Review: 'Heart of the Beast' is sturdy wilderness survival drama that gives Brad Pitt a gorgeous scene partner - a good dog named Odin

Director David Ayer’s “Heart of the Beast” is a wilderness survival drama where the journey matters far more than the destination — because through it we see the enduring friendship between a man and his canine companion.

It takes time for us to learn about James Belmont (played by Brad Pitt) and his dog, Odin (played by four dogs, mostly one named Uber) — we don’t even learn his last name until the final scene, but that doesn’t matter a lot. In the spare, tough script by music-video director Cameron Alexander, James and Odin have flown James’ seaplane to a remote spot in Alaska to do some hunting and fishing. The only conversation comes when an aged kayaker (J.K. Simmons) comes along and shares James’ and Odin’s camp, and a couple of Belgian brown ales from James’ cooler, for a night.

Through that conversation, Alexander and Ayer give us just enough exposition to deliver the basics. James is a former Green Beret, an Army Special Forces sergeant major, who went through some hellacious combat with Odin, a combat dog who now has a prosthetic front limb and titanium teeth as a result of his war injuries. Odin and James also both have bouts of PTSD at night, but they get through them together.

Flying back from their adventure, James suffers a heart attack and the small Cessna crashes through trees and into a lake. James manages to swim to safety and find Odin, who was thrown from the plane before it hit water. James battles through his cardiac issues, thanks to a bottle of aspirin he recovered from the sunken plane, and eventually he and Odin start hiking the approximately 60 miles through some beautiful Alaskan wilderness (filmed in New Zealand) to get to the nearest road.

Ayer, who directed Pitt in the 2014 World War II tank drama “Fury,” stages some tough, muscular scenes of James and Odin crossing raging rivers, skidding down mossy hillsides and enduring more hardships than a healthy body probably could outside of a movie. The plausibility of Alexander’s script isn’t the highest, but the cinematic vision of the journey certainly is. 

Ayer’s main mission in “Heart of the Beast” is to celebrate the bond between Pitt’s wounded ex-warfighter and his hard-nosed, traumatized dog. Pitt holds up his end with a gritty performance that prizes action and gesture above words. Pitt’s best acting choice is to let the dogs playing Odin take the attention, which they do beautifully. Whatever the movie’s faults, there’s no argument that Odin is a good dog.

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‘Heart of the Beast’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, peril, bloody/injury images and some language. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!' is a refreshingly alive tale of grief and recovery, sent soaring by Rinko Kikuchi's heartbreaking performance

For a story about grief and loss, director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” Is remarkably exuberant and, literally, light on its feet as it follows a woman’s dance-filled journey through widowhood.

The great Japanese actor Rinko Kikuchi (“Babel,” “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter”) stars as Haru, who lives in Tokyo with her Mexican-born husband, Luis (Alejandro Edda), where they live a blissful life of cooking meals for each other and sharing an impressive collection of vintage vinyl. Their shared passion, besides each other, is ballroom dancing, and they’re in the midst of a competition when Luis suffers a fatal heart attack.

After dealing with the funeral arrangements, and disagreeing with Luis’s father (Damián Alcázar) about how to tend to Luis’ remains, Haru is at a loss for how to carry on. Her sisters, Yuki (You Yoshida) and Hiromi (played by the Japanese presenter/actor YOU), suggest she go back to the dance studio where she and Luis used to practice, so they do.

At the studio, Haru becomes quite smitten with the new instructor, Fedir (Alberto Guerra), a Cuban dancer who was a pro on Japan’s version of “Dancing With the Stars.” Hiromi reads a rumor online that Fedir and his dancer wife, Mila (Keren Louis), have an “open” marriage, and that he got caught in bed with a gymnast from “Dancing With the Stars.” Would this be an opening for Haru, aka Ha-Chan, to see how far flirting with the new dance instructor will go? Yes, yes it would.

The other complication to Haru’s small obsession with Fedir is that she keeps seeing Luis in their house. Sometimes he appears in a giant black bird costume, like a mascot for a very depressed football team. 

Wladyka, co-writing with Nicholas Huynh, neatly maneuvers from Haru’s daily life to her waking dream state, which sometimes manifests in musical numbers — including an extended riff on “Dirty Dancing” that’s a delight to watch unfold. The lightness is deceptive, though, as the film looks through it to find Haru’s deep grieving for Luis.

Kikuchi’s performance is enchanting, which should not be a surprise to anyone who saw “Kumiko” at Sundance a dozen years earlier. Often, she deploys a deadpan that makes Buster Keaton look expressive — but when she smiles, which she does often with Eddo’s Luis, it melts your heart.

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‘Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 25, at area theaters. Rated R for sexual content and language. Running time: 122 minutes; in English and in Japanese and Spanish, with subtitles.

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This review ran previously on this site on January 29, 2026, after it premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom' delivers Aardman's clay-animated wackiness in an efficiently hilarious package

If you’re familiar with the clay-animated works of Aardman Animation — the folks behind Wallace & Gromit — you know that the studio’s latest, “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” is going to pack more laughs in 80 dialogue-free minutes than you otherwise might have thought possible.

Shaun, you may recall, was introduced in 1995, in the Wallace & Gromit short “A Close Shave,” the most rambunctious of the sheep that W&G had to free from rustlers. Shaun has gone on to a popular TV series and now three movies, all hilarious and lacking any recognizable language, 

As the new movie begins, it’s nearly Halloween, and the sheep are about to celebrate the fruits of their long labor, tending to a secret pumpkin patch. Meanwhile, their farmer is hoping to ask the local veterinarian out to the town’s annual Halloween Hoedown. Before he can, though, he stumbles into the pumpkin patch, destroying the entire crop.

The ever-inventive Shaun borrows one of the farmer’s science books, and develops a formula that will grow one seed into a full-sized pumpkin in a matter of days. Eventually Shaun and the other sheep realize the formula is unstable — but not before the farmer gets some mixed in with his anti-baldness lotion, and glops it all over his scalp. Soon the farmer has grown great amounts hair all over his body, until the nervous townspeople think they’re being attacked by a giant hairy monster. And it’s up to Shaun, his flock and their sheepdog, Bitzer, to put things right again.

The directors, Aardman veterans Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, keep the action and the gags moving so briskly that you may need a repeat viewing or two to get all the jokes. Writers Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, along with a small army of animators, make sure those jokes are worth the second view — sometimes looking back to classic silent movies and just as often throwing in a modern reference to see who’s paying attention. (There’s a “Game of Thrones” gag that nearly put me on the floor.)

The movie manages to be quite universal — with the absence of discernible dialogue, just hums and grunts — and also specifically British. Another of my favorite jokes involves Bitzer borrowing the farmer’s truck, but carefully placing the “L” sticker, the British indicator of a student driver, on the tailgate.

“Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” is also that rare beast, a Halloween movie that viewers of any age can enjoy. Something this delightfully wicked this way comes not often enough.

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‘Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild scary action. Running time: 80 minutes.

Review: 'The Weight' is a riveting heist thriller propelled by Ethan Hawke's performance as a dad at the end of his rope

Ethan Hawke has been a working actor so long, over more than 100 roles in movies and TV, that we almost take him for granted — until he breaks out a performance, like he does in director Padraic McKinley’s heist drama “The Weight,” that reminds you how devastatingly good he can be.

Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, who in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, is struggling to keep a roof over his head and that of his little girl, Penny (Ava Berry). One day, after Murphy and Penny are evicted from their apartment, Murphy has an unfortunate encounter with some unsympathetic Portland police, and he ends up being sent away to prison.

At a labor camp in Deschutes County, the warden, J.J. Clancy (Russell Crowe), lays down the law: Work two days, get one day taken off your sentence. Murphy does the math, and sees there’s no way to get enough time deducted to get out before the state puts Penny up for adoption. 

Clancy offers Murphy an alternative, one that’s as dangerous as it is illegal. Clancy knows someone at a nearby gold mine, Taggert (Alec Newman), who wants to move several gold bars over 100 miles of Oregon forest and hills, to keep the FDR administration from confiscating it. Clancy tells Murphy to pick three inmates he trusts — and if they finish the job, Clancy will sign the paperwork to release them. Murphy may not believe Clancy and Taggert will live up to their end of the bargain, but he’s got little choice but to agree.

Murphy picks his three accomplices: Rankin (Austin Amelio), who’s on the most recent of many prison stays; Singh (Avi Nash), a socialist intellectual; and Olson (Lucas Lynggard Tønnesen), a Scandinavian immigrant. They’re joined on the journey by two of Taggert’s men, Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), and by Anna (Julia Jones), an Indigenous woman at the mining camp, who may be the best person to get them through the woods alive.

McKinley, a TV director making his feature debut, evokes some of the classics in the canon of desperate men moving contraband (think Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” or William Friedkin’s remake, “Sorcerer”), as the men have to confront natural obstacles and what’s more treacherous: other men.

At the center is Hawke, grim and grave, the determination to complete this task and get back to his daughter etched in every crevice of his face. Hawke doesn’t talk a lot here — a contrast to his Oscar-nominated performance in “Blue Moon,” as the overly verbose Lorenz Hart — and he makes every motion and syllable speak volumes.

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‘The Weight’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in several theaters. Rated R for language and some violence/bloody images. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'American Doctor' shows viewers the horrors of Gaza, with three doctors trying to save lives during wartime

“Harrowing” doesn’t begin to describe the war violence shown in director Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor,” which shows the efforts of three U.S.-based surgeons trying to save lives in Gaza — and how they try to process the horrors of what they’ve experienced.

The three doctors have all worked at Nasser Medical Center, in Khan Younis in Gaza, often at the center of the response to shelling and bombings by Israeli military forces. And their reactions, as we find out, are shaped in part by their different backgrounds:

• Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an abdominal surgeon from California, arrived last March during a ceasefire — and stayed when the bombing started. He’s of Pakistani heritage, and he talks about how his parents faith (they’re Zoroastrians) have led him to advocate for peace wherever possible. He also expresses frustration that the United States, the government of his country, supplies so many armaments to the Israeli government.

• Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, works at Nasser to save the limbs of children wounded in Gaza. He’s Jewish, but is also ferociously angry at the Israeli Defense Forces and the Netanyahu government, which he blames for perpetuating the deadly violence in Gaza.

• And Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency-room doctor from Chicago, is Palestinian American. He’s worked before at Nasser, but as the movie unfolds is frustrated that the Israeli government regularly blocks him from returning to treat the wounded in Gaza. Instead, he tries to raise awareness in the U.S. of what he’s seen firsthand.

Poh Si Teng, who’s also one of the movie’s five cinematographers, captures the daily grind and panic of the doctors and nurses trying to keep people alive. 

The film also labors to keep the doctors’ political leanings at arm’s length — there’s a conversation at one point about whether Perlmutter’s militancy helps or hurts the hospital’s efforts — but in this hot-button atmosphere, how one views “American Doctor” may be preordained by where one stands to begin with.

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‘American Doctor’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for graphic scenes of war violence, and for language. Running time: 93 minutes; in English, and in Arabic with subtitles.

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This review previously appeared on this site on January 23, 2026, when the movie premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Practical Magic 2' isn't a sequel we needed, 28 years later, but Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman make some sisterly magic

I had utterly forgotten about “Practical Magic,” the 1998 darkish comedy with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as sisters who were witches and living under a curse that killed any man who fell in love with them. I found my review in the archives and discovered I hated the movie, giving it a paltry 1½ stars. 

So it was a pleasant surprise, albeit a small one, that “Practical Magic 2” wasn’t the unnecessary slog of a legacy sequel I feared it would be — but instead a fairly enjoyable reunion with two charming actors 28 years after they first teamed up.

The curse on the Owens women remains strong, as the first scene shows Sally Owens (Bullock’s character) and Gillian (Kidman) at the grave of Sally’s second husband, Gary — the part Aidan Quinn played in the first movie. Graveside, Sally extracts a promise from Gilly, that she will never tell her daughters that they are witches. Sally has suppressed her magic abilities ever since.

Cut to an indeterminate number of years later, and Sally is organizing a family party for their aunt, Jet (Dianne Wiest), who continues to live with her sister, Aunt Franny (Stockard Channing). Gilly arrives late, and Sally’s adult daughters — doctor-in-training Antonia (Maisie Williams) and art history student Kylie (Joey King) — arrive just a bit later. A surprise guest arrives: Gideon (Xolo Maridueña, from “Blue Beetle”), Kylie’s boyfriend. 

There’s another unwanted guest: A death beetle, whose clicking indicates that someone in the house will die soon. Jet knows it’s her turn to go, and she passes shortly after the birthday party. Jet leaves gifts for everyone, with a special one for Franny. It’s a book of magic spells that might, if worked properly, hold the secret to lifting the family curse.

The secret is soon needed, when Gideon is hit by a car and put in a coma — the day after Kylie finally said she loves him. Gilly forces Sally to reveal the family secret to Kylie and Antonia, and a distraught and desperate Kylie grabs the magic book and heads to London. Sally and Gilly follow her, leaving Antonia to watch over Gideon (and leaving poor Williams abandoned for most of the movie).

In London, the Owens women meet two men who become important to the story: Prof. Ian Wright (Lee Pace), an expert in witchcraft in general and the Owens’ legend in particular; and Tom Lockland (Solly McLeod, from “House of the Dragon”), who tends to the manor where the sisters’ ancestor lived and died, starting the curse.

Director Susanne Bier, who worked with Bullock on the apocalyptic “Bird Box,” creates the best moments when each pair of sisters — Sally and Gilly, Jet and Franny, and Kylie and Antonia — pair off, demonstrating that the sisterly bond is the purest form of magic. This pays off particularly well with Bullock and Kidman, who have a loose chemistry that wasn’t so evident in their first pairing 28 years ago. King (in the role Evan Rachel Wood played at age 11) carries her half of the movie quite well, too.

“Practical Magic 2” has its share of flaws, mostly in the cobbled together script (credited to three writers) and in the unnecessary fan service references that I’m guessing few fans will actually remember. It’s not a movie we needed, but as long as it’s here, it’s enough to enjoy Bullock and Kidman making a little magic.

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‘Practical Magic 2’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content, suggestive material and brief strong language. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'Hope' delivers action and thrills at a breakneck pace, and runs through genres and ammo with ludicrous speed

The Korean action thriller “Hope” is a mystery, a monster movie, a chase picture, and a few other genres I don’t want to give away — and the biggest thrill is in how writer-director Na Hong-jin shuffles the deck moving from one to the next.

In Hope Harbor, a seaside town, the police chief, Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), arrives with his backwoods cousin, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), to an odd scene: A dead cow in the middle of a road, with large bloody gashes on its body. Neither the chief or his cousin’s hunting buddies can figure out what killed the cow. Maybe a bear came out of the woods, or a tiger from a nearby preserve. 

Then the chief heads back into town and sees more carnage. Cars are upended, bodies are lying in the streets, and entire businesses are hollowed out. Soon the chief is either running toward or speeding away from the danger — some of it with his eager young officer Sung-ae (played by Hoyeon, from “Squid Game”) taking aim with the large array of weapons she’s carrying. 

For much of the film, Na is toggling between the chief and Sung-ae in town and Sung-ki and his pals in the woods — each facing different renditions of the same peril. Na keeps the tension going a good deal longer than one might expect, pumping up a furious adrenaline rush through several sustained action sequences. There’s also a surprising amount of humor, particularly of the gallows variety.

And then there’s the ending, which comes completely out of left field and still feels like an organic result of what happened before. (I’ll note that the efforts of Irish actor Michael Fassbender and his Oscar-winning Swedish wife, Alicia Vikander, are also featured in the last half hour — but I won’t say how.)

“Hope” is a welcome reminder that action movies are universal, and that Hollywood doesn’t have a monopoly any more.

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‘Hope’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content and language throughout. Running time: 160 minutes; in Korean, with subtitles.

Review: 'Edie Arnold Is a Loser' is a goofy Utah-made teen comedy with a punk-rock sentiment, a 'Napoleon Dynamite' vibe and a generous heart

Like many movie critics, I tend to be wary of scrappy low-budget movies made locally — for the same reason restaurant reviewers may not trash a substandard mom-and-pop restaurant, and save their critiques for the really delicious places to go. No critic wants to be the bad guy to someone they might run into in the grocery store.

So the fact that I’m reviewing the Utah-made teen comedy “Edie Arnold Is a Loser” at all is a positive indicator. This is a fun, offbeat and exuberant movie about teen girls chasing a nearly impossible rock ’n’ roll dream so passionately that you’d be made of stone not to want to see them succeed.

The title character, Edie Arnold (played by Adi Madden Cabrera) is a student at Our Lady of Undying Sadness, an all-girl Catholic school. She loves music, though it’s difficult to show that love when she’s assigned to play percussion for the school’s woeful choir, led by the picture-perfect and tone-deaf Kati Vital (Alana Mei Kern). Up in the organ loft, she plays accompaniment with her very nerdy best friend, Frances (McKenna Tuckett), while daydreaming about the cutie from the nearby boys’ school, Walter Boyd (Lucas Van Orden).

Spurred on by Frances, Edie performs a rebellious act, sneaking away from her status-conscious mom (Cherish Rodriguez) to go see a punk band play at a scuzzy music venue. When the girls get there, they learn that the band’s drummer has passed out, and Frances volunteers Edie to fill in. Edie discovers that she likes punk rock, she’s good at playing it, and she wants to play more. Before they know it, Edie and Frances have told everyone — notably the goofy emcee, Iggy (Gabe Root), that they have a band.

The next step for Edie and Frances is to convince the other outcasts at their lunch table, Judith (Niki Rahimi) and Ellen (Alexa Paige), to join their band. They also have to sneak the school’s instruments out of the organ loft, without arousing the suspicion of the school’s cruel disciplinarian, Sister Myra (Star Hermann). Thank heavens for Sister Sheena (Luseane Pasa), the choir director, who thinks Sister Myra needs to unclench her rosary a little.

Directors Megan Rico (who wrote the script, inspired by her own Catholic school days) and Kade Atwood neatly capture the adrenaline rush of teen defiance. There’s a goofiness to the movie’s humor, like in Tuckett’s performance as the anarchic sidekick, that evokes strong comparisons to  two more products of the I-15 corridor, “Napoleon Dynamite” and “SLC Punk!”

It’s the sweetness of “Edie Arnold Is a Loser” that puts it more on the “Napoleon Dynamite” side of the Utah movie spectrum. Edie herself, alone or with her bandmates, emerge as a good kid, just trying to find her voice when so many other things – her school, her rivals, the nuns and her mom — want her to be meek and quiet. It’s hard to think of a teen movie character who deserved her punk rebellion more.

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‘Edie Arnold Is a Loser’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for strong profanity and some sexual dialogue. Running time: 72 minutes.