Tag: review

Movie review: Toy Story 5

Jessie faces Lilypad

My wife and I went to see the movie Toy Story 5 on a weekday afternoon at the Spectrum 8 in Albany because I had to. I’ve seen Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999) in the cinema well before we had a child. When we watched the third film (2010), we didn’t take the kid. For the fourth (2019), the three of us all saw it at the movies, but not together. I even saw a couple of TV specials, Toy Story of Terror! (2013) and Toy Story That Time Forgot (2014). But I never saw the Lightyear (2022) movie. 

So I guess I’m as invested in the TS universe as others are in the ones for Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic, or LEGO.

Bonnie, the eight-year-old who inherited Andy’s toys in TS4, is rather content with playtime, which is represented wonderfully in a handmade-looking style. But her parents are concerned. They buy her a new smart tablet, Lilypad, so Bonnie can chat with her dance class members. Has Bonnie outgrown her toys?

On the outskirts of town, Blaze, a nine-and-a-half-year-old, loves animals: a horse, Daffodil, and the family pig, Jimmy Dean. (The name cracked me up.) She has a display of her model horse collection in her room and still enjoys playtime occasionally.

Sheriff Jessie and the other toys, including her deputy, Buzz Lightyear,  worry that Lilypad will usurp Bonnie’s attention. The action goes from there, including the return of Woody. A unit of high-tech Buzz Lightyear toys crash-lands on a deserted island, and they too end up in the main plotline.

The cowgirl

This is very much a Jessie story. There’s a brief reprise of When She Loved Me from Toy Story 2 early on, which was a hint for me. How much has the cowgirl mattered over the years? 

At the same time, the movie seemed to be set up to bash online technology, yet in the end found a place for it. 

Rotten Tomatoes gave Toy Story 5 a 92% (critics)/94% (fans) positive rating. It “largely sidesteps franchise fatigue” through its redirected focus. We liked it a lot, and even got a little, er, emotional. Aside from the core characters, most of the TS tribe was underutilized, but it would have made the story too bloated.

It was strange, though. There was a father and child in the theater, but they left early on, leaving us to see the film by ourselves, which was too bad; I like getting audience reaction.

Movie review: The Sheep Detectives

crimessolvers

My daughter and I saw a Wednesday matinee of the film The Sheep Detectives at the Spectrum Theatre in late May. Initially, we were the only people in the theater, but eventually two groups of three joined us.

One of the television ads featured a pull quote calling the movie a cross between Babe and Knives Out. That was a useful observation, as it let me know that we would have a bunch of talking animals. 

“George (Hugh Jackman) is a shepherd who reads detective novels to his beloved sheep every night, assuming they can’t possibly understand. But when a mysterious incident disrupts life on the farm, the sheep realize they must become the detectives. As they follow the clues and investigate human suspects, they prove that even sheep can be brilliant crime-solvers.”

Of course, it is easier to solve a book crime than an actual one, as sheep Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and the others (voiced by, among others, Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, and Regina Hall) soon discover. And then, how do they convey the information to Officer Tim, the only cop in town?    

There are a half dozen suspects: a couple of competing farmers, the shopkeeper who steals something from the letter carrier, maybe even the minister. How about that young woman new to town? Is the lawyer (Emma Thompson) on the up-and -up? 

Big thumbs up

I adored this movie. It was smart and compassionate. The description one sheep made to others about the nature of God and the church was LOL funny to me. Those sheep had their own myth about death, which is no weirder than the one people you know have. The sheep have to get out of their comfort zones, physically and otherwise.

On Rotten Tomatoes, it received 95% positive reviews from critics and 96% from audiences. Recommended for someone 8 to 80. Warning: you may get a little teary-eyed. 

Review: The Devil Wears Prada 2

didn’t see Michael

My wife, daughter, and I went to see the film The Devil Wears Prada 2 at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany on a Saturday afternoon in mid-May. It’s been a while since the three of us did that;  I have no idea when, or what we saw.

It was fine. The initial “reunion” between Miranda (Meryl Streep) and Andy (Anne Hathaway) was on point. Andy and her frenemy Emily (Emily Blunt) were mostly entertaining. And we finally see Nigel (Stanley Tucci) come into his own.

What we see in the consolidation of media and how powerful manipulates the marketplace is definitely there. It was fun to see all of the cameos at one party. The fashion was interesting to see.

And yet, I found that the movie wasn’t always maintaining my attention, or my daughter’s; she rested her head on her mother’s shoulder for a time. I wouldn’t say the movie, at two hours, was too long.

David Nusair of Reel Film Reviews wrote that the “picture eventually segues into an almost impossibly sluggish midsection rife with needless subplots and digressions.” The Milan scenes, in particular, meandered, although it was Nigel’s shining moment. 

Also, per IMDb, “Miranda hosts a large dinner directly beneath Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In reality, access to the room is strictly limited, and food, candles, and any form of smoke are prohibited to preserve the fragile artwork.” I didn’t need to be an art historian to know that was true.  

Yet I did like the payoff. Rotten Tomatoes critics were 78% positive, while the fans were 84% positive.

DNS

The next day, my wife and daughter saw the biopic Michael at the same venue, with Jermaine’s son Jaafar playing his late uncle. I had seen the jukebox musical MJ at Proctors Theatre in December 2024 and didn’t feel the need to see the film, but my family liked it.

The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes scores were 39% among critics but 97% among fans. One critic wrote: “A banal, airbrushed portrait that plays like a jukebox musical and, except for a few snide winks, ignores the controversies that have long swirled around the singer.” 

Movie review: Project Hail Mary

based on an Andy Weir book

My wife and I had not seen a movie at a cinema in TWELVE weeks. So we went to an Easter Monday matinee of Project Hail Mary at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany.

I should note that the Artemis II crew was still in space at the time. Did that influence my enjoyment of the film? I dunno. But I liked it a lot. And so did a lot of folks.

From Slate: “Project Hail Mary is now Amazon MGM’s highest-grossing movie ever and the highest-grossing movie of 2026 so far. And the new movie, from Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, isn’t going away anytime soon: Audiences are clearly falling for Ryan Gosling’s teacher turned astronaut and the crablike alien he makes his friend, ensuring that the movie earns not just good reviews but the kind of word of mouth that will keep it in theaters for weeks to come. (The movie received a near-perfect A grade from the audience-polling firm CinemaScore.) At a time when it can feel as if only franchise films ever rake in hundreds of millions at the box office, Project Hail Mary really might have seemed like a long shot, but it’s found a way to connect.”

Yeah. I saw trailers for the new Mandalorian film and some other franchise that day, and I thought, “Meh.”

Teacher

The story starts in a junior high classroom, with Ryland Grace’s (Ryan Gosling) students concerned about the Earth’s sun dying. He answers honestly but not without hope. Then he discovers, to his disbelief, that the powers that be believe that HE is a large part of the solution.

Despite his jousting with the project director, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), he finds himself in space, just trying to figure things out, doing sciency stuff to try to save his world.

But then he meets an unlikely companion, Rocky, “played” by James Ortiz, who was born in Albany, NY, in 1984. The interaction between Grace and Rocky, as well as the flashbacks between Grace and Stratt, propel the joy and the seriousness of the situation.

I never read the book by Andy Weir on which the movie was based. Here are the Top 10 Differences Between the Project Hail Mary Book and Film. Based on viewing a number of videos, even the science geeks, such as Hank Green, weren’t taken out of the film by a few science mistakes, most notably the centrifuge thing.

I loved the Sandra Hüller character. I’d only seen her in heavier fare, such as The Zone Of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. She’s serious here but with a twist. Ryan Gosling is just right as the VERY reluctant hero. Lionel Boyce, as Carl,  Grace’s security handler, was fun.

The movie brought me joy and hope, and that ain’t nothin’.

Movie review: Song Sung Blue

Neil Diamond tribute band

Apparently, many people thought the new movie Song Sung Blue was a biopic about the singer Neil Diamond. No. It’s a biopic of a Neil Diamond tribute band fronted  by “Mike and Claire Sardina, a real-life couple that performed covers of Diamond classics in Wisconsin under their act ‘Lightning and Thunder.’ Directed by Craig Brewer, the movie dramatizes how the couple fell in love, became a hit in the Milwaukee area, survived a life-altering accident, and made a comeback.”

And that’s the arc of the new movie with the same title. Mike (Hugh Jackman) was a journeyman performer, covering a variety of artists before meeting Claire (Oscar-nominated Kate Hudson), who specialized in covering Patsy Cline. He tells her early that it was his birthday, but in a subsequent meeting, that it was his sobriety birthday.  

At least in the movie, it was Claire who suggested to Mike that he specialize in being Neil.  “It took a while to build a following. It’s true, as the movie shows, that the pair was booed out of a biker bar in Chicago. But after performing at the giant music festival Summerfest and the Wisconsin State Fair, their fan base grew. Singing “Forever in Blue Jeans” with Eddie Vedder in 1995 as the opening act for a Pearl Jam concert put them on the map.”

Credible

The movie chemistry between Jackman and Hudson was believable. They were on some show together (CBS Mornings?) Jackman was attached to the film first and was enthusiastic about Hudson after he saw an interview with Hudson about then-new music album.  

There were some funny moments in the film. One involved Mike’s oblivousness about what Pearl Jam was. Another was when Mike and Claire tell Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson) that she would be meeting Mike’s daughter Angelina (King Princess), who usually lives with her mother in Florida. “What’s this, a playdate?”Claire also has a young son Dana (Hudson Hensley), who was NOT one of those cloying movie kids. 

Some of the reviews (78% on Rotten Tomatoes) complained that the film was “made with such falsely constructed schmaltz.”  But I was more in this camp: “What the movie does well is some well-staged musical numbers. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson prove to be very capable singers in this movie. While the movie is a downer a lot of the time, the songs are uplifting for the most part.” And that middle act WAS a downer, though it reflected Mike and especially Claire’s, reality.

I like Neil Diamond well enough, especially his early stuff. (Alas, Thank The Lord For the Night Time didn’t make the cut, even when they had a choir on stage.)

 My wife and I liked Song Sung Blue, as did 97% of the Rotten Tomatoes audience. We saw it on MLK Day at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.