that.

One of those others is his folk-music mentor, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) — whom Dylan meets in 1961 in a New Jersey hospital, where Seeger is visiting the legend, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), left mute by a stroke but still as ornery as ever. Dylan plays for Guthrie a tribute, “Song to Woody,” to receive a blessing that he’s got something in him that others need to hear.

The other characters who come into young Dylan’s orbit are the women who became closest to him. One is Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), a composite of several early Dylan girlfriends and lovers — notably Suze Rutolo, his girlfriend from 1961 to 1964, who was immortalized holding Dylan’s arm on the album cover of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” (which featured “Blowin’ in the Wind” and other classics). The other is Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), already a folk-singing star when Dylan came on the Greenwich Village scene when they began a torrid love affair.

Mangold marvelously distills the feeling of those ‘60s performances, the fan frenzy generated by Dylan’s success, and Dylan’s irritation at being asked to meet expectations — placed by the record label, the public and the folk-music establishment, embodied by Seeger and historian Alan Lomax (Norbert Leo Butz) — to become “the spokesman of a generation.” It all comes to a head at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when Dylan does the one thing the old guard didn’t want him to do: Plugged his guitar into an amp.

It’s not a spoiler to describe this. Mangold and Cocks based their script on Elijah Wald’s book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties.” And the phrase “Dylan Goes Electric” has become an indelible part of Dylan’s legend. (Todd Haynes, in his impressionistic 2007 Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” depicted the moment and its impact by having Dylan — played by Cate Blanchett in that section — and his band pull out machine guns and fire them at the audience.) 

What Mangold captures best through “A Complete Unknown” is the tension — in Dylan and in society in the days of JFK’s assassination and the ramping up of the Vietnam War — that led to that electric moment. Mangold and Chalamet, a chameleonic collaborator, show how Dylan managed to be both outside those arguments and in the heart of them, to the consternation of mentors, lovers and fans.

The great irony of “A Complete Unknown” is how perfect the title is. There may never have been anyone as famous as Dylan who, at the same time, has been as unknowable. Was he the troubadour for an unsettled age, or (as Don McLean pegged him in “American Pie”) a “jester … in a coat he borrowed from James Dean and a voice that came from you and me”? Mangold entertains both ideas, and Chalamet brings them alive.

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‘A Complete Unknown’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 25, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 141 minutes.

Review: In 'Nosferatu,' director Robert Eggers injects some sensuality into the classic vampire tale, with help from a brilliant Lily-Rose Depp

Director Robert Eggers, in his first three movies (“The VVitch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman”), has thrived in dark spaces — both literally in pre-electric eras and figuratively in the recesses of the soul — so it’s inevitable, I suppose, that he would happen upon the century-old vampire saga “Nosferatu.”

It’s also inevitable that he would take the classic story — inspired by Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” with some creepy additions by the German director F.W. Murray for the 1923 original — and bring his own creepy and audacious style to the effort.

Set in early 19th-century Germany, Eggers’ version introduces us to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), newly married to the lovely Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and starting a new job with a reputable financial firm where he expects to start building his fortune. His new boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), assigns Thomas to travel to the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, to deliver papers to a very rich but somewhat eccentric new client, who buying a castle in Germany. 

Hutter arrives in Romania, as assigned, and hears the locals’ fearful warning to stay away from the castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), who only comes out at night. Skarsgard’s Orlok is a fearsome presence — and one of Eggers’ better revisions is giving Skarsgard a beefier appearance than the gaunt, hook-nosed and nakedly antisemitic caricature Murnau’s version had. Skarsgard’s hulking look and dark, full mustache makes Orlok appear like a ravenous creature.

If Orlok is the beast, Depp’s Ellen is his beauty. Ellen, we’re told, is haunted by visions, and seems to know Orlok’s desires as if they were her own. Depp is Eggers’ stealth weapon, mixing the fragility of a classic heroine with a will of iron — a necessary trait, when she learns from a vampire expert, Professor von Franz (Willem Dafoe, delightfully maniacal), that she is their only hope to destroy Orlok once and for all.

Eggers deploys old-school suspense and a growing sense of dread that makes this “Nosferatu” as chilling as one would expect from moviedom’s most ageless vampire. The surprising wrinkle is how, even with Skarsgard’s monster makeup, the movie conveys a raw erotic energy under the period horror trappings. The results are bloody wonderful.

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‘Nosferatu’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 25, in theaters. Rated R for bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Babygirl' gives Nicole Kidman, as a CEO in a fiery sexual relationship with an intern, a chance to seductively subvert the male gaze

In “Babygirl,” writer-director Halina Reijn teases the audience with sex and danger, in order to get us on board with her true mission — to get us thinking about pursuit of female desire and the consequences of fulfillment

Nicole Kidman stars here as Romy, a hard-driven and charismatic CEO of a tech company. (They make robotic package-delivery systems, but that’s neither here nor there.) She’s confident and in charge, and a hero to her assistant, Esme (Sophia Wilde). She’s also married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theater director, and they have two teen daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly). What more could someone want?

Reijn answers that question at the outset, with what appears to be volcanic sex between Romy and Jacob. When it’s over, though, Romy slips into her home office and masturbates to porn because she didn’t have a genuine orgasm with her husband.

So when Romy meets the interns just arrived at the company, one tall young man catches her eye. That’s Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who applies online for the company’s mentorship plan and requests Romy — even though Romy thought she wasn’t one of the available mentors. In their first meeting, Samuel says something inappropriate: “I think you like to be told what to do.” This opens a door for a game of shifting power dynamics, and a scorching love affair in various hotel rooms where Romy sometimes finds herself crawling on all fours at Samuel’s insistence.

Who’s running the show? Is it Romy, the boss who’s usually in command of every situation? Or is it Samuel, who seems to know what Romy wants better than she does — and could, with one call, cause Romy’s corporate and personal lives to crumble?

In truth, Reijn is in charge here. She stages sex scenes between Kidman and Dickinson, and Kidman and Banderas, that are inventive, tension-filled and hot as blazes. They provide more than titillation, but show who’s in control and how quickly that can shift between two people. Above all, the sexuality shown here demonstrates what it’s like when a female director applies her sensibilities, shutting out the male gaze and concentrating on what the woman in the situation wants. (Men like me are so conditioned to expect the male gaze that it’s refreshing, if not a bit intimidating, when it’s gone.)

Kidman is game for this, and gives a performance that capitalizes on her brittle beauty and lets her show something more vulnerable underneath. Dickinson keeps up with Kidman all the way, in the bedroom and the boardroom, as the gamesmanship threatens to destroy Romy’s well-ordered life — while also showing her what’s most important. “Babygirl” is at its best when Kidman and Dickinson are locked in this battle of wills, each grabbing for the controls to keep it all from crashing around them.

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‘Babygirl’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 25, in theaters. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity and language. Running time: 114 minutes.