Review: 'The Roses' pits Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as a married couple fighting each other and an overly cluttered script

If “The Roses” was just about the dark heart of a couple’s divorce at its center, it could have been one of the great spite-driven comedies of the modern era — if only director Jay Roach and screenwriter Tony McNamara hadn’t gone soft.

This is a revision, of sorts, of the 1989 comedy “The War of the Roses,” in which director Danny DeVito piloted the story of a lawyer (Michael Douglas) and a homemaker-turned-caterer (Kathleen Turner) through a loving marriage that curdles into loathing and attempted murder. The new movie doesn’t credit DeVito’s screenwriter, Michael J. Leeson, but does note Warren Adler, whose novel spurred both films.

Here, Theo Rose (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a London architect who despises the soulless boxy apartment buildings his firm forces him to design. One night, he escapes his colleagues at a dinner, and finds in the restaurant’s kitchen Ivy (Olivia Colman), a chef who’s more talented than her bosses will let her be. They fall for each other instantly, and Theo follows Ivy to America soon after.

The movie jumps ahead 10 years, and the Roses are still giddily in love with each other and with their two children (played by Delaney Quinn and Ollie Robinson in the movie’s first half, and Hala Finley and Wells Rappaport in the second half). Theo has built his dream project, a maritime museum designed to resemble a sailing ship, and celebrates by buying Ivy what she’s always dreamed of: A seaside restaurant where she can make her amazing food.

Then the Roses’ fortunes change drastically. Theo’s museum is a disaster, collapsing in a heavy storm. That same storm forces California travelers to stop at Ivy’s restaurant — and one of them is a food critic, whose rave review sets Ivy on a stratospheric career path. Theo, blackballed by every architectural firm, channels his time and disappointment into raising the kids into athletes, while Ivy builds her food empire. And the resentment builds, from both of them.

McNamara, who wrote “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” for Yorgos Lanthimos, can’t seem to settle on Theo and Ivy’s emotional state from scene to scene. He and Roach are overly occupied with the side players that clutter up the field: The seemingly dying marriage of Amy (Kate McKinnon) and Barry (Andy Samberg), Theo’s architecture friends (Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou) and Ivy’s loyal restaurant employees (Sunita Mati and Ncuti Gatwa). 

These talented performers — I’d watch Kate McKinnon file her taxes — aren’t given enough to work with, and we cling onto every moment hoping they’ll do something truly funny. This is a particular shame for Gatwa, recently departed from “Doctor Who,” whose abundant charisma gets wasted here.

Roach hasn’t done a broad comedy since “Dinner for Schmucks” in 2010, and has devoted his recent efforts to biopics, like “Trumbo” and “Bombshell.” He seems to have trouble finding the right tone for Colman and Cumberbatch, or anyone else, to navigate consistently. 

One scene particularly smacks of desperation. It’s late in the movie, when the Rose are negotiating divorce terms — and Ivy’s hard-nosed lawyer (Allison Janney, in her only scene) comes in with a pet Rottweiler. The obvious joke is that the dog is meant to intimidate Theo — but when Janney is already doing that quite well, thank you, what’s the point of adding the Rottweiler?

Even when stranded by McNamara’s overly busy script and Roach’s idiotic direction, Colman and Cumberbatch come close sometimes to displaying the acid wit and mendacity this movie requires. These actors make a great match, especially when showing us why Theo and Ivy don’t.

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‘The Roses’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, sexual content, and drug content. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Honey Don't' is comedy noir that director Ethan Coen doesn't handle as gracefully as he used to with his brother

The detective comedy “Honey Don’t!” stuffs too many half-baked ideas into a truncated narrative — one that strenuously tests Roger Ebert’s rule that “a bad movie is never too short,” because I wonder if director Ethan Coen would have had something here if he allowed his movie a few minutes to let its characters and plot threads breathe. 

What Coen does have is Margaret Qualley, who makes the best out of this bad situation.

Qualley — who starred with Geraldine Viswanathan in Coen’s previous lesbian-centered noir comedy, “Drive-Away Dolls” — plays Honey O’Donahue, a small-time private detective in Bakersfield, Calif. She’s at loose ends because the client who just hired her has inconveniently turned up dead. The cops, embodied by the clueless Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), decide the woman, Mia Novotny, died in a simple car crash.

Honey’s not sure about that, so she snoops around, trying to figure out why Mia wanted to hire her to begin with. The top of Honey’s suspect list is Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), a charismatic evangelist who appears in ads for his church all over town. 

Honey senses Rev. Drew is a creep, and that’s without seeing everything we’re seeing — including his bondage-heavy sexual adventures with his parishioners, a murderous flunky (Josh Pafchek) and what appears to be a side hustle in drug trafficking. Rev. Drew is beholden to a mysterious group referred to only as The French., represented by the alluring Cher (played by model-actress Lera Abova), who rides around town on her Vespa.

Honey also is contending with her sister, Heidi (Kristen Connolly), and her many children — most notably Heidi’s rebel teen daughter, Corinne (Talia Ryder). And there’s a flowering romance with MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who works in the basement of the police station.

Qualley is charming, and impossibly sexy, bantering her way through Bakersfield trying to unravel the mystery — and makes the most out of her underwritten character. (The script is by Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke; they also wrote “Drive-Away Dolls.”) Qualley’s scenes with Plaza, clothed and naked, are hot enough to pop whatever kernels of popcorn are left unpopped in the bottom of your bucket. 

“Honey Don’t!” often feels like Coen is attempting to rekindle the magical comic noir he and his brother, Joel, created in “The Big Lebowski.” But this movie lacks the control of the narrative Coen had when working with his brother, or even what he displayed working solo on “Drive-Away Dolls.” If we can’t get the Coen brothers back together, can we at least give Joel temporary custody of Qualley?

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‘Honey Don’t!’

★★

Opens Friday, August 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, some strong violence, and language. Running time: 88 minutes.

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.