It was never going to be an easy task following up a cultural phenomenon like Moana, which still remains Walt Disney Animation’s finest offering of the past ten years. Originally conceived as a long-form streaming series for Disney+, Moana 2 doesn’t quite have the narrative poignancy or thematic sophistication of its predecessor. Where that film felt like it was actually trying to speak to a teenage audience, this sequel brings things more in the kid-friendly range with easy laughs and an easier-to-follow plot. The fact remains that this lush and vibrant setting is nothing short of enchanting and any excuse to revisit the world of Moana is worthwhile, no matter how it compares to the original. Perhaps I’ll change my tune once Moana 5 is released but until that time, I intend to stay on the boat of this franchise.

Following her transition to chiefess of the Motunui people, Moana (Auliʻi Cravalho) also acts as their lead wayfinder, voyaging to other nearby islands in search of inhabitants. In her exploration, she learns of the sunken island Motufetu, which once served as a connecting point for the nearby isles but was pushed to the bottom of the ocean by the storm god Nalo (Tofiga Fepulea’i). Emboldened by visions from her ancestors, Moana recruits a team to raise Motufetu from its watery depths and restore the channels to the separated sea. Accompanied once again by haughty demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) and joined by Moni (Hualālai Chung), Loto (Rose Matafeo) and Kele (David Fane), the crew ventures across the treacherous ocean to break Nalo’s curse.

If Moana was a journey of self-discovery and independence, then Moana 2 is about the next step into maturity, wherein our heroine takes on the responsibility of looking after others. She now has a much younger sister Simea (voiced by Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda), who acts like Moana walks on water and misses her dearly when she leaves for her expeditions. Her tribe looks to her for guidance on issues big and small as they crop up on Motunui and she even has a fan club of adoring “MOANA-BEs” who idolize the young trailblazer. During the story’s main quest, Moana doesn’t always have the right answers but like any good leader, she considers the capabilities and commitments of her people when making decisions about what to do next. The storms are always easier to ride out when you have the right people by your side.

Like Moana, Moana 2‘s adventure storyline is supplemented by new original songs, although Lin-Manuel Miranda did not return as lead songwriter this time around. While this sequel doesn’t quite have instant classics like “How Far I’ll Go” and “You’re Welcome”, new tunes like “Beyond” and “We’re Back”, penned by Opetaia Foaʻi, Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, are welcome additions to this series’ songbook. Auliʻi Cravalho’s singing was, of course, lovely in the original but her voice seems even more powerful and assured this time around. Once the crew gets sailing, “What Could Be Better Than This?” finds the four main performers trading humorous lines, with Rose Matafeo as a standout among them. The rousing ensemble number “We Know The Way” is also reprised here and Maui gets another cheeky uptempo anthem with “Can I Get A Chee Hoo?”

Also returning from the first movie are the sentient coconut pirates from the Kakamora tribe, who get even more screen time than the first adventure and remain a cute concoction within this magical universe. Their antics certainly play a role in the narrative but also seem to play double-duty as a way to keep kids entertained. The Kakamora have aboard a gelatinous, bug-eyed creature whose noises seem pitched to emulate the “goat scream” fad from several years ago. Moana 2 has several moments like that, where it feels like it’s dumbing itself down just to hit the marks with everyone and I wish it didn’t. But the animation and craft in this sequel is just as impressive as it was the first time around and the color palette is always a wonder to behold. Just because the waves aren’t quite as high in this sequel doesn’t mean it’s not worth the trip back out to the dazzling blue.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Y2K, a disaster comedy starring Jaeden Martell and Rachel Zegler, set at a high school party on New Year’s Eve 1999 which imagines if the millennium bug actually caused all technology to come to life and turn against humanity.
Also coming to theaters is Werewolves, a horror thriller starring Frank Grillo and Katrina Law, following two scientists who try to stop a mutation that turns people into werewolves after being touched by a supermoon event the year before.
Streaming on Netflix is Mary, a biblical epic starring Noa Cohen and Anthony Hopkins, telling the story after the birth of Jesus wherein Mary is forced to flee when Herod’s insatiable thirst for power ignites a murderous pursuit for the newborn.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Following up last year’s When You Finish Saving The World, Jesse Eisenberg makes another compelling case for himself as a writer and director with his sophomore effort A Real Pain. This time, not only is he in front of the camera as well but also giving one of the best performances of his career in the lead role. Since scoring an Oscar nomination playing Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Eisenberg has alternated between big studio pictures and much smaller indies. These back-to-back dramedies suggest that he’s most comfortable with projects over which he has more creative input. It’s not hard to imagine a career trajectory for Eisenberg similar to Woody Allen, writing and directing a collection of stories investigating the human condition while popping up in lead or supporting roles.

As A Real Pain opens, Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) sits patiently at a terminal in JFK awaiting his cousin David (Eisenberg) hours before their flight. The pair are destined for Warsaw, where their recently-deceased grandmother spent her remaining days and allocated funds in her will for Benji and David to make the trip to connect with their Jewish heritage. Once in Poland, they meet up with tour guide James (Will Sharpe) and the rest of the group, the overwhelmingly friendly Benji making fast connections with the other tourists while the more neurotic David holds back. As the Heritage Tour makes stops at locations marred by the atrocities of the Holocaust, the Kaplans reflect on their family’s place in its history while also bickering about their comparatively insignificant interpersonal drama.

While Eisenberg and Culkin are aided by a talented supporting cast that also includes Jennifer Grey and Liza Sadovy, A Real Pain is primarily a two-hander between the Kaplan boys. Even though they were born 3 weeks apart, they’re cousins and not brothers, even though they certainly argue like it. While Benji has bummed around upstate New York his whole adult life, David took the more “mature” route after college, heading into the city to sell digital ad space and support his wife Priya and their son Abe. Benji is closer to the rest of their mutual family, so he takes the death of their grandma harder than David does but nevertheless, they find themselves together on this journey tied by shared history but typified by their pronounced differences.

Eisenberg’s eloquent manner in distinguishing these two characters, both in his writing and direction, is what ironically makes A Real Pain a joy to behold. It’s a film of little moments that speak volumes about how these two guys see themselves and the world in which they somehow coexist. David is horrified when Benji wants to do something that is outside David’s admittedly small comfort zone, even if that means talking with someone in the tour group during a visit to a concentration camp. Introverts in the audience will cringe at the carefree attempts that Benji makes at making connections with people and David similarly resents his lack of self-consciousness in doing so. David’s bitterness with Benji’s seeming lack of insecurity doesn’t limit itself to their waking hours; the two share a hotel room and when David looks over at Benji sleeping as peacefully as a baby, the look on David’s face says “why can’t I have that?”

It’s the time of year when movie award consideration kicks into high gear and I wouldn’t be surprised if A Real Pain earns quite a bit of it, especially for its main two performances. Though David isn’t a character polar opposite of ones Eisenberg has played in the past, he digs deeper into what drives this character and why the relationship with his cousin is so hard. But Culkin especially seems likely to earn an abundance of praise for his portrayal of a young man so stripped of inhibitions that he can drive people crazy with his openness while being none the wiser. If David is our main character, then it’s easy to read the film’s title and surmise that it’s referring to Benji but in the film’s subtext about the vast scale in degrees of personal suffering, Eisenberg reminds us that conflict is all about context.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Wicked, a fantasy musical starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, adapting the first half of the Broadway smash hit which tells the events leading up to The Wizard Of Oz through the eyes of Glinda The Good Witch and The Wicked Witch Of The West.
Also playing in theaters is Gladiator II, a historical epic starring Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, following up the 2000 Best Picture winner as the son of Maximus is forced to enter the Colosseum and must look to his past to find strength to return the glory of Rome to its people.
Streaming on Netflix is The Piano Lesson, starring Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington, which follows the lives of a family during the Great Depression as they deal with themes of family legacy in deciding what to do with an heirloom: the family piano.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The plot of Here, the dreadful new formal experiment from director Robert Zemeckis, is fixated on a plot itself — a plot of land, to be more specific. The film begins millions of years ago when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and as their extinction comes to pass and the ice age takes hold, the camera stays fixed on that location as large swaths of time come and go. The bulk of the Zemeckis’s focus is on a house that’s built on the land around the turn of the 20th century, which is eventually purchased by Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose Young (Kelly Reilly) after World War II. We see their lives unfold, specifically as their oldest of three children Richard (Tom Hanks) grows up and takes the house over for his parents as he and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright) raise children of their own.

Based on a groundbreaking 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, Here is a feature-length movie that could have worked as a short film or even a Super Bowl commercial. At 105 minutes, it’s positively intolerable. If Robert Zemeckis wanted to make this concept of an unmoving camera work, he could have at least composed his vignettes linearly. We start at the chronological beginning in the first few minutes but after that, Zemeckis and his Forrest Gump co-writer Eric Roth choose to interrupt the story of the Youngs with other periods of time. There are scenes of Native Americans roaming the land hundreds of years before and sequences with other inhabitants of the house before and after them. There are even brief moments in colonial times outside the estate of Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William. Instead of Zemeckis treating each of these sections as their own chapters, he opts for a nonlinear storyline where we spend no more than a handful of minutes at a time in each era.

Not only does this method of storytelling undercut any sort of narrative momentum but it also corners the characters into paper-thin caricatures who only get a few minutes to share who they are and what they want. Worse yet, Here makes copious use of digital de-aging (courtesy of new generative AI tech) to make the actors playing the Youngs match whatever age they’re supposed to be. We’ve seen this technique and face swapping and other visual effects of the like pop up in recent blockbusters but because of the story he’s telling, Robert Zemeckis forces himself to put this CG effect front and center. Even though this isn’t nearly the worst de-aging effects I’ve seen, the amount of screen time that utilizes it eventually draws attention to how much the effects are being used and deteriorates the illusion.

As unconvincing as the AI-assisted effects can be, they’re nothing compared to what Zemeckis and Eric Roth have brewing in their cliche-riddled screenplay. Thankfully, some of the chronologically early segments play out wordlessly, with Alan Silvestri’s overbearing music score doing the heavy lifting instead. If the golden rule in screenwriting is “show, don’t tell”, the pair of scribes break it early and often. It’s not enough for Zemeckis to set the scene for each of these vignettes; the characters have to loudly explain when and why we are in any given point of time. It’s an enormous disservice to the actors, who are doing their best to establish their roles while having to spew weapons-grade pablum about how quickly time passes, how important it is not to have regrets and other hoary platitudes.

It’s not like Zemeckis has been immune to cornball sentiment in the past but in the case of previous winners of his like Forrest Gump or The Polar Express, at least we can be distracted by the creakier elements of the presentation. Here, there’s nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. Locking the camera down in a fixed position of course is both compositionally dull — no matter how often you try to switch out the set design — and emotionally unengaging. Potentially poignant moments and mundane glimpses of domesticity are treated with the same exact framing and thus, their dramatic impact is dulled. The camera is unmoved and so are we. Compelling camerawork isn’t always about lush cinematography or showy hyperactivity; it can crucially aid the filmmaker in telling smaller stories-within-stories through close-ups, two shots and really everything else that isn’t just a static shot. Here’s hoping Here is the last time Zemeckis chooses to limit himself with ostentatious obstructions.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Heretic, starring Hugh Grant and Sophie Thatcher, is a horror thriller about two Mormon missionaries who are drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse in the house of an Englishman while trying to convert him to their faith.
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, starring Judy Greer and Pete Holmes, is a Christmas comedy adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name about a group of juvenile delinquent siblings who inadvertently find themselves starring in the town’s Christmas pageant.
Small Things Like These, starring Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh, is a historical drama about a devoted father who discovers disturbing secrets kept by the local convent in his small Irish town and uncovers shocking truths of his own.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Anna Kendrick steps behind the camera for the first time to take on misogyny and murder with Woman Of The Hour, a chilling true crime tale debuting on Netflix starting this Friday. In September 1978, photographer Rodney Alcala was the winning Bachelor on an episode of The Dating Game. What producers and viewers of the show didn’t know at the time was that he was in the middle of a killing spree that already claimed the lives of several young women throughout southern California. Weaving back and forth through time, Kendrick uses the taping of the now infamous game show entry as an anchor point to underscore just how deceiving appearances can be. Backed by a sharp script and even more incisive editing, her directorial debut is a bracingly fresh take on the serial killer genre.

Kendrick also stars as Cheryl Bradshaw, a struggling actress who schleps fruitlessly to auditions, where casting directors barely even look up from their notes to acknowledge her when running scenes. Desperate for work, she reluctantly takes a spot on the hit game show The Dating Game, in the hopes that her appearance will spark more TV roles for her in the future. After throwing the three male contestants unscripted questions, to the chagrin of host Ed Burke (Tony Hale), Cheryl chooses the charming and intelligent “Bachelor #3” Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto). Anxious for the all-expense paid trip to Carmel, Rodney asks Cheryl for a drink right after the show but during their date, she can’t ignore the nagging feeling that something isn’t right with the newly-minted game show winner.

In addition to the unsettling encounter Cheryl has with the murderer, whose victim count was estimated to be 130 by the time he died in 2021, Woman Of The Hour depicts a handful of the atrocities Alcala committed. While these scenes are terrifying and can be difficult to watch, they certainly don’t indulge in brutality against these women and are intended to convey just how casual the transition from flirtation to violence can be at the hands of a monster. Daniel Zovatto is appropriately unnerving as the calculatedly charismatic creep, connoting confidence and conscientiousness atop his psychopathic impulses. In each of the sequences that show Alcala on the hunt for vulnerable women, Zovatto reveals aspects of his character that make him even more deplorable but no less fascinating.

Concluding right at the 90-minute mark, Woman Of The Hour does come across as somewhat underdeveloped despite its weighty subject material. Kendrick devotes a portion of the narrative to an audience member, played by Nicolette Robinson, who recognizes Alcala during the taping of the episode after a previous encounter that left her shaken. I imagine her inclusion in the film is Kendrick taking artistic liberties, as there isn’t any evidence someone who had a brush with Alcala was in the audience for the show. But in comparison to Cheryl’s perspective of events and Rodney’s murderous interjections in the narrative, the scenes of Robinson’s character desperately trying to warn a top producer of The Dating Game about Alcala don’t resonate with the same level of intensity.

What Kendrick makes clear is how the sexism of the era, the residue of which is still on display today, allowed murderers like Alcala to carry out horrendous crimes undetected. Using The Dating Game, a long-running game show that positioned women as prizes to be won, as a backdrop drives home the point that a literal serial killer can be championed if they say the right thing. During commercial breaks, Cheryl chats with a tenured makeup artist who quickly touches her up and imparts bits of wisdom for the nervous contestant. In the years she’s been on the show, she says the real question under all the different questions that are asked is “which one of you will hurt me?” Of course, the line takes on a more literal meaning in context but even outside this story, it points to how unsafe women have been made to feel by men throughout the years. It’s a premise that Kendrick unpacks brilliantly as both the lead actress and director of Woman Of The Hour, an impactful evocation of quiet dread.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Smile 2, a horror sequel starring Naomi Scott and Rosemarie DeWitt, following a pop singer begins to experience a series of increasingly disturbing and daunting events as she is about to go on a new world tour.
Also playing in theaters is We Live In Time, a romantic drama starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, telling the story of an up-and-coming chef and a recent divorcée who find their lives forever changed when a chance encounter brings them together.
Streaming on Shudder is MadS, a one-take horror movie starring Lewkowski Yovel and Lucille Guillaume, involving a teenager whose night takes a surreal turn when he picks up an injured woman after driving back from seeing his drug dealer.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

What do you get when you cross a loosely-adapted comic book movie with a billion dollars at the box office and 11 Oscar nominations? Well, you get Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel borne not of artistic necessity but of financial potentiality. On paper, it doesn’t seem like a lazy effort; after all, it’s a full-blown musical that spends most of its runtime either in a prison or a courtroom. But it’s clear that director and co-writer Todd Phillips is simply out of his element here. It’s no secret that Phillips borrowed heavily from two Scorsese classics (Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy) when creating Joker. It’s ironic (or perhaps fitting) that his follow-up seems to track so closely with Scorsese’s New York, New York, a dolefully nostalgic musical so poorly received that it sent the director into a downward spiral. Don’t be surprised if we see a black-and-white boxing epic from Phillips 5 years from now.

It’s two years after the events of Joker and Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been committed to Arkham State Hospital while awaiting trial for the murders he committed. Taking up his case is attorney Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), who plans to argue that Arthur’s crimes were the result of a split personality over which he had no control. The conditions of Arkham are bleak — courtesy of thuggish prison guards like Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) — but a bright spot appears in the form of fellow inmate Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), whom Arthur meets in music therapy. Despite the unusual circumstances, the pair fall for one another but as the media frenzy around Arthur’s hotly anticipated trial continues the swirl, will their burgeoning bond survive the madness?

To be clear: Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t bad because it’s a musical; it’s bad because it’s not a good musical. Instead of crafting original songs, Todd Phillips opts for standards like the ones Lady Gaga sang with Tony Bennett on the albums they collaborated on before his passing. Obviously the songs are in her wheelhouse and she belts them out well, but Phillips doesn’t even try to stage cogent musical numbers to feature her towering vocals. Understandably, Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t match her vocally but you could make the argument he’s singing “in character” more as Arthur, where Gaga doesn’t register as playing a character during her songs. Aside from a few cheek-to-cheek reveries, the choreography often seems haphazard and almost improvised in the rest of the sequences. The switches to song-and-dance mode often feel perfunctory and there are periods where the film seems embarrassed to admit that it’s a musical.

As underwhelming as Joker: Folie à Deux is as a musical, its ultimate undoing is that it’s a narratively inert courtroom drama as well. Putting Arthur on trial may have seemed like a satisfying narrative arc in theory but for the purposes of this sequel, it anchors its ambitions down with callbacks and reframing of events from the first film. It also puts front and center how little Todd Phillips actually understands or cares about Arthur in the first place; most of the testimony is centered around how awful his character was to people around him in Joker. Borrowing from the “God’s lonely man” mold from the aforementioned Scorsese classics, Phillips was at least able to feign empathy for his central character the first time around but here, he has no idea what to make of him and his actions. This aimlessness affects Joaquin Phoenix’s performance too, whose work here is still passable but not nearly as arresting as it was in his initial Oscar-winning role.

Aside from an opening animated sequence that feels like it’s trying too hard to throw the audience off kilter, the early stretch of Joker: Folie à Deux is its most promising. If the end of Joker positioned the titular rogue as a folk hero for the downtrodden, Folie à Deux provides a sobering counterpoint to infamy with its dispiriting prison sequences. Even though the guard characters are inconsistently written, Phillips reliably hits the prison drama beats with cinematographer Lawrence Sher, returning from Joker with camerawork that’s more claustrophobic than the predecessor but no less compelling. Frankly, someone more talented than Phillips would’ve had more success with this project but since he was never going to turn down the paycheck, why not play to the director’s strengths and make this a road movie? Phillips directed Road Trip, Due Date and three The Hangover films, so why not have Arthur and Lee hit the road like Bonnie and Clyde?

Score – 2/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
Saturday Night, starring Gabriel LaBelle and Rachel Sennott, is a biopic based on the true story of what happened in the 90 minutes prior to the 1975 premiere of NBC’s debut of Saturday Night Live.
Piece By Piece, starring Pharrell Williams and Morgan Neville, which documents the life and musical career of producer Pharrell Williams, incorporating his faith and expressing his artistry by means of Lego.
Terrifier 3, starring David Howard Thornton and Lauren LaVera, continues the saga of the murderous Art The Clown, as survivors of his Halloween massacre struggle to rebuild their shattered lives during the holiday season.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup