How to Train Your Dragon (2025)

Posted on June 15, 2025 at 9:32 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	4th - 6th Grade
Date Released to Theaters:	June 13, 2025
Date Released to DVD:	August 13, 2025

It may be completely unnecessary but this live action version of the terrific 2010 animated “How to Train Your Dragon” is still a great story. The story is heartwarming, the visuals are exciting, and the themes of courage used for a deeper understanding are still worthy.

I object to the idea that an animated film is just a lesser version until technology develops to create a “live action” remake (the dragons are CGI). Animation has its own artistry, vibrance, and expressiveness. This version is almost a shot-for-shot remake, emphasizing the original’s unsurpassability, yet somehow it is nearly half an hour longer. The original – and its sequels and spin-offs – are so memorable that this remake is like enjoying a cover band version of a classic song more for the memories it evokes of the original than for its own merits.

Our young hero is Hiccup (Mason Thames), the son of single dad and chief Stoick (Gerard Butler, who voiced the same character in the original). They live in Berk, a craggy, stark, unforgiving, and remote Scandinavian community beset by dragons who steal their food. Status is based on killing dragons and many people in the community proudly sport scars and prosthetics to demonstrate their courage in these battles. Stoick, disappointed by his son’s lack of warrior spirit, reminds Hiccup that his mother was killed by a dragon (though those of us who have seen the animated sequels know that she is still alive). Hiccup is apprenticed to Stoick’s best friend Gobber (Nick Frost), whose prosthetic hand and foot are the result of fighting dragons, and who now provides weapons and teaches those teenagers who, unlike Hiccup, are going to be trained to be dragonslayers.

As in the original, the dragons here are wonderfully imagined, with many fascinating species. Each looks different and poses different kinds of threats. While Stoick has taken all of the warriors in search of the dragons’ nest, Hiccup finds and befriends a wounded Night Fury he names Toothless, hiding their relationship from everyone else until they are discovered by Astrid (Nico Parker), the best young warrior trainee. He takes her for a ride on Toothless and she is convinced that dragons are worthy of respect and affection.

Very little has changed in the storyline, as noted. But perhaps 15 years distance has brought some changes in our atmosphere and understanding. For me at least, Stoick’s harsh judgment of Hiccup as weak and fearful because he does not want to cut the heads off of dragons felt like a slightly broader statement about masculinity, hierarchies based on community standards, and fear of the unknown than a father’s distorted but genuine wish to protect his son from creatures that were responsible for so much loss. Perhaps that was just because I know the story so well and thought the padding dragged a little.

Thames portrayal of Hiccup is sincere and he allows us to see the teenager sort through his feelings as he allows curiosity to triumph over tradition. Parker, the daughter of Thandiwe Newton and Ol Parker, is excellent, showing us Astrid’s fierceness and, like Hiccup, the curiosity that leads her to question her community’s assumptions, even though by the standards she was raised with, she is at the top.

Production designer Dominic Watkins skillfully translates the animated world with intricate, textured, settings filled with intriguing details. The ships, the landscape, the workshop, even the doors in the arena that open up to allow dragons to enter for the training sessions area are all gorgeously imagined to bring us into the world. Lindsay Pugh’s costumes and the hair designs by a talented group of artists help define the characters, who dress for battle but show a lot of personality and intention in the way they present themselves. The flying scenes are dynamic, fun to watch, and I’m sure a glimpse at what the new ride at Universal Studios will be like.

Parents should know that this movie has extended peril and violence, though human and dragon deaths are off-screen. We hear about injuries and deaths, including the death of Hiccup’s mother. It also includes a very positive portrayal of people (and a dragon) with disabilities.

Family discussion: Why was Hiccup the first to see that the dragons could be friendly? Why was it hard for his father to accept that?

If you like this try: the animated movies, the books, and the television series

The Life of Chuck

Posted on June 15, 2025 at 12:24 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Apocalyptic themes, sad off-screen deaths including parents and grandparents, references to suicide
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 13, 2025

When a movie begins with “Act Three,” it is an invitation to open our minds to something unusual. “The Life of Chuck” is based on a story by Stephen King, and it reflects his more mystical side. While it includes dark and tragic themes, it is a story of profound humanity, ultimately spirit-expanding.

It begins at the end in more ways than one. A teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is meeting with parents who seem oddly disconnected from concerns about how their children are doing in school. The world seems to be collapsing. A major earthquake has knocked California into the ocean. The internet is shutting down. Couples who have been together are splitting up and those that have split up are getting back together. Marty’s ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan) is an exhausted nurse in a hospital where most of the arrivals are attempted suicides. And somehow, signs – billboards, skywriting, bench posters, even projected in the windows of suburban homes — are appearing everywhere thanking someone named Chuck.

In Act Two we meet Chuck as a young boy and see him grow up. His parents were killed in an automobile accident, and he lives with his grandparents (Mark Hamill as Albie and “Ferris Bueller’s” Mia Sara as Sarah) in an old house with a padlocked room in a cupola on the top floor that he is warned never to open. He is very good at math but what he loves is dancing, and a dance class leads him to what will be one of his life’s most profound and satisfying moments, in part because after moments of doubt and fear of being judged (he is in middle school, the judgiest part of life), he finds the courage to follow his heart and take a risk. Later, as an adult, and, as we are told by narrator Nick Offerman, nine months from his death due to a still-undiagnosed brain tumor, he will have another sublime moment of dance, when he passes by a busking drummer on a break from an accounting conference.

To say much more would be to say too much; this is a film that benefits from an audience without expectations or advance guidance. But for those who have seen it and would like to know what I think it means, I have some spoiler-filled comments at the end of this review. For now, I will just point out that twice in the film teachers share a selection from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in their classrooms, the part that goes

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

When Chuck’s teacher (played by Kate Sigel) explains this passage to him, she places her hands gently over his ears and asks what is between them. It is the multitudes within each of us, every emotion, every memory, every wish, every fear, every sublime moment, every crushing disappointment, every tiny quotidian interaction we are not even aware that we noticed.

This movie is a labor of love from both King and writer/director Mike Flanagan, whose wife (Seigel) and son (as the youngest version of Chuck) appear as key characters. It has a transcendent, poetic humanity that should make us better appreciate our own lives and the people we value. And take the time, at least once in a while, to dance.

Parents should know that a child’s father and pregnant mother are killed (offscreen) in a car accident and there are apocalyptic events. A central character dies and there are references to other deaths, including a suicide. Characters use strong language and there are references to pornography.

Family discussion: What multitudes are in you? Who would you want to be with if things were scary? What do we learn from Marty’s conversations with Sam and Gus? Should Chuck have listened to his grandfather’s advice?

If you like this try: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” and “Stranger Than Fiction”

Stop now if you don’t want spoilers.

CLUES: What does it mean that we see Sam and Gus in different time periods but they do not seem older or younger, while Chuck is played by four different actors as he goes from young childhood to middle age? Why is the Whitman poem so important?

MY VIEW: Every character in the movie is a part of the “multitudes” that make up one person, Chuck Krantz. The thank you signs are a part of his shutting down as he dies. When we die, our stories, our memories, our relationships, the multitudes within us stop, at least in the form of being contained in one individual consciousness. What Chuck saw in the locked room represents the recognition we all have that our lives are temporary.

The Penguin Lessons

Posted on March 27, 2025 at 5:55 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for strong language, some sexual references and thematic elements
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Mostly off-screen depiction of a military coup, characters captured and beaten
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 28, 2025

“I had you as a head down sort of fellow. Anything for a quiet life.” Jonathan Pryce as the headmaster of a posh private school in Buenos Aires is disappointed to discover that the English professor he thought wanted to hide from the world and, especially, from his feelings, might have started out that way but due to an outside influence, had become a head up sort of fellow who was increasingly less quiet.

That professor is Tom Michell (Steve Coogan), who is joking-not-joking when he tells the headmaster his career has been “steadily working my way down,” and then adds, “geographically speaking.” Both are Brits who have ended up in Argentina just as it is on the brink of a military coup in 1976. The headmaster explains that there is “trouble in the streets and the economy is in free fall,” but their school is a haven where wealthy families send their sons. He tells the faculty it is also a haven from any conversation about politics. “Whatever strong opinions you may have, keep them to yourselves and don’t bore the rest of us.”

The coup happens and the school sends the students home for a week until the country calms down. All this means to Michell is a chance to go to Uruguay for a chance to drink and perhaps find some ladies. A lonely colleague from Finland (Björn Gustafsson) comes along, telling Michell, “I like you.” Michell responds, more wry than bitter, “Do you? I don’t.”

They go to a bar and Michell meets a beautiful woman who takes him for a walk on the beach. They come across a Magellanic penguin drenched in oil from a spill. Only because he wants to impress (meaning, have sex with) the lady, Michell agrees to clean off the penguin. The lady then leaves and Michell is about to discover that penguins are very loyal and this one will not leave him.

That is how Michell ends up hiding a penguin, later named Juan Salvador, in his room. The flightless bird is quickly discovered by the maid and her granddaughter, Sofia (Alfonsina Carrocio) who gives him his name, from the Spanish version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

The setting makes this more than the typical “grumpy or grieving person finds solace, hope, and connection with an animal” movie. Screenwriter Jeff Pope, who worked with Coogan on “Philomena,” “The Lost King,” and “Stan and Ollie,” took the real-life story of a 23-year-old teacher and adapted it to Coogan’s strengths as an actor. This is one of the best performances from someone who is not given a chance to show all he can do often enough. At first he is remote, though not humorless. He tries to reach his “privileged and spoiled” students by explaining sarcasm. Then, as it becomes harder to pretend to ignore the atrocities around him, especially after Sofia is taken, the poetry he shares with his students begins to tend first toward loss, then courage, integrity, even rebellion. There’s a wonderful moment when Michell is on the phone with the local zoo, saying he will kill the bird if they won’t take Juan Salvador, quickly gesturing to the penguin reassuringly.

The combination of horrific national tragedy with the personal story of someone unconnected to the community does not always work. But people do struggle to work through their own losses and sometimes they do find connection in unexpected places that help them reconcile emotions they thought were too painful to acknowledge. There is so much warmth and humor in this story that we cannot help feeling touched by the story and maybe even thinking about a penguin of our own.

Parents should know: This movie occurs during a brutal military coup and while much of the abuse is off-screen, a character is “disappeared” and the end credits acknowledge that thousands were captured and killed during this period. Characters use strong language, drink alcohol, and mention sex

Family discussion: When did Michell’s feelings about the penguin begin to change? Why did everyone want to talk to the penguin?

If you like this, try: The book by the real Tom Michell, My Penguin Friend, and the beloved documentary March of the Penguins

The Friend

Posted on March 25, 2025 at 5:36 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language including a sexual reference
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drunkenness
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad death by suicide
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 28, 2025

“How can you explain death to a dog?”

A character in “The Friend” asks that question as she tries to persuade Iris (Naomi Watts) to take a very sad dag who is mourning the loss of Walter (Bill Murray). It is the hardest kind of death to explain to anyone, canine or human. Walter took his own life.

Walter was a writer and he loved to tell the story of how he found the dog, a very large black and white Great Dane named Apollo. Walter’s widow is the rather imperious Barbara (Noma Dumezweni), his fourth wife. She does not like dogs. Iris, also a writer, is an animal person, but she likes cats, not dogs. Her building does not permit animals of any kind. Yet when she finds out that Barbara has sent Apollo to a kennel, she allows herself to be persuaded — temporarily. Iris lives in a rent-controlled apartment. She cannot move. And yet once Apollo gets past the tearing up the pillows and knocking over the furniture phase and Iris gets used to giving him the bed and sleeping on a blow-up mattress, she finds she is very attached to him.

Walter was Iris’ closest friend, and his death is devastating. Iris is struggling with her latest book and also teaching college students and working on a book of Walter’s collected letters with the help of his daughter, Val (Sarah Pidgeon). We get a brief look at a happy dinner party, and it is clear Walter is a natural story-teller who relishes being on center stage, being charmingly incorrigible. It is also clear that Iris relishes challenging him with love and humor as only the dearest friends can. Later she will speak fondly of the way they talked for hours about books and people and we can imagine that their conversations were playful, heartfelt, and very literary, lots of witty references and ripostes.

One of the best scenes in the film has Iris meeting with a therapist for what she thinks is going to be a simple request. Tom McCarthy, better known as a director of films like “The Station Agent” and “Spotlight,” gives a beautiful performance as the sympathetic doctor, gently asking Iris what she would say to Walter if he was there. Watts shows us the pain and confusion Iris is feeling, and the anger she has not been willing to allow herself to feel. Being honest with herself gives her the insight she needs to tell her own story, gently revealed to us in an imaginary conversation between Iris and Walter.

McCarthy is just one of the outstanding cast in supporting roles, including Constance Wu and Carla Gugino as Walter’s previous wives, Sara Pidgeon as the daughter Walter did not know about until she was an adult, Josh Pais as Iris’s editor, who cheerfully tells her that Walter’s suicide has made him “hotter than ever,” which will help sales of the book of his letters, and Felix Solis as Hektor, the super in Iris’ building who tries to enforce the no-pets rule.

“The Friend” is based on a best-selling book of that name by Sigrid Nunez, winner of the National Book Award. While we see the Iris-Apollo relationship develop from putting up each other to deep affection, the movie is much more a meditation on grief, and it matches the literary grace of the book with delicacy and depth.

Parents should know that this film includes discussion of suicide and loss, some strong language, drinking and drunkenness, and sexual references.

Family discussion: Would you want to be friends with Walter? Why were people so devoted to him despite his faults? Was the solution Iris came up with fair?

if you like this, try: “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “Wonder Boys”

Mickey 17

Posted on March 5, 2025 at 5:16 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for violent content, language throughout, sexual content and drug material
Profanity:	Very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended peril and violence with graphic and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	March 7, 2025

You know how finicky printers are. Sometimes the printed paper comes out part way and then goes back a bit to do some more printing and comes out again. Sometimes you forget to put on the tray the paper lands on, and so it drops to the floor. It turns out that in the future, when someone develops a 3D printer that uses organic waste to print out people, actual human beings, those finicky printers do the same thing.

Mickey (an outstanding performance by Robert Pattinson) needed to leave the planet because a vicious loan shark who loves to watch the gruesome murders of those who haven’t paid on time was after him. The only way to jump to to head of a very long waiting list was to agree to be an “expendable.” He’s not very bright (see: in trouble with a vicious loan shark), so when he is repeatedly asked if he has read the contract he is signing, he says yes. That gets him a four-year-long trip to a new planet, where is job will be, basically, lab rat crossed with a crash test dummy. He is continually put in mortal danger until he dies, and then they print a new one of him out of that finicky printer. And sometimes they forget the paper tray, or I guess person tray, and he falls out onto the floor.

The new planet’s colony is run by an officious former politician named Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo with some large teeth) and his wife, Yifa (Toni Collette). Kenneth is obsessed with the “purity” of the civilization on his new planet, and Yifa is obsessed with superficial indicators of elegance and grace. She constantly drapes herself over her husband and coos into his ears, except when she is creating exotic sauces for their luxurious meals, while the rest of the people they brought with them to build their new community are fed with slop and live in bare, dorm-like cells.

Even in this miserable situation, there are levels of status, and Mickey is at the bottom. With one exception, he is considered less than human because he keeps dying and getting re-printed. The exception is not his Earth friend Timo (Steven Yeun), the one who got him into all the trouble he had to leave the planet to escape. The exception is the beautiful and intelligent Nasha (Naomie Ackie), who is, somewhat improbably, devoted to him.

As the movie begins, before a flashback telling us how he got there, Mickey has died and been reprinted 17 times, thus the title. He is stuck in an icy crevasse and certain he is about to die again, from exposure or from being eaten by the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, who look. like giant combination tardigrades and caterpillars. But somehow he survives. Only everyone else assumed he had died again and the most severely punished crime has been committed: another Mickey has been printed while the last one is still alive. There are multiples.

Some of the resulting complications work better than others, but the movie comes together in a tight climax as the Marshalls go over the top and the Mickeys and Nasha have to save the day.

Director Bong Joon Ho continues the sly, dark humor and provocative commentary on class hierarchies, hypocrisy, and pervasive societal inequities he featured in “Parasite,” “Snowpiercer,” and “Okja.” More heightened than the Oscar-winning “Parasite,” this imagines the future consequences of arrogance, exceptionalism, and careless exploitation. The Marshalls are so caricatured they undermine the more nuanced elements of the story. The other characters’ understated, matter-of-fact acceptance of the outrageous abuse is far more powerful.

Parents should know that this film includes peril and graphic violence, with some disturbing images including a severed hand and bloody barfing, injuries and deaths. A character is repeatedly killed. There are sexual situations and explicit sexual references and drawings. Characters use very strong language.

Family discussion: What would make someone agree to be expendable? What did the Marshalls want their new world to be like? Why were they so affectionate to each other and so cruel to everyone else?

If you like this, try: “Snowpiercer,” “Okja,” “The Maze Runner,” and “The Hunger Games”