Review: 'Death of a Unicorn' aims to blend gory comedy with social satire, but the mix only works sporadically

The satire in the chaotically funny “Death of a Unicorn” may be obvious at times, but the targets — a family of selfish billionaires who made their ill-gotten wealth in pharmaceuticals — are too irresistible.

The death referred to in the title comes very early, as Elliot (Paul Rudd), a corporate lawyer, and his sullen teen daughter, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), are driving through a game preserve. Then Elliot hits something in the road. When they get out of the car, they see it’s a unicorn, bleeding purple on its pure-white fur. Ridley touches the creature’s horn, and has a cosmic vision — until Elliot whacks the animal with a tire iron, thinking he’s putting it out of its misery.

They load the creature into the back of their vehicle, and continue up to the secluded woodside mansion of Elliot’s boss, Big Pharma CEO Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), who’s dying. While Elliot is trying to get Odell to sign some papers, he notices that he doesn’t need his glasses any more — while Ridley’s face, on which unicorn blood splashed, is suddenly free of acne. Then the dead unicorn turns out to be alive, and Odell realizes the animal could provide a miracle cure.

The reactions of the rest of the Leopold family are curious. Odell’s wife, Belinda (Téa Leoni), the family philanthropist, talks about how to ration out the unicorn’s curative powers to the truly deserving — which means rich people like herself. Their son, Shepard (Will Poulter), an idiot who fancies himself a deep thinker, thinks he’s found an elixir for immortality — by pulverizing the horn and snorting lines of the powder.

While Odell’s in-house doctors (Steve Park and Sunita Mani) run tests, Ridley researches the mythology of unicorns — and finds they’re not the sweetly innocent creatures of lore, but blood-thirsty killing machines. And more seem to be coming up to the house.

Writer-director Alex Scharfman, in an audacious feature debut, locates some barbed humor in the hypocrisies of the wealthy Leopold family, talking a good game about the greater good until their greed and ambition show them as they really are. The material gives Grant, Leoni and especially Poulter room to reveal their money-grubbing selves.

Where this plan starts to come undone is when it tries to get Rudd, the most amiable movie actor ever created, to join the Leopolds in their venality. It never feels authentic, because it’s hard to think of a less plausible actor in the role, outside of casting a Smurf.

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‘Death of a Unicorn’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 28, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content, gore, language and some drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'The Penguin Lessons' serves teacher cliches and a cute animal, tastelessly set on a backdrop of authoritarian horror

One of the most horrific things we’ve seen in recent days is the surveillance video of a Turkish woman, living in America on a student visa at Tufts University, being surrounded by masked thugs working for your federal government and hustling her into an unmarked car to take her Lord knows where.

This kind of jackbooted fascism is depicted in a moment of “The Penguin Lessons,” a movie set in Buenos Aires in 1976, where a military junta “disappeared” thousands of Argentinians for daring to speak out against authoritarian regime.

To call the scene in the movie “problematic” is mild to the point of absurdity, for a couple of reasons. One is that the focus is not on the young Argentinian woman being taken away, but on an observer — a middle-aged Englishman, played by Steve Coogan, as if to say he’s really the victim here.

The other is that the scene is made small by the odd juxtaposition in the middle of a whimsical comedy-drama about the Englishman and his unexpected companion, a penguin.

In this movie “inspired by true events” — and one imagines that word “inspired” is doing a lot of work here — Coogan plays Tom Michell, a misanthropic English teacher arriving at a new job at a boarding school in Buenos Aires, teaching the sons of Argentina’s ruling elite and military officers. 

Tom is sarcastic towards authority, embodied here by Jonathan Pryce’s turn as the headmaster. Tom is also a sad, unfocused figure, for reasons that are eventually explained but for the first half just make him look like a jerk.

When the school goes on an unexpected break, for safety reasons involving a military coup, Tom and Tapio (Buörn Gustafsson), a Swedish teaching colleague, take an impromptu trip to nearby Uruguay. Tom ends up spending the night walking the beach with an attractive woman (Mica Breque), and as they walk they find a penguin washed up in an oil slick. They sneak the penguin back to Tom’s hotel and clean it up — and Tom ends up the penguin’s reluctant caretaker.

Director Peter Cattaneo (“The Full Monty”) and screenwriter Jeff Pope (Coogan’s writing partner on “Philomena”) run through scenes with Coogan dutifully reciting Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Masefield to inspire his young charges, who inspire him to care again about his profession, and so on. Just think of any movie you’ve ever seen about a teacher, from “Dead Poets Society” to “Dangerous Minds” — and add a penguin.

Which brings me back to that kidnapping scene. Because the “whimsy” knob is already set to 11, any attempt at seriously depicting the Argentine junta’s brutality feels crass and exploitative. Thousands of people, we’re told, were never accounted for after they were “disappeared” — and this movie presents the idea that it wasn’t so bad because it helped a shaggy-haired Brit find his smile again.

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‘The Penguin Lessons’

★★

Opens Friday, March 28, at theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual references and thematic elements. Running time: 112 minutes; in English and Spanish with subtitles. 

Review: 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl' is a moving drama from Zambia that shows generational trauma is universal

Like any movie from another country, writer-director Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” stops to ask us what we have in common with people in, in this case, Zambia — like how patriarchy and generational sexism are universal.

Shula (Susan Chardy) is driving home one night from a party — where, one assumes, her Missy Elliott costume was a hit — when she sees a body lying in the road. When she stops, she sees that the body is that of her Uncle Fred. For a moment, she catches a glimpse of herself as a little girl, and the audience immediately senses there’s some history here.

Shula tries to call her mother for help. While she’s waiting, her cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela), walks up, apparently feeling the effects of too much alcohol wherever she was this evening. 

By morning, everyone in town knows that Fred has died, and people start piecing together why he was in that particular part of town so late at night. For Shula and some of her female cousins, there’s a pattern here — involving Fred’s predilection for young women, including ones within his family. 

But as Shula’s house and backyard start filling with relatives for Fred’s funeral, there’s little time to think about Fred’s past sins. Shula and the other young women are put to work, cooking food for all of the mourners, and for keeping the peace among the female cousins of her mother’s generation, who seem to be in an undeclared contest to appear to be the most grief-stricken. Meanwhile, the men of the family sit around and expect Shula and her cousins to keep serving them plates of food, like they’re waitresses in an outdoor cafe.

Nyoni never declares it outright, but it’s clear Shula is the oldest of the female cousins of her generation. She’s the one expected to be in charge, of carrying the weight of keeping the funeral attendees fed as well as the emotional weight of holding the family secrets. Chardy’s compelling performance shows Shula holding the family and herself together, though it’s clear that if she should snap, the explosion would be heard for miles.

Nyoni steeps “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” in bits of Zambian culture that become an anthropological lesson for outsiders. Just below the surface, though, is a deeper, universal truth about generational trauma and the courage it takes to challenge it.

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‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 21, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some drug use and suggestive references. Running time: 99 minutes; in English and Bemba, with subtitles.

Review: 'Universal Language' presents a surreal, absurdist story steeped in Canadian kindness

The title of Canadian director Matthew Rankin’s oddly touching “Universal Language” becomes apparent gradually, as the viewer realizes where and what is going on — and that the weirdness and whimsy are only starting.

We start at a school where the sign out front is in Farsi, the language of Iran. Then the subtitle tells us the school’s name: Robert H. Smith School. Then we see a teacher rush through the snow and in the front doors, then go to his classroom and berate his students — in French.

We soon figure out that we’re in an alternate-universe version of Winnipeg, Rankin’s home town, where the bilingual mix isn’t English and French, but French and Farsi. While the viewer untangles that, they must also keep track of the wide array of characters who bounce off each other through the interwoven narrative.

There’s the angry teacher, Iraj (Mani Soleymanlou), who berates his students, particularly young Omid (Sobhan Javadi), who lost his glasses and can’t see the blackboard. Two of his classmates, Nazgol (Saba Vahedyousefi) and Negin (Rojina Esmaeili), want to get him new glasses, and they think they can when they find a 500 Riel note (named for Louis Riel, the founder of Manitoba) frozen in the ice. While they look for a way to break the ice, they ask Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), who has many jobs around Winnipeg, to watch the space and not steal the money or the ice.

Each of these characters, at one point or another, encounters Matthew (played by Rankin), a morose fellow who has left his job in Montreal to return home to Winnipeg to care for his ailing grandmother. When he goes to his old house, he learns she’s no longer there — but the family that lives there now welcomes him anyway. He calls his mom’s phone number, and the man who answers agrees to meet him at a Tim Hortons, a coffee-and-donuts chain that is as much a symbol of Canada as the maple leaf, even when the cafe’s sign is in Farsi.

As Matthew makes his way through a Winnipeg that feels both familiar and foreign, in ways that have nothing to do with people speaking Farsi, the movie’s thesis comes into focus: That kindness is everywhere, if one only looks around or opens themselves up to experience it. 

Some of this kindness can be ascribed as “Canadian nice,” that legendary national trait of politeness and easygoing charm that doesn’t get rattled by much — other than losing at hockey or hearing some blowhard talk about creating a 51st state. (But, really, who does that?) 

Rankin, following up on his 2019 expressionist history tale “The Twentieth Century,” peppers this complex narrative with moments of surreal silliness, whether it’s a shop that only displays frozen turkeys or an ice skater who appears literally out of nowhere. He demonstrates in “Universal Language,” that we do indeed have more that unites us than separates us — no matter what language we’re speaking.

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‘Universal Language’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for thematic material. Running time: 89 minutes; in Farsi and French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Snow White' gets an enjoyable 21st century update, thanks to the charms of stars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot

Who’s the fairest of them all? That’s a high bar for any movie, particularly a remake of a 1937 classic that revolutionized animation and is considered a work of art — but Disney’s 2025 take on “Snow White” is, in its best moments, a pleasant update.

It’s a familiar story, not just from Walt Disney’s beloved “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” but centuries of the Brothers Grimm: A princess is born, given the name Snow White, and raised by a kindly king and queen in a kingdom where the royals party with the farmers and bakers and all is well. Then the queen takes ill and dies, and the king is enchanted by a beautiful stranger (played here by Gal Gadot), who gets the king out of the way and sets herself up as a greedy, evil queen.

As the story goes, the Queen also is vain, constantly asking her magic mirror (voiced by Patrick Page) “who’s the fairest of them all?” For many years, the mirror answers that the Queen is the fairest. But as Snow White reaches adulthood, in the form of “West Side Story” star Rachel Zegler, the mirror declares that she, not the Queen, is more fair.

The Queen orders her huntsman (Ansu Kabia) to take Snow into the woods, kill her, and cut out her heart. But the huntsman can’t bring himself to do the deed, and tells Snow to run deep into the forest and hide. After some encounters with grabby tree branches, she lands among some kind forest animals, who lead her to a place to sleep: A cottage inhabited by seven small men. (It’s an interesting exercise the movie sets up to create computer-animated characters who look like the classic cartoon characters, but never use the d-word from the original’s title.)

Highlighting the seven characters is just one example of the constant tug-of-war director Mark Webb (who made the Andrew Garfield “Amazing Spider-Man” movies) and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (whose last script was the adaptation of “The Girl on the Train”) are engaged in with Walt Disney’s source material and his company’s marketing department. As much as they stay close to the original’s visual and musical touchstones, the filmmakers also recognize that this is a different era, and we expect something else from our title heroines.

Ziegler’s Snow White isn’t just wishing for her prince to come, but for her kingdom to return to what it was before the Queen began her evil reign. She’s also wishing — as she explains in her solo “Waiting on a Wish” — for the courage, taught to her by her parents, to act for the good of the people. She gets her first taste of that bravery when she helps a daring bandit, Jonathan, escape the Queen’s clutches. 

Jonathan is charming, but he’s no prince. Played by Andrew Burnap (who played Joseph Smth in the miniseries “Under the Banner of Heaven”), Jonathan is reminiscent of the likable rogue Flynn from Disney’s “Tangled.” And, like Flynn and Rapunzel, Jonathan and Snow start out bantering and bickering before the rom-com realizations set in.

Other changes to the plot feel necessary to maintain a PG rating, and are an admission by Disney that some of the darkest moments of the 1937 movie are — and always were — too scary for kids. And some things from the original are just dated; anyone who’s the title character in her own movie in 2025 isn’t sitting around waiting for her prince, but instead taking the fight to the Queen.

Then there are the songs, only three of which have been carried over from the original. Two of them, “Heigh-Ho” and “Whistle While You Work,” are expanded into engaging musical numbers. The third, “The Silly Song,” starts a celebration party that segues to “A Hand Meets a Hand,” a love duet for Zegler and Burnap. The new songs are from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songwriting team behind “La La Land’ and “The Greatest Showman,” and go from forgettable to satisfactory.

One of the better numbers is the Queen’s “All Is Fair,” which feels like something Ursula from “The Little Mermaid” might perform as an encore to “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Gadot has fun with the song, which is her one opportunity to deliver more than one-note icy villainy.

Zegler is the best thing about this “Snow White.” She’s got the singing voice and the acting chops, proving that her Maria in “West Side Story” wasn’t a one-off. She carries the story, particularly in the reinterpretation of Snow as a princess finding her own way toward leadership rather than being a passive object of other character’s devotion or jealousy. She’s got charisma for miles — and I truly think that Zegler, if pressed, could charm actual woodland creatures, not just computer-animated ones.

There will be fans of Disney’s original who will be upset with the changes Webb and his collaborators have made here. Some of those people have been down on this movie from the moment Zegler, a Latina, was cast as Snow — and were even more dismissive when Zegler posted an emotional response to Donald Trump’s re-election. Just wait until they unpack the story’s politics, of a populist uprising trying to bring down a selfish, self-loving autocrat.

For some fans, I think, the problem is less to do with what the filmmakers have done, and more with the idea that the studio allowed them to change anything at all. That’s an argument that traps the story of Snow White in a glass coffin of nostalgia — lovely to look at, but inert and lifeless. Every generation should have the chance to discover “Snow White” and make it their own, and it shouldn’t take 88 years for the next one. 

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‘Snow White’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violence, some peril, thematic elements and brief rude humor. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Black Bag' is a stylish, sly and steamy spy movie where the stars and the set design are equally alluring

You’re supposed to judge a movie not by the scenery but by what the actors are doing in front of that scenery — but in the case of Steven Soderbergh’s sleek spy thriller “Black Bag,” both are sexy as hell.

It’s London, and our main venue is the supremely appointed townhouse where married spies George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett) live, cook extravagant meals and deliver urbane, super-hot endearments to each other. Example: Kathryn catches George watching her get dressed, and when he says he’s sorry, she replies, “I like it.”

George has been given a top-secret — or “black bag” — assignment by another operative, Philip Meacham (played by Gustaf Skarsgård, yet another of those Skarsgårds). A super-sensitive and potentially deadly bit of software called Cerberus has gone missing, and Meacham has a list of five people within British intelligence who might have taken it. One of those on the list is Kathryn.

George, whose expertise is in polygraph tests and detecting lies, and Kathryn host a dinner party. Unknown to Kathryn, the guests are the other four people on Meacham’s list. They include two agents, Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke) and James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page), staff psychologist Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris), and data analyst Clarissa Dubose (Marisa Abela). Not so coincidentally, James and Zoe are dating, and so are Freddie and Clarissa. 

During a party game, Clarissa reveals that she knows Freddie is cheating on her. When Freddie denies it, George drops the details of which hotel and at what times Freddie is having his affair.

At the end of the party, George makes an odd discovery: A used movie ticket in Kathryn’s wastebasket. Could this be evidence of Kathryn being unfaithful to him?

Those are just some of the clues — or are they diversions? — that Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp (the director’s collaborator on the recent “Presence” and “Kimi”) plant on this movie’s winding path, which is smart both in its twists and in its gorgeous production design. (Credit here goes to Philip Messina, who also worked magic for Soderbergh on “Erin Brockovich,” “Traffic,” and his three “Ocean’s” movies.)

Soderbergh’s ensemble is also smart, stylish and as hot as six human beings have a right to be. Fassbender and Blanchett lead the way, of course, with their slightly sinister take on Nick and Nora Charles — and give special attention to Abela (who played Amy Winehouse in the biopic “Back in Black”), who makes tapping on a keyboard look like foreplay.

Soderbergh brings a coiled tension to the action and verbal gymnastics of “Black Bag” — particularly in a tight sequence where George gives polygraph tests to four of his suspects, which is a masterclass in editing and camerawork. (Soderbergh, under pseudonyms, takes on the jobs of cinematographer and editor, along with directing.) The best part is that Soderbergh does this all so seamlessly that a viewer can admire the technique while not losing the thread of the narrative. How does Soderbergh do it? I’m afraid that’s a secret.

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‘Black Bag’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language including some sexual references, and some violence. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Novocaine' is a decent, if bloody, action comedy that sneaks in some heart and soul

The action movie “Novocaine” centers on one man becoming a human piñata, and to whatever extent that premise works, it’s because of the charm of the young star doing it, Jack Quaid.

Quade plays Nate Caine, an assistant manager at a San Diego bank branch. He’s one of the good ones, though, as we see early when he quietly bends the rules to give a widowed hardware store owner (Lou Beatty Jr.) until after Christmas to pay his mortgage. Nate is also sweet on one of the bank’s tellers, Sherry (Amber Midthunder) — and when he finally gets up the nerve to ask her out for coffee, he’s surprised that she says yes.

On their first date, Nate tells Sherry a secret: He has a condition, called CIPA — for Congenital Insensitivity to Pain and Anhydrosis — in which the person afflicted cannot feel pain. This condition, Nate tells Sherry, is quite dangerous, and has required him to be exceedingly careful in his life. For example, he consumes only protein shakes and blenderized foods, because if he chews solid food, he runs the risk of severely biting his tongue. Their real date ends at his place, quite romantically.

The next day at the bank, Nate’s reverie is shattered by three robbers in Santa outfits, carrying machine guns. The robbers kill the bank manager, and threaten to kill Sherry unless Nate gives them the combination to the vault. They make off with the cash, and take Sherry along as a hostage as they shoot several cops who have arrived outside the bank.

Nate, determined to save Sherry from the crooks, steals a police car (taking a moment to put a tourniquet on the injured cop) and gives chase. This is how directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, whose last movie was the forest survival thriller “Significant Other,” set in motion a series of set pieces that take advantage of Nate’s no-pain condition to create cringe-inducing physical violence. In an early scene, Nate fights with one robber in a restaurant, and one of the gags involves Nate retrieving a gun from a deep fryer.

It’s gross, and gets downright gory as it goes. But soon a viewer becomes oddly fascinated with the way the directors and screenwriter Lars Jacobsen commit so completely to the gag. It may be a one-joke story, but that joke is played and replayed hilariously and rather fearlessly.

If you don’t know Jack Quaid’s work yet on “The Boys” or “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” his name may lead you to suspect he’s a nepo baby, and you’d be right, twice over. Quaid is the son of stars Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, and it’s apparent that charisma is an inherited trait. He’s a pleasure to watch, and brings a lightness to a role that could get weirdly heavy.

Some of the movie’s success also goes to Midthunder (“Prey”), who delivers a lot more than a typical damsel in distress, and to Jacob Batalon (from the Tom Holland “Spider-Man” trilogy) in a role that it’s best not to know much about in advance.

The premise of “Novocaine” can’t quite sustain the movie’s full length, but it gets points for being more real about CIPA than it needs to be — and for surreptitiously splicing a nice romantic comedy into what could have been just another blood-fueled action comedy.

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‘Novocaine’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 14, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, and language throughout. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'The Day the Earth Blew Up' brings back two of the Looney Tunes stars for a feature-length exercise in comic craziness

It’s odd to realize that the Looney Tunes gang — the manic cartoon characters who became synonymous with the name “Warner Bros.” — has never starred in a fully animated feature-length movie before this new one, “The Day the Earth Blew Up.” 

Then you watch the movie, which is packed to the gills with inventive gags and features two of the troupe’s most engaging characters, and see that sustaining the Looney Tunes’ antics for 90 minutes isn’t as easy as it looks.

The movie tells us the origin story of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, brothers from another species who are raised from babyhood by kindly Farmer Jim. (Porky and Daffy are both voiced by Eric Bauza, the current holder of Mel Blanc’s title as the man of many voices.) They live together in the house Farmer Jim left them, which has become a neighborhood eyesore — and is in even worse shape after an apparent meteorite tore through the roof before landing just out of town.

An astronomer spots that meteorite and follows it to its crash site, and realizes that it’s not a meteorite but a UFO. Before he can alert the authorities, the green goo from the UFO turns him into a zombie, tasked with spreading the brain-altering goo to the rest of the population. The vehicle for that alien invasion is the town’s gum factory — where Porky and Daffy just landed menial jobs.

The plot, of which there’s just a little too much, kicks into gear when Daffy convinces Porky that there’s something sinister about the factory’s new gum flavor. They enlist the help of the factory’s renegade flavor scientist, Petunia Pig (voiced by Candi Milo), who didn’t like the new gum flavor anyway. The three find themselves going up against an alien, known only as the Invader (voiced by Peter MacNicol), who says he’s out for Earth’s most precious resource. (No spoilers on what that is.)

Director Peter Browngardt and the 11 writers credited with the screenplay clearly love the old Looney Tunes characters and vibe, and largely succeed in translating that classic feel to a new audience. The movie opts to show Daffy in his more manic phase — the live wire of Robert Clampett’s shorts, rather than the cynical con artist of the Chuck Jones era — to match Porky’s nervous energy. (One Easter egg comes when Porky and Daffy eat at a diner named after Clampett, and the waitress is voiced by Clampett’s daughter, Ruth.)

It’s notable that while Warner Bros. Animation made “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” Warner Bros. Pictures — who shelved the already completed “Coyote vs. Acme” as a write-off — turned over distribution to a smaller company, Ketchup Entertainment. It’s another sad sign that the corporate overlords at Warner Bros. have no love for the movies.

The movie’s length exposes a paradox: The plot requires passages where the action slows down and the audience can take a break from that manic energy — but it’s that mania that makes the Looney Tunes who and what they are, so those slower moments expose the cracks in the facade. When the Looney Tunes can create perfect narratives in 8 minutes, taking 90 minutes feels like an unnecessary luxury, no matter how many jokes they can cram into that space..

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‘The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for cartoon violence/action and rude/suggestive humor. Running time: 91 minutes.