Hoppers feels a little less sanded-down than most of the studio’s recent movies, less content to coast on formula and hew to expectations about what Pixar movies do and don’t do.
While it digs deep into the eerie insularity of mediocre TV, Kelly’s movie is also informed by the understanding that some of the best children’s entertainment is driven by a powerful sense of the uncanny.
Is it OK if, as a critic who has at times found the director’s work to be astringent to the point of sourness, I enjoyed without unreservedly loving this foray into warmer, more humanistic territory?
A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.
The resolution of these characters’ arcs, and of For Good’s several other subplots, feels unsatisfying, rushed through and at the same time too fussed over. But any sense of disappointment that Wicked: For Good doesn’t quite live up to the first movie pops like a big pink bubble the moment Erivo and Grande unite one last time to sing the showstopping duet “For Good.”
Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down.
Blue Moon feels like the more major entry in the director’s filmography, if only because it marks a new epoch in his ever-evolving partnership with Hawke.
