Review: 'Slanted' is a body-horror thriller with some shocks and a painfully obvious message about race and assimilation

First-time writer-director Amy Wang has some good ideas floating around “Slanted,” a body-horror drama about race and assimilation taken to the extreme. One wishes Wang had gotten a couple movies under her belt before biting off so much here.

Joan Huang is a first-generation Chinese-American girl, having arrived in the States with her parents, Roger (Fang Du) and Sofia (Vivian Wu), when she was 7. Now 17 (and played as a teen by Shirley Chen), Joan is obsessed with being the all-American girl — personified in the pursuit of becoming her school’s prom queen.

When the odds-on favorite for prom queen, Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber), drops out because she’s landed a role in a TV show, Joan sees her opportunity — and even bleaches her black hair blonde to try to impress Olivia’s circle of friends. Olivia, who’s not above using Joan to get discounts at a Chinese-run nail salon, isn’t buying it. “I can see your black roots. Ew,” Olivia tells her dismissively.

That’s when Joan walks into Ethnos Inc., a storefront that offers a unique medical service: Making anyone of color look and sound white. “If you can’t beat ‘em, be them,” intones Dr. Willie Singer (R. Keith Harris), who tells Joan that he used to be Black before inventing the process. (The premise sounds like a variation on a “Saturday Night Live” sketch from the ‘80s, when Eddie Murphy put on makeup to appear white, and learned that without Black people around, white folks give each other stuff for free.)

Without getting into too many spoilers, Joan takes the Ethnos treatment — and soon everyone at school see a new student, Jo Hunt (played by McKenna Grace). 

Wang’s story plays like an old “Twilight Zone” morality tale, or a grotesque mash-up of “Mean Girls” and “The Substance.” The pacing is slack, however, and the dialogue — like when Joan’s parents see what she’s done to herself — is trite and obvious. And the third-act reveal, when Joan/Jo realizes something’s gone wrong with the treatment, doesn’t hit as hard as it could. 

Watching “Slanted,” I wondered what a director like Jordan Peele might have done with it — applying some subtlety and sly wit to Joan’s rejection of her Chinese identity in order to fit in with white America, and discovering how shallow that pursuit is. But one sees in Wang’s flawed film the potential for something more biting on her next film.

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‘Slanted’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, some sexual material, teen drug use and brief violent content/bloody images. Running time: 104 minutes; in English and in Mandarin with subtitles.

Review: 'Hoppers' is Pixar's delightful return to form, a glorious mix of strong animation and lots of humor in the animal kingdom

Whew. Pixar, you had us worried there for a little while, with a string of not-so-amazing movies — “Elio,” “Inside Out 2,” “Elemental” and “Lightyear” — and some great movies, like “Turning Red,” “Luca” and “Soul,” relegated to streaming during the pandemic. But “Hoppers,” the first great Pixar theatrical movie since “Toy Story 4” in 2019, is worth the wait.

The central figure in “Hoppers” is Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a lifelong animal lover who at 19 spends more time crusading against Mayor Jerry (voiced by Jon Hamm) and his habitat-destroying freeway project than actually attending her college classes. Then she learns that her professor, Dr. Sam (voiced by Kathy Najimy), is running a secret project where she’s built robot versions of animals into which she can insert human consciousness.

Or, as Mabel says when she sees it, “It’s just like ‘Avatar,’” to which Dr. Sam insists, “It’s nothing like ‘Avatar.’” It took a multi-billion-dollar merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox to make that joke happen, and I’m here for it.

Of course, Mabel sneaks in and uses the technology, in an effort to communicate with the mammals in the habitat Mayor Jerry’s plans could destroy. Mabel learns some hard lessons at first — namely, that the animals are accepting of their fate in life, particularly as prey to other predators. Mabel befriends George (voiced by Bobby Moynihan), the beaver king of the mammals, and discovers there’s a whole council of kings representing birds, insects and other categories of animals, and they don’t always get along.

Director Daniel Chong and screenwriter Jesse Andrews (who wrote “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) create an elaborate world of creatures with fur, fins and feathers, and their complicated interactions with each other and those naked apes known as humans. They also mine those interactions for a great deal of humor, to create a more gut-busting movie than Pixar usually makes — while still packing an emotional punch and one of the wildest finishes an animated movie has delivered in a long time.

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‘Hoppers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril, some scary images and mild language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'The Bride!' nearly falls to pieces, but Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley create monsters with beating hearts

After proving her directing skills with the tricky material of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal takes on one of the classics of literature and film — the bride of Frankenstein — in “The Bride!”, and the results are never boring.

They are a lot of things — brash, striking, perplexing, emotionally intense, often ill-conceived and narratively all over the damn place — but “boring” is not one of Gyllenhaal’s attributes.

Gyllenhaal reimagines the classic monster story as part tragic romance, part gangster drama and part, I don’t know, “Moulin Rouge” spectacle. Set in the 1930s, the story starts in Chicago with Ida (Jessie Buckley), a bar-hopping party animal who mouths off about a local gangster’s dirty dealings. So it’s no surprise that two of the gangster’s underlings (John Magaro and Matthew Maher) rough Ida up, and end up sending her tumbling to her death down some stairs.

Meanwhile, the creature sometimes called Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has also arrived in Chicago, seeking help from Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), an acolyte of the monster’s deceased creator. Frank wants Doc to help him achieve a dream: Building a female counterpart of himself, to be his mate. Doc takes some convincing, but soon Doc and Frank are digging up a potters’ field for a corpse to reanimate — and they find what’s left of Ida.

Here, Buckley — who’s just over a week from getting an Oscar for “Hamnet” (I don’t think this movie will cause Academy voters to have a “Norbit”-style reconsideration) — plays both the bride but also Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.” That’s meant as a cheeky nod to director James Whale’s 1935 “The Bride of Frankenstein,” where Elsa Lanchester was credited for playing Mary Shelley in the prologue, and was uncredited as the bride in her Hostess cupcake hairdo. Alas, it’s more obvious and less thought-provoking than Gyllenhaal likely intended.

The movie is littered with similar references, and you’re invited either to groove with or groan at the attempts — which include, and I kid you not, Bale and Buckley leading a musical number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” evoking the holy memory of Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein.”

Gyllenhaal also calls in some favors. She casts her brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, as a ‘30s Hollywood movie idol who’s Frank’s idol. And she casts her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, alongside Penelope Cruz as a pair of detectives following Frank and his amnesiac Bride on a cross-country killing spree that Bonnie & Clyde would have envied.

So “The Bride!”, with its porto-feminist narrative and gimmicky pacing, throws a lot of spaghetti at the screen, and only some of it comes together as anything coherent or compelling. Thankfully, two of the most arresting parts are Bale and Buckley, who put a lot of conviction in their renditions of screendom’s most enduring monsters. For all the mismatched parts of Gyllenhaal’s fever dream, the leads are the beating heart that keep the movie alive.

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‘The Bride’

★★1/2

Opens Friday. March 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and language. Running time: 126 minutes.

Review: Oscar-nominated documentary shorts deliver half-hour looks at big issues — and one beautifully strange walk around an observatory

Four of the five nominees for the 98th Academy Awards in the documentary short categories are more than 30 minutes long and take oblique looks at some of the thorniest issues of our time — school shootings, abortion rights, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza — that engage brains and hearts to devastating effect.

The program, curated by filmmaker Taika Waititi, starts with the oddball in the group, director Alison McAlpine’s “Perfectly a Strangeness.” On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a lot here, just three donkeys walking around an astronomical observatory in a desert in Chile. But McAlpine’s stirring cinematography and observant eye make us stop to really consider the intersection between stubborn nature and cosmic technology.

The other four I’ll list from simply good to really great:

• “Armed With Only a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” is a labor of love by two of Brent’s filmmaking collaborators — his brother Craig and their producer friend Juan Arredondo — to capture the work of the first American journalist killed in the war in Ukraine. The movie captures Brent Renaud’s determination to dive into conflict zones, from Iraq to Somalia to Afghanistan, and tell the stories of the people on the ground who were affected by decisions made elsewhere. If there’s a weakness here, it’s that Brent seldom pointed the camera at himself, so we only get by inference what he was feeling and thinking when he courted danger. The bond between brothers is evident, including in the credits, where Craig shares directing credit with his late brother.

• “Children No More: ‘Were and Are Gone’” follows a silent protest movement in Israel, where volunteers line up holding posters depicting children who have been killed by Israeli military operations in Gaza. Director Hilla Medalia interviews some organizers, who insist their efforts are nonviolent and anti-violence, not anti-Israel — then shows the vitriolic responses the events get from other Israelis. Like so many aspects of the divide between Israelis and Palestinians, the emotions the movie evokes are, well, complicated. 

• “The Devil Is Busy” goes inside a different battle zone: A women’s health clinic in Atlanta, where women who need reproductive care must deal with Bible-quoting protesters outside and the possibility inside that they’ve gone past Georgia’s restrictive ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Directors Geeta Gandbhir (who’s nominated in the documentary feature category for “The Perfect Neighbor”) and Christalyn Hampton focus on the clinic’s weary but determined staff members, notably the chief of security, who’s the first one in and last one out every day. It’s a concise and heart-breaking chronicle of women facing hard choices because of someone else’s holy war.

• “All the Empty Rooms” is the toughest watch of the bunch, and ultimately the most rewarding. Director Joshua Seftel profiles Steve Hartman, a CBS News correspondent, and photographer Lou Bopp, who have taken on a challenging personal project: They meet families who have lost children in school shootings, and create profiles of those children by taking exhaustive photos of those children’s preserved bedrooms. The project, and Seftel’s chronicling of it, are reminders of the real young people and the lives they lived — and the lives they might have lived if they had the chance to become grown-ups.

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Oscar-nominated documentary short films

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). “All the Empty Rooms” is rated PG-13 for brief strong language and thematic material; “Armed With Only a Camera” is rated TV-MA; “The Devil Is Busy” is rated TV-14; “Children No More” is unrated, but probably PG-13 for language; “Perfectly a Strangeness” is not rated, but probably G. Running time: 157 minutes in total; one film is in Hebrew, the other partly in Ukrainian and other languages, both with subtitles.

Review: 'Scream 7' brings back Neve Campbell to the 'final girl' role that made her a star, but this time nostalgia's the real killer

Thirty years after Wes Craven’s thriller “Scream” launched a meta-slasher series, the new installment “Scream 7” is what the franchise always despised — a by-the-numbers bloodbath.

The one upside to this installment is that Neve Campbell is back as the franchise’s original “final girl,” Sidney Prescott, after the star sat out the last movie when Paramount Pictures didn’t want to pay her what she’s worth. In a sequel that constantly references back on its past chapters, Sidney’s absence from “Scream VI’s” New York misadventures gets referenced the most.

This movie’s attempt at emulating the original’s trademark opening kill gives away what director Kevin Williamson — who wrote the original, and co-wrote this one with Guy Busick — is going for here. The opener shows a dudebro (Jimmy Tatro) with a true-crime obsession dragging his girlfriend (Michelle Randolph) to stay at the Macher house, the site of the murders in the first “Scream” movie. Now a tourist trap with Ghostface Killer animatronics and posters from the franchise-within-a-franchise “Stab” films, the house, like this movie, is a nostalgia-heavy cash grab.

Sidney has holed up in a small town, where her husband Mark (Joel McHale) is the police chief. They have a daughter, Tatum (Isabel Ray), who’s 17 — the age Sidney was when the first murders happened — and resentful that Mom doesn’t talk about those horrific experiences. (Fans will note that Tatum is named for Sidney’s best friend in high school, played then by Rose McGowan, who didn’t survive the original movie.)

Tatum has friends, Hannah and Chloe, played by McKenna Grace and Celeste O’Connor, who are both familiar with the legacy-sequel money play, since they both co-starred in the recent “Ghostbusters” movies. Tatum also has a boyfriend, Ben (Sam Rechner), and there’s a boy next door, Lucas (Asa Germann), who’s a bit obsessed with Sidney’s previous exploits. Being teens in a teen-slasher movie, the audience is fairly sure these characters are suspects or targets. 

Other characters who might be carrying the knife or getting one between the ribs are: Jessica (Anna Camp), Sidney’s neighbor and friend; Tatum’s drama teacher (Timothy Simons); an orderly (Ethan Embry) at a nearby psychiatric hospital; and an ambitious local TV reporter (Mark Consuelos). Three more familiar faces — who we’re quite sure aren’t suspects — are TV reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), the only person who’s been in all seven of these movies, and her interns, twins Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding), who have survived the fifth and sixth chapters. 

There are some other familiar faces — I won’t say who, but their appearances require more fancy writing than the script can deliver. Their presence, particularly in the grand finale, point out how desperately Williamson and company want to play the greatest hits.

Williamson does manage to stage one clever sequence — the one in the trailer, where Sidney and Tatum are in a tight crawlspace trying to elude ol’ Ghostface. But that doesn’t make up for the movie’s many killings, which range from ho-hum to tasteless. If there’s an eighth movie in the series, they should change the name to “Yawn.”

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‘Scream 7’

★★

Opens Friday, February 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, and language. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: This year's Oscar-nominated animated and live-action shorts are 10 solid stories, with a couple of standouts

This year’s Academy Award nominees in the animated short and live-action short categories are uniformly good, and in some cases great. It’s a relief to say there’s not a clunker in the bunch.

The distributor of this year’s program, Roadside Attractions, solicited director Taika Waititi (whose “Two Cars, One Night” was nominated in the live-action short category back in 2005) to curate the programs. Waititi’s contribution seems to be in choosing the best order for each group of five — making sure audiences leave smiling by seeing something funny at the end.’

The animated program starts with “The Three Sisters,” by Russian-born director Konstantin Bronzit, a humorous and wordless tale of three lonely sisters who rent a room to a crusty sea captain. That’s followed by the more whimsical “Forevergreen,” in which directors Nathaniel Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears depict the loving relationship between a pine tree and an orphaned bear cub. Then comes the Canadian stop-motion entry “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, a beautifully rendered fable of love and greed set in Montreal of about a century ago.

Then comes the best of the animated crop, French director Florence Miailhe’s “Papillon (Butterfly).” It’s based on the real life of Alfred Nakache, an Algerian-born swimmer who competed for France in the 1930s, including at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin — where, as a Jew, he helped the French swimming team beat out the Germans. In a swirl of images resembling oil paintings, Miailhe shows Nakache swimming through memories of marriage, antisemitism and Auschwitz. 

The fifth nominee, director John Kelly’s “Retirement Plan,” is a sweet discourse on the dreams of a man (voiced by Domhnall Gleeson) making plans for his years after retiring. (Since the five nominees add up to about 65 minutes of screen time, the distributors add a sixth short, “Eiru,” a bit of Irish folklore by director Giovanna Ferrari and the folks at Cartoon Saloon, the production company behind “Wolfwalkers” and “Song of the Sea.”)

The live-action slate begins with director Sam A. Davis’ “The Singers,” a melancholy short that depicts a group of barflies trying to win a bet by displaying the best singing voice. That’s followed by a sweet British story, Lee Knight’s “A Friend of Dorothy,” where a teen (Alistair Nwachukwu) befriends an elderly woman (the great Miriam Margolyes) with a love of theater. 

Then come the two shorts that, if I had to guess, will duke it out for the Oscar. The first, writer-director Meyer Levinson-Blount’s “Butcher’s Stain,” is a chilling study of intolerance, where a Palestinian butcher working in a Tel Aviv market tries to fight an accusation of tearing down hostage posters in the break room. The second, “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” written and directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, is a formally composed story of a forbidden love between a rich woman (Zar Amir, from “Holy Spider”) and a shop clerk (Luàna Bajrami), set in a metaphor-rich world where kissing is outlawed and slaps across the face are currency.

The last of the five is the funniest and wittiest. “Jane Austen’s Period Drama” is a satire that imagines an Austen-esque woman (Julia Aks, who co-wrote and co-directed with Steve Pinder) explaining her menstrual cycle to a clueless suitor (Ta’imua). Even the characters’ names induce some solid laughs.

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Oscar-nominated animated short films 2026 

★★★1/2

Oscar-nominated live-action short films 2026

★★★1/2

Both programs open Friday, February 27, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). The compilations are unrated, but probably PG-13 for references to violence, sexual material and language. The animated program is 83 minutes, and includes a short in French with subtitles; the live-action program is 115 minutes, and features one short in Hebrew and Arabic, and one in French, both with subtitles.

Review: 'Pillion' presents the sexual dynamics between a studly biker and his young submissive with an unflinching eye, and finds tender romance beneath the leather surface.

If you’ve heard anything about writer-director Harry Lighton’s bondage-themed drama “Pillion,” you may already know that it’s unflinching in its portrayal of a young man’s sexual exploits as a submissive partner to a dominating motorcycle rider. What you might not latch onto, through the “don’t try this at home” exploration of the BDSM subculture, it’s oddly sweet and romantic.

The young man at the center of Lighton’s adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’ book “Box Hill,” is Colin (played by Henry Melling), a young man seeking his first gay sexual encounter. He does this with the blessing of his parents, Pete (Douglas Hodge) and Peggy (Lesley Sharp), who even drive him to the bar for his first blind date. 

That date doesn’t go anywhere, but at the pub, Colin first encounters Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), an impossibly handsome man in motorcycle leathers. Colin later meets Ray on the street, and Ray guides him through a sexual experience in an alley. 

“What am I going to do with you?” Ray asks. “Whatever you want, really,” Colin replies.

Colin finds out how far that answer goes. Ray takes his measurements, and orders Colin is own set of leather ware — and puts a chain with a padlock around his neck, an outer symbol that Colin is Ray’s “property” within this biker group. Colin revels in this role, happily sleeping on the floor while Ray sleeps on the bed. He doesn’t share the details of his relationship with his parents or coworkers, except to say that he has “an aptitude for devotion.”

Lighton is forthright in his depiction of the strong sexual component to this culture — one doesn’t usually see this much butt-baring clothing outside a fetish supply store — but he also leans into the commitment and cooperation inherent in such a dominant/submissive relationship. The movie also digs into the camaraderie of the other submissive’s in Ray’s motorcycle group, and how Colin finds in it a place he can belong.

As magnetic as Skarsgård is as the hunky Ray, it’s Melling as the vulnerable Colin who really shines here. A quarter century from being introduced as Harry Potter’s bullying cousin, Dudley Dursley, Melling has grown into a mature actor, and watching how his Colin presses his leverage within the relationship is downright heart-warming.

“Pillion” isn’t for everyone — the sexual content is too in-your-face for many moviegoers, and makes “Midnight Cowboy” look tame. But it’s a movie that, for an audience who can meet it halfway, delivers a poignant romance under that rough exterior.

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‘Pillion’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but likely on the border between R and NC-17 for strong sexuality and suggestions of extreme nudity. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: "Wuthering Heights" is a delirious, delicious mess of a romance, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi steaming up Emily Brontë's classic

Some people consider Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” not just a great romance novel but THE great romance novel, against which every love story is measured. So director-writer Emerald Fennell has her work cut out for her as she attempts to fashion a steamy, sensual movie out of it.

Fennell, who gave us plenty to chew on in “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn,” has the building blocks to adapt a cracking version of “Wuthering Heights.” Those include windswept moors for locations, a sumptuous visual palette, gorgeous costumes and two leads — Margot Robbie as the flighty Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as the darkly brooding Heathcliff — who don’t just fill out those costumes but inhabit their legendary characters.

It’s not always smooth sailing for Robbie and Elordi, because the characters’ moods and motivations flit from one extreme to the other over the course of more than two hours. Both Cathy and Heathcliff swear their love to each other, but they also behave in the most beastly ways to each other and to anyone who comes into their orbit. They are, by turn, both the moth and the flame for each other, and they and others get burned.

Heathcliff starts out as an orphan, taken in by Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), who has squandered his fortune on gambling and strong drink. Cathy gives Heathcliff his name and, at first, treats him as a pet — but over time they grow into friendship. This stirs jealousy in Nellie, who lives in the Earnshaw’s home, called Wuthering Heights, and as an adult (played by Hong Chau) becomes Cathy’s paid companion.

Cathy and Heathcliff always seem on the verge of expressing their love for each other, but society pressures and occasional external events get in the way. One such event is the arrival of new neighbors, wealthy Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his barely-adult ward, Isabella (Alison Oliver). Cathy is cajoled to think about marrying Edgar, because of his wealth, and abandon the idea of marrying Heathcliff. When Heathcliff overhears Cathy talking about Edgar, it drives him to a desperate decision.

Fennell’s script leans heavily into Brontë’s creaky plot mechanics — there’s a lot of things overheard, or attempts at communication thwarted by third parties — that border on silliness. Where the movie is more sure of itself is when Robbie’s Cathy and Elordi’s Heathcliff are together, getting soaked in the English rain or making out in various settings. 

People who watch this “Wuthering Heights” may argue online from here to doomsday about whether Robbie and Elordi have any romantic chemistry here. That’s in the eye of the beholder, really — but it’s clear they are hungry to fulfill Fennell’s sometimes contradictory impulses to capture Brontë’s 19th century moodiness while also working over the classic story into something more current and alive. 

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‘Wuthering Heights’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual content, some violent content and langauge. Running time: 136 minutes.