Review: 'Ne Zha II,' an epic animated Chinese fantasy, arrives in an English-language dub — which doesn't relieve all the cultural barriers

The Chinese animated fantasy epic “Ne Zha II” is one of the most visually stunning movies you’re likely to see in your lifetime — but with a densely packed storyline that people who haven’t seen the first “Ne Zha” movie, or aren’t versed in Chinese mythology, will find confusing.

Give it time, and don’t sweat the details, and “Ne Zha II” will reveal its splendor to all.

There’s a quick, but dense, recap of the legend that is “Ne Zha II’s” jumping-off point. The short version: There are two supernatural objects, the demon orb and the chaos pearl — which manifest themselves into two young warriors, Ne Zha representing the fiery red demon orb and Ao Bing the icy pearl. The two were destroyed in the events of the first movie, but their spirits remain. But when Ne Zha’s master, Taiyi Zhenren, tries to create new bodies for them, he can only create one — so Ne Zha and Ao Bing agree to share Ne Zha’s body until they can create a second one.

The two spirits, uneasily sharing the pint-sized Ne Zha’s body, are assigned by the wizard Master Wuliang to perform three tests, all of them involving dragons. The trials are difficult, even more so because Ne Zha has trouble relinquishing control of his body to Ao Bing, who’s a more experienced fighter.

Director Jiao Zi uses his richly realized animation to create entire worlds to populate — while also setting action pieces filled with jaw-dropping wonder. There are numerous icons of Chinese mythology depicted here, none more ferocious than Ao Guang, the Dragon King of the East, who’s also Ao Bing’s father.

All of that, and what comes after, is actively delightful to watch — but a bear to follow the plot’s logic. I’d recommend people seek out the original “Ne Zha,” so you don’t feel like you’re walking into “Avengers: Endgame” without ever seeing any Marvel movies before that.

“Ne Zha II,” which has made a reported $2 billion in global box-office receipts, is being released with an English-language dub. The cast’s most familiar voice is that of Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) voicing Ne Zha’s mother, Lady Yin, the protector of the fortress that guards humankind from the whims of demons and dragons.

If you can keep up with the plot (it’s not Shakespeare or anything), the movie rewards with gorgeous spectacle and breathtaking action. It’s some of the most spectacular animation you’re likely to see this year — and enough to make lovers of animation seek out the first “Ne Zha” movie.

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‘Ne Zha II’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 22, in theaters everywhere. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for animated violence and destruction. Running time: 143 minutes.

Review: 'Relay' is an entertaining throwback to '70s paranoid thrillers, one that presents Riz Ahmed as an Everyman action hero for the 21st century.

The golden era of paranoid thrillers was the 1970s, in the days of “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View,” and director David Mackenzie’s “Relay” shows why modern technology it’s harder to make those kind of movies — and finds an ingenious old-school of getting around that problem.

The action starts with guy named Hoffman (Michael Maher) meeting a CEO (Victor Garber) in a New York diner — a meeting to arrange the return of documents that prove the CEO’s pharmaceutical company was hiding data that showed their new wonder drug was actually killing people. Hoffman had stolen the documents, but got cold feet when the company harassed and threatened him.

All of this is prologue, and the character Mackenzie is concerned with is near the diner, watching the exchange from a distance. This character, played by Riz Ahmed and not identified by name until late in the movie, is a fixer who plays a low-key form of blackmail — arranging for such documents to go back to their secretive sources, but hanging onto a copy as insurance to keep the companies from threatening their former employees.

Once Ahmed’s character and his methods are introduced, Mackenzie and rookie screenwriter Justin Piasecki introduce someone new. She’s Sarah Grant (Lily James), a biotech scientist who has paperwork showing that her company’s new GMO wheat hybrid has some deadly side effects. Sarah reports she’s been harassed and threatened, and she’s heard about somebody who can make problems like this go away.

The method of contact between Sarah and Ahmed’s character is the clever wrinkle in Piasecki’s script, and a technological throwback to the “Three Days of the Condor” era. It’s an old-school TTY teletype, a device used by deaf people to use the telephone. Ahmed’s character uses the teletype in connection with a relay service in Yonkers, where operators read messages to and from deaf people. What makes it foolproof is that, because of the provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act, such relay services never record calls or save the information exchanged in them — a cool way to get around modern surveillance techniques.

Not that a security crew that’s been harassing Sarah isn’t willing to try. They are led by Sam Worthington (“Avatar”) and Willa Fitzgerald, and their cat-and-mouse sequences with Ahmed are so electric they make typing a tension-packed experience.

Mackenzie (who directed the riveting neo-Western “Hell or High Water”) puts the action on the Manhattan streets, making it the second movie in as many weeks — after Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest” — to deploy the geography and atmosphere of the Big Apple so cleverly. 

The ride is so engaging that you think it can’t last. And, unfortunately, it can’t. The story runs out of gas toward the end, to the point where an observant filmmaker can spot Piasecki’s big twist about 20 minutes before it arrives.

Even when that happens, the pleasures of watching Riz Ahmed think his way through this intense scenario is still enjoyable. As his character applies his brains and an ability to blend into the New York scenery, Ahmed shows he’s a perfect choice for a 21st-century action figure — someone who stands out by blending in.

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‘Relay’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'Highest 2 Lowest' shows Spike Lee at his most dynamic and sometimes self-indulgent, and cements Denzel Washington's legend status

Part crime thriller and part morality drama, “Highest 2 Lowest” has moments that are dynamic, breath-taking, self-indulgent, overwrought, implausible and authentic all at once — in other words, it’s a Spike Lee joint.

What makes “Highest 2 Lowest” undeniably watchable, in spite of Lee’s occasional excesses, is that the director has teamed for the fifth time with Denzel Washington, who can seemingly do no wrong.

Washington plays David King, a music mogul who still is called “the best ears in the business,” decades after his early-aughts heyday. David lives in a luscious Brooklyn penthouse, with an impossibly gorgeous view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline from the balcony. It’s a multi-room apartment decorated with Basquiat paintings and other artwork, where David, his wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), and their 17-year-old son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), live an undeniably good life.

Also living in the apartment are the Kings’ good friend and chauffeur, Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), who has a son, Kyle (Elijah Wright), who’s Trey’s age and his best friend.

As the movie begins, David is engineering a complex and expensive deal to buy back controlling interest in the record label he founded. It’s a gamble — one that has David risking the penthouse, the family’s vacation home and pretty much all of their fortune.

Before the deal goes down, though, David gets a disturbing phone call, informing him that Trey has been kidnapped. The ransom is $17.5 million, an amount that would bankrupt the Kings and make the deal null and void. The Kings call the cops, and soon the three main detectives (John Douglas Thompson, LaChanze and Dean Winters) are working the case — which includes interrogating the quick-tempered Paul.

In short order, though, the Kings find out that Trey is safe — and that the kidnappers grabbed Kyle by mistake. But when the kidnapper calls back, still demanding the ransom, David faces a moral dilemma about whether to pay the money, and risk his business, for someone else’s son.

Film buffs will recognize the scenario as the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece “High and Low,” which starred Toshiro Mifune as the businessman facing this difficult choice. That movie and this one are inspired by the Ed McBain novel “King’s Ransom,” and screenwriter Alan Fox mines both the book and the Kurosawa movie for material — along with Lee’s regular obsessions, like the Knicks, the Yankees and the endless variety of New York neighborhoods.

There’s one set piece that ranks among the best work Lee has ever done: A sequence where David has to hand off a backpack with the ransom, shot through a lively Puerto Rican neighborhood festival. (The salsa legend Eddie Palmieri, who died Aug. 6 at 88, and his band provide the diegetic musical accompaniment that adds to the sequence’s tightrope tension.) 

There’s another noteworthy sequence where Washington’s David faces off in a rap battle with a character played by A$AP Rocky. I won’t describe it further, but it gives Washington a chance to showcase how versatile and compelling an actor he always has been.

With those two sections in his movie, Lee earns the right to go overboard elsewhere in the movie, with radical tone shifts and an action-movie ending that undercuts a lot of what Lee and his cast — particularly Washington and the constantly arresting Wright — have done to that point. “Highest 2 Lowest” does, indeed, have its high and low points, but the best parts make up for the lesser passages.

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‘Highest 2 Lowest’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout and brief drug use. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Nobody 2' puts Bob Odenkirk through more cartoonish violence, and inches him closer to a universe-building franchise

“Nobody 2” is an enjoyably maniacal action movie with a ridiculous body count, following in the path of 2021’s “Nobody” and taking its first steps toward creating a cinematic universe.

Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch Mansell, who from the outside seems to have two major personality traits: He’s boring in a suburban dad sort of way, and he’s indestructible — both characteristics that come in handy in his chosen work, as a lethal contractor who takes jobs that usually involve lots of killing. He’s working off a debt to a Russian mobster, whose money he torched in the first movie, and his handler, called only The Barber (Colin Salmon), tells Hutch he still has $30 million to go.

Hutch, though, needs a break — not necessarily because of the violence, but because his work has taken him away from his wife, Becca (Connie Nielsen), and their two kids, Brady (Gage Munroe) and Sammy (Paisley Cadorath). He keeps missing family dinners, and watching his kids growing up. So Hutch decides to plan a family vacation.

The place Hutch chooses is Plummerville, Wisconsin, the place his dad (Christopher Lloyd) took a young Hutch and his brother Harry when they were kids. It’s got a water slide, a midway, an arcade and “duck boats” — which Hutch has to explain to his children. What could go wrong?

Let the list begin. First, there are the teen bullies who harass Brady and Abby at the arcade. Followed by the security guards who kick the Mansells out of the arcade, and slap Abby on the back of the head as they leave — which prompts Hutch to go back in and beat the crap out of the bullies and the security goons. That’s how Hutch and Blake wind up in the county lockup, run by Sheriff Abel (Colin Hanks), who’s a nasty, vindictive sort. Turns out, though, that Abel isn’t the big dog in Plummerville. That’s Wyatt Martin (John Ortiz), whose father founded the tourist trap the Mansells are visiting — and Wyatt isn’t happy, because he blames Brady for hurting Wyatt’s son, Max (Lucius Hoyos), a high school baseball star, in his throwing arm.

It only takes Hutch a few minutes, and a lot of deputies and goons to beat up, to learn that Wyatt is answering to an even bigger boss — a ruthless gangster, Lendina, who launders her crime empire’s money in Plummerville.

Lendina is played by Sharon Stone, who hasn’t had a movie role this prominent in a while — and she makes up for the absence with a world-class display of scenery-chewing, full-gonzo, over-the-top menace. 

Director Timo Tjahjanto stages a series of outlandish action sequences, turning Martin’s amusement park into a gauntlet for Lendina’s hired hands to get shot, stabbed and blown up in unusual ways. If you can imagine Wile E. Coyote with an arsenal the size of a medium-sized country, you get the general idea. 

Meanwhile, screenwriters Derek Kolstad (who wrote the original “John Wick”) and Aaron Rabin expand the action to give moments of righteous violence to Nielsen, Lloyd and RZA, who returns as Hutch’s warrior brother, Harry. The script also hints at a larger universe of workaholic contract killers, one that might be explored in future installments.

The possibility of those future installments rests largely on how much rest Odenkirk gets between film shoots. Odenkirk shows a remarkable physicality, and a continued ability to take a fake punch, that give the fight sequences an authenticity that make the ridiculousness seem just plausible enough to make an audience worry about the guy’s health.

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‘Nobody 2’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, and language throughout. Running time: 89 minutes.

Review: 'East of Wall' is an authentic modern West story of a mother and daughter in crisis, played beautifully by the people who inspired the characters

Writer-director Kate Beecroft’s beautifully shot and tenderly realized drama “East of Wall” is a great example of “high risk, high reward” filmmaking, where a real-life person — someone who’s fascinating in and of themselves — is cast as a lightly fictionalized version of themselves.

The people Beecroft gives that spotlight to are Tabatha Zimiga and her teen daughter, Porshia. Tabatha is a hard-bitten South Dakota rancher, training horses and giving homes to teens who have nowhere else to go. Porshia is friends with many of these teens, and she’s the best rider in the bunch.

In Beecroft’s light polish on reality, Tabatha has been widowed for about a year. The death of her husband, John, is a taboo topic of conversation, though it’s clear that Porshia, who idolizes John, blames Tabatha for his death. Porshia barely talks to Tabatha, who’s trying to pay the bills by selling horses at local livestock auctions — where Porshia can demonstrate her horse-handling skills to make the sale.

That opportunity seems to come in the person of Roy Waters (played by the actor Scoot McNairy), a Texas rancher who makes an offer to buy Tabatha’s ranch and keep her and all of her hands on as employees. To sweeten the deal, Roy takes Porshia on the road to sell horses at livestock barns further away than where Tabatha usually goes.

As the relationship between Tabatha and Porshia grows more tense, Tabatha seeks advice from her own mom, Tracey, who’s a piece of work in herself. Tracey is a moonshine-making hard-ass who readily admits she did a terrible job raising Tabatha, who wound up pretty good in spite of it all. Tracey is played by Jennifer Ehle — a long way removed from playing Elizabeth Bennet in the 1995 miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice” — who gives a quietly intense portrayal of a mom staring her regrets down and coming to terms with them.

Beecroft and cinematographer Austin Shelton, both making their feature debuts, beautifully capture the rough beauty of the South Dakota plains and badlands. They also find similar beauty in the people like Tabatha and Porshia who make their homes there, embodying the land’s uncompromising spirit.

That spirit shines through every moment Tabatha and Porshia are on the screen. Some may dismiss their casting, saying they’re playing themselves — but we all play ourselves every day, for audiences as small as our immediate family. They’re doing it on the screen, for who knows how many viewers, and they triumph in those impressive roles.

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‘East of Wall’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language throughout. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Weapons' is a horror thriller that confounds, surprises and keeps the audience off guard as the shocks and drama build

My hope is to live long enough for medical science to understand fully how Zach Cregger’s brain works — because the mind that can devise such head-tripping horror movies as “Barbarian” and his loopy follow-up, “Weapons,” is capable of anything.

“Weapons” begins with an audacious horror premise: At 2:17 a.m. one night, 17 second-graders in a small town got up out of bed, went outside and ran off into the dark. A month later, they were still missing, and the town turns dark from the unexplainable tragedy.

Cregger’s script unfolds the story in chapters, each one focusing on someone affected by this awful disappearance. First up is Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher whose class all ran into the night. Actually, not all, because one boy, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), came to school the next day like normal. Both Justine and Alex endure grilling from the local police, while Justine also hears the taunts of the angry townspeople — one of whom paints “witch” on her car.

After we follow Justine through her unraveling, the next chapter centers on Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a homebuilder whose son was one of the 17 kids who disappeared. Archer spends his time chewing over the case, rewatching the Ring camera video of his son running away from the house, and occasionally stalking Justine.

Later chapters focus on Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a cop who used to date Justine; Marcus (Benedict Wong), the principal at the elementary school; James (Austin Abrams), a crack addict Paul arrested at one point; and finally Alex, through which we learn the twists in this mystery.

There’s one more person in this narrative: A figure in a red fright wig who appears in Justine and Archer’s nightmares. She’s played by Amy Madigan, who shows up in the flesh eventually — and leaves a mark as one of the most insidiously terrifying roles the movies have delivered since Freddie Krueger.

Cregger’s script doles out information in measured doses, never giving away too much too soon. And that’s not just with the scares and shocks. Cregger’s handling of character detail is also judicious — a prime example being Justine, who is introduced as a shell-shocked survivor but emerges as a complicated and not entirely likable person, for reasons completely apart from whatever happened to her students.

Cregger takes some big swings, particularly in the depiction of what happened that night at 2:17 a.m. — aided by the perfect disturbing use of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness.” But Cregger also finds room for sadness and some disquieting snippets of humor — which make the gory moments pop out even more effectively.

On paper, it sounds like it shouldn’t work — and there are times where Cregger’s ambition almost feels like it’s going to sink the movie. But those moments, a viewer realizes by the end, are designed to knock the viewer off-kilter while Craggier lays the groundwork for the audacious finale that makes “Weapons” one of the most surprising and emotionally devastating movies this year. 

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‘Weapons’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and grisly images, language throughout, some sexual content and drug use. Running time: 128 minutes.

Review: 'It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley' presents the late singer-songwriter in all his contradictions and talent

Documentarian Amy Berg sets a tough assignment for herself in “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley”: Getting to know, and allowing us to know, the mind and heart of an essentially unknowable person — a singer and songwriter who, had he lived past 30, been a generational voice on par with Dylan or Springsteen.

Jeff Buckley was born in 1966 in Anaheim, California, to a 17-year-old single mom, Mary Guibert. His father, Mary explains in one of the movie’s many illuminating and heartbreaking interviews, left before Jeff was born. His father was Tim Buckley, an acclaimed folk-rock singer and songwriter who was also considered a “once in a generation” talent.

Mary describes the one time Jeff spent time with his father, in 1975, when Jeff was 8 years old. Mary took Jeff to one of his concerts in Los Angeles, and in the dressing room backstage after the show, Tim invited Jeff to stay with him and his second wife for a week. Shortly after that visit, Tim Buckley died of a drug overdose at age 28. Notably, Jeff was not mentioned in Tim’s obituary.

As Mary tells the story, Jeff was always interested in music, and shared some of his father’s gifts — including a five-octave vocal range and a voracious appetite for every kind of music. He also held a measured antipathy for his father’s legacy. Once Jeff became famous, a journalist asked him what he had inherited from his father; Jeff’s acerbic answer was “People who remember my father — next question.”

After several years trying to break into the music industry, in Los Angeles and New York, Jeff’s “big break” came in an unlikely venue: A 1991 tribute concert for his father. He performed one of Tim’s songs, “I Never Asked to Be Your Mountain,” one written for Jeff and Mary — while wearing one of his father’s jackets. Jeff wasn’t striving to make a career-launching moment, but it sort of happened.

The bulk of Jeff’s story is told by three women: Mary; Jeff’s first New York girlfriend, experimental artist and actor Rebecca Moore, who was the inspiration for most of the songs on Buckley’s only album, “Grace”; and his later girlfriend, musician Joan Wasser, whose band The Dambuilders often opened for Buckley on tour. (Wasser now performs under the name Joan as Police Woman.) Each of these women capture a side of Buckley’s personality, and Berg leaves it to the viewers to figure out where the pieces of the jigsaw fit. 

The movie also reflects on the strange nature of stardom, such as the irony of Buckley’s most famous song not being one he wrote, but his cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (The 2022 documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” commented that after Buckley’s death in 1997, more than a few musicians played “Hallelujah” as a tribute to Buckley — and some might have thought he wrote it.) 

“It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” lays out the contradictions of Buckley’s life — such as the fact that he labored to escape his father’s shadow only to end up with a similar career path and early death — without trying to resolve them or pass judgment on them. Berg presents Jeff Buckley’s brief life and extraordinary music as best as anyone can, and all we can do is watch and appreciate the talent that blazed so briefly and brightly.

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‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for strong language, drug references and thematic elements. Running time: 106 minutes.

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.