Review: 'Bring Her Back' is a smart and creepy bit of terror, anchored by Sally Hawkins' unsettling turn as a foster mum

The veil between this life and the next is tattered and not well guarded — and it’s a divide that Australian filmmaking brothers Danny and Michael Phillippou like to poke with a sharp stick, both in their debut “Talk to Me” and now in their equally unsettling horror thriller “Bring Her Back.”

Two half-siblings — high-schooler Andy (Billy Barratt) and 8th-grader Piper (Sora Wong) — are trying to hang together after the sudden death of their father, who passed out in the shower and fell through the glass shower stall. Now they’re trying out a foster parent, Laura (played by the great Sally Hawkins), and hoping child protective services doesn’t split them up. 

Piper is visually impaired; it’s explained early that she can see shapes and brightness, but that’s all. (Wong also is visually impaired, and her performance shows that the Phillippous can count amazing luck in casting among their skill set.) 

As Andy and Piper try to settle in, something feels off about Laura and her house. Maybe it’s how eager Laura is to please. Or it’s her fascination with Piper’s visual impairment, which Laura says matches that of her late daughter. Or maybe it’s Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a mute boy also living with Laura — but who gets treated radically differently than Andy and Piper do.

That’s as far as I dare take the synopsis, because I don’t want you to go in knowing too much and because I don’t think you’d believe me anyway. Some shocks can’t be described, only lived through.

What’s not shocking, but is disturbing, is how good Hawkins is as Laura, as she rides the edge of madness in ways that will terrify and make a viewer care. Is Laura crazy? Or are the circumstances around her what’s off the rails? Anticipating that answer is part of what makes “Bring Her Back” so tension-inducing and brilliant.

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‘Bring Her Back’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 30, in theaters. Rated R for strong disturbing bloody violent content, some grisly images, graphic nudity, underage drinking and language. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'Karate Kid: Legends' brings together two threads of the franchise — Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio — and can't find interesting ways to use either of them

The test of a legacy sequel is when the current caretakers of the franchise try to figure out how to connect back to the original — and in “Karate Kid: Legends,” the fifth movie in the franchise, they make a complete shambles of the effort.

The effort begins with a prologue that begins with footage taken from the 1986 movie “The Karate Kid Part II,” when young Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) hears a story from his teacher, Mr. Miyagi (the late Noriyuki “Pat” Morita). The story involves a Miyagi ancestor who ended up in China, and learned kung fu from someone named Han — and how, together, they melded their martial-arts styles. “Two branches, one tree,” Mr. Miyagi tells young Daniel.

The story then shifts to the present day, in Beijing, where this century’s Mr. Han, played by Jackie Chan, is running his family’s kung fu school. His most promising student is Li Fong (Ben Wang), who’s leaving China with his mom (Ming-Na Wen), a doctor who has lined up a job in New York City. Mom disapproves of Li studying kung fu, and has made her son promise that he won’t fight ever again — for reasons that are explained later, and involve Li’s now-absent older brother, Bo (Yankei Ge). 

Li works to fit in at his New York school, and actually finds a friend in Mia (Sadie Stanley), whose father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), is an ex-boxer who runs a pizzeria. However, Li runs into Mia’s ex-boyfriend, the bullying Conor (Aramis Knight), who studies karate at a dojo run by O’Shea (Tim Rozon), who also happens to be the loan shark to whom Victor owes some money. 

Conor, we’re told, is the toughest karate fighter in New York — and the two-time defending champ of a tournament called “The 5 Boroughs.” From the moment this tournament is mentioned, any member of the audience can chart out the steps that end with Li and Conor facing each other in that tournament’s final match.

First-time feature director Jonathan Entwistle — who created the Netflix series “The End of the F***ing World” and “I Am Not Okay With This” — somehow manages to make a 94-minute movie feel tedious. Maybe it’s because the script (credited to Rob Lieber) feels hollowed out, as if entire sequences that would have explained things were removed and replaced with an endless string of lackluster montages. 

There are some small joys scattered through the film. Wang turns out to be a dynamic martial-arts performer, and one could imagine him taking on the kind of movies Chan made in his prime. And the inevitable team-up between’s Chan’s Mr. Han and Macchio’s Daniel generate some warm laughs, particularly when they debate the merits of kung fu and karate, using poor Li as a rag doll test subject.

It’s interesting to think about how “The Karate Kid,” a much-loved movie with some decent fight scenes and an Oscar-nominated performance by Morita, grew into a franchise with six movies and a fan-favorite TV series (“Cobra Kai”). Either audiences aren’t very demanding, or previous installments were better than this franchise filler.

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‘Karate Kid: Legends’

★★

Opens Friday, May 30, in theaters everywhere .Rated PG-13 for martial arts violence and some language. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Jane Austen Wrecked My Life' adds a French sensibility to the classic rom-com, fueled by the complex feelings for writing

One of the more outwardly funny things in the quietly humorous romantic comedy “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is that it takes a French filmmaker to show us how to pull something fresh and fun out of that most English of wits, Jane Austen. 

In writer-director Laura Piani’s lovely feature debut, Camille Rutherford plays Agathe Robinson, who works in a Paris bookstore — OK, the best-known Paris bookstore to American cinephiles, Shakespeare and Company (seen in “Before Sunset” and “Midnight in Paris,” among other movies). 

When we meet her, Agathe’s life is rather stuck. She’s a writer, but can’t get past the first few chapters of anything she’s working on. She hasn’t had sex in two years, though her flirty co-worker Felix (Pablo Pauly) gives her plenty of opportunities. She’s afraid to get into a car, because of an accident seven years before that killed her parents. She lives with her sister, Mona (Alice Butaud), and Mona’s 6-year-old son, Tom (Roman Angel).

Agathe’s fantasy life is quite lively, though. In one scene, Agatha is eating alone in a Japanese restaurant, and she looks in the bottom of her sake cup and sees a picture of a naked man. Then, suddenly, that naked man is walking to her table, and they dance in the restaurant.

Agathe is inspired to write about the naked sake man — and is shocked when she finds out that Felix sent those opening chapters to The Austen Residency in England, who have accepted her for a two-week writing fellowship. Felix eventually convinces Agathe to get in his car for the ride to the ferry terminal.

Across the channel, Agathe gets picked up by Oliver (Charles Anson), who identifies himself as the great-great-great-grandnephew of Jane Austen herself. He also tells Agathe that he teaches contemporary literature at a nearby college — and that he’s not a fan of his ancestor’s writing. Agathe takes a dislike to Oliver as quickly and as strongly as Elizabeth Bennet did for Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice.” And if you don’t know where this all leads, you don’t know Austen or you’ve never seen a romantic comedy.

Even though Piani is clear about the destination, the road map provides some engaging twists and turns. Much of that comes from the other writers enrolled in the fellowship, including a well-traveled poet (Annabelle Lengronne) and a strident feminist theorist (Lola Peploe).

Rutherford is a charming leading lady, who embodies Piani’s Austen-like predilection not to define her female character not solely in relation to the men sniffing around her. Agathe finds that the fear of the blank page and the fear of moving forward in her life are identical, and Rutherford embodies both with humor and heartache.

Piani shows herself to be a true Jane Austen fan, and in “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” proves the old writer’s adage that if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

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‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 30, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, some sexual content and nudity. Running time: 98 minutes; in French with subtitles and English.

Review: 'Lilo & Stitch' is a so-so movie for kids, but parents will recognize Disney's cash-grab remake of its animated title

Among the live-action remakes Disney has done of its animated movies, “Lilo & Stitch” is not the worst — Robert Zemeckis’ atrocious take on “Pinocchio” has that trophy locked up. And it’s not the most unnecessary one; “The Lion King,” which is the animated version with different animation, holds that title.

The 2025 “Lilo & Stitch” just exists, a serviceable copy of the 2002 animated movie — which is beloved by many who saw it when they were kids, and probably not as good as they remember.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp (who made the sublimely wonderful “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On”) zips fairly quickly through the set-up to the plot: The Galactic Federation catches a rogue genetic experiment, a little blue monster labeled Experient 626, but the thing escapes and lands on an unremarkable planet called Earth. The galactic commander (voiced by Hannah Waddingham) sends two creatures to retrieve 626: Its four-eyed mad-scientist creator, Jumba, and a dweeby one-eyed operative, Pleakley.

The fugitive beast lands on the island of Kauai, where he’s quickly run over by a tour bus and taken to an animal shelter, because the locals have mistaken him for a dog. That’s where the alien meets Lilo, a 6-year-old girl (played by newcomer Maia Kealoha) with a love for Elvis Presley and a talent for getting into mischief. Perhaps that’s why she takes to the odd fuzzball, which she names Stitch.

Lilo’s older sister, Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), has bigger concerns, like holding down a job, helping herself and Lilo through the grieving process for their parents, ignoring the crush her surfing buddy David (Kaipo Dudoit) has on her, and making sure the town social worker, Mrs. Kekoa (Tia Carrere), doesn’t put Lilo in a foster home. (Fun fact: Carrere voiced the role of Nani in the 2002 movie.)

Nani doesn’t know she’ll have bigger problems, some of them caused by Stitch’s rampant misbehavior — and even more when Jumba and Pleakley, taking human form (specifically, by Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen), start hunting Stitch. There’s also a CIA agent, with the improbable name of Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance), who arrives in Kauai and goes undercover as Mrs. Kekoa’s supervisor. (This slight alteration to the character cleans up one of the off-key parts of the 2002 version, when the Ving Rhames-voiced Agent Bubbles was ex-CIA and actually was Lilo’s social worker.)

Fleischer Camp doesn’t mess with the core of the story or characters — he’s not allowed when Disney’s quarterly earnings are depending on the movie and its ancillary merchandise — but he and writers Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes do some work around the edges to keep the proceedings lively. And Agudong and young Kealoha, as the sisters, give heartfelt and grounded performances despite the computer-animated chaos around them.

It’s hard to find anything really wrong with this version of “Lilo & Stitch” that wasn’t a problem with the first one — namely, a threadbare plot and a labored effort to make Stitch (voiced, then and now, by Chris Sanders, who co-directed the 2002 film) cute instead of vaguely creepy. The biggest problem with this version of “Lilo & Stitch” is that the reasons to make it aren’t cinematic ones but fiduciary ones. Kids may enjoy the slapstick, but the adults accompanying them will only see the ticker of Disney’s share price.

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‘Lilo & Stitch’

★★

Opens Friday, May 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, peril and thematic elements. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Friendship' is a comedy that takes apart male relationships, and centers Tim Robinson for some cringe-inducing comic genius

Writer-director Andrew DeYoung could have played it safe in his uncomfortable comedy “Friendship,” in which he dissects the nature of male bonding and its opposite in ways that might make the audience’s skin crawl.

DeYoung had already cast Paul Rudd, the Nicest Guy in Movies (trademark pending), as one of the two main male characters here. All he had to do was pick a comic actor with a little bit of edge, but not too much, and watch his movie travel familiar territory to please the audience.

But, no, he cast Tim Robinson, and the cringe factor got kicked up to 11, which is how DeYoung wanted it.

Robinson is famous among fans of nervous comedy for his Netflix sketch show “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson,” where he plays characters in scenarios where things get so tense or unpleasant that one of the characters has to hit the eject button.

If you haven’t watched the show, you may be familiar with the most famous meme it produced — a sketch where a hot-dog car crashes into a clothing shop and Robinson’s character, a guy in a hot dog costume, tries to avoid blame for it.

In DeYoung’s comedy, Robinson plays Craig, a suburban dad and husband who works for a company that makes phone apps and other things more addictive. His wife, Tami (Kate Mara), is a cancer survivor who’s running a florist business from their dining table, and keeps asking Craig to buy a van so she doesn’t have to cram her deliveries in their hatchback.

One evening, Tami asks Craig to walk a misaddressed package to the new neighbors a few doors down. That’s how Craig first connects with Austin, Rudd’s character, a TV weatherman who is everything Craig is not: Cool, confident and affable. And, because he is all these things, Austin invites Craig to hang out — and even explore the secret passages under their town.

It’s when Austin invites Craig to be part of his established friend group that things go off the rails — because Craig, incapable of reading social cues, takes things too far. 

What follows, as Craig desperately tries to re-create the magic of his brief friendship with Austin, is by turns funny, unsettling and even sometimes cruel — to the other characters and to the audience.

DeYoung, a TV director making his feature film debut, perfectly calibrates how far Robinson will take a joke, then deploys Robinson like a missile at the comedic target. The result is a caustic, biting look at every idea we have about toxic male behavior in the 21st century.

Some may find it too mean-spirited — but if you can tune into DeYoung’s wavelength, there’s enough laughter amid the cringe to make “Friendship” a place worth hanging out.

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‘Friendship’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some drug content. Running time: 100 minutes. 

Review: 'Final Destination: Bloodlines' is a fitfully clever horror contraption, and a tender sendoff to the iconic actor Tony Todd

Watching a “Final Destination” movie is like watching someone play the children’s game “Mouse Trap” — you see the pieces placed to start the chain reaction of events, then watch in delight as those steps play out exactly as you expect.

The sixth chapter of the franchise, “Final Destination: Bloodlines” — which is also the first made since “Final Destination 5” back in 2011 — follows the familiar formula, with a few gruesome surprises along the way.

The opening sequence is worth the price of admission. It’s set in 1962, where a young man, Paul (Max Lloyd-Jones), is taking his girlfriend, Iris (Brec Bassinger), out to a special dinner on the opening night of The Skyview, a restaurant atop a high tower that I’m sure the lawyers representing Seattle’s Space Needle have made clear bears no resemblance to their client’s landmark. Iris sees the whole evening end in disaster, as the tower falls apart and people in cartoonishly nasty ways — except that in the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote wasn’t crushed into a bloody pulp.

The opening is too good to sustain, and it turns out it doesn’t have to. The Skyview disaster is seen in the nightmares of a present-day college student, Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), which are so disturbing they’re messing with her sleep cycle and her grades. So she goes home to ask her relatives about what she’s seen, particularly Iris, the woman at the center of it all.

Iris turns out to be a sore subject for the family, who finally divulge that Iris is Stefani’s long-absent grandmother — whose paranoia about death made her obsessive and drove her away from her two children, Stefani’s absentee mom Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt) and her uncle, Harold (Alex Zahara). Stefani goes to talk to Grandma Iris (Gabrielle Rose), and finds her in a heavily fortified cabin deep in the woods, working to cheat Death.

Stefani discovers that her dream of Iris at The Skyview wasn’t a dream, but a premonition Iris had while on the tower’s observation deck — and her warning got everyone out of the place before it collapsed. After that, Grandma Iris tells Stefani, Death is working to pick off all the people who should have died in The Skyview disaster, and because that’s a multi-decade task, Death is trying to take out the children of those people. (Apparently, Death obeys the same rules of succession as the British royal family: After Iris is out, Death goes after Harold, but then goes after Harold’s kids before going after Darlene and her children.)

Directors Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, following a sometimes-clever script by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, stage some elaborate scenes where all the ways someone can die are put into motion, and it’s a waiting game to see which one will do the job. There’s a good one fairly early during a backyard barbecue at Harold’s house, where shards of glass in an ice bucket, a rake under a trampoline, and various gardening implements are set in place waiting for their turn. (I didn’t spoil too much, as this sequence is shown in the trailer.)

The other cool thing in “Final Destination: Bloodlines” is the swan-song performance by Tony Todd, playing the mysterious coroner, William Bludworth, for the fourth and final time. Todd, 69, died from cancer last November, and was clearly ill when the movie was filmed some six months earlier. (The movie is dedicated to his memory.) Gaunt and careworn, Todd recites a short but memorable monologue about the inevitability of death and the preciousness of every second of life. His words and their meaningful delivery transcend horror movies and become a coda for what appears to be a life well lived.

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‘Final Destination: Bloodlines’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent/grisly accidents, and language. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' is a disaster of a music movie, a vanity project for The Weeknd with abstract visuals and jumbled storytelling

Somewhere between failed experiment and vanity project sits “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a tediously arty mess of a movie in which the fledgling actor Abel Tesfaye — better known to the world as the musical star The Weeknd — tries to get you to buy his album while also arguing how horrible it is to be a rock star.

Tesfaye’s character here happens to be called The Weeknd, and he’s an internationally famous performer who fills arenas with adoring fans wanting to hear his sing his songs. Backstage, though, he’s a miserable mess, listening to the voice message left behind by the woman who’s leaving him. There’s an entourage just out of view, and the only person we see on The Weeknd’s side is his smarmy Irish manager, played by Barry Keoghan.

As director Trey Edward Shults (“Waves,” “It Comes at Night,” “Krisha”) follows The Weeknd through his self-inflicted spiral of depression, he also follows another character — played by Jenna Ortega — whose connection to the rocker is not clear. This woman, called Amina in the credits and nowhere else, is busy walking through a remote house in Montana, pouring out a can of gasoline and setting it on fire.

Shults spends a long time creating artfully abstract images of Tesfaye in his funk, while Ortega’s character drives away from the burning house and into the night. The script — by Shults, Tesfaye and Reza Fahim — is so vague that a viewer might surmise that Ortega’s character is the woman who was breaking up with The Weeknd via voice message. But, at the 40-minute mark, we see them meet for the first time.

There’s an instant connection, and the two seem to be falling in love without ever saying the words. After a night in a fancy hotel room, away from The Weeknd’s manager, Amina finds The Weeknd to be distant and self-involved — nothing like the man who fell in love with her the night before. Then things take a turn toward Stephen King’s “Misery.”

So, as that synopsis indicates, not much in “Hurry Up Tomorrow” makes a lick of sense. And if you were hoping hearing new cuts from The Weeknd’s new album — for which an ad and a music video are served to viewers before the movie “officially” begins — will find the songs dreary, particularly compared to The Weeknd’s better-known hits, which Amina comically dissects before a tied-up Mr. Weeknd.

Shults is a gifted director, and his arresting imagery works to hold the viewer’s attention when everything else fails to do that. Here’s hoping he will bounce back from this tiresome misfire, which is as much of an endurance test as — if you believe Tesfaye — being a ridiculously famous rock star.

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‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, some bloody violence and brief nudity. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' lets Tom Cruise deliver the stunts, in a bloated story propped up by callbacks to past installments

Like a good magician, “Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning” does a very good job of misdirection — of putting so many spectacular stunts and cool set pieces in front of the viewer that they will be tempted not to notice the flimsy framework that is barely holding it together.

The eighth installment of the movie franchise, started 29 years ago when star Tom Cruise was a mere lad of 33, is a nearly three-hour effort to wow audiences. It’s also a brazen attempt to gaslight the audience, to make them believe that the three decades of these frenetic, disjointed movies were following some kind of master plan.

It’s breathtakingly impressive that director Christopher McQuarrie, who will now be known for directing the last four movies in this franchise, and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, have cobbled together enough callbacks and returning characters to create a grand facade of continuity. But if you think movie buffs are going to buy the idea that past franchise directors Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird were all conspirators in a grand cohesive narrative, you’ve got another thing coming.

The new movie picks up pretty much where the last movie, subtitled “Dead Reckoning,” left off — with Cruise’s intrepid Ethan Hunt in a bind. An AI program called The Entity has taken over cyberspace, manipulating people’s information, and making them believe the world’s great powers are at each other’s throats. It’s also inspired a doomsday cult that has infiltrated law enforcement and government agencies everywhere. And The Entity’s next step is to breach the security systems of nuclear arsenals in the nine countries that have them. If it weren’t so creepily close to current events, it would be comical.

Ethan is also on the run from, well, everybody — and has gone into hiding in London’s Underground. The only person with enough juice to get a message to him is the president of the United States, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), who, incidentally, been in office since 2018’s “Fallout.” 

Ethan has a daring plan to stop The Entity, a convoluted plot that involves retrieving a box with The Entity’s original source code, pairing it with a digital “poison pill” devised by tech genius Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise to appear in all eight movies), and downloading it into The Entity. 

There are numerous problems with this plan: The box is inside a sunken Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean; Sloane and her top advisers want to keep Ethan locked up; and one of The Entity’s human operatives, Gabriel (Esai Morales), is out for revenge on Ethan. (None of these are spoilers, as they were laid out pretty clearly in “Dead Reckoning.”)

But even getting through this set-up seems to take an eternity — it’s 23 minutes before the title credits appear — in a movie that clocks in a bit shy of three hours. McQuarrie weighs down the exposition with a ton of callbacks, mentioning everything from Jon Voight’s character in the first movie to the bombing of the Kremlin in the fourth, “Ghost Protocol.” There’s one callback that’s actually quite charming, involving an actor named Rolf Saxon, who appeared in the first movie in 1996 and hasn’t been seen since.

All those references to the previous chapters are meant to serve a purpose, to invest Ethan Hunt’s endless lone-wolf battles against evil with an air of destiny — a word that’s overused in the movie’s ponderous dialogue, with many scenes of other characters telling Ethan the fate of the world is, again, on his shoulders.

The story puts us back with Ethan’s support team: Tech expert Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and cop-turned-ally Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). Each gets some interesting bit of business, though they’re mostly there to give Cruise’s Hunt what he needs at the exact moment he needs it to save the world.

When McQuarrie and Cruise dispense with the blah-blah-blah, they move into a series of dynamic set pieces. There are some smartly executed hand-to-hand fight scenes on a U.S. submarine and an Arctic outpost, a nifty bit with Cruise in diving gear on that Russian sub, and a climax involving biplanes that — as the movie’s marketing has already shown us — features Cruise himself hanging on a wing and getting his face whipped by the onrush of air.

The action sequences are a reminder that the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise isn’t a cerebral cat-and-mouse game, the way Bruce Geller’s ‘60s TV series was. It’s a stunt show, which has seen Cruise morph into a do-it-yourself action performer in the spirit of Jackie Chan. Pretending otherwise wastes the filmmakers’ time and the audience’s patience. Cruise and McQuarrie have a mission, which they’ve chosen to accept, to pump up the intensity and letting logic self-destruct.

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‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language. Running time: 169 minutes.