As anyone who’s been in a serious relationship can attest, weekend retreats with significant others don’t always go as planned. More than one such plan goes awry in Over Your Dead Body, an action comedy from The Lonely Island alum and MacGruber director Jorma Taccone. The film’s couple, Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving), have been married for seven years but their seven-year itch has taken a turn for the deadly. We learn early on that Dan plans to kill Lisa during their trip out in the wilderness, prepping an alibi with his co-worker and his dad Michael (Paul Guilfoyle) by saying that Lisa is planning on partaking in a rigorous hike over the weekend. As he sneaks up on her in the cabin, she parries his chloroform-soaked rag with a stun gun; it turns out she’s been making plans as well.

We flash back to a few days earlier, where Lisa is preparing a fabricated story of her own, telling a friend that Dan plans to go hunting during their time away. It’s not clear exactly how Lisa thought out disposing of Dan and by the time the pair come to learn of their mutual murder plots, it’s obvious neither one is a criminal mastermind. As they scuffle for a shotgun, a blast hits the ceiling and a trio of interlopers falls from the attic. If things weren’t fraught enough, Michael’s cabin was serving as a temporary safe house for escaped convicts Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), along with their crooked CO accomplice Allegra (Juliette Lewis). They tie up the squabbling couple, whom they saw bickering from the attic, and try to patch up their dysfunction for long enough to shake them down for cash before they continue to evade capture.

Over Your Dead Body is an English-language remake of Norwegian Netflix offering The Trip and given the amount of twists and turns in both stories, your best shot at enjoying this American re-do is not being familiar with the original. The distributor IFC is wisely playing up the fact that the movie comes courtesy of 87North Productions, the company behind action comedies like Bullet Train and Violent Night. What starts out as a tale of desperation amid marital strife gradually gives way to a cheeky wam-bam fight for survival, where blood is spilled in mostly cartoonish and comedically-colored fashion. Since co-founding 87North in 2019 and producing the Bob Odenkirk actioner Nobody in 2021, David Leitch has seemingly cornered the market on a brand of bone-crunching action fare with yucks between the ruckus.

The primary reason Over Your Dead Body doesn’t work lies in director Jorma Taccone’s inability to find a tone that works for the material. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving are talented actors but they’re saddled with characters obnoxious and petty enough that we’d be okay with either one of them being offed, except that it means the other would succeed. Once they’re interrupted by the fugitives, it becomes easier to root for them as a couple with renewed purpose but the preceding domestic scenes, where they argue about Scrabble words and how to mince garlic, are torturous. In the way Pete and company serve as de facto marriage counselors for Dan and Lisa, Taccone seems to be shooting for an update of The Ref but lands on the timbre of a home invasion thriller. There’s a specific scene set around the basement billiards table that’s particularly icky and doesn’t mesh at all with the playful anarchic vibe that Taccone is going for.

He and his editor Jeremy Cohen put together fight sequences that feature laudable stunt work while also tracking with the bombast from other 87North projects. The best moments in the movie come not from the actual combat sequences but from characters trying to pick up the pieces — sometimes literally — after the fact. A scene where Allegra fruitlessly tries to reassemble fragments of her foot builds to the funniest punchline in the whole film, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a gorier The Lonely Island sketch. Like his troupe mate Akiva Schaffer, who helmed the hilarious The Naked Gun last year, Taccone has a killer grip on slapstick humor. But with Over Your Dead Body, he hasn’t proven to have nearly as high a command over darkly comic premises or action setpieces.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Michael, a music biopic starring Jaafar Jackson and Colman Domingo, covering the life and career of pop icon Michael Jackson, from his involvement in the Jackson 5 in the 60s to his early solo career in the 70s and 80s.
Also coming to theaters is Mother Mary, a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, involving the fraught relationship between a costume designer and an international pop star on the eve of her comeback performance.
Premiering on Netflix is Apex, a survival action film starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, following an adrenaline junkie whose rock climbing expedition is thwarted by a fellow adventurer who’s made it his mission to hunt her in the wild.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Are any of us more than the worst thing we’ve ever done? The dark romantic comedy The Drama boldly posits “maybe not!” The film opens on a more mild transgression: seeing Emma (Zendaya) reading in a café, Charlie (Robert Pattinson) snaps a photo of the book she’s buried in so he can look it up and pretend he’s a fan before introducing himself. On the ensuing first date, he admits he hasn’t read the novel and manufactured the meet-cute so that he could seem interesting to her. Fortunately, it’s not a large enough deception to derail things and 2 years later, Emma and Charlie are engaged. The week of the wedding, Charlie runs the speech that he’s prepared for the reception past his best man Mike (Mamoudou Athie); “I love how you always turn my drama into comedy,” Charlie says of his bride-to-be.

A last-minute food tasting between Emma, Charlie, Mike, and Mike’s wife and Emma’s maid of honor Rachel (Alana Haim) turns into a multi-bottle wine sampling to help take the edge off all the planning. Emma and Charlie relay a moral quandary that’s come up with their DJ, prompting Rachel to tipsily bring up an infraction from Mike’s past that she ribs him about periodically. He offers to spill the details if everyone agrees to share the worst thing each of them has done and the day-drinking session immediately gets more personally revealing. Mike and Rachel offer up dirty deeds about which they deservedly feel a measure of shame but Charlie can barely muster up an anecdote about how he cyberbullied a classmate who possibly moved away as a result. Emma brings them home with a secret so dark, it makes Charlie reconsider his entire relationship with her.

The Drama isn’t as much about what Emma did specifically — an act the film’s marketing cleverly conceals — but more about how fragile the bonds between significant others can be when they matter most. Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli, whose previous film Dream Scenario found Nicolas Cage popping up in people’s nightmares, carries over a sense of dream logic and unreality to this intimate tale. After Emma’s confession, Borgli and his editor Joshua Raymond Lee intersperse scenes of the couple completing pre-wedding tasks with mordant reveries that reveal anxieties about where they stand with one another. While some are exaggerated enough to read as purely fantastical, others are more plausible and we’re forced to decide whether what we’re seeing actually happened or not.

The humor in The Drama doesn’t come from minimizing Emma’s past actions but in seeing ourselves in the way that Charlie summarily unravels after learning about them. Every little detail — be it the messaging on an old coffee mug or the way that their photographer lays out the order in which family members will line up for photos — reveals hilarious fissures in Charlie’s psyche. Borgli doesn’t treat the characters or the audience with moral absolutes about how they should feel but he delights in depicting how one’s code can shift out of desperation. This is a comedy of discomfort, to the degree that some viewers may be repulsed by its subject material and possibly find it distasteful. As someone whose paranoia and uncertainty can dictate pointless rumination for embarrassing lengths of time, I felt seen by Charlie and found comfort in watching him scramble to resolve his dilemma.

Borgli personifies this struggle with a below-the-knee shot of Charlie pacing back and forth while trying out fancy shoes and socks, following up with a close-up of Emma unable to take him seriously due to the dainty sound of his feet shuffling. It’s a brief interaction that sums up the movie nicely; some fights and problems in a relationship should rightly be taken seriously but others can get so blown out of proportion that all it takes is a small discrepancy or distraction to render them comedic. It should be easy to tell the difference between the two, but as anyone who hasn’t been on the same page as their partner can tell you, it’s not. Sharing your life completely with someone else is both the most intimidating and the most rewarding act one can participate in. The Drama honors both the reverent and the ridiculous parts of the process.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is You, Me & Tuscany, a romcom starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page, in which a free-spirited young cook makes a brash decision to become a squatter in an abandoned Tuscan villa and strikes up a romance with the homeowner’s cousin.
Also coming to theaters is Hunting Matthew Nichols, a found footage horror movie starring Markian Tarasiuk and Miranda MacDougall, involving a documentary filmmaker who sets out to solve her brother’s missing person’s case twenty-three years after his disappearance.
Streaming on Apple TV is Outcome, a dark comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill, which follows a Hollywood star as he is forced to confront his problems and atone for his past after being threatened by a bizarre video footage from his past.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When Ridley Scott accepted the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical Or Comedy ten years ago for his adaptation of the Andy Weir novel The Martian, he almost immediately blurted out, “Comedy?” with a quizzical hand turned upward. If directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should happen to win for Project Hail Mary, their take on another Andy Weir novel about an astronaut stranded in space, it’s unlikely they’ll be as bemused by the categorization. The protagonists of both tales certainly use smart aleck humor to deflect from their dire situations, but the newest of the two space epics has both a mirthful touch and sense of wonder in its storytelling that make it a lighter lift. The film gets off to a slow start but once it hits ignition, it’s a joyous sci-fi spectacle that counts as a high point for the cinematic year so far.

Project Hail Mary centers on Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher whose PhD in molecular biology makes him uniquely qualified for a top-secret space mission. He’s visited by government higher-up Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), who needs help understanding the “astrophage” material that is slowly eating away at our sun. Initially, Grace’s work is intended to be here on Earth but when the team discovers a line near Venus filled with the nefarious particles, the decision is made to put Grace on board with Hail Mary crew members Yáo (Ken Leung) and Olesya (Milana Vayntrub). Sadly, he’s the only one to wake up on the spacecraft when it finally arrives at the destination and Grace has to do his best impression of an astronaut while attempting to save the galaxy from a solar extinction.

It sounds like as much — if not even more so — of a bummer than The Martian on its face but the secret to the levity behind Project Hail Mary is that Grace gets by with a little help from his extraterrestrial friends. The appearance and nature of the alien life is best for audiences to discover on their own, but once that element is introduced into the story, the movie moves in the direction of a cosmos-set buddy comedy. Drew Goddard’s script balances the scientific jibber-jabber with humor that stems from Grace trying to bridge the communication gap with his new interstellar cohort. Ryan Gosling is effortlessly engaging even on his own but his game is elevated by the exceptional work of James Ortiz, who voices the creature Grace encounters in his journey. Chief among their hilarious exchanges is one invoking a fist bump to celebrate a win, which I assume comes from Andy Weir’s original text but registers as an instant classic regardless.

While co-director Chris Miller stated earlier this month that Project Hail Mary doesn’t have any green screen shots, the movie obviously utilizes visual effects heavily to depict its outer space settings. But the production design of the Hail Mary ship itself is immaculate, a fully-realized interior down to every last control panel light blinking peril at the stand-in space traveller. Everything outside the windows of the spacecraft is breathtaking to behold as well, whether it’s luminous planets suspended in the vast darkness or stars whizzing past at impossible speeds. Blockbuster filmmaking doesn’t get much more exhilarating than the scene above the moon of Tau Ceti, with Grace dangling precariously by a wire to collect material for an experiment. As the title of the film suggests, this mission is humanity’s last shot to save itself from catastrophe and watching our hero lay it all out on the line is why we return to the movies.

Besides The Martian as an obvious point of reference, Project Hail Mary readily recalls exemplars of the science fiction genre like Arrival, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others. It may not live quite up to the standard set by those classics but it’s certainly an improvement on Spaceman, the Netflix clunker from a couple years ago with a similar premise. Lord and Miller, perhaps best known for producing the animated Spider-Verse franchise, continue to excel at synthesizing their influences into pop confections that don’t jettison their braininess along the way. At 156 minutes, the editing isn’t as judicious as it could’ve been and the storyline has a few different spots that would’ve properly sufficed as a fitting endpoint. But this film’s canvas and candor is so optimistic and open-hearted that it’s easy for me to overlook even its most apparent flaws.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, a comedy horror sequel starring Samara Weaving and Kathryn Newton, in which the sole survivor of a brutal “game” that resulted in the deaths of her husband and in-laws is forced to participate in a new deadlier game.
Also coming to theaters is The Pout-Pout Fish, an animated fantasy comedy starring Nick Offerman and Nina Oyama, which follows two aquatic misfits as they embark on an impossible journey to save their home.
Premiering on Netflix is Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, a crime drama starring Cillian Murphy and Rebecca Ferguson, continuing the story of an infamous gangster as he returns to a bombed Birmingham in 1940 and becomes involved in secret wartime missions.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Most pop culture geeks are familiar with the 20 Year Rule, a cyclical principle in which popular trends can enjoy rejuvenated relevance roughly 20 years after their initial emergence. It’s why mid-aughts nostalgia is everywhere now, from emo stalwarts helming major music festivals to sitcoms like Scrubs and Malcolm In The Middle getting rebooted. The latest Pixar film Hoppers is mired in a mid-2000s animal-crazy animated era, when box office beasts like Madagascar, Ice Age: The Meltdown and Open Season ran rampant. It’s a throwback to when all you needed was a bevy of fuzzy creatures to make families at the cineplex happy. But the standard is higher now, chiefly because of Pixar output like Ratatouille, WALL·E and Up from the later 2000s that raised the bar for all American animation.

The hero of Hoppers is Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda), a peppy sophomore at Beaverton University whose love of nature stems from time spent as a kid with her grandmother by a tranquil glade nearby. Ever the activist, she frequently petitions against Mayor Jerry Generazzo (voiced by Jon Hamm) and his efforts to expand the town at the expense of the local forests and their inhabitants. Jerry’s latest plan involves demolishing the very glade Mabel loved as a child to make way for Beaverton Beltway but when Mabel goes to revisit it, she discovers a particular beaver is acting strangely. It turns out that it’s actually a beaver-appearing robot that Mabel’s biology professor Dr. Sam (voiced by Kathy Najimy) has zapped her consciousness into so she can study the habitat. Against Dr. Sam’s wishes, Mabel “hops” into the robotic animal to help the glade flourish with wildlife once again before it’s too late.

Marketing for Hoppers has leaned heavily into an interaction Mabel has with Dr. Sam when she first finds out about the body-swapping tech; “Guys, this is like Avatar!” Mabel gawks, while Dr. Sam protests, “This is nothing like Avatar!” Since Disney now owns 20th Century Fox, the exchange counts not only as a cross-promotional effort but a meta way to get ahead of the film’s flimsy and derivative premise. The storyline is most reminiscent of FernGully: The Last Rainforest (which Avatar incidentally cribbed from as well), Happy Feet and other environmentally-conscious animated efforts. Messages about corporate interests poisoning the natural world remain depressingly relevant, but there have already been so many kid’s films with those themes that you have to broach the subject with more nuance than what’s on display here.

A member of Pixar’s senior creative team since 2022, Daniel Chong has his first shot here at directing a full feature for the studio and developed the story with fellow Pixar mainstay Jesse Andrews. He recruits a talented comedic ensemble of Saturday Night Live alum like Bobby Moynihan, Melissa Villaseñor and Ego Nwodim to voice cute animals that reside in the woods. Meryl Streep and Dave Franco fill out the dramatic side as an insect mother and son duo that seek to use the “hopping” technology for revenge against constantly interloping humans. Their sinister plot gives way to a third act that’s surprisingly menacing for a Pixar movie but even the darker turns don’t fully make up for a story whose stakes are largely superficial up to that point.

Between a montage set to “Working For The Weekend” where fuzzy creatures rebuild a dam and lines like “flock around and find out!” from a goose character, Hoppers feels tossed-off and regressive for a studio that knows better. Even if you’re going to populate your movie with myriad woodland dwellers, you can still write them with a sophistication that makes them memorable in addition to being adorable. With the exception of Mabel, the human characters are similarly underwritten and mainly just relied on as props to keep the action moving. The nature animation, particularly of the beaver’s Superlodge community, is predictably awe-inspiring from an animation house that is second to none when it comes to crafting intricate digital worlds. But in terms of storytelling, Hoppers feels like a hop backward in time to an era when simply compiling “wacky” animated critters was enough to win the day.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Bride!, a gothic crime movie starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, in which a companion is created for a reanimated creature and the pair spark up romance, police interest and radical social change.
Also playing in theaters is Dolly, a horror film starring Fabianne Therese and Seann William Scott, involving a young woman who fights for survival after being abducted by a deranged, monster-like figure who wants to raise her as their child.
Streaming on Netflix is War Machine, a sci-fi action movie starring Alan Ritchson and Dennis Quaid, which follows the final recruits of a grueling special ops boot camp who encounter a deadly force from beyond this world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

English writer-director Emerald Fennell puts the “more” in Yorkshire Moors with “Wuthering Heights”, her torrid but tawdry take on the oft-adapted Emily Brontë novel. Based on Fennell’s two previous efforts, Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, one may go into this movie expecting something similarly sinful and transgressive as her other features. But the filmmaker’s penchant for empty provocation is largely eschewed for a period piece that looks every bit the classic Hollywood romance, with only flashes of racier on-screen explications of licentious longing. Even though Romeo And Juliet is discussed at length during one scene in Fennell’s film, her version of an ostensibly similar romantic tragedy isn’t a radical reinterpretation à la Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and, given how many times Brontë’s classic has already been seen on screen, is worse off for it.

In late 18th-century England, Cathy Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington) and her father (played by Martin Clunes) take in a destitute young boy (played by Owen Cooper) without a name, whom Cathy dubs “Heathcliff”. Through the years, the two become close as Cathy teaches Heathcliff how to read and Heathcliff handles chores around the estate. As adults, Cathy (played by Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (played by Jacob Elordi) share an inseparable bond but looking to improve her situation, Cathy sets her sights on their wealthy new neighbor Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). Soon after an arranged run-in, Cathy accepts Edgar’s proposal for marriage and a heartbroken Heathcliff flees after what he sees as a betrayal of their inextricable bond. A year later, he returns to find Cathy is with child and well cared for at Linton’s manor, but she’s still secretly yearning to make an impossible affair with Heathcliff work.

Though “Wuthering Heights” isn’t the most revelatory telling of this tale, make no mistake that this is a first-rate production, where every dollar of its $80 million budget is well-represented on-screen. The production design is consistently stunning, harkening back to Golden Age theatrical opulence when the costumes and sets worked in concert to become characters in the story. One piece of gothic set design that’s particularly striking is a fireplace surrounded by melted plaster handprints, a haunting homage to the theme of reaching out for something incendiary and ill-advised. Linus Sandgren, whose cinematography in Saltburn was one of that film’s highlights, makes an absolute meal out of lavish nature settings where every moor is perpetually fog-enveloped and every sunset is blood red.

There aren’t any performances in “Wuthering Heights” that stand out as subpar but with the exception of Alison Oliver in an eccentric supporting role, not much of the acting here feels especially adventurous either. Much has been made about how star and co-producer Margot Robbie has promoted the film by waxing poetic about her off-screen “codependent” connection with Jacob Elordi. While I don’t doubt there were some sparks, I’d mostly chalk all the talk up to a marketing stunt so auditoriums could fill up for Valentine’s Day weekend. Regardless, the pair sell the love like the pros they are and indulge the darker sides of lust and obsession as well. But in a movie rife with BDSM undertones, it’s most disappointing that Cathy and Heathcliff’s mutual kink is treating everyone outside of their relationship horribly.

“Wuthering Heights” is hardly the first romantic drama to underscore an “us vs. the world” mentality but in Fennell’s cynical translation of this material, love means never having to say you’re sorry to bystanders you’ve treated with derision and contempt. There’s a mean streak in this movie’s Cathy and Heathcliff — primarily in how they manipulate others and dispose of them afterwards — that tracks with the callousness present in Fennell’s cinematic output thus far. A negative worldview comports better if you’re making a vigilante thriller or a dark comedy but when you’re tackling classical romance, it just feels like the wrong attitude to bring. Climbing these Heights wouldn’t feel as daunting if we had better footholds for character motivation beyond the doomed lovers imposing their will, no matter who they burn along the way.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
How To Make A Killing, starring Glen Powell and Margaret Qualley, is a black comedy thriller involving a young man disowned at birth by his ultra-wealthy family who will stop at nothing to reclaim his $28 billion inheritance.
I Can Only Imagine 2, starring John Michael Finley and Milo Ventimiglia, is a faith-based sequel following the lead singer of Christian band MercyMe as he struggles with his beliefs and inner demons while seeking a path through adversity.
Playing at Cinema Center is The Voice Of Hind Rajab, a docudrama nominated for the Best International Feature Film at next month’s Academy Awards about Red Crescent volunteers responding to an emergency call from a 6-year-old girl trapped in a car.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup