The Penguin Lessons

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

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Brave the Dark

Brave the Dark

Posted on January 23, 2025 at 5:31 pm

B
Lowest Recommended Age: Middle School
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for domestic violence/bloody images, suicide, some strong language, teen drinking, drug material and smoking
Profanity: Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Teen drinking and smoking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness: Domestic violence, murder, suicide, abuse, guns
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: January 24, 2025

An angry teenager can seem like an immovable object. Most adults have a hard time finding the patience to be the irresistible force that reflects back unconditional support. “Brave the Dark” is based on the true story of a teacher who was that for many students over the years, especially for Nate, a boy who desperately needed a reason to believe that life had more to offer than abuse, trauma, and disappointment. It was made with love by the now-grown boy himself, with three brothers from the other side of the ocean who saw a story that needed to be shared.

The three brothers are the sons of actor Richard Harris (“Camelot” and the original Dumbledore). Damien Harris directed and co-wrote the screenplay. Jared Harris (“Chernobyl” and “Mad Men”) plays teacher Stan Deen. And Jamie Harris plays Barney, the tough probation officer assigned to Nate when he gets in trouble. While the heart of the film is the relationship between Nate and Stan, the scenes with Stan and Barney are among the highlights. The two characters have a history that left them respecting one another but they are very different. Stan is almost preposterously optimistic and Barney is as tough and cynical as you might expect a parole officer whose job is riding herd on acting-out teenagers to be. Jamie and Jared have great chemistry and really spark off each other so well we could imagine a whole other movie about them.

But this is Nate’s story. When we first see him, he’s running track at his high school. We won’t find out why until later, when we learn he has been living in a car after eight years in an orphanage starting at age 6 and failed placements with four foster families. And he has friends who invite him to go along on a break-in. For them it’s fun. For him it’s a way to get some money for food. But he is caught. He gets sent to prison.

Stan Deen cannot let Nate stay there. He is just that guy, as we see when the prison guard explains that only family is allowed to see Nate, and Stan glances at the portrait on the wall and asks to see the warden. This is not some “I need to see the manager” thing. As we will learn, Stan has made the lives of everyone in Lancaster County better, teaching them or their kids, helping them through tough times. Of course the warden is a former student. And many of the movie’s best moments are like this one, when Stan always just seems to know and be loved by everyone.

Stan is a bit of an oddball. He’s a bit awkward but he is incapable of being anything but completely authentic. That, more than anything else, is what gets Nate started on thinking of himself and his life’s possibilities differently. But in order to move forward, he has to be willing to be honest about the past, about the unthinkable tragedy he witnessed as a child. It is something his grandparents insisted he lie about, even to himself. Witnessing Stan’s natural honesty shows Nate that he can be honest, too.

Stan, who once dreamed of being an actor, is directing a school production — tellingly — of “Flowers for Algernon.” That story is the basis for the movie “Charly,” which won an Oscar for Cliff Robertson as a man with low cognitive skills who has an experimental surgery that — temporarily — gives him superior intelligence. The brief moments we see in the play parallel the movie’s themes about increased understanding as Nate’s interactions with one of the play’s leads, the girl who broke up with him after he was arrested. Viewers should know those scenes were shot in the school auditorium where the real Stan Deen staged plays with his students, and that it is now named in his honor.

Stan was feeling stuck after the death of his mother. He is able to move forward by allowing Nate to move into his home, even into what was his mother’s bedroom. There are setbacks and struggles, but that makes the conclusion and the images of the real Stan and Nate at the end especially moving.

Parents should know that this film has strong language, drinking, smoking, and drugs, and a mostly off-screen depiction of murder and suicide witnessed by a small child. The story includes abuse, abandonment, homelessness, and teen crime.

Family discussion: Why was Stan different from the other teachers? What teachers have made the biggest difference in your life? Can you be more like Stan?

If you like this, try: “Stand and Deliver” and “Coach Carter”

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A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown

Posted on December 25, 2024 at 9:00 am

B +
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language
Profanity: Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking, smoking, and marijuana
Violence/ Scariness: References to war, some scuffles
Diversity Issues: None
Date Released to Theaters: December 13, 2024
Copyright 2024 Searchlight

“A Complete Unknown” is the story of Bob Dylan’s early years in New York, based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties. It begins with Dylan’s first stop after he arrives from Minnesota, a visit to see Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), who was paralyzed and unable to speak, with Huntington’s disease. Guthrie has another visitor, Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, capturing Seeger’s nerdy, generous, gentle optimism). Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) takes out his guitar to play a song he wrote in tribute to Guthrie. The two folk singers are impressed. We then follow the 21-year-old singer/songwriter as he creates some of the century’s most groundbreaking and influential music while mistreating most of the people around him, until he creates a near-riot at the Newport Folk Festival by plugging in his guitar and “going electric.”

Biographical films, especially those about musicians, tend to have the same format, as so devastatingly destroyed in the parody “Walk Hard.” There’s the precocity and one or two formative childhood experiences, then the moment someone on the board in the recording studio says, “Hey, wait, this kid can play/sing!” Success, setback, moments of inspiration, fights with managers/bandmates/romantic partners, often a descent into drugs and/or alcohol, various breakups, possibly a health crisis, and then either an early death or some kind of rebound.

Wisely, this film, from director James Mangold, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jay Cocks, avoids most of the cliches, and makes no kind of effort to understand or reveal the inner workings of the famously inscrutable Dylan. The title of the film, of course taken from the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone,” applies to its subject. It is not that the movie tries and fails to help us understand Bob Dylan; on the contrary, it recognizes that Dylan defies that kind of simplification. And that he doesn’t need it and we should not attempt it. Anything we need to know is in the songs.

And so, this movie does give us the songs, full performances with Chalamet’s singing close enough to Dylan’s voice in the 60s, and perhaps with just a bit more lyrical clarity and tunefulness. The movie thus seems like one brilliant song after another, with interludes of Dylan being a terrible boyfriend. For the fans of Dylan the icon as well as Dylan the musician, there are several well-known highlights of his biography, like encounters with other future luminaries. Joan Baez is played with verve and a sweet, clear singing voice by Monica Barbaro, but with no sense of the complexity and conflicts portrayed in the recent documentary . The most amusing is Boyd Holbrook as a young Johnny Cash, who exchanges supportive letters with Dylan and, when they finally meet at Newport, encourages him to “muddy the carpet,” and stir up some trouble. Elle Fanning plays Sylvie, a character based on Suze Rotolo, the young woman pictured holding Dylan’s arm on the cover of his Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan record. She is credited with exposing Dylan to social activism. She tells him songs should be about more than Johnny Appleseed and the Dust Bowl, but Fanning’s scenes are mostly about being disappointed at what a bad boyfriend Dylan is.

At first, Dylan says all he wants is to be a musician and eat. But then he gets successful. He feels oppressed and under pressure. The fans want him to stay the same. He wants to try new ideas. More than that, he does not want to be told what not to do. He gets more reserved, more internal. but his hair keeps getting fuzzier.

The best scene in the movie is when Pete Seeger is hosting his low-key public access television show. He thought Dylan, by then very famous and very busy, was not going to show up. He invited a back-up guest, a Black folk musician. Dylan does show up. Another performer might have apologized and taken over or just rescheduled and allowed the substitute musician to play. But Dylan lights up at the prospect of jamming with him. He starts to play. Seeger joins in. It is the most illuminating, touching, and engaging moment in the movie.

Parents should know that this film includes some strong language, drinking, constant smoking, and marijuana. There are some unhappy confrontations and references to wartime violence.

Family discussion: Was Dylan right about what people wanted to hear when they asked where the songs come from? Which song means the most to you and why? Was he wrong to play electric music at a folk festival? Why did he do it?

If you like this, try: the classic documentary about Bob Dylan during these years, “Don’t Look Back” and a later documentary, Bob Dylan–The Never-Ending Narrative

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Sing Sing

Sing Sing

Posted on August 1, 2024 at 6:20 pm

A-
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language
Profanity: Very strong language, n-word
Alcohol/ Drugs: References to drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness: References to armed robbery and murder, fights, sad deaths of human and pet
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: August 2, 2024

Actors playing kings are wearing robes of velvet, encrusted with jewels. They take their bows to enthusiastic applause. Then they go back to the dressing room, remove their costumes, and put on the clothes they wear all day, every day, their prison uniforms. These men are incarcerated in the famously bleak maximum security prison in New York, the one with the deceptively upbeat name Sing Sing (derived from the name of the Indian tribe that once occupied the land).

Copyright 2024 A24

The RTA (Rehabilitation Through Art) program at Sing Sing was created by the men who are incarcerated. Esquire wrote an article about it called “The Sing Sing Follies (A Maximum Security Comedy),” and that inspired Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, the co-screenwriters of the indie gem “Jockey” to start from scratch with their own research, interviewing the participants in the RTA program. Colman Domingo came on as star and co-producer. Most of the cast are formerly incarcerated men cast as characters based on their own experiences. Unusually, and crucially, the producers of the film put their money where their mouths were, and everyone, including the crew and the first-time screen actors, had equal pay and has an equal participation in the film’s profits. At a screening held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, co-star Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin told said in a post-screening Q&A that the recidivism rate of participants in RTA is 3 percent, as compared to over 60 percent for the rest of the prison population.

Domingo gives what is clearly one of the best performances of the year as Divine G, a founder of the theater program. Divine G is an author and playwright. His tiny cell includes a typewriter and stacks of books. He helps other incarcerated men prepare for their parole hearings and is seeking clemency for himself, based on a taped confession that has been discovered since his trial and appeals. He feels a genuine brotherhood with the others, but he still has a sense of pride in his education and accomplishments. We get glimpses of his sense of superiority. (Note: the character we see briefly, asking Divine G to sign a copy of one of his books, is the real Divine G.)

“The Sound of Metal’s” Paul Raci plays Brent, a patient and sympathetic outside facilitator of the small theater group, who gives them exercises (“Now walk like you just won the lottery! Now like a zombie!” “Now close your eyes and imagine a place where you feel happy and peaceful”) and guides them through the stages of production. Divine G offers them a play he wrote about corruption in the recording industry, but the men want a story about cowboys, ancient Egypt, Robin Hood, time travel, and Hamlet, and Brent agrees to write the script for them.

The RTA participants realize quickly that there is a freedom within the walls of their rehearsals that they do not have anywhere else. They realize more slowly that participation unwinds tightly coiled emotions they hid from others and did not not even acknowledge to themselves. The protective wall they have used all their lives, the one they may think keeps them alive and not obsessed with the absence of hope, the one that communicates confidence, power, and hostility — that has to be abandoned if they want to be a part of RTA. By trying on the characters they play, they explore feelings they would not let themselves acknowledge. They make themselves vulnerable to being known, by their casemates, by their audiences, by themselves. They go from being afraid of being seen to inviting others to see them.

One detail that audiences may find heartbreaking comes when Brent asks the men to close their eyes and imagine a place where they feel at peace. Some of the men cannot put themselves in a place outside the walls of the prison, even in their imagination. One they may find touching is when Divine G points to a small open square, smaller than a postcard, in the metal screen on the window. He likes to look at that square. It makes him feel in touch with the outside. Another is when a formerly incarcerated man returns to encourage the men and tell them what his experience has been like on the outside.

And one they might find jarring, at least at first, is the way the men in RTA address each other as “Beloved.” The real-life Divine G, a producer and writer on the film, told me that they chose that word to replace the n-word, which the men were using as a kind of semi-hostile, semi-insulting term of affection. His co-founder, Sean Dino Johnson, who appears as a character inspired by his own life, told me the first play the group put on was about the history and import of the n-word.

Domingo is extraordinary here, conveying his character’s struggles with the subtlest details of expression and posture. He is matched along the way with the RTA alumni, especially Clarence Maclin as a character with his name and some of his history. Two men begin to trust one another and then, unabashedly, proudly, call each other “beloved,” setting up the story for an ending of enormous power and meaning.

Parents should know that this story takes place in a maximum security prison and some characters are there because they were drug dealers, armed robbers, or murderers. They take responsibility for their choices but the focus of the film is on the human capacity to learn and get better. Characters use very strong language, including the n-word. There are sad deaths of a human and a beloved pet.

Family discussion: What is your most perfect spot? Why is laughter so important in the rehearsal room? What play would you like to be in?

If you like this, try: “The Quilters,” a short documentary about a program that teachers men in prison to make quilts for foster children, “Greenfingers,” with Clive Owen, based on a program in the UK where men in prison create gardens.

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Widow Clicquot

Widow Clicquot

Posted on July 18, 2024 at 5:48 pm

B
Lowest Recommended Age: High School
MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong bloody violence, language, sexual content, nudity, and some drug use
Profanity: Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness: Very sad death, reference to war
Diversity Issues: A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters: July 19, 2024

I never knew that the legendary Veuve Cliquot champagne was named for the woman who created it in the late 18th century. Veuve means widow.

Copyright WME 2024

Haley Bennett, who also produced, plays Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, devastated by the death of the husband she adored when she was still in her 20s. In flashbacks (too many) throughout the film, we see that her relationship with Francois (Tom Sturridge) was deep, intimate, and meaningful. They were both committed to full partnership in the family wine business and he had complete faith in her judgment and taste. That is why, almost unheard of in that era, he made it clear in his will that he was leaving her the vineyards and the business. Throughout the film, she faces one crisis after another as her father-in-law, Philippe (Ben Miles), tries to seize control of the company, her less hierarchical and more inclusive relationship with her workers is challenged, and production and logistics problems make it impossible for her to sell her wine. She gets support (and more) from a man who was her husband’s close friend (perhaps more) and the sales and distribution partner of the business, (Sam Riley).

Trailer for Widow Clicquot

Cinematographer Caroline Champetier, production designer Stéphane Sartorius and the sound team have created an immersive world that makes us feel like we’re inside a Napoleonic era oil painting. The creaking floorboards, high ceilings, and flickering candlelight are in sharp contrast to the natural world of the vineyard, where Barbe-Nicole is happiest and most at home. Bennett has a quiet, almost serene, quality but seems to glow from within. Her scenes with Sturridge in the blissful early days and then as he became more unstable (there is an implication that he may have committed suicide) and when she makes the decision to send their daughter away to protect her from her father’s deterioration, are subtle but effective, as is Barbe-Nicole’s passion for the vineyard and for making the most delicious champagne ever created. As she talks about the flavors and the size of the bubbles, as she talks about evading Napoleon’s restrictions on international sales, she is quiet, but sure. A defining moment is when she explains that she wants to rotate the crops because the vines need to struggle. That moment and her literal final word tell us that one of the world’s most delicate and cherished drinks is the result of struggle, one that all who embraced considered worth it.

Parents should know that this film includes a mental breakdown and a possible (offscreen) suicide, grief, some sexual situations with nudity, and the misogyny of the era.

Family discussion: Why was Madame Clicquot so confident and determined? What was unusual about the way she treated her employees? Was she right to try to evade the trade restrictions?

If you like this, try: The book by Tilar J. Mazzeo, and Bennett’s film, “Cyrano.” And, if you’re old enough, try some champagne.

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