Review: 'M3gan 2.0' gives the killer robot the 'Terminator' treatment, but loses momentum repeating the campy nonsense of the first movie

In the action sequel “M3gan 2.0,” writer-director Gerard Johnstone tries to recapture all the bat-guano craziness of the first movie and augment it with some equally insane mythologizing — with the end result being more unhinged but less fun than the 2023 original.

Tech wizard Gemma (Allison Williams) and her niece/ward, Cady (Violet McGraw), are still dealing with the aftermath of what happened in the first movie — when Gemma’s high-tech robot plaything, the Model 3 Generative Android, dubbed M3gan, turned into a killing machine. 

Gemma’s coping mechanism is to become an activist and author, warning parents about the dangers of letting kids have too much screen time — a campaign aided by her new boyfriend, Christian (Aristotle Athari). Cady, when she’s not using her new aikido skills to subdue bullies, is studying robotics on the sly. What they’re not doing is talking to each other about what happened.

Before that sort of family bonding can get going, the Feds bust into their house. Specifically, Col. Sattler (Timm Sharp), a Defense Department contractor whose latest project, a military-grade killer robot named Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), went rogue on a test mission. (There’s a too-clever acronym for Amelia’s name, but I wasn’t interested enough to jot it down.) Sattler thinks Gemma’s in league with whoever is controlling Amelia — because the new robot’s programming is based on M3gan’s original design.

Then comes the least surprising aspect of the movie, which is that M3gan isn’t dead. Her software lives on in Gemma and Cady’s smart house technology, and it wants out to play. Gemma reluctantly agrees, with limitations, as they go “Ocean’s 11” in the lair of an arrogant tech billionaire (Jemaine Clement) to get to his system before Amelia does.

Can Gemma and her crew — her assistants, Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez), and Tess (Jen Van Epps), are along for the ride, for reasons that even the script admits don’t hold water — get ahead of Amelia? Can M3gan pull a “Terminator 2” and go from villain to savior? Can Johnstone slip in a “Metropolis” reference for Amelia without getting caught? 

The answers, it turns out, are fairly irrelevant, because Johnstone — who shares story credit with Akela Cooper, who wrote the first movie with James Wan, but otherwise seems to have taken over the franchise — is more interested in loading up on campy set pieces, mostly borrowing from and riffing on the first movie’s biggest hits.

It’s fun watching Williams getting her teeth into this role, as Gemma becomes a fierce warrior for Cady. But the highlight, now as before, is the collaboration that creates the devilish M3gan: Amie Donald making the moves and Jenna Davis providing that uniquely snarky voice. 

One watches “M3gan 2.0” fully confident that the producers won’t want to squander their chance at a “3.0.” There’s too much money on the table, and too many opportunities to satirize the A.I. monster that Hollywood  screenwriters fear and their bosses want to keep alive, not to keep the franchise going.  

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‘M3gan 2.0”

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language, sexual material, and brief drug references. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: '28 Years Later' continues the fast-zombie franchise with guts and gore, but wins out with brains and heart

It’s odd to say a filmmaking team is taking a risk by returning to a successful horror franchise 23 years after they started it, but that’s the impact director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland made with their 2002 classic “24 Days Later.”

Boyle and Garland have reunited to make the worthy successor to the franchise, “28 Years Later,” a bone-chilling and thoughtful thriller that explores how humans don’t just outrun disaster but adapt to it. 

After a prologue in which a young preacher’s son (Rocco Hayes) escapes those infected by the rage virus in the early days of the outbreak, Garland’s script moves ahead 28 years to a small island off the coast of England. There’s a self-sufficient village there, with gates to keep out the infected.

It’s there that Spike (Alfie Williams), age 12, learns survival skills from his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who’s preparing to take him on his first outing to the mainland – and notch his first kill of an infected. While they’re out, Spike sees a bonfire in the distance, suggesting that there are non-infected people still surviving off the island.

Alfie sees that fire as a chance to find help not available in their village. His mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), is sick with something — not the rage virus, but with something beyond his neighbors’ ability to treat. When he hears from a villager that there might be a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) on the mainland, Alfie hatches a desperate plan.

Boyle and Garland build the world around Alfie and the village with just enough detail, and a smattering of gore and non-sexy nudity tho show how pitiful and slovenly the infected have become — and how some of them, the Alphas, have come to rule the vast spaces of the mainland. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the brainless majority dominating through numbers and bile, but Boyle lets it stew in the background while he’s busy scaring the crap out of us. 

Boyle and Garland’s neatest trick is the sharp turn in the movie’s second half, as they strip out the horror elements and plunge us into a surprisingly tender drama about love and grief. Fiennes is tenderly beautiful in this part of the film, but the strongest emotions are brought by Comer and the young Williams, playing a mother-son team who are heartbreaking.

At the very end, Boyle throws in an odd coda that also serves as a handoff to director Nia DaCosta, who has been making a second franchise movie, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” alongside this production. (It’s set to be released early next year.) DaCosta’s a strong director, but she’ll have a lot to live up to after this intense ride.

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’28 Years Later’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Elio' is a fun, if sometimes bumpy, ride through Pixar's ideas of outer space and family solidarity

It’s a given that the computer-crunching animators and storytellers at Pixar Animation Studios are a bunch of nerds — and even by those standards, Pixar’s latest adventure, “Elio,” is a nerd’s dream, a trip to outer space propelled by a lot of imagination and the inspiration of the late Carl Sagan.

The title character, voiced by Yonas Kibreab, is an 11-year-old boy who’s been through a lot in his young life. Living with his aunt, Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña), after the sudden death of his parents, Elio has become obsessed with aliens — and spends his nights on the California beach presenting himself to be abducted by one. Olga works for the U.S. Space Force, tracking satellite debris, but is unable to help Elio with his fascination with UFOs.

One night, though, Elio gets his wish and is picked up by an alien beam. He’s transported to something called the Communiverse, where a collection of aliens believe that Elio is the leader of Earth. The space creatures are eager to welcome him as an ambassador — until a nasty warrior race, the Hylurg, come in demanding to be admitted to the Communiverse. 

Elio says he can broker peace with the Hylurg’s ruler, Lord Grigon (voiced by Brad Garrett), and protect his new Communiverse friends. That’s how Elio comes to befriend Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), a roly-poly Hylurg kid.

“Elio” seems to split itself down its plot threads, which don’t always knit together well. It’s a reflection of the reported journey the movie took within Pixar’s hierarchy. The film’s original director, Adrian Molina, who co-directed “Coco,” left midway through to work on “Coco 2.” He was succeeded by Domee Chi (who directed “Turning Red”) and Madeline Sharafian, who made Pixar’s short “Burrow.” The seams sometimes show, as the different filmmaking visions butt up against each other.

Even an imperfect Pixar movie has its moments of whimsy, wonder and emotion, and “Elio” hits those beats well. It presents a universe built on parental concern, families on the fly, and children encouraged to be who they are — a universe many of us, against all obstacles, are trying to make.

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‘Elio’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action/peril and thematic elements. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'F1' goes deep into the exciting details of Formula 1 racing, but the storyline falls into another kind of formula

Every sports movie ultimately has to make a choice — at what point are you going to sacrifice authenticity, all the work that has gone into creating the atmosphere of genuine competition, to give the audience the outcome they want?

In other words, at what point does a sports movie — no matter how accurate it purports to beor how many experts or former athletes it brings on as producers and technical advisers — become a variation on “The Mighty Ducks”?

That’s the question that hovers expectantly over “F1,” in which director Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”) takes us into the noise, the flash and the fury of Formula 1 racing — and manages to present it as a high-stakes thrill-a-minute endeavor. But, still, when the rubber meets the road, this adrenaline rush of a movie still has to have its “Mighty Ducks” moment.

Kosinski and Kruger (who share story credit) start with the protagonist, Sonny Hayes, who’s played by Brad Pitt in an outward admission that the name “Sonny” hasn’t really applied for a long time. Hayes will race anywhere — when we meet him, he’s a team’s overnight driver in the 24 Hours of Daytona — but never stays around for long, and he’s off in the van in which he also lives.

Sonny is in a Florida laundromat when he’s found by an old racing buddy, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who owns a struggling Formula 1 team and needs Sonny’s help. There are only nine races in the season, and if Ruben’s APX GP team doesn’t get a win, the F1 board will force him to sell the team. Ruben wants Sonny to drive the No. 2 slot behind his rookie driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). 

On one level, Pearce and Sonny are opposites — Pearce is all about computer simulators and running on treadmills, while Sonny prefers old-school methods like jogging on the track ahead of the race. Deep down, of course, they’re identical in their drive to win and a staggering confidence in their ability to harness what’s essentially a rocket engine with a steering column. Sonny has more miles on him, and at least one near-fatal crash in his early Formula 1 days.

So can Sonny work with the hotheaded Pearce? Can he convince the team’s technical director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), to create a tougher car that can handle his type of driving? And can the incessant race commentary impart enough plot exposition and automotive expertise to let the audience feel like they know what’s going on? The answer to the third question is: Your mileage may vary.

Certainly, if the idea is to present Formula 1 as an endless caravan of corporate logos and product placement, “F1” nails it. It seems like the only frames of this movie that don’t come with a company name are the tight close-ups of Pitt — whose face has become a corporate logo in itself. The movie looks as expensive as anything with a Rolex or Ferrari label attached, and we have Apple Studios to thank for that, promising a second life for this movie on streaming after its theatrical run is done. (That said, if you do plan to see “F1,” an IMAX screen and sound system is your best bet.)

Even when succumbing to the sports-movie cliches, Kosinski delivers where it counts, in the jaw-dropping spectacle of Formula 1 racing — its exotic locales, its ostentatious spending, its endless media hype, and the sheer excitement of “car go fast, vroom vroom.” “F1” may be another racing movie, but it’s a state-of-the-art model of the genre.

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‘F1”

★★★

Opens Friday, June 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong language, and action. Running time: 155 minutes.

Review: 'Materialists,' led by a radiant Dakota Johnson, explodes the romantic movie expectations and makes us fall in love with them all over again.

How do you know when you’ve met “the one”? In dating, as with movies like filmmaker Celine Song’s luminous comedy-drama “Materialists,” it depends a lot on chemistry — and even more on dropping the facades and being emotionally honest and true.

Meet Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, who works for Adore Matchmaking, where she specializes in finding the perfect romantic match for her clients. As the movie begins, Lucy has logged her ninth wedding success — though on the big day, the bride, Charlotte (Louisa Jacobsen), is having qualms about marriage, and it takes a serious pep talk from Lucy to get the nuptials back on track.

During the reception for Charlotte and her new husband, Lucy meets the groom’s brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’s both ridiculously rich and seriously charming. Lucy first tries to recruit Harry to sign on for Adore’s service — she calls him a “unicorn,” a guy who most of her women clients would be desperate to date. But Harry is more interested in dating Lucy, and after a while, that’s what happens.

At this wedding reception, though, Lucy also encounters one of the cater waiters, John (Chris Evans), an underemployed actor who’s also Lucy’s ex-boyfriend. The attraction is apparent, and in one flashback scene — where the couple argues about whether to pay $25 to park John’s car in Manhattan or miss a dinner reservation — we understand the money issues that led to their break-up. 

Song, as writer and director, cleverly sets up this scenario like a Hallmark-ready rom-com, with a classic love triangle in which Lucy must choose between the rich guy but the poor guy. In the second act, though, she complicates the formula, because neither Pascal’s Harry nor Chris’s John play to the rom-com stereotypes.

Part of the complications come from Lucy’s work, which presents her with an endless parade of wealthy New Yorkers with insanely overreaching ideas about who they can attract on the dating market. Her work with one client, Sophie (Zoe Winters), provides some key insights into Lucy’s disillusionment with her job.

If act one is a rom-com, and act two is a romantic drama, act three surprises by being the last thing a romance-minded viewer would expect: A thoughtful and precise dissection of all the rules of romance movies. Song deftly makes Lucy and her two suitors dig into the meaning of love, of marriage and of relationships. Song even reaches back to the time of the cavemen, a narrative device that is more meaningful than one might expect. (This is Song’s second movie, after her amazing debut “Past Lives.”)

Evans and Pascal are delightful in their roles, which represent the two sides of Lucy’s desires: The electricity of true love and the stability of wealth. But it’s Johnson, better than she’s ever been in a movie, who carries the weight of Song’s movie effortlessly. Johnson has earned her stripes on both the comedic and dramatic sides of Hollywood romances, and she displays a hard-earned wisdom as she becomes Song’s collaborator in deconstructing those Hollywood tropes.

The sure sign that “Materialists” is doing its job well is that it tears down the expectations of movie romance, and still ends up being a movie romance for the ages. The fundamental things apply, somebody sang in my all-time favorite movie — and Song and Johnson apply them brilliantly.

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‘Materialists’

★★★★

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and brief sexual material. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: 'How to Train Your Dragon' is a sturdy, action-packed live-action remake of the animated original

It’s been 15 years since DreamWorks made one of their best animated movies, “How to Train Your Dragon” — and now, some of the same players have teamed up to make a live-action version that opens up the seemingly endless debate of what is gained by doing with human actors what already has been done so well with pixels and paint.

So far this year, Disney has trotted out live-action reworkings of their 1937 landmark movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and their 2002 charmer “Lilo & Stitch” — following in the footsteps of so many others, mostly from the Disney archives, including “The Lion King,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Mulan” and more. Seems only fitting for DreamWorks to want to get in on the action, particularly when their corporate partners at Universal have a “How to Train Your Dragon” theme park opening in Orlando.

I don’t care too much about the idea that these live-action cash grabs — their reasons for existence are more economic than artistic — are inherently evil. There have been dozens of movie versions of “Hamlet,” and we’re well past calling them a blot on the memory of what ol’ Will S. staged back in Stratford in 1599 or whenever. I take my live-action remakes one at a time, and judge them as I see them today.

With that in mind, I declare that this “How to Train Your Dragon” — written and directed by Dean DeBlois, who co-wrote and co-directed the 2010 animated version with Chris Sanders — strikes a strong dramatic tone, even if he could stand to stray from the source material a bit more.

As before, we’re on the small north Atlantic isle of Berk, where Vikings scratch out a tough existence that’s sometimes punctuated by random attacks by fire-breathing dragons. Berk’s chieftain, Stoick (played then and now by Gerard Butler), is the hardest Viking of all — which means he’s often disappointed in his son, Hiccup (Mason Thames), who’s far more brains than brawn. 

Hiccup tries to impress Stoick by building a weapon that he thinks can take down the nastiest dragon of all, a night fury — a breed no Viking has ever killed or captured. When Hiccup tries out the weapon during a dragon attack, it seems to go haywire, deepening Stoick’s disappointment. 

But when Hiccup goes into the woods, he discovers that he actually grounded a night fury — and the black beast is trapped in a canyon, unable to get off the ground because Hiccup injured the dragon’s tail. Hiccup also discovers that the dragon, which he calls Toothless, isn’t a killer after all.

What follows, as with the original, is a clever juxtaposition of two parallel stories. In one, Hiccup works to gain Toothless’ trust, trains him to be ridden, and invents a prosthetic tail assembly for him. In the other, Hiccup is pressed into dragon-fighting training with the teens who usually tease him, where he works to impress the gutsiest young fighter of all, Astrid (played by Nico Parker). 

It’s this middle section where the new version really cooks, as it establishes the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, and the tensions among Hiccup’s teen classmates, more completely than the animated version did. Credit the expressive nature of the actors, particularly Thames and Parker, and the extended screen time DeBlois gives them. (The movie clocks in a half-hour longer than the animated film.)

If you’re truly enamored with the animated film, seeing live-action scenes that copy the original beat for beat — like the iconic moment of Toothless first allowing Hiccup to touch his snout — can be maddening. It would have been nice for DeBlois and his team to rethink new ways to capture that narrative, but I’m sure “the suits” would have complained that they weren’t getting the “How to Train Your Dragon” they were expecting.

Here’s the thing, though: This is the “How to Train Your Dragon” you’re expecting. And because the original was really good, it’s not too hard to believe that a copy, made by the people who gave the first one so much care and attention, could get it right — or mostly right — a second time. 

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‘How to Train Your Dragon’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for sequences of intense action, and peril. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'The Life of Chuck' is an ambitiously constructed story about the value of a life, but it gets too clever for its own good

The filmmaker Mike Flanagan may be one of the more creative people working in the horror and suspense realms today — and you only need to look at his work with Stephen King’s “Doctor Sleep” or his Netflix miniseries, like “The Haunting of Hill House” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” to see the genius at work.

So why is the ambitious “The Life of Chuck,” which Flanagan wrote and directed off of a King short story, feel like a cleverly conceived misfire? Maybe it’s because Flanagan holds his secrets so tightly that he never allows the audience the space to enjoy the life-affirming message he’s so eager to express.

Flanagan tells his story in three acts, starting with the third act. In this act, titled “Thanks Chuck,” it’s the present day and the world seems to be collapsing in on itself, with natural disasters everywhere and people losing access to the Internet. The main characters here are Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Felicia (Karen Gillan), ex-spouses who reconnect in the face of the growing chaos. There’s also one weird constant: Messages of thanks to Charles Krantz, or Chuck, for “39 great years.” (Think of the Julia Reagan tribute billboards seen across Utah and other states, but increasingly sinister.)

Then comes Act Two, called “Buskers Forever.” That’s also set in the present day, and starts with Taylor (Taylor Gordon, the drummer known as The Pocket Queen) busking on a summer afternoon, when a guy in a business suit stops and starts dancing to her rhythms. This, we recognize from the previous portion of the film, is Chuck Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston. Chuck starts dancing with a woman in the crowd (Annalise Basso). Flanagan fills in a lot of character detail here, mostly through an overbearing narrator with the unmistakeable voice of Nick Offerman.

Act One carries the title “I Contain Multitudes,” which means we’ll come back to the Walt Whitman recitation that starts the movie. We also meet young Chuck (played by Cody Flanagan, Benjamin Pajak and Jacob Tremblay at various ages), and some of the many loose ends are tied up, some of them a little too neatly.

Flanagan has assembled quite a troupe of actors through his past works, and many of them — like Gillan, Lumbly and Basso, as well as Mark Hamill, Kate Siegel (who’s married to Flanagan), Samantha Sloyan, Violet McGraw and Heather Langenkamp — give some graceful small performances here. One newcomer to Flanagan’s acting ensemble who’s striking here is Mia Sara, making her first screen appearance in 12 years.

Flanagan has a gift for densely layered narratives that make surprising connections across time and space. It’s a gift that serves him best in his miniseries, where he’s got the time to let the magic unfold. In “The Life of Chuck,” that gift works against him, and the cleverness interferes with the emotional connection. There’s stuff in this movie that should make even the hardest heart weep, but those things get caught up in Flanagan’s intricate mechanism and never have the desired effect.

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‘The Life of Chuck’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Prime Minister' profiles New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern in a thoughtful and deeply personal documentary

In politics as in documentary filmmaking, access is everything — and “Prime Minister” directors Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz get extraordinary access and use it to create a fascinating, emotional portrait of former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The main narrative runs from 2017, when Ardern suddenly ascended to the leadership of New Zealand’s Labour Party, just two months before a general election, to her somewhat surprise resignation in 2023. In between, Ardern faced and answered a series of crises that would humble any world leader.

She spoke at the United Nations in 2018, urging global cooperation in the face of Donald Trump’s isolationism. There was the mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch in 2019, in which 50 people were killed — and prompted Ardern to become her country’s mourner-in-chief, and then push for a nationwide ban on assault weapons. 

The biggest crisis came in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic. Ardern oversaw a national shutdown, and closed her country’s borders — a move that, for awhile, allowed New Zealand to avoid the worst of the pandemic’s first wave. As the pandemic continued, Ardern led the efforts to get her citizens to get the vaccine, which caused a backlash from a minuscule but loud far-right protest movement, which unfurled misinformation and Trump flags in front of Parliament. (Of all the things the United States could export, why that?)

Oh, and just as she took office in 2017, Ardern found out she was pregnant. Her daughter, Neve, grows into the movie’s scene-stealer.

Walshe and Utz have footage from deep inside Ardern’s campaign, government and home life. Her then-partner, and now husband, broadcaster Clarke Gayford, started shooting footage on his phone when Ardern was named to lead the Labour Party, and kept getting the view from inside the house for years after. The film also had access to audio diaries Ardern recorded over the years, part of an oral history project that usually doesn’t release its clips until the subject dies. All told, the filmmakers said, they had 200 hours of material to comb through.

What Walshe and Utz produce is both expansive and intimate, covering not just Ardern’s politics but her personal side — from the security dangers the wing nut protesters put her family through to her deep interest in the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, who serves as a metaphor for a leader making hard decisions to keep people alive.

“Prime Minister” presents a strong argument that the test of leadership isn’t what a leader plans to do, but what a leader does when the unexpected comes. Based on the evidence of history and this engaging documentary, Ardern clears the bar with room to spare.

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‘Prime Minister’ 

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 13, at the AMC West Jordan. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language snd mild breastfeeding scenes. Running time: 102 minutes.

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This movie was originally reviewed on January 24, 2025, when the movie premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.