Review: ‘The Angry Birds Movie 2’ Is A Lackluster Deluge Of Cliched Musical Cues And Animated Pig Butts

 

We live in a fascinating time, when an animated kids’ movie based on a formerly popular phone game can generate a film franchise. 2016’s “The Angry Birds Movie” seemed like a one-off, but then it made more than $350 million internationally, and so here we are with “The Angry Birds Movie 2.” Gather up your cliched musical cues, your animated pig butts, and your recognizable messages about the importance of friendship; they’re all here in this sequel.

“The Angry Birds Movie 2” picks up where “The Angry Birds Movie” ended: Piggy Island, led by Leonard (voiced by Bill Hader) and Bird Island, led by Red (voiced by Jason Sudeikis), are now involved in an increasingly heated prank war. They don’t hate each other, but they are frenemies, especially because Piggy Island was partially destroyed in the preceding film. The birds engineer tricks on the pigs. The pigs use their superior technology to unleash an onslaught of crabs on a beach where the birds are sunbathing. Everyone is getting along, sort of, and Red is relishing the role of being the island’s hero.

Until, Leonard writes a note offering a truce—because both islands are now being attacked by another entity who keeps firing huge ice balls at them from across the ocean. The culprit is someone on far-off Eagle Island, which is horrendously cold and mostly frozen over. Eagles live there, but they have to chip through chunks of ice to catch fish; there are seals who steal their meals; and everything is encased in snow. The ice balls they are lobbing at both Piggy Island and Bird Island is clearly an attack, so what are Red and Leonard going to do about it?

The answer, obviously, is to assemble a team, which means the return of characters from the preceding film (including Josh Gad as the super-speedy Chuck and Danny McBride as the explosive Bomb) and some new faces, including Leonard’s assistant Courtney (voiced by Awkwafina) and Chuck’s sister Silver (voiced by Rachel Bloom). Silver is an engineering student with a passion for physics and planning, and her style clashes with Red, who is more melodramatic and spontaneous. Whether the two can get along, and how the team faces off against Zeta (voiced by Leslie Jones), the mysterious villain ruling over Eagle Island, are the two main concerns of “The Angry Birds Movie 2.”

Visually, “The Angry Birds Movie 2” slightly improves upon the first with clear detail: the texture of the birds’ feathers, in particular those of the fuzzy little Hatchlings, is impressive, and there’s great expressiveness to Zeta; her bright purple feathers add a jolt of color to this world of primary colors and neon greens. But too often, “The Angry Birds Movie 2” goes for not just the obvious joke, but the crassest or grossest one: We see numerous piggy butts, there’s a random scene with a focus on diarrhea, a bird devours pig snot more than once. On the one hand, Silver being a brainiac is a good thing, but Zeta’s character development feeds into some pretty heteronormative stereotypes. And the franchise’s continued reliance on labels like “stupid” and “idiot,” and numerous songs like David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Lionel Richie’s “Hello” as opportunities to turn scenes into dance parties, are a coverup for the fact that not much here is very funny.

The film’s final message about putting differences aside is a good one, but it’s not much different from “The Angry Birds Movie,” which already stressed the importance of accepting individuals who may look different from you. There are some clever spins on that formula in “The Angry Birds Movie 2,” but not so much that you can’t wait for this one to hit streaming.

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Review: Netflix's Rom-Com Dominance Continues With Formulaic But Enjoyable ‘Always Be My Maybe’

Netflix has become our go-to destination for romantic comedies, from The Incredible Jessica James to Someone Great, and they expand their dominance with Always Be My Maybe. The film is a triumph in terms of Asian-American representation, another star-making turn for comedienne Ali Wong (whose stand-up specials Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife were also released through Netflix), and a wonderfully self-aware cameo from Keanu Reeves. It doesn’t deviate much from the rom-com formula at all, but it’s an enjoyable diversion.

Always Be My Maybe traces the friendship of childhood besties Sasha Tran (Wong) and Marcus Kim (Randall Park), who grew up next door to each other in San Francisco. A latch-key kid whose parents were always busy running their store, Sasha spent her formative years with Marcus’s mother (the lovely Susan Park), who taught her how to cook. With her own Vietnamese background and Marshall’s Korean family, Sasha became increasingly interested in food—and when we see her in the present, in her mid-30s, she’s become the latest hot celebrity chef living in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Marcus is still in San Francisco, still living in his parents’ house, smoking weed and practicing dance moves in the mirror hanging in his childhood bedroom. After all these years, he’s still playing with his high school band, who has a local following but not much attention past his neighborhood. And he hasn’t spoken to Sasha in years, so when they cross paths again in San Francisco, the once-close friendship is defined by awkwardness and distance.

What drove the two friends apart? And when Sasha and Marcus reconnect, it becomes clear how different their lives are—one defined by fame and media attention, and the other with a sort of curmudgeonly resistance to how San Francisco is changing. Can they even still be friends? Or potentially something more?

Directed by Nahnatchka Khan (who created ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, in which Park stars) and written by Park, Wong, and Michael Golamco, Always Be My Maybe takes its time building up the friendship between Sasha and Marcus, demonstrating what drew them together as children, and how they complemented each other’s personalities into their teenage years. Wong’s casually foul-mouthed energy, recognizable from her stand-up, balances well with Park’s more laid-back, disdainful-of-wealth vibe, and you’ll believe the two as friends who jab at each other as easily as they laugh with each other. Reeves’s role is a hilarious one that shouldn’t be spoiled, and I won’t here, but the film can’t quite recover from his presence, speeding up a little too quickly once his character is introduced and rushing through the romantic comedy motions instead of maintaining the same steady pace as before.

But Always Be My Maybe is refreshing in the intentional way it incorporates Sasha’s and Marcus’s cultural heritages into their identities and their lives: their relationships with their parents, their understandings of personal success, and their considerations of what it means to be “authentically” Vietnamese or Korean. The conversations and arguments they have with each other about those concepts feel real, but also often hilariously funny. The supporting cast works, too: Marcus’s father, James Saito steals scenes with his ribbing of Marcus and Sasha, and as their high school friend and Sasha’s business partner, Michelle Buteau is equally blunt and reassuring in her treatment of each of them.

The familiarity to Always Be My Maybe is a little disappointing, but as an expansion of the romantic comedy genre into of a reinvention of it, the film mostly works. Wong and Park have good chemistry; the script asks intriguing questions about the first-generation experience and the transforming dynamics of San Francisco; and Reeves is dazzlingly weird. Altogether, they make Always Be My Maybe more definitively positive than its title would suggest.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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Review: ‘We Have Always Lived In The Castle’ Fails to Build The Same Spookiness As Shirley Jackson’s Classic Novel

The shadow of novelist Shirley Jackson looms large in the horror genre. Her short story “The Lottery” remains a masterful example of building dread and suspense; her novel The Haunting of Hill House is now a multi-season adaptation on Netflix; and her last work, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, gets a mostly loyal-to-the-book cinematic treatment from director Stacie Passon. Passon can’t quite match the creeping spookiness of Jackson’s source text, choosing to inject the film with additional bouts of violence that make for jarring moments but a somewhat disjointed whole.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is told from the point of view, and with narration from, 18-year-old Merricat Blackwood (American Horror Story ensemble player Taissa Farmiga), who lives with her sister Constance (a never-better Alexandra Daddario) and Uncle Julian (Crispin Glover) in their palatial home, set back from the road, away from the nearby village, secluded but not forgotten. Constance takes care of the home, cooking all their meals and caring for Uncle Julian, who is confined to a wheelchair, but she never leaves. She is bound to the place, for reasons that are revealed later in the film.

So it is up to Merricat to travel into town, to buy their groceries and their supplies, and it becomes clear that the hate between the town’s residents and the Blackwood family is a two-way street. The townspeople loathe the Blackwoods for their wealth and their isolation, and Merricat treats them like she’s a haughty aristocrat, refusing to make eye contact and insulting them. They intimidate and bully her and she loathes them, turning to spell-casting and other rituals and customs to try and exact revenge on those who hurt her and Constance.

Into this fraught situation saunters in Charles (Sebastian Stan), a young man claiming to be Merricat and Constance’s cousin, who drives up to the manor in his cherry-red convertible and who steadily—and then rapidly—assumes a position of authority within the Blackwoods’ home. He talks over Uncle Julian. He treats Merricat with barely veiled contempt. And he is sweet and kind to Constance, whose smiles for him seem wider and more genuine than the ones she gives her sister. How Merricat handles the competition for her sister’s affection, and how the townspeople will react to another Blackwood in their midst, barrels We Have Always Lived in the Castle toward its conclusion.

Jackson’s novel is told in first person by Merricat, and her interiority shapes the narrative: her adoration of Constance, her distrust of Charles, her ignorance of Uncle Julian. Not all of that translates into the screenplay written by Mark Kruger, who mostly writes Merricat as an off-kilter girl operating in only two modes: jealousy and anger. Farmiga is capable of conveying that with her wide-open eyes and hunched-over stance, but it makes Merricat’s character a little flat, and the paranoia and dread of the narrative a little less. Stan exhibits a good hair-trigger temper, and Daddario infuses her accommodating smile with a recognizable amount of sadness, but something about the ensemble never quite clicks because the characters aren’t exactly well-developed enough.

So there’s less of a spookiness to We Have Always Lived in the Castle than in Jackson’s work, but the fear and the hatred that is present in her writing style is obvious here, too. Those emotional extremes are what give the film its final powerful moments, but before then, We Have Always Lived in the Castle has a flatness and a simplification that doesn’t live up to the original novel.

Rating: 3 out of 5 

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Review: Zach Galifianakis, Hugh Jackman, and Zoe Saldana Make a Wonderful Team in Laika's 'Missing Link'

In a world where Disney increasingly owns everything, Laika Studio's latest stop-motion animation feature, Missing Link, is a refreshing change of pace from that studio's formula. Per usual, the film -- following preceding Laika offerings The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings -- is meticulously visually detailed and thematically dense, with a deeply moving message about belonging and stupendous visuals that take us from the New American West to the snowy Himalayas.

Missing Link starts with a thrilling discovery: Sir Lionel Frost (voiced by Hugh Jackman) has found the Loch Ness Monster, has used his wits and his knowledge to attract the beast, and has taken a photograph of the creature to prove his discovery. What an amazing achievement! And then the monster breaks his camera, the evidence is lost, and his assistant quits. Lionel has already squandered much of his family's fortune and developed quite a rakish reputation, but he's determined to make a name for himself as an explorer, so he sets a goal: He will find the Sasquatch creature, and by proving its existence, he will secure entry into an elite adventurers' club led by Lord Piggot-Dunceby (voiced by Stephen Fry).

But there's a rift between Lionel -- who believes in evolution, and is convinced that the Sasquatch is the "missing link" between our ape ancestors and ourselves -- and Piggot-Dunceby, who refuses to accept the scientific evidence. So although Lionel travels to the American West to find the creature, he is unaware he's being tracked by an assassin, who has orders to take out both Lionel and the creature.

Which is unfortunate, because the Sasquatch -- who Lionel names Mr. Link (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), is quite charming! He speaks English, he's well-read, he's polite, he knows who Lionel is, and he's lonely in the Pacific Northwest all by himself. As humans keep expanding into nature, Mr. Link's home is disappearing. So he asks Lionel to help him travel to the Himalayas, where he thinks the legendary Yeti creatures may be his cousins. And to get there, Lionel and Mr. Link will need help from an old flame of Lionel's, Adelina Fortnight (voiced by Zoe Saldana), who is grieving the death of her husband but is interested in reclaiming her own adventurer roots.

Missing Link benefits greatly from this excellent voice cast. Jackman brings charming haughtiness to his role, a mixture of curiousity and imperiousness that works well to transmit the dueling motivations of Lionel Frost. Galifianakis brings a lively sincerity makes Mr. Link almost immediately lovable, even as his clumsiness sometimes puts their group in danger. And although Saldana doesn't have as much to do with Adelina, she demonstrates a gentleness toward Mr. Link that is in direct contrast to Lionel and helps the adventurer move toward a greater understanding of the Sasquatch's experiences.

Every location is gorgeous and lush and detailed; the film smartly contrasts the worldview of Lionel's adventurers' club with the Yetis they eventually meet in the Himalayas in order to describe two different ways of approaching life; and the film's gentle humor helps keep its pacing brisk. With its nuanced narrative and astonishing visuals, Missing Link is another delightful offering from Laika that continues to demonstrate the studio's dominance in telling stories you'll love that you never knew you needed.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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Review: ‘Berlin, I Love You’ Is An Uneven Entry In The ‘Cities of Love’ Franchise

The “Cities of Love” franchise has been an inconsistent exercise, and it stays that way with its latest installment, “Berlin, I Love You.” The film composed of a series of vignettes about the German city veers wildly in tone, content, and character development, and quality, too. There is some zaniness here, some realistic pain, and a few stories that are so far off the mark that I’m not sure what they have to do with Berlin at all.

The films in this franchise—Paris, New York City, and Rio—sort of operate as tourist advertisements for the featured cities, and “Berlin, I Love You” has some of that. There is consistent emphasis on the city’s art and music scene, on its openness to individuals coming to the city to work on their creativity and share their creations with others, and Berlin’s unique vibe is effectively communicated to viewers.

Jim Sturgess’s photographer character captures Berlin’s citizens in beautiful black and white portraits; a puppet theater performer played by Dianna Agron draws crowds of engaged, adoring children; a tourist played by Jenna Dewan forms an instant connection with a drummer played by Nolan Funk, and their waltz transforms them to another time in the city; and street performers Sara (Rafaëlle Cohen) and Damiel (Robert Stadlober) bond over 48 hours together. Those stories in particular seem to align most with what Berlin’s citizens would want to portray about their city, about its eccentric spirit and its edgy energy, and they pay the most attention to the location where these characters live.

But there are also some stories here that seem to have absolutely nothing to do with the city, and they feel like wasted opportunities. A segment with Mickey Rourke and Toni Garrn playing would-be lovers is shockingly bad and could take place in any hotel bar in Germany, Europe, or abroad. Diego Luna is cast as a transgender woman who bonds with a 16-year-old boy on his birthday morning, but there’s nothing Berlin-specific here, either. And a story in which four women bond together after embarrassing a film director who has been accused of sexual assault is purposefully timely, with dialogue that focuses on Time’s Up and #MeToo, but those subjects are treated trivially. That vignette ends with a wink at the audience that seems completely out of place given the subject matter.

The best segments are those that consider how Berlin is changing: Keira Knightley plays a worker in a refugee camp who spars with her mother (Helen Mirren), but their interactions with a young Middle Eastern boy force them to reevaluate their relationship—this premise could be an entire movie, and Knightley’s and Mirren’s performances are solid. Similarly promising is another segment in which a sex worker hides a refugee man who has been accused of murder; those minutes unflinchingly consider the racism and nationalism present in some German citizens’ treatment of the refugees resettling in their country.

Still, it’s a mixed array, and the disparateness of “Berlin, I Love You” never quite paints a portrait of totality for the city. Perhaps that’s the point—a sort of suggestion that the city is constantly changing and transforming—but that idea could be better served with a collection of segments that are unanimous in their exploration of what Berlin means to its citizens and to outsiders. Without that cohesion, “Berlin, I Love You” is an example of diminishing returns for “Cities of Love.”

Rating: 3 out of 5

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Review: 'Outlaw King', Chris Pine And David Mackenzie Do Their Best ‘Gladiator’ And ‘Braveheart’ Impressions

In the footsteps of Gladiator, King Arthur, Braveheart, and Game of Thrones (with whom it shares many cast members) steps Outlaw King, the latest partnership between director David Mackenzie and Chris Pine, who previously worked together on 2016’s best film, Hell or High Water. Some of the same themes of that film are recreated here—relationships between fathers and sons, literal and figurative debts, the connections between violence and revenge—but this 14th century tale of Scottish lords uniting and rebelling against the English monarchy is still very much in the mold of “dudes in chainmail with swords on horses.” It’s a formula done well, but still a formula.

Outlaw King takes place in Scotland and England after the failed uprising of William Wallace (which you may remember from Mel Gibson’s Braveheart), who has fled and is in hiding; in his absence, English King Edward I (Stephen Dillane, or, Stannis Baratheon from GOT!) forces the other Scottish lords to swear fealty to England. The decision to bend the knee by Robert de Brus (James Cosmo, or Jeor Mormont, from GOT!) rankles his son Robert the Bruce (Pine), but the patriarch makes a decision for the future of his family: Give up dreams of a united Scotland with its own king now, and survive into the future, for generations and generations afterward.

“It’s ours to bear,” Robert the Bruce says to his brothers of their father’s decision, but things change quickly when tragedy strikes twice: First when Robert de Brus dies, and then when the English monarchy announces the capture and murder of William Wallace, with various body parts of his put on display throughout Scotland, to send a message. Enraged, Robert the Bruce decides to seize power in an attempt to name himself king of Scotland, a decision that inspires Edward I to send his son and heir Edward, Prince of Wales (Billy Howle), to kill Robert and all the Scots who follow him.

Outlaw King will feel familiar to anyone who has seen the last few seasons of Game of Thrones, when Sansa and Jon traveled around the North, trying to round up men to join their uprising, and there are echoes here of the climactic fight between the Starks and the Boltons, too. (If you can't handle watching horses get killed, you may need to sit this one out.) But of course that makes sense because so much of George R. R. Martin’s novels are inspired by true stories such as this, of the bloody and violent struggles for power that shaped the British empire and its subsequent colonization of so much of the rest of the world.

And so while Outlaw King feels familiar, it is ultimately upholding a specific genre construct, and doing it successfully. There is an almost unbelievably well-done 20-minute tracking shot that opens the film, introducing all the key players and their varying motivations in a dizzying example of technical mastery. That solid pacing continues throughout; the movie moves briskly, and although the timeline—like so many movies these days—feels a little fuzzy, like what we watched could be taking up days or weeks or months, it’s still edited in a way that keeps the action moving without feeling too rushed.

Pine’s Scottish accent is pretty believable, and he works well as a man worn out by years of war who has to learn that the chivalrous choice isn’t always the smartest one. It’s a similar role to his subdued-then-violent brother in Hell or High Water, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson fills the Ben Foster role by stealing scenes as the crazed James Douglas, a man desperate to avenge his family’s death and reclaim his ancestral lands from the Englishmen who stole them.

But this is very much a Movie About Men, and so Florence Pugh, as Robert’s wife Elizabeth, is fairly underserved. She falls in love with Robert because he's smart and kind and abstains from having sex with her until she’s ready (in a cliched, disappointing “lovemaking” scene), but when she swears her loyalty to him, it feels perfunctory at best. The character isn’t developed enough to make her support of her husband feel worthwhile to the narrative.

Oh, and let me just say this: This was a movie that KEEPS getting hyped as having full frontal Chris Pine nudity, and that is a LIE. The split-second moment is NOT WORTH IT unless you were interested in seeing a sequel to Braveheart anyway. Do not watch Outlaw King for Pine Jr.; you will feel manipulated and lied to.

But, for what it is, Outlaw King is effective, if not exactly thrilling; there are no big speeches like Gibson’s “They’ll never take our freedom” in Braveheart or Russell Crowe’s “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius” declaration in Gladiator. The battle scenes are cleanly shot and often grotesque, as befits the time period; the motivations for Robert the Bruce’s actions track and will garner the audience’s sympathies; and there’s a moment when Taylor-Johnson, covered in blood and grime, screams his own name into the sky after murdering a bunch of men in vengeance. That’s the kind of stuff you want from a historical battle epic like this, and Outlaw King delivers.

Outlaw King is now streaming on Netflix and available in limited theaters. 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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Review: Documentary ‘Mercury 13’ is a Must-See Companion Piece to ‘Hidden Figures'

In 2016, Hidden Figures shared with audiences a story we should known decades ago: that dozens of black women, including mathematician Katherine Johnson, engineer Mary Jackson, and computer specialist Dorothy Vaughan, worked for NASA during the space race with the USSR and helped American astronauts like John Glenn reach the moon. That is awesome and inspirational! We never learned that in school textbooks! The movie, starring Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monae, Octavia Spencer, and Mahershala Ali, was great!

And now the documentary Mercury 13 offers another bit of space race history that you may not know, and that is as infuriating as the racism and dismissal faced by the women in Hidden Figures: that 13 women were identified as being physically and mentally suitable to be U.S. astronauts, and NASA refused.

 “It was a good old boy network, and there was no such thing as a good old girl network” says one of the women interviewed in Mercury 13, currently airing on Netflix. The original Netflix documentary from filmmakers David Sington and Heather Walsh focuses on Project Mercury, NASA’s program to send a man into space, which began in 1958. The men were subjected to a series of strenuous physical and mental tests administered by physician and surgeon William Randolph Lovelace, and when the seven participants were selected, many of the Mercury 7 would go on to become household names, like Glenn.

But at the same time, Lovelace was also putting out a call for women to take the same tests. Mercury 13 puts a spotlight on Lovelace’s daughter, Jackie Lovelace Johnson, who remembers the Mercury 7 coming to her home for dinner and shares how her father, after spending time with the selected men, began to feel strongly about having a group of female astronauts as well. So he invited more than two dozen women who were decorated pilots to take the test at his clinic, without the knowledge of NASA or the U.S. government, to determine whether his hunch that women would have some stronger physical and emotional attributes than men was correct.

And the women, enthralled with the idea of getting to space, were thrilled to be there. Mercury 13 features interviews with a number of them: Wally Funk, of the “good old girl network” quote, who talks about feeling her most free at 20 years old in California, flying her own plane; Rhea Woltman, who shares that her parents didn’t like the idea of her becoming a pilot, but she “knew better” and did it anyway; and Sarah Ratley, who shares the story of her first flight as being the first “new adventure” of many. Also included are Bob Steadman, husband of the late “B” Steadman, whose accomplishments he speaks of with deep pride and love, and Jim and Ann Hart, two of the eight children of pilot Janey Hart, whom they refer to as “Mother” while speaking of her determination and pluck.

Mercury 13 does a good job explaining the origins of women in aeronautics, using archival footage of women in day dresses and pearls getting in and out of cockpits, fixing their makeup while sitting in planes, and generally juxtaposing their ‘50s feminine aesthetic with machines they weren’t expected to fly. And the movie also goes the next step of pointing out how Project Mercury’s specifications for potential astronauts were particularly engineered to keep women out, instead resulting in, as Ratley says, “cookie-cutter males” with no difference in religion or state of origin, “all exactly the same.”

How the dreams of the Mercury 13 ended isn’t necessarily a surprise, but the documentary effectively links the story to more-recent times by tracking how the experiences of these women, including their testifying before Congress, shaped the future of NASA and the astronaut program in years to come. But what is a little lacking is that the film doesn’t include any commentary from NASA or any government officials; none of the people the women identify as standing in the way of the Mercury 13 is questioned. It’s enlightening to hear their opinions on the Mercury 7—especially their sexist stories about Glenn, who was portrayed so positively in Hidden Figures—but disappointing that the filmmakers don’t take the next step of interrogating the individuals who let sexism get in the way of progress.

Nevertheless, Mercury 13 is a must-see for anyone who saw and enjoyed Hidden Figures, and who may not have known about the contributions of these women to our space race success. They were denied an opportunity that could have changed American society for decades afterward, and their story needs to be known.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 

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Review: 'Midnight Sun,' Starring Bella Thorne, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Rob Riggle

What is there to say about Midnight Sun that hasn't already been said about all movies in the very specific subgenre of "sick teen girl falls in love with romantic, devoted boy; sad things happen"? There is a sick girl. She falls in love with a romantic, devoted boy. Sad things happen. Honestly! There is nothing else to say!

But OK, fine, let's try anyway. A remake of a Japanese film from 2006 that was a sort of extended music video for its star, pop singer Yui, Midnight Sun focuses on teenager Katie (Bella Thorne), who has the rare disease xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP. She is basically allergic to the sun, meaning she spends her days cooped up inside, hovered over by her photographer father Jack (Rob Riggle), scribbling lyrics in her journal and pining over the handsome Charlie (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Desperate to breathe outside air, she sneaks out of her house at night to play her acoustic guitar, finally piquing Charlie's attention.

Do they fall in love? They sure as hell do! For weeks Katie meets Jack only at night for frenzied makeout sessions while her secret lingers over their relationship. He rents her recording time at a studio; they make dopey adorable eyes at each other. But a movie like this has a foregone conclusion, and each scene only takes you closer to the inevitable, obvious end.

Thorne is doing what she can with an underwritten, trapped-princess character, and while she goes for a little zaniness and a little slapstick humor, it doesn't really jive. (And of course, like so many "sick girls" in film, she's beautiful throughout, with only a slight thrill of danger in a scene where Katie and Charlie stay out too long, and only a more-pale lipstick shade hinting at a downward turn in her health.) And although Schwarzenegger will certainly grab some hearts (especially from teen girls who may remember his relationship with Miley Cyrus) and does the dreamy, committed boyfriend thing well, the character is also kind of absurd -- dude, you didn't realize for weeks that you never saw your girlfriend during the day? Really?

Everything is shot like and everyone is dressed like they're on a vintage '90s WB teen drama; Thorne is an okay singer but none of her songs is memorable; and the ending of the film is more of an eyeroller than a tearjerker. Midnight Sun will have a very particular audience, and you'll know if you're a member of it. If not, stay away.

Review: 1 out of 5 

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Review: ‘Early Man,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, and Timothy Spall

Maybe you don’t know Aardman Animations by name; in the United States, they don’t have the instant recognition of Pixar or Disney. But chances are you know the UK studio’s distinctive stop-motion clay-animation work, like the characters Wallace and Gromit, their first major hit “Chicken Run,” and the recently charming “Shaun of the Sheep.” Their latest, “Early Man,” is mostly the same: a little eccentric, a little erratic, equally hilarious and gross visually, and consistently amusing.

From the start, “Early Man” feels quite European—a variety of British accents are peppered through this thing, evidenced by the cast of Brits, like Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, and Timothy Spall—and that’s even before it’s revealed that the movie is actually an origin story for the game of soccer. (Excuse me—football.) The humor is a little drier and more macabre, and the plot centers on a feudal system in which an evil lord is forcing his subjects to pay “voluntary contributions” that go straight into his pockets. It may all be a little unfamiliar to American kids used to the multicolored and fast-paced insanity of most children’s films, but once the laughs get going (and they do, fairly quickly), they should be won over.

The film begins in a secluded forest, where a Stone Age-era tribe led by Chief Bobnar (voiced by Spall) has a quiet, nondramatic existence. They hunt small rabbits, make friends with rocks, and in general don’t do anything risky, reckless, or challenging, to the increased disappointment of young caveman Dug (voiced by Redmayne). With his trusty pet pig Hogknob by his side, Dug wants to encourage the tribe members to dream bigger, but that plan is undermined when the tribe’s forest lands are attacked by soldiers from the Bronze Age, who live in the land surrounding the forest.

The soldiers are under the control of Lord Nooth (voiced by Hiddleston), kind of pronounced like the word “nose” if you had a cold, who does, in fact, have a large, aggressive nose. The man is obsessed with bronze—with crafting things from it, counting it, and collecting it—and he’s convinced that the forest has untapped reserves that should go into his pockets. When Dug accidentally sneaks into the Bronze Age city, he sees examples of Lord Nooth’s greed, but also something he’s never seen before: a game played in a field, in which two opposing teams of players kick a ball at each other toward two opposing goals.

Lord Nooth calls it “football,” and he claims it’s a game that only the advanced Bronze Age society would dream up, and of course a game that only men play. But in Dug’s desperation, he challenges Lord Nooth’s champion team: If Dug and his tribe can beat them, they can go back to the forest and Lord Nooth won’t mine it. But if they lose, well, the land goes to Lord Nooth, and the tribe will have to work in the mines and live in the Badlands, which are fiery, desolate, and full of weird animals, like gigantic, man-eating mallard ducks.

What happens next is of a type with most any sports-related film: there are training sequences, and various montages of the tribe members pushing and encouraging each other, and an unexpected ally in the form of Goona, a young Bronze Age woman who is infuriated with the fact that Lord Nooth won’t let girls pay soccer, and who wants to change the status quo. Various messages about believing in yourself, changing your fate, and challenging others’ expectations of you are attached to all this, too.

What helps set “Early Man” apart, though, is that stop-motion clay-animation style, which is so visually striking, and a nice sense of zany humor, like the aforementioned giant mallard, a scene where Hogknob somehow ends up massaging and serenading an unsuspecting Lord Nooth, and a gag where a message-delivering bird ends up putting to memory only the things Lord Nooth doesn’t want to share with others. For the most part, scenes play out like you would expect, but every so often one takes an off-kilter turn that you’ll unexpectedly enjoy.

The voice performances are solid (Redmayne and Hiddleston are particularly unrecognizable, which is a good thing), the visual gags are plentiful (I perhaps laughed a little too hard at a joke about flopping in football), and the humor is continuous. “Early Man” is another Aardman Animations offering that delivers frivolity and feeling in equal measure.

Rating: 4 out of 5 

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Review: Documentary ‘Bill Nye: Science Guy’ Considers the Legacy of the TV Star as He Battles Deniers of Evolution and Climate Change

A specific generation of children grew up on Bill Nye The Science Guy. The show made scientific topics understandable for kids, and Bill Nye knew how to ham it up and goof around in a way that was appealing to young audiences. In our pop culture memory, it was the TV version of Nye (along, of course, with Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus) who provided us with an introduction to science.

These days, decades after the end of the show and during a time when anti-science thinking is not only rampant, but it’s taken up residence in the White House, Nye seems like a lone wolf fighting against a tide of misinformation. He’s on CNN and Fox News, he’s holding public debates and events, he’s leaning into the “Science Guy” persona as much as ever. It is easy to view him as an advocate, and perhaps tempting to see him as a hero.

But what the documentary Bill Nye: Science Guy achieves, as the best documentaries do, is peer behind the curtain of illusion and try to find some kind of truth. What that entails for filmmakers David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg is raising questions about Nye’s credentials (he has a bachelor’s degree in engineering, but no other formal science training) and his career (details are revealed about how he tried to go rogue with the Science Guy TV idea, leaving his collaborators behind), and following it up with: Does it matter? Does the work Nye is doing to support science in the culture and in the public sphere outweigh his own desire for fame and his own performative nature? Or is his approach more self-serving than helpful?

Bill Nye: Science Guy walks a fine line: It abstains from making those decisions for viewers, but it also provides a good amount of history about Nye and context about how other scientists view his transition from TV host to fighting creationists and climate change deniers. And the documentary also observes and interviews those opponents of Bill, too, like Ken Ham, a creationist with big money and big backers whose museum refuting evolution has exhibits showing dinosaurs and humans next to each other (Nye’s dry delivery of “to suggest this to school children is … irresponsible at best” is pretty killer) and has a mannequin with a thought bubble “I NEVER HEARD THIS BEFORE IN SCHOOL.” Screen time is also given to meteorologist Joe Bastardi, a vehement climate change denier who argues “Is it worth crashing the American economy? No, I don’t believe that” and whose son shows up to rattle Nye during a public appearance. And there’s also anthropologist Dr. Eugenie Scott, who says of Nye, “I don’t know what Bill’s goals are”—a slightly skeptical undercurrent that pops up a few times from other scientists interviewed in the documentary.

But the time spent with Bill captures a complicated man who seems to be battling his own feelings of personal inadequacy (he gets teary-eyed when discussing his parents; he mentions regret over not having his own family) and who understands his own shortcomings. “I don’t have a PhD, so I talk to the experts,” he says, and we see him do it, traveling to laboratories and universities and organizations to learn more about the subjects he then discusses in front of public audiences. Is Bill a mouthpiece who is furthering his own fame? Bill Nye: Science Guy allows viewers to make their own conclusions. But the documentary is clear in its presentation of Nye as a man who is self-aware of how others will view his limitations but still determined to keep moving forward in the defense of science and in the education of children, and that is an admirable thing. “Just trying to change the world here,” Nye says at the end of Bill Nye: Science Guy, and I believed him.

RATING: 3.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

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Review: Jon Bernthal and Christopher Abbott Face Off in the Thriller ‘Sweet Virginia’

People keep making the mistake of messing with Jon Bernthal. The actor has carved out a pretty solid niche for himself playing the tough guy with a sensitive streak that you don’t want to cross—from Wind River to The Punisher to Baby Driver—and he continues that streak with the thriller Sweet Virginia. As a former rodeo rider trying to live a small life in a small town, Bernthal simmers as Sam, a guy choosing to keep his emotions in check as the universe continues to serve him a series of a setbacks. But how much can one person take?

Things in Sweet Virginia kick off with a murder, as so many thrillers do. In a bar one night, three men play a game of cards, drinking and kvetching, until another man comes in and shoots them all dead. He double checks that they’re goners, and then shoots them a couple of times again for good measure.

The small town hasn’t seen anything this gruesome in a long time, and Sweet Virginia then pivots focus to two of the widows: the younger Lila (Imogen Poots), whose wide eyes seem in a perpetual state of disbelief, and the older Bernadette (Rosemarie DeWitt), who is having a quiet affair with Sam. The two sneak between his motel room and her home, and although there is clear affection between the two of them, a barrier is obvious, too. He puts a picture of a woman and a young girl away when she visits. She always asks whether anyone saw him come by. They’re in each other’s lives, but neither will fully surrender themselves, either.

This is fairly standard small-town life, and that’s why Elwood (Christopher Abbott) sticks out like a sore thumb. A new arrival staying at the Sweet Virginia Motor Hotel that Sam manages, Elwood couldn’t be more obviously different from those around him. He has a way of speaking that sounds like it’s a struggle to get clipped, brusque words out. He has a trigger temper, muttering a stream of vulgar insults under his breath at whoever pisses him off. But he recognizes Sam from his rodeo days, and he’s the only person Elwood seems to treat with any kind of respect. “You must get recognized” around here, he insists, and when Sam demurs, the Elwood response is perfectly in line with his character: “They’re fucking idiots.”

It is inevitable that Sam and Elwood will circle each other, and because Sweet Virginia is a pretty effective genre piece, the movie takes its time building the tension required between the two men. We see each interact with other people, cementing their personalities—Sam’s struggle to react to other people’s dismissal; Elwood’s phone call to a mother who doesn’t seem to remember him—and the pacing is measured enough that scenes seem to unspool rather than unravel.

And this is an absurd cast: Jonathan Tucker makes a foul-mouthed impression in his brief few minutes of screen time; Poots and DeWitt draw you into their dynamic of two women trying to move on from a horrendous crime; and of course, Bernthal and Abbott play quite well off each other. The shortcoming of Sweet Virginia, though, is that its sparseness means Sam and Elwood unfortunately don’t have that many scenes together, and because the narrative is kicked off with the murders, the forward momentum of the plot is tied directly to that event, and doesn’t have much room to grow.

Sweet Virginia would benefit from more interactions between its main characters and an expanded plot, but it’s a sign of the overall quality of the film that the complaint is we want more. Cut from the same cloth as the modern-day classic Blue Ruin, Sweet Virginia is a solid genre exercise.

RATING: 3.5 OUT OF 5 STARS 

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Review: “Bitch,” Starring Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, and Jaime King

There are two facial expressions that are secret weapons in Marianna Palka’s film Bitch: Her own glare, which is a determined look that communicates layers upon layers of disgust and resentment, and her costar Jason Ritter’s dopey grin, which he uses as a defense mechanism against knowledge of his own inadequacy. Together, how Palka captures rage and how Ritter demonstrates irresponsibility are the keys to a film that addresses personal and marital dissatisfaction in what is purposefully an off-putting way—with a person, who for years has been treated with a lack of humanity, quitting acting human altogether.

Bitch is written and directed by Palka, who you may recognize from Neflix’s GLOW, and there is some overlap between how that series jumped tonally between physical comedy antics and deep-seated personal anxiety and this film.  On a very surface level, you could smirk at how Jill Hart (Palka), when she assumes the identity of a vicious dog and stops acting human, throws her shit around and intimidates her philandering husband Bill (Ritter) and refuses to engage with her children. She is that bitch.

But consider the scenario for even slightly longer than a few seconds and there is, of course, something profoundly sad about it—about the degree to which Jill is pushed around and the depths to which she’ll plunge to exert even any semblance of control over her life. Her kids yell at her and take her for granted. Her husband simultaneously ignores and belittles her. When the film opens with a scene of Jill trying to hang herself from the dining room chandelier in their upper-class home, you know things are already pretty damn dark.

The premise of Bitch is pretty straightforward, and the film isn’t necessarily that surprising narratively once you accept the basic idea that Jill would rather scramble around her basement’s home naked, defecating and urinating freely, then listen to her husband’s lies or her children’s whining any longer (and I don’t blame her, because they are all initially terrible). What the plot does when Jill’s storyline is fairly contained is switch to Ritter as Bill, who is your typically awful husband who uses his demanding, well-paying job as a way to totally disengage from his children and abuse his wife. Ritter is all zeal, from how he collapses in an elementary school playground after having to spend a morning with his four children (the horror!) to the self-righteous way he mocks a doctor (a woman, of course) who suggests that Jill would benefit from psychiatric care. It’s hard to imagine another actor with Ritter’s unique combination of affability and smugness who would work as well as Bill, and although the film leans on his character more than you would expect, he can handle it.

As a foil to Bill, Jaime King as Jill’s sister Beth is a grounding presence; her increasing, barely contained frustration with her brother-in-law serves as a reflection of our own audience experience. It’s her reaction that the film uses to play with horror tropes; in a scene where Beth tries to remind Jill of their shared childhood, the use of camera angles and framing makes the confrontation feel more like something out of a zombie film than a family drama. It’s an effective switch-up that keeps Jill mysterious and unknowable.

Still, it’s a little disappointing how cut-and-dry the film gets toward the end, and how tidily—and somewhat expectedly—the narrative deconstructs the components of an upper-class suburban life to signify true happiness. And how Jill’s transformation is ultimately an impetus for Bill’s realization of how to be a better father and a better husband is a little disingenuous, too, since it seems to stymie her own character development at the expense of Bill’s.

Nevertheless, Bitch is darkly funny and often oddly satisfying, and how perfectly Palka and Ritter understand their roles goes a long way. The film could have skewed a bit more horror or a bit more comedy, but the family-drama lane it chooses isn’t bad either.

REVIEW: 3 OUT OF 5 STARS

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Review: ‘Only the Brave,’ Starring Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Taylor Kitsch, Jeff Bridges, and Jennifer Connelly

Only the Brave is very upfront about what it is: a movie about manly men doing manly things. That observation is not to undermine the bravery and skill required for what the Granite Mountain Hotshots did, which was fighting raging fires around the country, for hours and days at a time, saving people and towns from destruction. And it’s also not to diminish the sacrifice these men made, which you can tell is coming but still guts you. But while Only the Brave is a well-acted and well-made film, the testosterone with which it defines itself is almost overwhelming.

All you need to do is look at this cast, and you’ll understand the vibe here: Josh Brolin, Jeff Bridges, Miles Teller, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch. They’ve played federal agents, police officers, gun runners, military men, all those super-masculine roles that are so often portrayed in film. Sometimes it even feels like Only the Brave is on a personal quest to one-up itself with every scene of the men together: They drink Budweiser and do whiskey shots; they perform tricks with their chainsaws; they ride horses and hang out in the desert.

Oh, and they also rush into the front lines of fires. The film, which is based on the article “No Exit” published in GQ by journalist Sean Flynn, follows a municipal firefighting crew from Prescott, Arizona, who aspire to be hotshots, federally funded firefighters who travel around the country engaging with fires on the front lines. They speak disparagingly of the “structure” side of firefighting—which involves protecting buildings instead of using manpower to contain and fight the fire—and pride themselves on the danger and knowledge required for their job.

But what that means, in real life, is that the men are always short on sleep, barely have time with their families, and are living on the edge. Superintendent Eric Marsh (Brolin) has been working for four years to get his crew of 19 men certified as hotshots, but it’s a desire that is increasingly keeping him away from his wife, Amanda (Jennifer Connelly). Former pothead burnout Brendan McDonough (Teller) wants to become a firefighter to provide for his newborn daughter, but the job may be too demanding for someone who used to spend days high on his couch. And while the swaggering Christopher MacKenzie (Kitsch) is a shit talker of the highest order, his brusque humor and pranking nature rubs some guys the wrong way.

Only the Brave excels with its character development, which lets these men stand on their own individually and then come together when they get the call to report to yet another disastrous fire. The most attention is paid to Marsh and Brendan, who is nicknamed “Donut,” and their relationship is effectively built: The fatherless Donut is honored by the expectations Marsh places upon him, and in the young man, the superintendent sees a shadow of his former self. Their bond is believable and engrossing, and the gruff Brolin and sensitive Teller have good chemistry.

What is infuriating, then, is how much the movie underserves its few female characters: The mother of Donut’s daughter comes around every so often to complain about something or another, and while Connelly has the most screentime, her storyline is eventually simplified into motherhood, too. Only the Brave has endless interest and patience in its male characters, but little interest in the women it shows loving them.

Still, director Joseph Kosinski has a good visual eye: The movie opens with an inferno-like nightmare that haunts the rest of the film, and there are many overhead shots that capture the scale of the fires and the wildness of the Arizona landscape in which these men live. Plus, the firefighting scenes themselves are well-designed, helping viewers to understand the chaos of those situations and the control the Granite Mountain Hotshots brought to their job. With that foundation of clear visual storytelling in place, Kosinski effectively makes the final sequence of the film so captivating and so terrifying.

With all those strong elements in mind, the film’s missed opportunities are even more glaring. It’s not only the underwritten female characters, but also how the film ends in a somewhat anticlimactic way—what was the future of the Granite Mountain Hotshots? Only the Brave excels as an examination of a group of men and their interpersonal dynamics, but when it deviates away from rightfully honoring these men, it falters. 

RATING: 3.5 OUT OF FIVE STARS 

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Review: ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’ Is Thought-Provoking And Scintillating, But Not Illuminating

It is honestly kind of a marvel that DC Comics is letting Professor Marston and the Wonder Women be released. In this year, when Wonder Woman is one of the only bona fide smashes at the box office, has dominated cultural conversation for months, and has proved once and for all that Chris Pine is the No. 1 Chris, it’s shocking that DC Comics is allowing Professor Marston and the Wonder Women to make its way to theaters. With all of its scintillating sexual content, context about the battled past of the Wonder Woman character, and positive presentation of polyamorous love, Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is certainly a thought-provoking film experience—but it sure isn’t family-friendly.

Most glaring is the underdone character development, and it must be mentioned that writer and director Angela Robinson has said in interviews that there was no explicit documentation regarding a romantic relationship between Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne, who in the film are presented as being lovers for years. This is Robinson’s interpretation of the relationship between Wonder Woman creator Dr. William Mouton Marston and Elizabeth and Olive, and while it provides much of the film’s eyebrow-raising sexual content, if you want 100% historical accuracy, you won’t find it here. And anyway, that's not really the point. 

The film focuses primarily on the Marstons: William (Luke Evans) is a psychology professor at Harvard Radcliffe College, the women’s sister school to Harvard University that existed because the Ivy League at the time wouldn’t admit anyone but men, and Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) is his wife and research partner. She has a law degree and a master’s degree but Harvard University refuses to accept her into their PhD program, so she applies her deep intelligence and acerbic wit to her husband’s work.

They’re working on many things—a theory about human behavior that links together dominance and submission; an early version of the lie-detector test—but their married dynamic is mostly centered around William’s respect for his wife and Elizabeth’s resentment of social norms at the time. It’s a push-pull that is mostly defined by Elizabeth’s mercurial moods, and things only seem to get more intense when they meet Olive (Bella Heatcoate), a 22-year-old taking William’s psychology course. She applies to be the Marstons’s research assistant, and Elizabeth is immediately threatened, driving Olive to tears with her brusque “If you fuck my husband, I’ll kill you.”

Still, the attraction William feels for Olive is obvious to anyone, and as the three pursue their research together, a sort of kinship develops between them all. But Olive doesn’t return William’s lustful gazes—she’s doing some longing of her own toward Elizabeth. And through a series of events and altercations, including a spanking incident during a sorority pledging ceremony and an early version of the lie-detector test, there are admissions between the three that shape their lives to come, for better and for worse.

“What we want can never happen because the world won’t let it,” Elizabeth says, and that statement is underlined throughout the film when numerous parties, from Olive’s fiancé to suburban neighbors to family values groups, object to how William, Elizabeth, and Olive choose to live, and how their polyamory informs the creation of the Wonder Woman character. But while the film very effectively portrays the uphill battle the three of them faced when living their lives together, it is less successful in actually developing these characters fully on an individual basis and then growing them together as a romantic unit.

The film uses William’s defense of the Wonder Woman character before a review board as a framing device, and Evans is clearly the protagonist here; his research is the couple’s primary motivation, he’s the breadwinner in his marriage to Elizabeth, and he pursues Olive first. Practically everything centers around William, and it becomes repetitively disappointing that he is so often the one urging the women together. They can’t be honest with what they want unless he encourages them; they don’t tap into their sexual desires until he provides them with an outlet; they don’t realize their lifelong devotion to each other until he almost commands it. While the script solidly reiterates how the Wonder Woman character was born out of a desire to condition children into accepting and respecting strong women, it also focuses so much on William to the detriment of Elizabeth and Olive.

Does Olive have a defining characteristic aside from being submissive? If there is something, this film doesn’t uncover it. Heathcote is a striking figure in the corset, thigh-high boots, cuff bracelets, and coil of rope that would inform the Wonder Woman character design, but she’s given too little to do. She loves Elizabeth despite the woman’s constant undermining and belittling, and is defined only by her devotion to others, not herself. And the flip side of that is Elizabeth, who Hall excellently performs as a “grade-A bitch,” as William describes, but who is similarly problematically presented. She goes from being a foul-mouthed shit-stirrer and female warrior to a resentful and disgruntled secretary attacking everyone and everything around her, and while the movie makes clear how the patriarchy drove her to that point, that doesn’t legitimize her cruelty to her husband or to her lover. You can understand why someone would admire her, but not why they would love her.

The character shortcomings are most disappointing because the film is intentional in other ways that are impossible to ignore: the sex scenes are sensual without being exploitative; no character is objectified because of their gender; and the matter-of-fact handling of pornography and BDSM-inspired kink ensures that the movie isn’t titillating for the wrong reasons. But ultimately, it feels like Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is trying to do too much without quite enough; it is, by the filmmaker’s own admission, creating a narrative for which little historical data exists. And although the movie does a good job contextualizing Wonder Woman’s iconography and presenting a different kind of love story onscreen, it also cuts too many corners in its formulation to feel like the origin story this story truly deserves.  

RATING: 3.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

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Review: Q’orianka Kilcher Captures The Storytelling Spirit of ‘Te Ata’ In Inspirational Biopic

There is much to respect about the biopic Te Ata, which tells the story of the same-named Native American performer and storyteller. The movie has an excellent cast with recognizable faces like Gil Birmingham and Graham Greene; the script from Jeannie Barbour and Esther Luttrell is tightly written and well-paced; and Q'orianka Kilcher has a role worthy of her considerable charm. And while the direction and production design seem a little made-for-TV, this is still a story that needed to be told, one which unfurls enjoyably and educationally here.

It’s been 12 years since Kilcher played Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s gorgeous, evocative The New World, and in Te Ata, Kilcher has a scene where someone dismissively calls her—a Native American of Chickasaw heritage, dreaming of making it as a mainstream actress—by that woman’s name. This is after she’s rejected from auditions, objectified with skimpy fringed outfits, and otherwise ignored and demeaned. Through all that crap, you’ll identify and sympathize with Kilcher, who gives a riveting, fantastic performance as Mary Frances Thompson, the popular storyteller who brought Native American stories to countless audiences across the United States under the stage name Te Ata.

But before Fisher was criss-crossing the country, bringing her act to various small towns and increasingly large audiences, she was a child growing up in the Chickasaw land before it became Oklahoma. One of many born to Chickasaw father T. B. Thompson (Birmingham) and German mother Bertie (Brigid Brannagh), Mary Frances comes of age when her uncle Doug (Graham Greene) is battling with the U.S. government for more funding and support for their community.

The smirking, belittling “democracy” offered by the white men representing the U.S. government is frustrating for Doug but infuriating for T.B., who wants to forbid Mary Frances from attending college, going to New York City, or pursuing her dream of Broadway. But Mary Frances does all three anyway against her father’s urging to settle down with a “nice and normal” life; instead, Mary Frances heeds Doug’s observation that “People are afraid of what they don’t know” and sets out to teach them through her storytelling.

There are challenges, of course. Her roommate at the Oklahoma College for Women is judgmental and doesn’t pick up on Mary Frances’s overwhelming sarcasm when she says of her placement at the college, “Yes, we Indians are very grateful.” She’s first rejected from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, who tell her to apply again without any consideration of her talent or her effort. And the white audiences that Te Ata performs for are politely inquisitive about the treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government, but they don’t want real answers to their questions. They want Te Ata’s stories and that’s it, not her honest experiences or opinions—not in all their isolation, oppression, and pain.

That’s not to suggest that Te Ata is a dark film; it’s quite the opposite, thanks to bright lighting, natural locations like forests and fields, and Kilcher’s ever-sunny disposition. There is lots of positivity and reverence here in how Te Ata presents her stories, and Kilcher absolutely nails the performative scenes, with powerful emotion and graceful physicality. It’s even more impactful, then, when her even-keeled optimism is contrasted with disgust at rude casting directors or sadness at her father’s possessiveness. Kilcher gets all the different aspects of both Mary Frances and Te Ata right, and she’s the charismatic magnet of this whole thing.

There are some elements of the film that seem simplified—her relationship with her future husband seems particularly sped up, and her parents’ personalities are somewhat flattened—and there is a repetitive trend later in the film that involves white people over and over again telling Te Ata what an important responsibility she has. Overall, though, Te Ata wants to tell one particular story, and it does so well. For anyone who doesn’t know who Te Ata was—and there are absolutely too many of us—this biopic is inspirational and necessary.

RATING: 3.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

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