Review: 'Freakier Friday' is more frenetic than the 2003 original, but not as fun or as warm-hearted

There’s a frenetic sense of desperation that undercuts the comedy and camaraderie of the squeaky-clean teen comedy “Freakier Friday,” as if everyone involved is so determined to nail every joke that they squash too many of them.

The movie is the sequel to the 2003 Disney comedy “Freaky Friday,” in which a rock-guitarist teen, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), and her mom, Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), fall under an old Chinese curse and swap bodies — forcing Anna to do adult stuff while Tess navigates her teen years all over again. It’s 22 years later, and the loving bickering hasn’t stopped.

These days, Tess is a therapist with a podcast and a devoted second husband, Ryan (Mark Harmon, also back from the original) — while Anna has channeled her rock ’n’ roll dreams into managing other musicians, namely a high-maintenance pop star, Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who’s having a very public breakup. Anna also is a single mom with a surf-loving 15-year-old daughter, Harper (Julia Butters).

Topping it all off, Anna is engaged to marry Eric (Manny Jacinto), a chef and restaurant owner. Their meet-cute came when Harper and Eric’s daughter, Lily (Sophia Hammons), got into a fight at school a year earlier. Now, the high schoolers who hate each other are about to become step-sisters — and, after the wedding, leave Los Angeles to live in Eric and Lily’s old hometown, London.

At Anna’s family-friendly bachelorette party (it’s a Disney movie, after all), Anna and Tess have an encounter with a loopy psychic (Vanessa Bayer), who reads their palms and realizes “you’ve walked in each other’s path” — and that they may need to remember the lessons from their switcheroo 22 years ago. The same psychic also delivers a fortune to Harper and Lily: “Change the hearts you know are wrong to reach the place where you belong.”

The next morning, with the wedding only a couple days away, everyone wakes up as somebody else. Anna and Harper have swapped bodies, and so have Tess and Lily. And then the freakiness really gets started — or, at least, that’s the attempt made by director Nisha Ganatra (“The High Note,” “Late Night”) and screenwriter Jordan Weiss.

The plot sets Anna and Tess in their younger bodies on a course to find the psychic and undo the curse, while Harper and Lily — in the forms of Lohan and Curtis — decide to call a truce with the purpose of breaking up Anna and Eric before the wedding. They also try to fake being adults, in a series of vignettes that aren’t as funny as they should be.

Ganatra apparently knows there’s less genuine comedy here, because of the film’s efforts to pump up the volume with comic cameos from such comedians as Chloe FIneman, June Diane Raphael, Sherry Cola, George Wallace and Elaine Hendrix (for those who needed a “Parent Trap” reunion tosses in for good measure). There’s also Chad Michael Murray showing up as Jake, Lohan’s teen crush from the first movie, creating a nostalgic aura without coming anywhere near funny.

That’s the problem all over “Freakier Friday”: People who should be funny and charming are given little space for either. It’s good to see Curtis and Lohan reconnecting, this time as adults navigating motherhood and grandmotherhood, but the movie leaves them stranded without enough that’s authentically amusing or emotional.

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‘Freakier Friday’

★★

Opens Friday, August 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Sketch' is an effective scary movie for the pre-teen set, and the biggest surprise is how moving it is

Writer-director Seth Worley has created a fascinating beast in “Sketch” — a family-friendly horror movie that’s also a tender drama about family grief. It shouldn’t work, but it does, thanks to a playful tone and some unsettling animation.

Amber (Bianca Belle) is a moody 9-year-old who gets picked on regularly by Bowman (Kalon Cox), an obnoxious kid. Amber’s protector is her slightly older brother, Jack (Kue Lawrence). Her refuge is her sketchbook, in which she draws images of disturbing monsters — so disturbing that the school’s principal calls her dad, Taylor (Tony Hale), to find out how things are at home.

Things are not good at home. Taylor and the tow kids frequently tiptoe around the big thing they have in common: The recent death of Taylor’s wife, and the kids’ mom, Ally (Allie McCulloch, seen in occasional flashbacks). But, as Taylor’s sister, Liz (D’Arcy Carden), points out, Amber’s the only one with a coping mechanism, with her drawings — which the school counselor suggests she keep creating, because on paper, they can’t do any real harm.

This being a movie with a slight supernatural edge, the counselor’s statement turns out not to be true. Jack finds a pond in the woods near their house, and discovers that things that go into the water become fixed and/or healed. When Amber’s notebook lands in the pond, soon the forbidden monsters come bubbling up, reflecting the angry energy Amber put into drawing them.

Worley visualizes what’s next partly as a Japanese monster movie, with Amber’s creations as the kaiju rampaging the countryside. It’s also a chase picture, with the monsters pursuing Amber, Jack and their reluctant ally, Bowman, through the woods. And sometimes it’s got a twinge of horror, with suggestions of “Pet Sematary” and, in an audacious turn on Worley’s part, a PG-rated callback to the shower scene in “Psycho.”

“Sketch” is an oddly affecting movie, one where you come for the animated monsters and stay for the emotional wallop of watching a dad and his kids processing unfathomable grief. Holding it together is Worley’s inventive use of his animated monsters, and an innate understanding that kids like a good scare, too, if it’s calibrated for a cathartic surprise without creating some horror-movie trauma.

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‘Sketch’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, August 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for scary action, some violence, thematic elements, language and rude humor. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'The Bad Guys 2' is as sharp and funny as the first one, on levels kids and adults will both enjoy

The animated heist thriller “The Bad Guys” was one of the happier surprises of 2022, a successful cross between “Ocean’s 11” and “Zootopia” — and it’s equally surprising that the sequel, “The Bad Guys 2,” is equally smart and funny.

The whole gang is back together, both in the story and in the voice booth — team leader The Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell), safe-cracker Snake (voiced by Marc Maron), disguise expert Shark (voiced by Craig Robinson), ace hacker Tarantula (voiced by Awkwafina) and live-wire Piranha (voiced by Anthony Ramos). 

The intro shows them when they were still bad, on a job stealing from a billionaire in Cairo, before bringing them back their current lives, after they went to the good side in the last movie. Being law-abiding isn’t always great, as they’re rejected at job interviews because they’re not trusted. (At one point, Wolf interviews with a bank manager who reminds him that he robbed that bank three times.)

Wolf still has a friend in Gov. Diane Foxington (voiced by Zazie Beetz), who has given up her criminal alter ego, the Crimson Paw. And the gang even tries to help the police commissioner (voiced by Alex Borstein), to capture a new criminal, The Phantom Bandit, if only to prove it’s not them.

The Phantom Bandit turns out to be Kitty Kat (voiced by Danielle Brooks), who has two accomplices but needs the Bad Guys to help pull off a heist involving a tech billionaire (voiced by Colin Jost) who’s planning a rocket launch and a lavish wedding. (Where do screenwriters Yoni Brenner and Etan Cohen get their outlandish ideas?)

The writers, along with director Pierre Perifel (who also directed the first one) and co-director JP Sans, concoct a heist movie that’s cleverly twisty, and loaded with sharp references. Diane has a reunion with the first movie’s villain, Dr. Rupert Marmalade (voiced by Richard Ayoade), that is staged like Clarice Starling’s first prison meeting with Hannibal Lecter. Also, the mystery metal Kitty Kat wants to steal is called MacGuffinite. (If you know, you know.)

Happily, “The Bad Guys 2” knows how to work both sides of the line, entertaining the kids with bold, colorful humor (including, yes, an extended fart joke) while playing it smart for the grown-ups. And it sets up something interesting if they ever decide to make “The Bad Guys 3” — which, given the franchise’s track record, I hope they do.

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‘The Bad Guys 2’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/mild violence, rude humor and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'The Naked Gun' reboot doesn't quite reach the wacky satirical heights of the original, but Pamela Anderson shows she's a great comic foil

Dang it, the reboot of “The Naked Gun” looked so good on paper — following up on a much-loved comedy franchise, casting a non-comedian with a tough-guy reputation like the first one did, and throwing everything to the wall to see what sticks. What could go wrong?

I’m afraid just enough goes wrong with the 2025 version of “The Naked Gun” — directed by Akiva Schaffer, who made the hilarious and smart boy-band mockumentary “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” — that it doesn’t achieve the comedy heights that the 1988 original did.

The movie follows Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson), who introduces himself in his noir-style voiceover as both “sergeant” and “detective lieutenant.” No matter, he’s the toughest cop in Police Squad, the unit his late father — played in the original by the great Leslie Nielsen — worked in for years, solving cases almost by accident. 

The younger Frank is more likely to fight than his dad, as Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand explore ways to satirize Neeson’s career as a hard-as-nails action star. It’s a move that doesn’t pay off as much as it should, in part because Neeson seems too in on the joke, not reaching the heights of obliviousness Nielsen achieved at his peak.

The story, like it matters, starts with a bank robbery that Frank breaks up — but not before a slick baddie, Sig Gustafson (Kevin Durand), blows open a safe deposit box and takes a small electronic gadget, immediately identified as the P.L.O.T. Device. 

The next day, Frank and his partner, Ed Hocken Jr. (Paul Walter Hauser, taking the role George Kennedy played in Nielsen’s films), check out a car crash that left a man dead — a case initially ruled as a suicide. But the dead man’s sister, Beth Davenport (played by Pamela Anderson), thinks her brother was murdered, possibly by his employer, the tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston). Frank pursues the case, and also pursues romance with Beth, an author who describes her work like this: “I write true-crime novels based on fictional cases that I make up.”

Some of the extended set pieces work better than others. A romantic montage in a snowy cabin becomes its own comedic and creepy short story, and may be the movie’s finest sequence. On the other hand, a bit where Sig is using infrared binoculars to spy on Frank and Beth is a gag that overstays its welcome. The movie’s brief running time — it clocks in under 90 minutes, including credits that are worth staying for — is dotted with instances where Schaffer and his team don’t know when to let a joke end.

The one person here who fully understands the assignment and nails every scene is Anderson. Anyone who survived five seasons of “Baywatch” must have a sense of humor, and here Anderson shows that she’s got strong comic chops and is willing to sacrifice her dignity for a good joke. If someone isn’t building a sitcom around her right now, they’re missing out on a golden opportunity.

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‘The Naked Gun’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for crude/sexual material, violence/bloody images and brief partial nudity. Running time: 85 minutes.

Review: 'Together' delivers a pre-marital commitment conundrum in the clever disguise of a creepy body-horror thriller

If you like your weird body horror wrapped in a metaphor, writer-director Michael Shanks’ “Together” is your jam — a smart, occasionally funny and deliciously grotesque story about the secrets of commitment.

Meet Tim and Millie, played by real-life married actors Dave Franco and Alison Brie. They are in the process of moving from the big city to the country, where Millie has lined up a job as an elementary school teacher. It’s a rough transition for Tim, a rock musician who, at 35, is still chasing the dream of a major record deal.

Shanks’ sharp script presents us with Tim and Millie’s relationship problems — including Tim’s fear of getting married, Millie’s worry that Tim is a man-child, and mutual concerns about how infrequently they have sex recently. But, because Brie and Franco are such charming people, the audience suspects that Tim and Millie will be fine if they just stick together.

And, after getting lost in the woods and drinking from a watering hole, sticking together — literally — is what Tim and Millie start to do. Suddenly, their attraction becomes quite literal, which brings problems ranging from the gross-out comedy to revulsion to, by the end, an odd sort of acceptance. The fact that those steps also apply to Tim and Millie’s rocky relationship is the point.

The joy of “Together” is watching Franco and Brie descend into seven levels of freaking out about Tim and Millie’s situation. They are natural scene partners, and bring out the terror and sometimes the humor in each other’s work — and their apparent security as a married couple seems to be infused n their performances.

When Millie’s schoolteacher pal Jamie (Damon Herriman) makes a reference to Plato’s “Symposium” and its theory of the soulmate (for details, listen to “Origin of Love” from “Hedwig & the Angry Inch”), you may know where the movie is going. But with Brie and Franco steering this outlandish movie, it’s still fun going on the ride.

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‘Together’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violent/disturbing content, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug content. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'The Fantastic 4: First Steps' gives the MCU a fresh start, with frenzied action lightened by the clever creation of a retro-future world

There are two movies battling for our attention during the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” — and one works so well it makes up for the deficiencies in the other.

This installment, No. 37 in the sprawling franchise, introduces a set of characters new to the MCU: The Fantastic 4, a group of astronauts and scientists sometimes called “Marvel’s First Family.” As the quick retro-TV documentary at the movie’s beginning explains, the brainy Dr. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) led a space mission with his best friend, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), his wife, Sue Storm Richards (Vanessa Kirby), and Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn). 

That mission hit a cosmic storm, and the radiation gave all four of them incredible powers. Reed can stretch and contort his body like rubber. Ben has turned into a super-strong rock creature. Sue can turn invisible at will and manipulate powerful force fields. And Johnny ignites into a fire being who can fly. 

On this parallel universe of Earth, called Earth-828 (the MCU mostly has resided in Earth-616), the quartet aren’t just superheroes but super-celebrities. One of the best throwaway gags comes when Johnny opens a box of Lucky Charms and finds his own miniature action figure inside. It’s a retro-future kind of world, where women dress like Jackie Kennedy in the ‘60s, Johnny records space transmissions on gold-colored vinyl LPs, and the “Fantastic Car” looks like a Hot Wheels car from the days of tail fins. 

Director Matt Shakman is clearly at home building this Earth 828, which isn’t surprising for the guy who helmed the era-hopping “WandaVision.” Production designer Kasra Farahani and crew create a “Jetsons”-style futuristic style that permeates everything from the New York skyline to the Fantastic 4’s living room. The look is reminiscent of Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” and a group of movie geeks could stay up all night debating who influenced who. (One supervillain, a subterranean kingpin called Mole Man and played by Paul Walter Hauser, is reminiscent of The Underminer from “The Incredibles.”) 

Shakman makes us and his cast so at home in this world that we don’t mind so much that the story is a patchwork affair. The script is credited to four writers — Josh Friedman (“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”), Eric Pearson (who worked on this year’s “Thunderbolts*”) and the lesser-known team of Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, with Pearson, Kaplan and Springer sharing story credit with Kat Wood — and the seams sometimes show. 

Early in the story, Sue reveals to Reed that she’s pregnant, after years of trying. Any family celebration of this blessed event is cut short when an alien visitor arrives, a silver figure on a celestial surfboard. The Silver Surfer, played in motion capture by Julia Garner, tells the people that Earth has been chosen to be devoured by a planet-chomping being known as Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson). The Fantastic 4 vow that they will do something, though the super-smart Reed isn’t sure what, to stop Galactus.

Shakman stages some action scenes of varying quality — a mid-movie outer-space chase as Sue goes into zero-gravity labor is the most frenetic — and more use of the word “family” than any script this side of a “Fast and the Furious” movie. Through it all, Shakman clearly is having more fun building this cool world than capturing the emotional lives of the superpowered humans who are trying to keep it from being destroyed. 

While this is the first time the Fantastic 4 has been in the MCU, it’s not the first time they’ve been in the movies. There was an atrocious Roger Corman-produced adaptation in the ‘90s (the stars of which make cameos in the early moments here). There were two not-horrible movies, in 2005 and 2007, with Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis in the lead roles. (That one was referenced in “Deadpool and Wolverine.”) And there was the train wreck that was the 2015 version, with Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell. This one, unlike those others, manages to gauge accurately how seriously we’re supposed to take all this, which is maybe 40 percent.

The results are a lot more entertaining and eye-catching than some recent Marvel movies. Maybe because Marvel is starting fresh with these superheroes, and giving them a self-contained story that doesn’t rely on knowledge of 14 other characters presented in nine previous movies and TV shows. (Of course, there’s a mid-credits scene that teases an upcoming supervillain, but that’s almost required in Marvel movies these days.) “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” is charming on its own, and a sign that Marvel is bouncing back after the doldrums caused by the inevitable decline after “Avengers: Endgame.”

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‘The Fantastic 4: First Steps’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and some language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Sorry, Baby' is a biting and empathetic tale of a woman trying to get her life unstuck, and a glorious debut for writer-director-star Eva Victor

Alternately sad, scary and awkwardly funny, writer-director-star Eva Victor’s debut feature, “Sorry, Baby,” is a sneakily moving story of a woman stuck in place and trying to move — move on, move forward, move somewhere — after a bad thing happens to her.

Victor is very clear what the bad thing is, though she does not dramatize the bad thing. Victor tells her story in chapters, and the second chapter is called “The Year with the Bad Thing,” and she doesn’t leave any doubt what the bad thing is.

In the first chapter, called “The Year with the Baby,” we meet Victor’s character, Agnes, a literature professor at a small New England college. Her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), has driven up from New York for a visit — staying at Agnes’ house, which is the same house they shared when they both were grad students here. Agnes is the youngest full-time professor the college’s English department has ever had, a fact often cited by Natasha (Kelly McCormack, wickedly funny), an adjunct professor and former classmate who jealously comments that everything has come easy to Agnes.

Lydie also meets Agnes’ neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a handsome and slightly perplexed man — and, Lydie suspects, someone with whom Agnes has had sex. Since Lydie knows about the bad thing that happened to Agnes four years earlier, the possibility that Agnes has an occasional friend with benefits down the road is a positive.

Then comes that second chapter, “The Year with the Bad Thing,” set when Agnes and Lydie are grad students, finishing their respective literary theses to turn in to their professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Natasha’s in the class, too, and annoys Agnes by suggesting that Agnes is the professor’s favorite. 

Then there’s the Bad Thing. 

The rest of Victor’s sharply observant and warmly empathetic movie focuses on the ways Agnes is trying to exist in the wake of the Bad Thing. She tries to write. She carries on at school. She considers doing some damage, either to herself or to something else. She finds a stray kitten in the street and tells Lydie that they’re keeping it.

Every second Victor lets us spend with Agnes is perfect. Victor finds quiet, precise moments that show us Agnes’ bruised psyche, with hints of humor that show us her resilience to avoid falling into an abyss of her darker thoughts. Victor doesn’t underline her points, and doesn’t have to — she understands Agnes intuitively, and projects that feeling to the audience so we understand her without having to have her emotions broadcast to us.

As an actor, Victor balances Agnes’ hesitant humor with a deep reservoir of pain, finding a middle space where she’s working through her life to find a way to get out of her rut. When “Sorry, Baby” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, I compared Victor’s writing skills and deep empathy to another Sundance phenom, Miranda July. Victor shows in “Sorry, Baby” that she, like July before her, has got a lot to show the world. 

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‘Sorry, Baby’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content and language. Running time: 103 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 30, 2025, during the film’s premiere run at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Oh, Hi!,' the most nerve-wracking date night movie ever, is a showcase for the crazy-good comic talents of Molly Gordon

From the premise — a couple dating for four months takes their first weekend road trip together — a viewer might think they know where writer-director Sophie Brooks’ romantic comedy “Oh, Hi!” Is going to go.

They would be disastrously, hilariously wrong, because Brooks and star Molly Gordon (who shares story credit with Brooks) go into some strange and dark places in this examination of miscommunication and mixed expectations.

When we first see Gordon’s Iris, she’s greeting her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), who has arrived in a panic and very concerned for her friend. She should be, because Iris opens with “I did something bad.” Then Brooks cuts to 33 hours earlier in the narrative, as Iris and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are driving in the countryside in upstate New York, heading to a farmhouse they’ve rented for the weekend.

Iris and Isaac seem like a very typically gaga-for-each-other couple. They have sex on the couch when they first arrive. They make out in the creek behind the house, drawing the wrath of a creepy neighbor (David Cross). Isaac cooks her scallops. And, later, Isaac suggests they uses some of the leather and chain goods they found in their landlord’s closet for some light S&M.

What happens next — and how Iris draws Max and Max’s boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), into her “something bad” — make up the last hour of this funny and off-kilter comedy. And I am loathe to give away anything more.

Iris’ behavior will, I’m sure, divide audiences, in part along gender lines. Women will likely empathize with Iris’ heartache, and may even consider her drastic actions justified. Men could go either way here, either dismissing Iris as a nut case, or reluctantly conceding that Iris has a point — even if she has gone to extremes to make that point.

What’s not up for argument is that Gordon is one of the funniest people working in movies, woman or man. Gordon has shined in supporting turns in “Shiva Baby,” “Booksmart” and “Theater Camp.” Here, she invests Iris with a boatload of modern anxieties, and adds a bracing dose of righteous anger when her perfect weekend goes off the rails. Scoring her first significant leading role, Gordon makes “Oh, Hi!” a wonderfully off-the-wall declaration of empowerment — one that will make people laugh and then reconsider how they’ve been treating their significant other.

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‘Oh, Hi!’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content/some nudity, and language. Running time: 95 minutes.