NATURAL HORN KILLERS

In the multiplexes this weekend:

Death of a Unicorn--Paul Rudd plays Elliot, a lawyer, who is enroute to the home of his megarich employers, where he's on the verge of a massive promotion. With him is his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), perfectly well aware that she's being used as a prop to show what a good family man Elliot is, to help him clinch the deal. They're both still bereaved over the recent death of his wife.

Driving up a mountain road to the remote home, Elliot hits and injures what appears for all the world to be a baby unicorn. Just as the creature is establishing a psychic bond with Ridley when she touches its horn, Elliot bashes it in the skull, meaning to put it out of its misery, and also to get the hell to the meeting for which he's already late.

They carry the body to the palatial home in the back of their rental SUV, but if you guess that their encounter with single-horned magical equines isn't over, you'd be right. The movie takes off from its literal-minded opening into a satire of the wealthy, their bottomless capacity to self-justify, and the similar capacity for toadies like Elliot or the rich family's manservant Griff (the excellent Anthony Carrigan)--to justify enabling them. The employers, you see, are in the pharmaceutical biz, and they--Dad Richard E. Grant, Mom Tea Leoni and cloddish son Will Poulter--soon realize that the creature's horn is a virtual panacea offering a cure for cancer, among other miraculous properties.

Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, Death of a Unicorn is strikingly funny and exciting. It also carries a tinge of sourness, but this is true of most satires. Rudd's obsequious, cowardly character is deeply unlikable for much of the film's length, but this is offset because, of course, Rudd himself is one of the most naturally likable actors on the planet.

In the same way, Scharfman offsets the (justified) bitterness of the satire with monster-movie elements--even some gore--and a dash of New Age mysticism. And he plays fair by the rules of these genres. It's also nice to see unicorns rescued from My Little Pony-style cutesy insipidity, and depicted as badass.

The Penguin Lessons--From horned horses to flightless birds: here's the second movie in less than a year set in South America and based, however loosely, on the real-life friendship between a foundling penguin and a bereaved aging man. Last summer we got My Penguin Friend, with Jean Reno. Despite Reno's undeniable star presence, some gorgeous scenery and the endearing title character, this new effort is a big improvement.

Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a cynical, lazy, emotionally shut-down English professor at a private school for upscale Argentine boys in Buenos Aires in 1976. On a weekend in Uruguay, he's walking on the beach with a beautiful woman he's met dancing, and they come upon an oil-slicked Magellanic penguin. 

Mostly to impress the woman, Michell takes the poor creature back to his hotel and they clean him up. Things don't work out with the woman, but Michell finds himself stuck with the penguin, smuggling him back into the school and trying to keep him a secret from the strict Headmaster (Jonathan Pryce). Eventually the bird, dubbed "Juan Salvador Gaviota"--the Spanish name of Jonathan Livingston Seagull--becomes a classroom teaching aid and a beloved mascot.

Juan Salvador also triggers a spiritual reawakening in Michell, who connects through him with the family of a cleaning lady at the school. The Junta has just taken over, and people are being "disappeared" off the street in broad daylight; Michell finds himself unable to remain apolitical.

Despite a couple of Monty Python references early on--the Pythons had a long and noble history with penguins--this Brit film isn't a broad comedy. At the beginning we're told that "This story is inspired by real events," whatever that may mean; the script by Jeff Pope is based on a memoir by the real-life Michell. Directed by Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty--one of the very best poignant Brit comedies--The Penguin Lessons has laughs, but it's also character-driven and melancholy; in the long run it could fairly be called a tearjerker.

It's hard to imagine the movie working as well as it does with anyone but Coogan in the lead. As in the terrific Philomena (2013), he plays an elaborately ironic, acerbic poseur whose reserve is gradually and reluctantly broken down by a guileless fellow being; the penguin serves almost as well as Judi Dench in this role. But Coogan never gets sappy. He lets the marvelous bird melt us, then he dries the movie out again.

BAR NONE

In theaters this weekend:

Sing Sing--A troupe of actors, all incarcerated, work to put up a show in the notorious maximum security state prison in New York. They're members of the institution's Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA). At the center of the company is John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo).

In prison for a crime he did not commit, Divine G not only throws his soul into his theatre work, playing Shakespearean leads like he should be onstage in Central Park, he also assists his fellow inmates with appeals and preparation for parole hearings.

His anger at the injustice of his circumstances is unmistakable, yet it's less scary than the intensity with which he works to control and channel it; he knows too well that giving vent to rage would be futile and harmful to his cause. Besides, he's a true believer. His positivity is an act of faith, sometimes a Herculean one.

Like its hero, the movie, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script he wrote with Clint Bentley, is taut and melodrama-free. Perhaps because so many of the actors were actually incarcerated people--many of them RTA veterans playing themselves--Sing Sing has almost a documentary feel at times. Yet it also has, with almost no violence or other prison-movie cliches, the charge of high drama. Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin and Sean San José are particularly memorable among the other company members. A word should also be said for Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the diplomatic, unflappable director and playwright. 

But the core of the film is Colman Domingo. Rarely does an actor give us so much heart to invest in with so little hamming or telegraphing. It's a classic performance, both for its emotional impact and for its discipline.

My Penguin Friend--It's hard to go wrong with penguins. They've been amusing us for a long time, not just in zoos but in movies like George Miller's mad animated musical epic Happy Feet and its sequel, and Surf's Up, and the crack team of penguins in the Madagascar franchise, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the 2005 French documentary March of the Penguins, back though the exploding penguin and the giant penguin in Monty Python, not to mention Chilly Willy and Bugs Bunny's friend "Playboy Penguin," who wept tiny ice cubes when he was sad.

It's also hard to go wrong with Jean Reno. Best known as menacing killers in Luc Besson films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the rugged-looking French actor projects an air of effortless authority. So My Penguin Friend, which has both Jean Reno and a jaunty, spirited penguin in starring roles, starts out with certain advantages. And it ends up needing both of them.

This family film is, to use its opening titles, "Inspired by a True Story." In 2011, a man named Joao Pereira de Souza living on Ilha Grande, off the coast of Brazil, found a weakened, oil-slicked Magellanic penguin outside his house along the beach. He cleaned the poor flightless castaway up, fed him some sardines, and soon became friends with him. Dubbed "Dindim"--a grandchild's mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for penguin--the bird disappeared back into the Atlantic some months later. But he returned for many years thereafter, to hang out for the winter with Joao along his migratory route.

This fictionalized retelling of the story, directed by David Schurmann from a script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich, starts off on the wrong foot with a tragic episode that seemed entirely gratuitous to me. And in its second half, it follows Dindim's encounters with researchers at his other home in Patagonia. These scenes feel very strained, with dialogue so stilted I began to wonder if it had been written by AI. And the movie's final stretch, which attempts to generate some danger and suspense, feels extremely half-hearted.

In between all this, however, we get to see Jean Reno, looking scruffy and soulful and beaky-faced as Joao, tenderly interacting with a penguin. That can carry a movie a long way. Reno seems to enjoy playing a childlike sweetness here, as Joao proclaims that Dindim "comes and goes as he pleases" and is "not my pet...he's my friend." The other humans in the film, including Adriana Barraza as Joao's wife, are all attractive, even when the dialogue coming out of them seems canned.

The movie is visually impressive, too. Dindim was played by several different penguins, and presumably his adventures, particularly underwater, have been at least partly enhanced by CGI, but it's pretty effective and seamless; he comes across as a character. And the scenery, both in windswept Patagonia and idyllic-looking Ilha Grande, is breathtaking.

So it will be a matter of personal calculation for you to decide if a penguin, a bona fide international movie star and gorgeous settings overcome feeble kid-movie devices enough to make My Penguin Friend worth your time. For me, it was; the penguin tipped the scale the farthest.

Alien: Romulus--A band of young scavengers bust into a huge derelict spaceship in orbit around the cheerless, sunlight-free mining planet on which they live. They're hoping to filch equipment that will allow them to escape their indenture, and they repeatedly express confidence that they'll be in and out in half an hour, and nothing can go wrong.

So in they go, get the stuff they need, and sail off to a new world where they live happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. The result, in this seventh entry in the Alien series, is of course another gory encounter with an infestation of the elegantly spindly, terrifying creatures in all of their various stages of development, from "facehugger" to "chestburster" to full-grown fang-bearer.

Though it's not close to the 1979 original, Romulus is on the more watchable end of the franchise, deliberate and creepy for the first half, and non-stop in the second. It's a little unvaried and dark, however, and until the climactic scenes it doesn't really give us much that's new. Toward the end, the shots of the ice ring around the planet that the ship is approaching have a certain magical beauty, but otherwise we're mostly stuck in the chiaroscuro space dungeon.

The star is Cailee Spaeny, who played the fresh-faced young journalist in Civil War earlier this year. She's sympathetic, but the movie is stolen by David Jonsson as her companion Andy, a sweet, dad-joke-dispensing android who gets a reboot that gives him an upsetting personality change. Andy may be the best robot with divided loyalties since Robby in Forbidden Planet.

One more note: I'm a little over the vogue for gynecological/obstetric body horror. We got a big dose of nasty surgical instruments and moaning, keening young women birthing unnatural spawn earlier this year in The Last Omen; we get more natal splatter here. The gifted director of Romulus, the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, also showed unsavory interest in coercive pregnancy in his terrific 2016 shocker Don't Breathe. Even the title Romulus refers to one species nursed at the teat of another.

Could all this be a reaction to post-Roe reproductive chaos? I'll leave that to graduate students with stronger stomachs than mine.

ON THE TASTELESS AND THE FLIGHTLESS

Opening today, for your post-turkey-dinner diversion:

Horrible Bosses 2—Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day return as the three numbskulls who, back in the 2011 hit, plotted to murder their vile bosses, with wacky results. This time they’ve gone into business together, only to have an odious corporate bigshot (Christoph Waltz) bamboozle them into fresh ruin. So they switch from murder to kidnapping, this time targeting the bigshot’s equally odious but much stupider son (a pretty funny Chris Pine).

Bateman is the relatively sensible kvetcher of the group. Sudeikis is a buoyantly optimistic, easily distracted lecher, and Day is a well-meaning simpleton. The principal dynamic of the comedy is that they all jabber away at the same time, getting carried away with whatever imbecilic notion occurs to them, heedlessly blurting out inappropriateness ranging from white-boy racial anxiety to each other’s names over their walkie-talkies while they’re in the midst of a felony.

The absurdly twisting plot pulls in characters from the original—Jennifer Aniston as a sex-addicted dentist, Jamie Foxx as a “crime consultant” and Kevin Spacey as a venomous former boss—but the director, Sean Anders, and the gaggle of writers are not carry-overs from HB the First. I confess I missed that film, but on its own terms I can tell you that HB2 is raunchy, coarse, laborious and heavy-handed. Allowing for the context of the different styles of humor and filmmaking in their respective periods, it isn’t a bit less moronic than a Three Stooges short. But I can laugh at the Stooges, and I’d be lying if I tried to claim I didn’t laugh a fair amount at these three latter-day stooges as well.

Penguins of Madagascar—This spin-off from the Madgascar movies also made me laugh—quite a bit more, really. But unlike Horrible Bosses 2, this one earns its laughs from visual precision and imaginative verbal wit.

The stars are a quartet of zoo penguins who regard themselves as an elite covert team. They run afoul of a mad octopus (well voiced by John Malkovich) who, resentful of the popularity of penguins in menageries worldwide, has a nefarious scheme to abduct them all. The tale is organized like a Bond film, with an action-packed prologue and hilarious and exciting episodes in exotic locales ranging from Fort Knox to Venice to Rio to Shanghai. I was sort of disappointed that it didn’t have an expressionistic title sequence, set to a pop song.

It’s also possible that the finale, set in New York, is a penguin-feather-width longer and more involved than necessary. But this is quibbling—Penguins of Madagascar is one of the funnier films I’ve seen this year.

HEROIC FEET

2006’s Happy Feet was a truly crazy movie, a blend of Pixar-style animation, Bollywood musical & a streak of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Set in a world in which penguins sing to connect with their soul-mates, the film focused on the unfortunate young Mumble, unable to carry a tune but endowed with a natural talent for tap-dancing.

It starts off, in short, as a fable about nonconformity & finding your own individual path—a good joke right off the bat, in the black-&-white uniformity of the penguin rookery (in The Far Side, Gary Larson once depicted a single penguin amongst the multitudes belting out “I’ve Gotta Be Me”). But by the end, director George Miller had spun the film from a sweet, if deeply eccentric, underdog tale into a grandiose environmentalist vision for which the word epic is hardly sufficient—“cosmic” would be more like it.

I’d be tempted to say it’s a one-of-a-kind movie, but as of this weekend, it’s not. A major box-office hit & an Oscar-winner besides, Happy Feet could hardly fail to spawn a sequel, & here it is, some five years later. In Happy Feet Two, Mumble (voiced by Elijah Wood) has the penguins mixing some fancy footwork in with their stirring oratorios—the tiny feet often splashing in ominous melt-water—but alas his own son Erik, ironically enough, isn’t much of a dancer. Poor Erik runs away from the shame of this, accompanied by two loyal pals, & Mumble heads off to find them.

While they’re gone, a huge chunk of Antarctic ice collides with the rookery, sealing thousands of penguins, including Erik’s Mom Gloria (voiced by Alecia Moore, aka Pink, replacing the late Brittany Murphy), off from the ocean. So it’s up to Mumble, Erik & his friends to try to find a way to save them—from hunger, from marauding skuas, & from general despair. Their allies this time include the Latin-accented Adelie penguin Ramon (Robin Williams) & his colony, elephant seals, electric-guitar-playing human researchers &, albeit unwittingly, two nearly-microscopic krill (Brad Pitt & Matt Damon) who have broken away from their enormous swarm to strike out on their own existential search for identity.

There’s also, of all birds, a puffin—named Sven, & voiced complete with Nordic accent by Hank Azaria—who has somehow found his way to the other end of the world. He’s been mistaken for a penguin who can fly, which gives him the status of a sort of self-improvement spiritual leader.

In other words, like the first film, Happy Feet Two is another big helping of off-the-wall weirdness. But also like the first film, it’s funny & good-hearted, & the musical numbers—which, a la Bollywood, freely mix snatches of the Rawhide theme, grand opera & Queen & Bowie’s “Under Pressure”—are thrilling, both in their relentless rhythms & in Miller’s dazzling, undulating visual perspectives.

Miller’s apparent purpose, this time, is to stave off the sense of despair that many of us feel over the seeming futility of individual action in the environmental struggle. The moral which the movie asserts—it’s also on the poster—is “Every Step Counts.” To this I can only say: I hope so.