Review: 'Dangerous Animals' is a grindhouse movie with flair, topped by a devilish Jai Courtney, a strong turn by Hassie Harrison, and lots of sharks

I didn’t realize how much I missed seeing a well-made grindhouse movie — a B-movie horror movie with finely crafted twists — until director Sean Byrne threw one in my lap with “Dangerous Animals.”

Byrne, an Australian filmmaker directing his third film after “The Loved Ones” (2009) and “The Devil’s Candy” (2015), seems to understand that the most important elements to an effective psycho-killer movie are an appropriately nasty killer with a solid m.o. and a smart hero or heroine using their wits and courage to survive the carnage. 

The killer here is Tucker, played by the Australian actor Jai Courtney. He’s a burly guy running a tour boat out of Gold Coast, Queensland, taking the tourists out to see the sharks circling. What those tourists don’t know, until it’s too late, is that his kink is killing those tourists by feeding them to those sharks. There are more details to his pattern, but it’s better not to know too much ahead of time.

Tucker’s would-be victim is Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), an American surfer living out of her van. We learn early on that she’s had a rough life — an orphan who lived in a series of foster homes — and has a touch of the con artist. Zephyr doesn’t trust easily, which is why she surprises herself when she meets a nice guy, Moses (Josh Heuston), and they almost immediately make love in the back of her van.

Zephyr leaves Moses behind to catch the waves before dawn, which is when Tucker kidnaps her and holds her captive, handcuffed to a metal cot in a lower deck of his boat — alongside Heather (Ella Newton), a future victim Byrne and rookie screenwriter Nick Lepard introduced in the movie’s prologue.

The bulk of this tight thriller happens on Tucker’s boat, as Zephyr tries to outwit him, exploit the holes in his murderous process and stay alive long enough to see it through. It’s always surprising, sometimes unsettling and ultimately rewarding.

The extra strength of “Dangerous Animals” is the back-and-forth between its stars. Harrison, who played the ranch hand Laramie on three seasons of “Yellowstone,” is a Final Girl for the ages, making Zephyr’s fear and resolve feel entirely earned. Courtney has always been one of those guys who never quite jelled as an action hero — his misfires include “Suicide Squad,” “A Good Day to Die Hard” and “Terminator Genisys” — but is shockingly good as a full-out maniac.  

Oh, and yes, the sharks — whether real, mechanical or computer-generated — are really cool. What more could you want in a shark-driven serial-killer movie?

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‘Dangerous Animals”

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 6, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content/grisly images, sexuality, language and brief drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Mountainhead' is a crisp satire by the creator of 'Succession,' about tech bros on the edge of chaos

I’m not going to divulge too much about what happens in the deliciously dark comedy “Mountainhead,” and not because HBO asked critics not to — and provided a detailed list of plot points not to spoil.

I’m going to keep my trap shut, beyond the basic set-up, because the movie is a fascinating and entertaining artifact of biting satire in the year 2025, an age when billionaires don’t mind being caught talking casually about taking over the world or moving off of it.

Writer-director Jesse Armstrong, making his first feature film and his first project since wrapping up the Emmy-winning series “Succession,” sets the entire story in a ridiculously opulent mountainside mansion during a winter ski weekend. (The movie was filmed in Utah, mainly in a house near Park City that listed last year for $65 million.) The house’s half-billionaire owner, Souper (Jason Schwartzman), has invited three super-rich friends for a poker weekend, where the guys can hang out, nosh on endless plates of snacks, and not talk business. “No deals, no meals, no high heels” is the guys’ mantra.

Souper does have something he’d like to sell his billionaire buddies — a wellness app that he thinks can make up for some of the stressful toxic sludge the rest of the internet is distributing.

Some of that sludge is courtesy of Venis (pronounced like “Venice, and played by Cory Michael Smith), owner of a global social-media platform, for which he’s just introduced new web tools that make disinformation and deepfakes easier to create and harder to detect. Venis is the world’s richest man, we’re told, but it isn’t exactly improving his life.

Also on this trip are Randall (Steve Carell), the elder statesman of the group, who’s holding back some bad personal news, and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who’s Venis’ longtime friend and current nemesis — because Jeff won’t sell to Venis a new A.I. program that will do everything Venis’ platform will do, without all the evil parts.

Soon after settling in at the house, all four men look at their phones, which are blowing up. News reports come in of unrest around the globe, some of it caused by the deepfakes generated by Venis’ new products. Hundreds are dying, cities are burning, and both markets and governments are jittery.

As the news comes in, our tech bros shift with alarming speed from denial — this can’t be our technology causing this, can it? — to bargaining, as they start considering how they can leverage this global chaos to their own advantage. 

Just as “Succession” used the real-life Murdoch family as an allegorical starting point, one can look at the characters in “Mountainhead” in terms of nonfiction counterpart. Smith’s Venis is the easiest one to peg; his obscene bank balance and his fascination with finding a new planet both evoke Elon Musk. Carell’s Randall could be the weekend’s Bill Gates, comfortable with his wealth but thinking beyond it. Youssef’s Jeff and Schwartzman’s Souper are the yin and yang of that generation of technology — one inventing something and only dimly seeing its value, the other a hustler who wants to sell things people don’t want.

Armstrong’s dialogue is as fresh and as crisp as the first ski trails through new powder. He wrote the script early this year, and put the production into a fast pace — five months from first words on page to releasing it on HBO and Max — to keep the observations about the tech industry’s rewiring of human life to a dull roar.

All four actors are on their game, and one gets the feeling Armstrong challenged them to keep the number of takes down and the length of scenes growing. There’s a nervous familiarity in the performances, as if these tech giants are of suspicious of their industry as the mortals not on Mount Olympus trying to use their products. The four of them make “Mountainhead” something worth streaming the next time you’re hanging out with your buddies, contemplating how the world will destroy itself.

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‘Mountainhead’

★★★1/2

Debuts Saturday, May 31, on HBO, then streaming on Max (soon to be HBO Max again). Rated TV-MA for language and sexual dialogue. Running time: 108 minutes.

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.