Review: 'Freaky Tales' is a kaleidoscopic blend of ferocious storytelling and comical violence

“Freaky Tales” is a vibe — a “Pulp Fiction”-style amalgam of comically gory set pieces — and you’re either into it or not. I was definitely into it, riding on its giddy storytelling wave.

Director-writers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden — whose careers have veered from Sundance darlings (“Half Nelson”) to the MCU (“Captain Marvel”) — tell four interconnected stories set in Oakland, Calif., in May 1987. The common threads of the four tales are bloodshed, the Golden State Warriors’ epic playoff showdown with the Los Angeles Lakers, and a weird green glow that supposedly permeates what locals call The Town.

• The first chapter shows a group of punks standing up for their club against attacks from a group of skinheads, and the budding romance between two of the punks, Lucid (Jack Champion, from “Avatar: The Way of Water”) and Tina (Ji-young Yoo) 

• Chapter 2 introduces Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), who work at an ice cream shop by day and enter a battle-rap at night against an Oakland legend, Too Short.

• In the third story, Clint (Pedro Pascal), the muscle for a shadowy figure referred to as “the guy,” who aims to exit the bone-breaking racket to be with his very pregnant wife (Natalia Dominguez) — but a visit to a video-rental store proves fateful.

• And, finally, a story with the title “The Legend of Sleepy Floyd,” referring to the Warriors star (played by Jay Ellis) and his performance on and off the court.

Fleck and Boden have written a tight script, where offhand comments early on turn out to be seeds planted for later twists, where even a random movie reference becomes significant. They have fun playing with visual styles to evoke the ‘80s period — the aspect ratio changes from chapter to chapter, with some showing the static of old VHS tapes while others have “cigarette burns” to mark the reel changes. And they get support from a cast that includes Ben Mendelsohn as an obnoxious cop and Angus Cloud (who died in July 2023) as a heist organizer. 

Like I said, “Freaky Tales” may not be for everyone. The first and fourth chapters evoke levels of stylized violence reminiscent of “Sin City” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” while also riffing on classic martial arts movies. If you’re on its wavelength, though, it’s a blast.

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‘Freaky Tales’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout including slurs, sexual content and drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this website on January 21, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' is a whimsical story of music and nostalgia, and an introduction to a sharp British comedy duo

Providing dry humor in a damp place, the British comedy “The Ballad of Wallis Island” dances effortlessly between whimsy and melancholy with a story of two men looking for a way to restart their lives.

Herb McGwyer (played by Tom Basden) is a folk singer whose best years are in his past — at least a dozen years, when he harmonized beautifully with his singing and romantic partner, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).  Today, he’s making schlocky dance-pop, and needs an infusion of cash to get his next album off the ground.

Charles Heath (played by Tim Key) has that cash, and he’s paying half-a-million pounds for Herb to come to his remote island for a private gig. The audience, Charles tells Herb, is “less than 100” — and, eventually, Charles admits that it’s 99 less than 100, because it’s just Charles.

Something else Charles hasn’t told Herb yet: He’s also invited Nell, who arrives on the island with her bird-watcher husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). Nell has left the music business, and makes jams she sells at the Portland farmers’ market, and is equally taken aback by Charles’ attempt at creating a reunion of McGwyer Mortimer — whose albums and cassettes fill Charles’ music collection.

Basden and Key wrote the script, based on characters they created for a 2007 short film directed by James Griffith, who reunited with the lads 18 years later for this feature-length version. Basden also wrote the folk songs that Herb performs, with Mulligan’s Nell and without.

The droll chemistry between Basden and Key in their frequent scenes together suggests a comedic collaboration on the order of Fry & Laurie. These two know each other’s rhythms, and let their characters — the jaded musician and the socially awkward millionaire — play against each other in beautiful ways. Throw in Mulligan, who grounds the comedy with a bracing dose of sensibility and charm, and the results are quietly magical.

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‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for some language and smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'The Friend' is a gentle comedy-drama about grief and writing, bolstered by Naomi Watts and a friendly four-legged co-star

In the quietly effective comedy-drama “The Friend,” Naomi Watts is blessed with one of the best scene partners an actor has ever had — a stoic Great Dane named Bing.

Watts plays Iris Dickson, a New York author who’s grieving over the recent death of her writing mentor and longtime friend, Walter Meredith (Bill Murray). At the memorial service, it’s clear that Iris isn’t the only one processing Walter’s death by suicide. The mourners include two ex-wives, Barbara (Noma Dumezweni) and Elaine (Carla Gugino), current wife Tuesday (Constance Wu), his publisher Jerry (Josh Pais), and his daughter, Val (Sara Pidgeon). Notably, Val’s mother isn’t any of the three wives, but a woman who had a brief fling with Walter shortly after he divorced Elaine.

While Iris is looking through the files for her unfinished novel, which Walter didn’t like, and working with Val to edit a book of Walter’s years of correspondence, Barbara asks Iris over to help with something. That something is to take custody of Walter’s dog, Apollo — played by Bing. Iris is ill-equipped to take on a dog that outweighs her, but she’s also unable to say no.

So Iris must deal with a large animal in a small apartment — a place that strictly does not allow dogs, which her building super, Hektor (Felix Solis), reminds her regularly. Iris looks for an animal sanctuary that takes Great Danes, and in the meantime tries to deal with Apollo’s eating habits, sleeping arrangements and distrust of her building’s tiny elevator.

As the story — adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel by the writing-directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (“The Deep End,” “What Maisie Knew”) — gently unfolds, we come to know that Apollo is a good listener, particularly of anyone reading Walter’ words aloud. He also becomes a vessel through which Iris finally gets to process her complicated feelings for Walter and the way he chose to exit her life.

Watts gives a strong performance as Iris, a woman forced by weird circumstance to get out of her own head to deal with the memory of her mentor and the needs of this stoic mass of a dog. Murray, seen in flashbacks, adds a hint of his impish personality to Walter, and makes it easier to understand why so many women could love him and be aggravated by him.

But the character you’ll come away loving in “The Friend” is Apollo, and credit to Bing and his trainer/parent, Bev Klingensmith, for delivering a dog performance that isn’t instantly cloying and comical.

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‘The Friend’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters. Rated R for language including a sexual reference. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'A Minecraft Movie' builds on blocks of offbeat humor, and the hilarious bromantic pairing of Jack Black and Jason Momoa.

You can’t argue with someone to convince them something is funny — it’s either funny to you or it isn’t, and what you find funny isn’t what someone else will think is hilarious, and there’s no use applying reason or logic to make someone feel otherwise. Funny is very subjective.

That’s a lesson I learned in full more than 20 years ago, when director Jared Hess made “Napoleon Dynamite,” a movie that many (including me) think is gut-bustlingly funny and others think is just weird and off-putting. That same lesson comes roaring back into view with Hess’ new movie, his first big-budget special-effects film, “A Minecraft Movie.”

Yes, this is based on the mega-popular world-building video game franchise, where people use 8-bit and 16-bit bricks of various materials — dirt, wood, stone, what have you — and construct buildings, creatures and entire worlds. It’s a game where players can create anything they can imagine, which also means it’s a game that doesn’t have a story, because the game player is supposed to create that on their own.

Hess and the movie’s six credited writers — notably the team of Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer, friends of Hess from Brigham Young University — recognize the game’s story-free sandbox is a challenge. It’s also an opportunity, to pack as many cool things from the game as they can, and find a through line to connect them all that will please the game’s fans and newbies. It’s important that the title says “A Minecraft Movie,” not “The Minecraft Movie,” an acknowledgement that no one is presenting their interpretation of the game as the only one.

The movie’s prologue sets up the idea that there’s a portal between our world and the strange realm called the OverWorld, where the Minecraft universe exists. It’s a place where the animals and plants are all boxy, and even the full moon is a big square. It’s quickly explained that nightfall happens every 20 minutes — one of many gags that veteran players will laugh at with recognition. Our guide to this weird world is Steve, a man in his turquoise vest who learns to harness his imagination into building amazing things. 

The fact that Steve is played by Jack Black is a first indication that none of what we see is meant to be taken too seriously – and that we’re in for a lot of fun.

We cut away from Steve for a bit to meet the movie’s other characters. There’s Natalie (Emma Myers), a young woman trying to take care of herself and her high-schooler brother, Henry (Sebastian Hansen), after the untimely death of their mother. The two are moving to a new town – Chuglass, Idaho, the potato chip capital of the world — where Natalie has just landed a job creating social media for the local potato processing plant.

Henry, a nerdy inventor with notebooks full of sketches of contraptions, finds his way to an old video game store. Its owner, Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison — played by Jason Momoa — is a former video game champion, but those glory days are long in the past. There’s a strong hint of Uncle Rico, Napoleon Dynamite’s stuck-in-nostalgia relative, in Garrett’s story, which propels Momoa’s rather fearless comic performance.

Henry finds two objects in Garrett’s store: A glowing blue orb (that’s actually a cube) and a crystal box into which the orb fits snugly. Henry discovers that when they’re put together, the portal to the OverWorld appears. So, of course, Henry, Natalie, Garrett and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) — the kids’ real estate agent and new friend — go through it and find a strange land. 

They also find Steve, who explains to them the weird physics of this land — like how if you combine a chicken and hot lava, you get fire-roasted chicken. (There’s a great bit of animation, involving Minecraft pandas, which is both funny and a capsule explanation of how the OverWorld works.) Our team soon discovers that they can only get home if they recover the orb and the crystal, which means defeating an army of nasty porcine creatures called Piglins, led by their greedy queen, Malgosha (voiced by Rachel House).

And while this is “A Minecraft Movie,” which is packed to the gills with creative computer animation and effects from New Zealand’s Weta FX, it’s also fully and hilariously a Jared Hess movie. That means the humor is broad and silly, which feels perfectly in character with a world where blocks of rock and wood appear wherever someone points their finger. It’s also a movie where, like with “Napoleon Dynamite,” there’s an unusual amount of attention given to tater tots — which apparently are to Hess’ movies what bare feet are to Quentin Tarantino films.

Carrying the comedy load are Black — reuniting with Hess 19 years after their wrestling comedy “Nacho Libre” — and Momoa, who create a bromance of bravado as they take on the Piglin army. It’s hard to compete with those two, whose personalities are as comically oversized as their beards, but Myers makes a strong impression as the serious older sister. (Jennifer Coolidge, our patron saint of uncomfortable comedy, gets extended laughs as Henry’s principal, who has an encounter with an OverWorld villager.)

Like I said, you may not find Hess’ brand of off-the-wall humor to your liking, and for that you have my pity. If you think “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre” are funny, then “A Minecraft Movie” will provide you with plenty of laughs.

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‘A Minecraft Movie’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violence/action, language, suggestive/rude humor and some scary images. Running time: 101 minutes.

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.