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"She's got it figured out." Lizzy ( Michelle Williams ), a sculptor living and working in Portland, says about Jo ( Hong Chau ), her landlord, fellow artist and seemingly only friend. It's not a smooth relationship. Jo, who lives in the unit next door to Lizzy, is an inattentive landlord. Lizzy has no hot water, Jo keeps saying she'll get to it. Lizzy looks on at Jo's hardiness and resilience in wonder and something like envy, although the envy is more a nagging itch than Iago's overwhelming monomania. This relationship is the center of Kelly Reichardt 's gentle and sometimes funny "Showing Up," although Lizzy is surrounded by people who seemingly care about her. Lizzy is stuck. She can't feel the goodness of her life. Jo has everything she doesn't. Jo's got "it" figured out.

But what is "it"? Jo's art? Her casual ability to self-promote? Or is "it" just life in general? Lizzy is so undeveloped she actually thinks other humans have "it" figured out, rather than understanding all humans have problems and we're all built differently. Everyone moves at their own pace. Marlo Thomas told a story once about how she struggled to make a career for herself in the shadow of her famous father and her peers, who all seemed to be doing better than she was. Her father saw the struggle and said, "You've got to run your own race, baby." Lizzy can't run her own race.

There's a certain kind of competition among small-town "local" artists which has a different flavor from the jostling for status among artists in big cities and big-name artists with national or international reputations. In smaller circles, there's an assumption that all local artists are part of one big family, support of one another is required, everyone goes to everyone else's gallery shows, and nobody should absent themselves from the group. Lizzy is an outsider, but it's self-imposed, and she doesn't even realize it. She works at her alma mater, the Oregon College of Art and Craft (established in 1907, which closed its doors in 2019, the death of a beloved local institution). She's an administrative assistant for her mother ( Maryann Plunkett ), which makes asking for days off awkward. A visiting artist thanks her for creating a beautiful flier for an upcoming show and is surprised to learn Lizzy herself has an upcoming show. Lizzy doesn't "present" as an artist at all.

Kelly Reichardt, one of the most exciting filmmakers working today, nails this insular vibe and the unspoken supersonic buzz of competition and envy. This is a reasonably story-heavy film for Reichardt, who primarily specializes in moody pieces about wanderers and seekers (" Old Joy ," " Wendy and Lucy ," " Meek's Cutoff ," " Certain Women "). Her last film, the celebrated " First Cow ," also featured more of a linear "story" than her others, and "Showing Up" continues in that direction, although on a smaller and quieter scale. The scenes of students working at the college, sculpting, working at looms, or dancing randomly in the grassy lawn, have a Utopian feel, a Utopia Lizzy is barred from.

Lizzy's father ( Judd Hirsch ) was also a sculptor and he takes an interest in his daughter's work. However, he's wrapped up in his own life, with two perpetual visitors, played by Amanda Plummer and Matt Molloy, grifter hippies who never settled down. This duo might have been the lively center of another Reichardt film. Lizzy is irritated by them and feels her father is being taken advantage of (and maybe jealous of the attention they soak up from her dad). She worries about her brother ( John Magaro ), a more stereotypical genius artist, a recluse whose unpredictable behavior is alarming and possibly dangerous. Lizzy also gets caught up in this whole drama with a wounded pigeon foisted on her by Jo. The pigeon takes up a lot of brain space, and Lizzy finds it hard to work with it around. The pigeon is a literary device (the script is by frequent collaborator Jon Raymond of "Wendy and Lucy," "Meek's Cutoff," and "First Cow").

Williams (another frequent Reichardt collaborator) plays a downtrodden meek person, her slope-shouldered shuffling walk evoking disappointment, resentment, and invisibility. Hong Chau emanates energy and confidence, throwing parties for herself, building a tire swing, and working on her gigantic colored-yarn creations. (Michelle Segre created Jo's installations, and Lizzy's small sculptures of women in various stages of wild movement, either joyful or anguished, were created by Cynthia Lahti). The Portland "scene" is totally believable: the storefront galleries, the cheap wine, the cheese squares, the artists on top of one another, totally aware of each other's work, in each others' business, maybe ambivalent, but maybe not. Jo shows up at Lizzy's small gallery show. Lizzy doesn't go to Jo's. This is a no-no. The great André Lauren Benjamin (aka André 3000) plays the kiln operator at the college, and he is another "can do" personality, helpful and supportive to the artists who come to him. Lizzy can't meet him on that level. She's put-upon, maybe even embarrassed about her art. It's not important enough.

This may be stating the obvious, but the title has a dual meaning and expresses the tension in this small community, or, at least, the tension Lizzy feels. "Showing Up" can mean showing up for others, supporting, attending Jo's show, and being happy for her success. "Showing Up" also means feeling like others are ahead of you, doing way better than you, and obliterating your own accomplishments. If you feel "shown up" by your peers, it's impossible to "show up" for others. There's something a little too neat about the structure of "Showing Up," and the pigeon wears its symbolism on its broken wings. But the piercing specificity of Reichardt's vision, and her insights into the dynamics of an art scene like the one in Portland, are spot on.

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Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Showing Up (2023)

Rated R for brief graphic nudity.

108 minutes

Michelle Williams as Lizzy

Hong Chau as Jo

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The film that makes me cry: Up

None can stand before Pixar’s pinnacle of animated tear-jerking, which starts with a deathbed scene and ends with you in a blubbering mess

I first saw Up when I was 40,000 feet high in the sky. Unlike the lead character of the animation, however, who travels the world by helium-balloon-powered house, I was on a plane en route to my cousin’s wedding. Little did I realise that within 10 minutes of putting my headphones on and pressing play, I would be reaching for my travel tissues and stifling sobs as passengers either side of me stared awkwardly into their complimentary peanuts and pretended not to notice.

The somewhat unexpected hero of this 2009 Pixar classic is Carl Fredricksen, a balloon salesman in his late 70s who lives alone after the death of his wife Ellie. The animation starts further back in time, however, with Ellie and Carl meeting as wide-eyed, button-nosed children dreaming of exploration as they soar across the wilderness of their imaginary worlds in matching aviator goggles.

In quick succession, the two grow up, fall in love, get married and build a home together. But time presses urgently on, and soon we see Ellie on her deathbed handing Carl her well-loved book of adventures and telling him it’s time for one of his own. Some films may try to tease out a tear at some point along the way and never quite achieve it; Up has you with this opening sequence and doesn’t let you go.

Yet, magically, despite heart-wrenchingly understated scenes like Ellie’s death, Up is always one step ahead, making you laugh out loud just when you least expect it. Carl’s totally non-action-packed trip from the top to the bottom of his house via a stairlift is the perfect example – but perhaps you have to see that one to appreciate it .

Up is a film about getting old, about regret and about realising that life is messy and out of control, as much as you might try to make it otherwise. But it’s also a film about love, compassion and making sure that every day counts. Which is exactly what Carl does. When the local authorities try to send him off to a retirement home, Carl realises he has one chance left to do his best by his late wife, so he ties hundreds of helium-filled balloons to their home and floats the house out of the bustling city and across the tops of the clouds towards the place he and Ellie had always dreamed of visiting.

It’s only when Carl is thousands of feet up that he gets a knock at the front door and realises he’s brought an unexpected guest with him – a lovably useless local kid called Russell, who found himself on Carl’s front porch when the house took off. Proud he’ll be able to help navigate the journey using his GPS tracker, Russell throws his arms open enthusiastically, only to mistakenly lob the location gadget out of the window on to the clouds below.

“Oops”, says Russell, as he and Carl watch the flying object hurtle away from them. And so the pair’s adventure really begins.

The film that makes me cry
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‘up’: film review.

Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.

By Michael Rechtshaffen

Michael Rechtshaffen

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Given the inherent three-dimensional quality evident in Pixar’s cutting-edge output, the fact that the studio’s 10th animated film is the first to be presented in digital 3-D wouldn’t seem to be particularly groundbreaking in and of itself.

But what gives Up such a joyously buoyant lift is the refreshingly nongimmicky way in which the process has been incorporated into the big picture — and what a wonderful big picture it is.

The Bottom Line Winsome, touching and arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever, the gorgeously rendered, high-flying adventure is a tidy 90-minute distillation of all the signature touches that came before it.

It’s also the ideal choice to serve as the first animated feature ever to open the Festival de Cannes, considering the way it also pays fond homage to cinema’s past, touching upon the works of Chaplin and Hitchcock, not to mention aspects of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz and, more recently, About Schmidt .

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09 Oct 2009

102 minutes

In 1982, Werner Herzog made Fitzcarraldo, the story of an over-zealous Irishman (bonkers Klaus Kinski) who, in his quest to bring opera to the South American jungle, drags a huge steamer up and over a mountain. An epic, visionary, never-to-be-repeated slice-of-life action movie, it is also an unlikely touchstone for an animated summer entertainment, the likes of which are usually powered by focus groups and the need to tie in Happy Meals. Like Fitzcarraldo, Up, Pixar’s tenth feature-length slice of genius, is driven by a tenacious lead character dragging his home across the jungle, a real cinematic width and a sense of wonder at both nature and the burden of dreams. Unlike Fitzcarraldo, Up will break your heart in the first five minutes, boasts scene-stealing dogs with high-pitched voices and stars a rare exotic bird called Kevin. Herzog missed a trick there. A bird called Kevin would have done wonders for Fitzcarraldo’s box office.

If the traditional view of animation is that it is kiddie-aimed fare with a dose of adult slyness smuggled inbetween the primary colours and thrills and spills, Pixar appears to work on opposite principles. Even by its own standards, Up stretches the limits of what stories are permissible in mainstream animation. For all of WALL-E’s wordless abstraction, it still had sci-fi trappings, whizz-bang spaceships and cute robotic sidekicks. Here, the treatment and imagery is even more bizarre. It’s a character study of a cantankerous old git. It’s a buddy movie where the buddies are separated by 70 years. It’s a love story where the love transcends death.

Up also reveals an interesting retro reading on Pixar’s previous heroes, recasting the leads as figures stuck in a rut and looking for a way out of their status quo: the factory-working drones of Monsters, Inc., oppressed by the need to garner children’s screams; the obsolete superheroes of The Incredibles marooned in suburban mediocrity; the sewer-dwelling rat who dreams of a five-star kitchen in Ratatouille; WALL-E’s trash-compacting robot who yearns for life (and love) beyond the garbage. In Up’s case, the hero, Carl Fredricksen, is literally tethered to his house, dragging it across exotic South American landscapes, but in reality he’s tied to his memories of a previous life. It’s this that gives the U-rated thrills huge emotional heft.

As well as Fitzcarraldo, Up also shares trace elements with Chaplin, The Station Agent, The Wizard Of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, About Schmidt, Gran Torino and Hitchcock, so given its affectionate melting pot of filmic influences, it is perhaps apt that the movie starts with a little boy sat enraptured by the flickering images on a cinema screen. Carl Fredricksen, his eyes wide beneath aviator goggles, sits glued to the exploits of intrepid explorer Charles Muntz, detailed in a lovingly mounted mock-’30s newsreel, mouthing along with Muntz’s catchphrase, “Adventure is out there!” This ’30s milieu looms large: the entire film is fuelled by that decade’s spirit of derring-do, the thrill of hero worship and the sense of the world as a huge playground waiting to be explored. As Carl leaves the movie theatre, he imagines the newsreel narrator describing his journey home as a grand adventure, his imagination turning stepping over the cracks in the pavement into jumping over the widest ravines. It’s a lovely gracenote that acknowledges the importance of dreaming (and day-dreaming) within everyday life without once pouring on any sentimental, saccharine claptrap.

On the way home, Carl hooks up with fellow Muntz fan and wannabe adventurer Ellie (who looks like the kid sister of The Incredibles’ Helen Parr), and what follows is the most beautifully wrought, poetic love story of the year. As the couple’s dreams of adventures in far-flung places get parlayed into the reality of everyday life, Docter and Peterson provide snapshots of married life, a kind of Revolutionary Road without the harsh shouting, that movingly document the tiny triumphs (turning a rundown house into a Technicolor dream home) and crushing catastrophes (Ellie’s sad discovery at the hospital) that constitute a life. It’s a perfect piece of simple story-telling so lucid and moving that if you left the movie at that point, you’d feel thoroughly satisfied that you’d got your money’s worth.

Yet, happily, Up has plenty more surprises in its locker. Resembling a boxed version of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner-era Spencer Tracy, old man Carl (voiced by Ed Asner), withdrawn from life and facing eviction from his cherished love nest, comes up with a plan to finally realise his long-held dreams. Working his entire life as a balloon vendor, the plucky pensioner ties his inventory to his house, floating himself, his home and the movie into an entirely different zone of unpredictability. The first surprise is that Carl is not alone: an eager-beaver Junior Wilderness Explorer named Russell, desperate to earn his ‘Assist The Elderly’ badge, has stowed away on Carl’s porch. Russell boasts more buoyancy than all the old man’s balloons put together, and his relationship with Carl is tenderly etched. The arc of Carl’s initial disdain to the pair’s mutual companionship and dependency might be obvious, but the bond never feels forced.

What this second phase of Up doesn’t have is the kind of tight plotting that makes the best of Pixar sing (it also has one of the studio’s weakest villains), but its more freeform approach delivers some real delights. There is a run-in with colourful wildlife: the rare exotic bird Russell dubs Kevin is straight off the Chuck Jones drawing pad, a space-cadet version of Road Runner; in a genius move, a pack of dogs on the trail of the bird are able to vocalise their inner thoughts and obsessions through electronic collars. The best of this bunch is Dug (hilariously voiced by co-director Peterson), a goofy, endearing nerd of a mutt. Up also delivers the best action sequences of the season: an escape from the drooling dogs and a heart-stopping third act aerial combat involving a Zeppelin are perfectly crafted, virtuoso set-pieces where you can actually tell who is pursuing who. Most animation bombards the viewer with sensory overload and sees what sticks, but Up is more classical in approach. From subtle joke-making — look out for the cute sideswipe at C. M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker paintings — to a beautifully controlled colour palette that moves through the muted tones of Carl’s house to the explosion of hues in Paradise Falls, to Michael Giacchino’s lovely, artful score, this is refined filmmaking by any standards. Every now and then, Docter and Peterson deliver some 3-D bravura — the depth of field in a jungle sunset, or Russell swinging towards the camera on a rope — but for the most part they are admirably restrained. This is because they have bigger fish to fry. Up doesn’t need 3-D gizmology because, ironically, it is rooted in solid foundations. For all its fantastical leanings, Up is that rare animated film that sees the world as real. Its pains feel real and its joys feel earned. That may be an obvious thing, but it lifts Up into a class by its beautiful self.

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Movie Review: Up (2009)

General Disdain
Movie Reviews
3 responses
--> June 8, 2009

Admit it, you’re just like me — you really had no idea what Disney Pixar’s latest animated adventure, Up was about. For me, all I knew was it had a grumpy old man, a fat kid, a talking dog and a colorful bird in it. Oh yeah, how could I forget, there was also a house, a house that was being whisked about the sky by a million balloons. How all these pieces were supposed connect to form a cohesive story was going to take a lot of effort to pull off.

Yet ain’t it something — they pulled it off. Incredibly well too, I might add. And yep, I’m stunned about it; I certainly thought Up was going to be the Pixar clunker we’ve all been awaiting for some time. Instead, this film may be their strongest showing yet.

Continuing through the door that WALL-E ripped open, Up too, tells a powerful tale without wasting words or packing the 96 minute running time with unneeded filler material.

It gets going with an unexpectedly moving and heartfelt montage laying out the younger years of Carl Fredericksen (voiced by Edward Asner). He meets Ellie, a girl who shares his passion to become a great explorer like the famed Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer). They marry and build a fulfilling life together. She dies without them ever visiting their dream location, Paradise Falls or having children. Full of loneliness and sorrow, and backed into a corner, Carl gives the proverbial finger to the fast moving society building up around him by, quite literally, taking his house up and away. To Paradise Falls, South America he goes, as a final tribute to the woman he loved so much.

The ensuing adventure itself isn’t one to write home to mommy about — at its base it is simply a flighty fight for a colorful dodo-like bird between Charles Muntz with his army of talking dogs and Carl Fredericksen aided by a Junior Wilderness Explorer named Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai). It’s fun to watch due in part to its child-infused absurdity (dogs flying planes?) but mostly because it is fantastically modeled and rendered, and because the slow transformation of Mr. Fredericksen from old codger to an old man with a new lease on life is handled better than most live-acted dramas.

The animation is, as expected, a no-brainer; Pixar has pushed the limits of computer generated realism for years. Up doesn’t noticeably break any new ground (of course I didn’t see the 3D version of the film, so I may very well be wrong here) but it doesn’t lose any either. I’ll just say the landscapes and vistas are beautifully put together. What I found particularly engrossing, which leads to my transformative point, was the small details in Fredericksen’s face and the way he carried himself. In the beginning he was forlorn and lost, and by the end he’s engaged and reinvigorated — with so much of the story being told without ever needing a word spoken. Pete Docter, the man ultimately responsible for this project, had really seen to it that Carl could give the best silent film actors a run for their money for best conveying of a story via expressions only. Ben Affleck, take notes.

Oh yeah, the music score by Michael Giacchino is damn good too. So good in fact, I wouldn’t doubt it gets an award or two.

With Up , Pixar is clearly showing how far they’ve matured. It’s not just about the cutesy characters anymore (although they’re thrown in for good measure), it’s more about the substance of the story and the manner in which it is told. The bar has been raised, DreamWorks Animation — and this is one tough act to follow.

I'm an old, miserable fart set in his ways. Some of the things that bring a smile to my face are (in no particular order): Teenage back acne, the rain on my face, long walks on the beach and redneck women named Francis. Oh yeah, I like to watch and criticize movies.

Movie Review: Ghosted (2023) Movie Review: Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020) Movie Review: Fantasy Island (2020) Movie Review: Snatched (2017) Movie Review: Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) Movie Review: ABCs of Death 2 (2014) Movie Review: Life After Beth (2014)

'Movie Review: Up (2009)' have 3 comments

June 11, 2009 @ 9:43 am hanna

I admit as you, i did not know anything about Up when i went and saw it,I had not even seen the commercial! I was pleasently suprised after i saw the movie. I loved it!

April 30, 2010 @ 3:50 am IBS

This is a really good review. I havent actually seen Up yet, but it sounds like a great fun movie. I wasnt a big fan of WALL-E so I hope this is better.

May 1, 2010 @ 8:44 pm Richmond

Great movie that gives the viewer a mix of emotions.

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Movie Review: Up - The Greatest Adventure

[This review contains plot details revealed in the first 10 minutes of Pixar's Up ]

Pixar's movies have always depicted fantastical worlds spun out of reams of boundless creativity. A rat who dreamed of becoming a chef, and who lived out that dream through controlling a guy by pulling on his hair. An epic battle between ants and grasshoppers. A city full of monsters, powered by the screams of children. A family of superheroes that try to defeat a spurned ex-devotee.

It's in the context of these wondrous films that Up emerges as Pixar's entry for summer 2009. Directed by Pete Docter ( Monsters Inc. ), Up is Pixar's most ambitious effort yet. Pixar films have always expertly been able to imbue fantasy with real-world emotions, but with Up , Docter tries to create a world that is both distinctively ours, yet also a universe of its own. How well does he succeed?

Up tells the story of Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner), a retired balloon seller whose wife has recently passed away. Carl's biggest regret is that he never took his wife, Ellie, to visit her dream destination of Paradise Falls in South America while she was still alive. Determined to rectify this mistake, Carl fills his house full of helium balloons and the next morning, he deploys them out of his chimney, ripping his house off its foundation and sending it hurtling southwards. On the way to his destination, he finds that Russell (Jordan Nagai), a local Wilderness Explorer (this movie's version of Boy Scouts) has stowed away on board, in an attempt to help Carl and win his "Assisting the Elderly" badge. Together, the two form an unlikely friendship as Carl tries to fulfill his quest.

Let it first be said that Up is thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end. There was nary a moment that didn't engage, thrill, or pull (and occasionally yank ) on my heartstrings. The first ten minutes of the film, which contain an utterly masterful montage depicting a romance from inception till death, is some of the best storytelling I've ever seen in my life, and evokes Wall-E's opening 30 minutes of dialogue-free greatness. As Giacchino's sweet, yet plaintive score played in the background during that segment, tears came to my eyes and I felt the audience around me also cave in to the weight of the emotion on display.

If there's any flaw that can be attributed to Up, it's that it tries to do too much. That opening 10 minutes is completely rooted in the real world, where real people deal with real joys and real problems (Ellie even discovers that she is infertile during this portion of the film). However, the film rapidly veers into a world full of flying houses, talking dogs, fantastical inventions, and exotic creatures. Tonally, it gets a bit muddy towards the end, as the film takes us from extreme pathos to manic whimsy in the blink of an eye. Yet how often can it be said that a film, especially an animated one, is too ambitious? A forgivable fault, to be sure.

I was also mildly disappointed that the film wastes an opportunity to be a serious meditation on the rigors of aging. Up begins by reflecting on how one copes with the loss of a loved one in old age, but for the rest of the film, Carl's age is merely played for laughs; he's spry, limber, even acrobatic when the film needs him to be, but his body also gives out just when a comedic beat is necessary. This reflects some of my broader problems with the film — namely, that Up sometimes doesn't know what type of movie it wants to be.

Nonetheless, as is usual for Pixar, Up does so much right that it's easy to forgive these slight missteps. The performances are amazing: Asner is perfect as the cantankerous and deeply conflicted Carl Frederickson, but it's Jordan Nagai as Russell, the young Wilderness Explorer, that steals the show. Nagai, a first-time actor, successfully manages to straddle the line between annoying and adorable, and his performance as Russell gives what would otherwise be a more ponderous movie a much-needed jolt of life. While Russell's dialogue makes his character arc predictable, it's infused with so much sweetness that it will still melt your heart.

And of course, the visuals (my God, the visuals)!. Pixar continues to reveal themselves willing to push the envelope with their visual wizardry, and Up is no exception. The balloon physics are so detailed that they occasionally appear photorealistic, and the vistas visited in this film are unmatched in their breathtaking beauty. Yet one of the things I was most impressed with was the character design for Carl Frederickson. With his square jaw, stout body, and grizzled face, Carl is an imposing figure, but the combination of his nuanced emoting and Asner's performance make him an unlikely lovable hero.

In the end, I love Up because despite its flaws, it is ridiculously effective. Up transported me to another world and allowed me to experience that thrill of adventure, previously felt only in films as great as Raiders of the Lost Ark . But perhaps the film's biggest achievement is the eternal truth that it speaks to: That to experience true love and friendship is one of life's greatest adventures.

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10

Review by Brian Eggert May 29, 2009

The Spirit of Adventure. Pixar Animation Studios has captured it before, but never so precisely as in Up . The themes throughout the picture address life’s immeasurable potential to take a journey or explore the unknown. Through the studio’s gloriously bright and colorful animation, tangible and beautiful and alive all at once, they inhabit an emotional complexity that is conveyed with the utmost ease. There are layers to this picture; however, each is clearly described for children and adults alike, rendering a universal entertainment that wisps the viewer away into an escapist fantasy remarkably devoted to its very real characters.

As a boy, Carl Fredricksen (voice of Ed Asner) aspired for adventure with his playmate, and future soul mate, Ellie. The two children dreamed of visiting South America, to a faraway land called Paradise Falls, discovered by daring explorer Charles Muntz (voice of Christopher Plummer), containing unusual creatures never before seen by human eyes. The children kept an “Adventure Book” to log their fanciful wish of someday living in Muntz’s forgotten wonderland. But their dreams, like many of us, were slowly consumed by reality. Carl and Ellie were married, but they could not have children, which made their bond even stronger. Years pass, and in time, Carl, a 78-year-old balloon vendor, finds himself alone. Ellie has passed on and his life of adventure with her. This is all shown in a beautiful, wordless opening sequence that establishes the entire picture’s emotional substance.

Carl has become a cantankerous old man living alone in the rickety home he and Ellie built, a city growing all around him. He speaks to his absent wife, aching for her company. When he finally must resign himself to a retirement home, he instead launches the house from the city with countless helium-filled balloons and takes off for Paradise Falls. Accidentally stowed away on his porch, however, is Russell (voice of Jordan Nagai), the young Wilderness Explorer desperate to earn his “Assist an Elderly Person” badge. Russell’s sweet virtuousness recalls the young Carl, though the grumbling senior doesn’t realize it.

When they arrive at their destination, the world they find is best discovered for yourself. Among the mysteries are misty mountains, a chocolate-loving exotic bird, and a talking dog named Dug (voice of Bob Peterson). The reject of a small army of talking canines, Dug, and those like him, speak via electronic collars. If you’ve ever questioned what dogs would say if they could talk, this film captures it, in all their loving, naïve, desperate-to-please splendor. Who created these collars? Carl doesn’t care. He just wants to set his house down by the falls, as he promised Ellie he would do long ago. But as Carl quickly learns, there’s more at risk than his own desires.

Arguably the funniest of the Pixar films, the laughs are only matched by the thrills. Carl’s crankiness and Russell’s hilarious innocence keep the audience laughing, while dog humor is prevalent and twisted slightly by their ability to speak. Take the hench-pooch, Alpha, a Doberman Pinscher who stands with a threatening glare until his falsetto voice, raised by his broken collar, squeaks as if he was sucking the helium from some of Carl’s balloons. Near-constant humor helps ease some of the film’s later, more gripping suspense that might otherwise frighten youngsters.

As with every Pixar film, the stakes are set from the beginning. But these aren’t mindless conflicts cleared away by equally mindless animated antics. These characters are tangible, the turns of their stories occasionally heartbreaking. Pixar’s animators illustrate the characters through mild stylizations that don’t detach from their humanness. Of course, they’re cartoons, but they have depth and sheen and the faultless illusion of flesh. Cute animals are present not merely to elicit awww reactions from the audience; rather, they have fully conceived personalities, even while remaining true to their nature. Dogs are just dogs. People are just people. How they react in this amazing situation is what’s extraordinary. And the imagery used within the story captures a kind of vintage iconography, employing objects rooted in the simplicity of their design, such as balloons and blimps, bringing to mind an immediate classicism.

Director Pete Docter, who helmed Monsters, Inc. and conceived Toy Story and WALL•E , works alongside co-director and writer Bob Peterson, himself the writer of Finding Nemo . Together, they create a world where the impossible is just a step passed intention, where adventure arrives by your own making, and where escapism doesn’t necessarily mean escape. Once again, Pixar shows audiences that the potential for animated features is boundless in the right hands. In contrast, competing studios like Dreamworks and Fox prove time and again just the opposite.

How appropriate then that the film speaks with awe about the pure concept of Adventure, about the romantic possibility of unexplored nature and newfound technology colliding in a grand discovery. Pixar finds wondrous ways of touching on this theme on and offscreen, through their story and by way of their breakthrough animation techniques, while also acknowledging that the need for adventure and exploration have tragically become characteristics of the past. And so, Pixar films are contemporary cinema’s abundant fountain where our thirsty imaginations are quenched, as they can realize the most spectacular story, infuse it with the most sincere of human emotions, and render it with the most visionary narrative scope.

Up is the kind of film where even critics find themselves incapable of putting into words just how cheerful and entertaining it is, ever at a loss to explain how everything is just right. Each line of dialogue and the accompanying gestures extract the precise emotion intended. As always, from Toy Story to WALL•E , Pixar’s clarity of purpose astounds. Flawlessly evocative, the film’s joys are so very joyful and the saddening moments ever so tender. Miraculously transporting us up and away through means by which only Pixar can, this is Movie Magic at its purest, realized with all the infinite possibilities of the cinema, animated or otherwise.

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Screen Rant

'up' review.

Even within a pantheon of excellent films, Pixar's 'Up' stands out as the best one yet.

There's nothing better than an easy review: Pixar's latest summer offering, UP , is a fantastic film. Simply fantastic. Seriously, if Ratatouille and Wall-E deserved to be in the running for Best Picture of the Year (as many said they did at the times of their releases) then UP certainly does.

It's that good.

The film - which was written by Bob Peterson ( Finding Nemo , Ratatouille ) and directed by Peter Docter ( Monsters, Inc. ) - delivers all the things we've come to expect from a Pixar animated feature: gorgeous visuals, a strong story rife with moral lessons and (gasp) good character development; humor both low-brow (for the kids) and high-brow (for the grownups), with strokes of bold wit and a dash of sagely wisdom for good measure.

And yet, UP also delivers something quite unexpected: Pixar's most adult-oriented story yet, slyly disguised in a fantastic adventure tale.

UP tells the life story of Carl Fredricksen (the unmistakable voice of Ed Asner), a shy little boy who grows up in (1930s?) America, an era in which people pack into movie theaters to watch news reels about adventurous explorers like Charles Muntz, who travels the world on one epic quest after the next.

Young Carl Fredricksen idolizes Muntz: He spends his lonely days roaming his neighborhood pretending to be Muntz until one day he runs into Ellie, an energetic and fearless young girl (everything Carl is not) who idolizes Charles Muntz just as much as Carl does. Ellie and Carl cross their hearts then and there and swear to be great adventurers like Charles Muntz, and with that oath, theirs is a match made in heaven.

After that fateful first encounter, we get a truly beautiful montage of Carl and Ellie's life-long romance. We see the young kids grow into a teenage couple; see them get married and buy a house, working day jobs (balloon vendor) while saving up for the kind of adventures they fantasized about as kids. We watch the couple deal with the ups and downs, joys and tragedies of life; and gradually we watch them grow into old age, Ellie's "My Adventures" scrapbook still unfilled, even as her time on Earth ends.

With Ellie gone, Carl becomes a disgruntled old man desperately trying to hold on to a house, heirlooms and a lost-love he cherishes. A physical confrontation with neighborhood developers leads to Carl being forced into a retirement home for the rest of his days - but before the old man will give in he decides to honor the oath he and Ellie swore as kids and take one last shot at adventure! Carl ties an impossible number of balloons to his house (working a balloon cart at the zoo was his job for many years), rigs a steering system and UP he goes!

But there's a stowaway on board: a young boy scout-type named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who is desparately trying to earn his last merit badge assisting the elderly, for personal reasons that are as moving as a they are heartbreakingly naive. From that point on, the story mainly focuses on Carl trying to find room in his broken heart for love and friendship again, with Russell acting as his primary foil and simultaneous source of inspiration. Russell is also handy for providing the comedic relief the kids will get.

Of course there's a whole flying to South America, evil nemesis (Christopher Plummer), talking dogs/mythical bird adventure thrown in there. All of that stuff is pretty cool, and will be sure to entertain the kids. However, as one of the grownup kids, the story (for me) was all about Carl dealing with his profound sense of loss and love. The flying house escapism, fantastic creatures and evil villains were all just means and metaphors for that awesome emotional narrative.

No lie, there were a lot of sobs and sniffles around me in the theater. If you're old enough to know about love and loss, it's hard not to be affected by UP . By now it's no secret that Pixar knows how to tell a fantastic story, but who knew they could handle romantic drama so well? Superb work.

Visually, UP is just as stunning. The digital 3D tech employed for this film is far from a gimmick - it enhances the experience of the film by multitudes. When Carl and Russell are walking over cliffs or trekking through gorgeously rendered South American jungles, with an enormous floating 3D house harnessed to their backs, it's not just some of the most gorgeous eye-candy seen onscreen (the balloons are truly amazing), it's also a very clever and potent metaphor for grief. Rendered in 3D, those themes stood out loud and clear; the rest of the time, this movie was just a treat to look at.

I confess having wet eyes myself, not once, or twice, but on several instances during UP . Sometimes I was thinking, "This movie is breaking my heart." Other times I was thinking, "This movie is melting my heart." And sometimes, I was simply thinking, "This movie is so damn beautiful."

It definitely lifted me UP .

"Delightful, Terrific & Heartwarming Adventure"

What You Need To Know:

(CCC, BBB, V, M) Very strong Christian, moral worldview promoting letting go of your sins and burdens to find new life, loving and caring relationships, heroic action, sacrifice to help others, marriage, and other Christian, biblical values, with references to getting married in a church, having a funeral in a church and an afterlife in Heaven; no foul language but a couple of “darn” words; light action cartoon violence such as child and animals in peril, a scary thunderstorm, snarling leader of a pack of dogs whose frightfulness is undercut by some very funny comedy, dogs chase giant bird, dogs chase characters, dog bites bird’s leg, villain tries to kill protagonist with a sword, villain chases protagonist and his new friend, characters in danger of falling from great height, a villain is shown falling, villain and three of his canine minions try to shoot down floating house with boy in it, boy almost falls from open ramp of dirigible balloon, protagonist gets angry and injures a man with his cane, and characters often attached precariously to a hose which swings wildly at dangerous heights; no sex; no nudity; no alcohol; no smoking or drugs; and, light miscellaneous problems such as protagonist lies to send annoying boy on a wild goose chase, crotchety old man and boy’s sadness that his father has become too busy for boy’s scouting activities is not resolved.

More Detail:

A floating house. A crotchety old man. A young scout who hasn’t been camping. A giant bird that craves chocolate. Talking dogs!!!

These are just a few of the delightful ingredients to Pixar and Disney’s great new comedy adventure, UP, one of the most entertaining, hilarious and poignant animated features they’ve ever made (or anyone else for that matter).

The story starts in the 1930s. Little Carl Fredricksen meets precocious Ellie in a ramshackle, abandoned old house. They discover they are both big fans of the explorer Charles “Adventure is out there!” Muntz, but their hero has been disgraced and has disappeared in the jungle mountaintop of Paradise Falls in Venezuela to find proof of a giant bird he believes exists. Ellie and Carl plan to go there someday to explore.

[Warning – possible spoilers follow] A lovely montage shows that Carl and Ellie grow up and fall in love. They get married and rebuild the ramshackle old house where they pretended to go on great adventures together as children. They keep saving for their trip to Paradise Falls, but every time they get ahead, something happens. Like a flat tire. Or a broken leg. Before they know it, they are getting old, past middle age. Carl finally decides to go ahead and buy airplane tickets to Venezuela, but Ellie suddenly gets deathly ill and passes away.

Cut to elderly Carl still living in their house. He is surrounded by the massive construction of a bunch of skyscrapers. He refuses to sell their beloved house to the developer.

One day, Russell, a young Wilderness Explorer knocks on Carl’s door. All Russell needs is one more badge to become a Senior Wilderness Explorer, a badge showing that he has assisted an elderly person. Carl can’t be bothered, however, so he sends Russell on a wild goose chase – to capture an annoying bird that does not exist, a snipe.

Then, another bad thing happens. One of the construction men has accidentally nearly broken the beloved mailbox that Carl built with his wife Ellie. When the man tries to fix it, Carl hits him with his cane, causing the man’s head to bleed. The judge sentences Carl to the local retirement home.

Instead of going, Carl attaches hundreds of helium-filled balloons to the chimney of his house. He plans to fly to Paradise Falls and fulfill the dream that inspired he and his beloved Ellie. Once high in the air, he discovers that Russell was under the porch looking for the snipe. It looked strangely like a mouse, Russell says.

Carl tries to drop Russell back on the ground and take off again, but Providence intervenes and they are whisked to Paradise Falls, where they find the adventure of a lifetime. They also may just lose their lives in the process!

UP is a terrific movie full of crazy hilarity, hairbreadth escapes, enchanting characters, thrilling suspense, brilliant wit, and incredibly poignant, touching moments that remind one of the most heartfelt moments in one’s favorite movies. In fact, UP has one of the most adorable, winsome and extraordinarily tender openings ever seen in a movie. And, did we mention that there are talking dogs?

UP is also one of the funniest animated movies ever made. There are a couple moments in this movie that are so funny that the laughter in the audience drowned out the dialogue for almost a minute, or maybe more. There are also a few jokes that are laugh-out-loud hilarious, very clever and even totally unexpected.

Like every Pixar movie, UP breaks new ground. Instead of seeking photorealism, UP has an intentional symbolist style that is reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupery classic tale of THE LITTLE PRINCE.

Furthermore, like the MISSION, it has a clear allegory of letting go of your burdens and sins so you can accept the gift of new life. In many ways, Carl is born again when he lets go and crosses his heart.

Pete Docter and Bob Peterson have written a great script that’s beautifully directed by Docter, with help from Peterson as co-director. They’ve been associated with many other Pixar movies, but especially with the TOY STORY movies, MONSTERS INC. and FINDING NEMO.

Best of all, UP is another family-friendly classic movie from the magnificent team at Pixar and Disney. Ultimately, its message is that the best, most wonderful adventures we have are the ones we find with the people we love.

Pixar is at the top of its game here. Even when it ventures into situations that might be too scary or too intense for younger children, such as a pack of snarling (and talking) dogs or a villain trying to shoot down Carl’s house with Russell in it, the Pixar filmmakers show great taste and creativity by undercutting and relieving the moment with hilarious comedy or a heartfelt action.

All that said, UP is not absolutely perfect. At one point, Russell mentions to Carl that his father has become too busy to go to every one of Russell’s Wilderness Explorer meetings, or to take him camping. This plot point is not resolved, but it easily could have been, without making the movie seem overlong. Apparently, the filmmakers felt that doing this might take away from the relationship the movie is building between Russell and his new friend, Carl.

Also, some critics or viewers may think that the movie’s action-filled third act is slightly too frenetic or goes on slightly too long. This is a very minor, highly debatable flaw, however.

The good news is that there will probably not be a more entertaining, more heartfelt, more exciting, more creative, or funnier movie than UP this year. It has almost everything anyone could possibly want to see when they spend their hard-earned bucks at the local multiplex. And, did we mention that it has talking dogs!?

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On top of all that, Up opens with a standalone cartoon short ( Partly Cloudy ) and a newsreel, like going to the Saturday double-bill matinee in the old days, when Carl Fredrickson was a shy, wide-eyed lad who idolized dashing celebrity explorer Charles Muntz and dreamed of adventure, but became tongue-tied in the overwhelming presence of the irrepressible, voluble young Ellie, his polar opposite and kindred spirit.

Up opens with an eloquent, economical prologue that is among the most arresting tributes to lifelong love that I have ever seen in any film, let alone a cartoon. Joy, serenity, hope and heartbreak, dreams long cherished and long deferred — a lifetime of indelible memories effortlessly evoked in a few brief minutes.

Now a stumpy, crusty old geezer who lives by himself in a forlorn bungalow glaringly out of place in a neighborhood in the throes of urban upheaval, Carl (Edward Asner) is a widower, but Ellie remains very much a presence in the film. She is still the center of Carl’s world, and their love story is the only story he has.

No, Carl won’t hear of selling his house to the faceless suit who razes and erects worlds around him. He doesn’t want the help of the hopelessly earnest young Wilderness Explorer Russell (Jordan Nagai), doggedly fixated on doing the old man a good turn to earn his missing “Assisting the Elderly” merit badge.

Above all, Carl is contemptuously determined that whatever his future holds, it won’t be the sanitized comfort of the Shady Oaks retirement home. What other animated film has contemplated the anxious stubbornness of the elderly to cling to whatever independence they can for as long as they can, to remain connected to familiar places and things? What other animated film even has a senior citizen for a protagonist? ( Howl’s Moving Castle doesn’t count; Miyazaki’s doddering heroine is really a youth in a grandmother’s body.)

And then things start to unravel, and Carl’s future is no longer in his hands — not without reason, to his guilty shame. You may have seen or known about similar cases from the outside; Up shows us the story from Carl’s inside perspective.

And so we come to the great conceit celebrated in the much-seen trailers. If you’ve seen the trailers, you don’t need me to describe it, and if by some twist you haven’t, why would I rob you of the moment of revelation? It is a sequence of singular magic, and the delight of discovery comes but once.

Suffice to say, Carl precipitously decides to throw caution to the winds and embark on the long-dormant dream he and Ellie shared: to follow in the footsteps of their childhood hero Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer) and go to South America to see the spectacular Paradise Falls in the “Lost World” of Venezuelan mesa country. Yes, the journey started in that magical moment has a destination; Up is not the aimless, lofty film one might imagine from the trailer.

Yet nothing so far could prepare you for the lunacy that commences once the film reaches the vicinity of Carl’s destination. Somehow, like Dorothy with her cyclone, like Muntz in those old newsreeels, Carl has left the ordinary world behind and landed in a “Lost World” of his boyhood pulp fantasies — a world of lighter-than-air airships and biplane dogfights, of exotic refugees from a Dr. Seuss zoology, of “Wallace & Gromit”–esque dogs who cook, among other things, and even (in a conceit echoing the film version of Michael Crichton’s “Lost World” tale Congo ) communicate in a way that is both goofily human yet hilariously canine.

As wonky as the proceedings get, director Pete Docter ( Monsters, Inc. ) and screenwriter and co-director Bob Peterson ( Finding Nemo ) never entirely lose touch with the ragged human emotions underlying the story. There’s an obvious metaphor in the film itself for the strange blend of realism and zaniness, partly tethered to solid ground, partly twisting in the capricious winds of whimsy.

More fundamentally, Carl’s house, the film’s central metaphor, is the embodiment of his shared life with Ellie, and thereby a symbol of Ellie herself. Up offers a sweeter and less uncanny counterpoint to Gil Kenan’s Monster House , a darker computer-animated tale of a crotchety, reclusive old widower inhabiting a house that’s as much a character as the humans, with a mind of its own. Ellie’s childhood “Adventure Book,” a scrapbook documenting her exploits and aspirations, with its blank pages saved for her hoped-for trip to South America, epitomizes the tension between unrealized dreams and what turns out to be the actual stuff of our lives.

But it goes deeper than that. Not to spoil the emotional and narrative territory, I’ll append some brief final thoughts to the end of the review for readers who have seen the film.

There is also poignancy in Russell the Wilderness Explorer’s back story, and in the simple vignettes in which, ultimately, two broken lives prop one another up. Although not as centrally or violently, Up feels the gulf of grief and betrayal in the wake of the absentee father as acutely as The Spiderwick Chronicles — another family film in which a house is much more than a house.

As powerful as the emotional underpinnings are, the characters experiencing those emotions don’t quite come entirely into their own. They’re somewhat archetypal, not entirely unlike the characters in WALL-E , rather than fully realized, specific individuals, like those of Finding Nemo , The Incredibles and Ratatouille . In part because of this, for all its emotional power, for all that Up gets right, on first viewing I find the overall effect to be poignant and charming rather than enthralling.

Rarefied standards, applicable only to the work of Pixar. The very fact that I came this close to the end of this review without mentioning the studio’s name or comparing it to previous works is a testament to their sustained achievement. There was no need. Only one team in the world is doing work like this.

I did not cry while watching Up , though certainly many will, but I was moved to tears afterward thinking about it. It has become commonplace to say that Pixar makes films as much or more for adults as for children, but this is too facile. Up is a film about life that makes realities of adult and even geriatric experience universally accessible, even to the youngest viewers. Isn’t this among the noblest things a story can do?

Final thoughts (thematic spoilers)

For viewers who have seen the film, some parting thoughts about the symbolic depths of Carl’s house.

As noted above, the house represents both Carl’s shared life with Ellie and Ellie herself, who even in her absence remains the defining fixture of Carl’s life.

At first, the house — Carl’s memories, his mourning, his love for his late wife — is his refuge, his solace in a world that is moving on without him, leaving him behind. Then, in a moment of crisis, the house becomes his escape, his freedom. It buoys him up, elevates him above an intolerable situation.

As time goes on, though, the house starts to become something else: a burden. Baggage. An increasingly torpid, even ridiculous dead weight that he feels obliged to drag laboriously around everywhere he goes.

In the end, it threatens to become something worse: a death trap. It is something Carl must let go. Maybe not all at once — maybe it starts with piecemeal efforts that lighten the load — but in the end the whole thing has to be cut loose.

And then, a paradoxical miracle: Only when he lets it go does it finally take its rightful place in the whole drama of his life. The whole story-arc of the house is an astoundingly fluid metaphor for bereavement, grief, loyalty to departed loved ones, malaise and the threat of morbidity, and finally acceptance and something like peace.

Available on DVD and Blu-ray, Up comes loaded with extras, including commentary by directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, a new short with Dug the dog (“Doug’s Secret Mission”), and behind-the-scenes featurettes on story development (“The Many Endings of Muntz”) and the filmmakers’ expedition to Venezuela’s tepui highlands (“Adventure is Out There”).

Blu-ray extras offer tons more: featurettes on several characters (elderly Carl, young explorer Russell, brightly-plumed Kevin, even Carl’s house!), a geography game and more. The Blu-ray set also comes with the movie on standard DVD, so it’s worth getting even if a Blu-ray player is still well in your future.

I have mostly stopped reading movie reviews prior to viewing the movies, except for the reviews you write. Perhaps I just read the wrong reviewers, but I’ve noticed that more and more of them pretty much just give away the entire story and leave no room for surprise. It’s almost as though movie reviewers these days want to make sure that the movie consumer knows exactly what their $9.00 (or whatever it costs in your market) is getting them. It sure doesn’t leave a lot of room for surprise and wonder. This was brought to mind rather strongly in comparing your review of Up with the review published by another Christian venue for the same movie. I read yours before seeing the movie (I skipped the spoiler section on first reading, though your spoilers tend to be more coy than most), and the other review post-viewing. While I appreciated the other critic’s insights into some of the themes, I found the six or seven paragraphs summarizing almost the entire movie to be way to revealing. The review gave away too much. I say this not to pick on the other critic, but to illustrate what I see to be a general trend in movie reviews. I’m not a particularly observant movie watcher. I know little about movie-making technique, and I rarely sit around after viewing to analyze what it was that made the story work. I find reviews helpful to tip me off to things to keep an eye out for that I might otherwise miss, insights that amplify the viewing experience, and of course, whether the movie is one I might want to see. For me, a good review is one that I can read both before and after seeing the film and get something out of each time, while also getting to enjoy the movie itself. So thank you. Your reviews are consistently excellent (even when I have to disagree with your conclusions), and have been instrumental in pushing me to see movies I might not otherwise have seen (e.g. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days ). You don’t give away the story or spoil the movie for me, either. For all these things, I am grateful. Thank you!

I think you should up (no pun intended) your rating to an A+. I saw the movie with my teenage kids and they were moved by the incredible love of the couple. I’ve never seen love expressed so simple and so joyful in a cartoon movie.

Thank you for your “final thoughts” on the real role of the house in Up . There was something about the house’s relationship with Carl I didn’t quite get at the time (possibly because I was holding a 2-year-old on my lap, and the moment of the great house-purging occurred just as he — the 2-year-old — ran out of cherry icee — otherwise, he sat through the entire thing in rapt attention), but your comments on how [ spoiler alert ] the house became a burden to be dragged around and Carl’s piecemeal attempts to rid himself of it before realizing it was a real life-trap made the whole movie click for me. And, for what it’s worth, I was one of the guys who cried in the theater (probably the only time during the movie I was glad we’d seen it in 3‑D … those tinted buddy holly glasses are good for something). Not too many animated movies deal with the unsharable grief of a miscarriage (and certainly none with that degree of economy and emotional precision). But then, I cried in Cars (and every other Pixar movie), too, when Route 66 gets bypassed and Radiator Springs becomes a forgotten ghost town, so maybe I’m just a sucker for a good story.

Up was a joy. Your review not only encouraged us to go see it, it magnified our pleasure with the qualities and values it presented. Thanks for your site. You’re a gifted educator.

Thank you for your interesting review of Up . I thought the film was “cute”, but I was personally disappointed after all the hype. Something bothered me (besides the repetitive soundtrack): there were a lot of violent elements in the film (life-threatening situations for the heroes). I understand this is a cartoon, but at the same time, this is not a film with talking cars, superheroes, animated toys, or talking animals (well … okay). We have a character who tries to kill the young Wilderness Explorer not once, not twice but three times (the last time with a shotgun!). When the crazy guy falls to his death, there is no reaction from our “heroes” (not even shock or horror) — their only concern is for the house (and for the weird bird). This situation kinda felt odd in a film geared to young kids.

What are you opinions on the character of Kevin as a gay/transgendered character (colorful, rainbow-like character)? I’ve read that this was a subtle nod by Pixar to the Prop 8/GLBT crowd. I saw the movie and didn’t pick up on it, but others who have seen it had commented on this. I am interested to hear your opinion on this.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of Up , but I don’t think I have heard anyone addressing this particular issue [ spoiler warning ]. When Carl lifts up his house for his trip to Central America, he severs his home’s plumbing and electricity. He makes it clear that he doesn’t have any more balloons or helium. He can’t go back. He only has the food he keeps in the house, and he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to find more edibles in the jungle (and he certainly isn’t prepared to hunt). If he has a medical emergency, there is no doctor or hospital for maybe hundreds of miles. That leads to one conclusion: Carl is going to South America to die. Carl is clearly really healthy for his age (evidenced by all the physical activity he performs), but if he did succeed in moving his house to the cliffs, he would probably only have a few weeks before he died, probably of starvation. This journey is not just an adventure, it’s a suicide mission. I think that the heart of the story lies in Russell (and also Doug’s) ability to make Carl come alive once more. Once Carl realizes that he has a responsibility to others besides himself, Carl realizes that he has to fight to stay alive. I would like to make some comments on your final thoughts on the great metaphor that is Carl’s house. I think that in making the journey, Carl is trying to write the last chapter of his life, and the love story between himself and Ellie. By ripping it from the ground and disconnecting all pipes and wires, he has deliberately rendered it impossible to live in for very long. He has tried to draw the curtain on his life, but Russell and Doug draw it back again, and for the first time since Ellie’s death, Carl has someone to live for — thank goodness.

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The purpose of the movie is to entertain rather th

Clear and consistent message that you don't need s

The Marshall family are supportive and loving. Sco

Mild peril but no harm comes to any characters. Ch

Educational Value

The purpose of the movie is to entertain rather than educate.

Positive Messages

Clear and consistent message that you don't need superpowers to be a hero -- even ordinary people can achieve great things. The underlying storyline inspires thinking about the environment and protecting the planet.

Positive Role Models

The Marshall family are supportive and loving. Scott and his friends work together as a team. At first Scott lies to his family, but ultimately sees the importance of honesty. Positive representation: The Marshalls are a Black American family.

Violence & Scariness

Mild peril but no harm comes to any characters. Characters have guns but don't shoot them. A building gets blown up with characters trapped inside -- they escape unharmed. The superheroes are tied up to have their minds wiped.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Up, Up, and Away is a Disney comedy about a family of superheroes. It has many hallmarks of a TV movie -- most notably the laughable special effects -- and subsequently might not hold the attention of media-savvy kids in the 2020s. Despite this, there is a good solid message -- we're all heroes in our own way -- that runs throughout. While there is no real violence, there are sinister characters and perilous moments. Guns are seen but not used, and a building explodes with people inside -- although none come to any harm. It's also quite stressful watching Scott ( Michael J. Pagan ) lie to his parents and put himself in danger by pretending that he has superpowers when he hasn't. Overall, with positive messages and likable kids, it's a passable comedy adventure -- but high-quality viewing it's not. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

UP, UP, AND AWAY finds a family of superheroes -- the Marshalls -- living unnoticed in a regular neighborhood. Middle child Scott ( Michael J. Pagan ) is about to turn 14 -- the age at which his superpowers may (or may not) manifest. As his birthday nears, Scott begins to panic, pretending to his family that he has super strength and can fly. Meanwhile a peculiar organization called Earth Protectors is brainwashing Scott's schoolmates -- apparently to make them more environmentally aware but in reality to control their minds for more sinister reasons. When Earth Protectors' evil plans come to light, it's up to Scott to save the day -- and his family.

Is It Any Good?

With naff special effects, laughable costume changes, and some bizarre storylines, this movie is easy to poke fun at. But the overarching message in Up, Up, and Away -- that you don't need superpowers to be a hero -- and some genuinely funny moments make it just about watchable. There is well-placed humor around Scott's (Pagan) mom and dad juggling their day jobs with parenting, marriage, and being superheroes.

The concept of kids being brainwashed by staring mindlessly at their computer screens also strikes an amusing chord. Scott's best buddy, the cool but nerdy Randy ( Chris Marquette ), gets all the best lines, as the friends use seventh grade ingenuity and slapstick to overcome the baddies. Despite being made 20 years ago Up , Up, and Away has aged surprisingly well. And while the clunky, low-grade special effects and various implausible plotlines make it hard to take seriously, this is nevertheless gentle family entertainment with a good heart.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the positive messages in Up, Up, and Away . Why is honesty and taking responsibility for your actions so important? How did it make you feel when Scott felt he had to lie to his family?

Talk about the differences between made-for-TV movies and theatrical releases. The budgets are much smaller -- what does this mean for the production?

Discuss how environmental awareness has developed in the 20 years since the movie was made. For example, the phrase "single-use plastic" didn't exist in 2000 -- what else has changed?

Why is it important for superheroes to be diverse? How are the Marshall family an example of both racial and gender diversity compared to other superhero films?

Movie Details

On DVD or streaming : January 22, 2000
Cast : Robert Townsend , Michael J Pagan , Alex Datcher
Director : Robert Townsend
Inclusion Information : Black directors, Black actors
Studio : Disney Channel Original Movies
Genre : Comedy
Topics : Superheroes
Run time : 77 minutes
MPAA rating : NR
Last updated : February 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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DVD & Streaming
Action/Adventure , Animation , Comedy , Kids

Content Caution

In Theaters

May 29, 2009
Voices of Edward Asner as Carl Fredricksen; Jordan Nagai as Russell; Bob Peterson as Dug and Alpha; Christopher Plummer as Charles Muntz

Home Release Date

November 10, 2009
Pete Docter

Distributor

Walt Disney

Movie Review

Sometimes we build our dreams like snowmen, in the morning glint of February. We build them high, snow upon snow upon snow, until they tower over our heads and seem to stand like glistening stone. But then the spring starts its work, diminishing our gleaming dreams drop by drop. They disappear in tiny rivulets of ice-cold water, by imperceptible inches, until all that’s left is a ring of greener grass.

Never mind that this is an animated “kids’ movie.” This is the philosophical stuff of Pixar’s Up .

For you see, Carl Fredricksen had just such a dream. He and his beloved wife, Ellie, planned one day to visit Paradise Falls, a mysterious locale in South America filled with cliffs and waterfalls and adventure. When they were children, Carl promised they would go there, cementing the deal with a somber crosscut motion over his heart. Throughout their marriage, the promise of Paradise danced in front of them.

But life kept intruding. They’d raid their Paradise Falls fund for flat tires, for home repairs, for all manner of everyday hiccups. Their hair turned gray, then white, and when Carl finally bought their tickets to Paradise, Ellie was too sick to go. Then … she was gone, leaving Carl with a houseful of memories, a heart full of grief and two plane tickets he’ll never use.

But a promise is a promise, and Carl had crossed his heart. So he loads his house with helium balloons and rips its thousands of pounds of wood and metal and carpet right off its foundation, floating out of the city and into adventure. He has just one destination in mind—Paradise Falls, and he’ll slice through the air until he reaches its hallowed—

Knock, knock.

Until he reaches its hallowed—

Knock, knock, knock.

Carl walks to the door and finds a boy named Russell, a Wilderness Scout with a sash full of merit badges and a brain full of chatter, cowering on his swaying porch.

“Hello, Mr. Fredricksen,” the boy says, clinging to the siding for dear life. “Please let me in.”

“No,” Carl says. And he slams the door.

But then he opens it again.

So begins a new sort of dream for Carl, though he doesn’t know it yet. He still thinks he’s saving his snowman—his dream, his promise, his adventure, his treasure. But what he’s about to find out is that while there’s no denying that snowmen are cool and all, what’s really important is underneath—the lush circle of spring grass left behind. Green. Growing. Living.

Positive Elements

Carl’s a grouchy old coot, but we love him anyway. We can’t help it, really. He clearly adored his wife from the minute they met to the moment she was taken from him and far, far beyond. He takes the trip for her, and he continues to talk with her throughout the film. Carl preserves her memory in every way he can—even wearing a badge (a grape soda bottle cap with a pin stuck through it) that Ellie made for him when they were children.

And the fact that he holds true to a 70-year-old promise is, frankly, incredibly inspiring.

But while his devotion is laudable, how Carl carries it out violates Ellie’s free-spirited essence. Carl’s house is brushed in shades of mausoleum gray—a stark contrast to the brilliant balloons lifting it aloft—a suggestion that Carl’s not really living, but holding stagnant in a state of constant preservation.

In bounces Russell, with his brilliant, balloon-like merit badges and his buoyant personality. He has just one badge left to earn—his “assisting the elderly” badge—and he aims to assist Mr. Fredricksen, whether the old guy likes it or not. Along the way, he shows voluminous reserves of compassion, courage and creative problem-solving. It is he who becomes the film’s moral compass: As Carl struggles with his house and his stuff and the weight of his grief, it’s Russell who has a better sense of what’s really important—even as he himself struggles to come to terms with a father who, through some vaguely revealed circumstance, has grown ever more distant. Russell tells Carl that he and his dad used to get ice cream, sit on a street corner and count cars.

“It might sound boring,” Russell admits. But I kinda think it’s the boring stuff I remember the most.”

The pair’s trip to Paradise Falls is anything but boring, but through it Carl learns a bevy of valuable lessons involving family, friendship, commitment and materialism. And before it’s all over, he passes on the grape soda badge—which he calls the “Ellie badge”—to Russell.

Spiritual Elements

After Ellie dies, we see Carl sitting—mourning—in an empty church.

Sexual Content

Violent content.

Of course, nearly every major character in Up spends some time dangling from dizzying heights, afraid that they’ll fall down . This leads to loads of tense moments—stuff that feels, frankly, a tad more perilous than you’d expect in a “cartoon.” (Or maybe that’s just the 3-D projection and my fear of heights talking.) One character does plummet to the ground from a presumably fatal height, and several dogs fall off a cliff into a waiting river.

Carl becomes a geriatric action hero, “sword fighting” with a bad guy (longtime adventurer Charles Muntz) with his cane (an encounter that leads to bruises, a thrown-out back and a gigantic mess). Muntz fires at Carl with a shotgun and sets the house on fire.

Plane-flying dogs shoot what look to be tranquilizer darts at their quarry (Carl, Russell, a dog named Dug and a huge, flightless bird named Kevin). Dug gets bitten by the fearsome pack leader at least twice, and he tumbles down the side of a shallow cliff. A dog bites Kevin’s leg, drawing blood.

As a child, Carl falls through an attic floorboard and accidentally smacks himself in the face with his own arm cast. As an adult, he thwacks a poor, innocent construction worker with his cane. (The construction worker’s knocked out, and he appears to bleed a bit.)

Dug—who, like all the dogs in the movie, can talk thanks to a special dog collar—makes a joke about a squirrel, concluding it by saying, “It is funny because squirrel gets dead.”

The short feature Partly Cloudy (shown before Up ) displays a character getting chomped by an alligator, butted by a ram, skewered by a porcupine and shocked by an electric eel.

Crude or Profane Language

“Gosh,” “golly” and “darn.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Muntz’s pack of well-trained dogs serves dinner to Muntz, Carl and Russell—including wine for the two senior citizens. It’s hard to tell how much liquid actually gets in the glasses, though, since pouring vino is something the pack hasn’t quite mastered yet. The era of prohibition is mentioned.

Other Negative Elements

Wanting to get rid of Russell, Carl fantasizes about making him rappel down to a skyscraper rooftop—and in this daydream, the plan goes awry and Russell falls. Carl initially reneges on a promise to take care of Kevin.

We learn that Ellie ripped a page out of a library book to paste in her adventure scrapbook. Carl lies to a couple of retirement home workers when they come to take him away, saying he’s going to say good-bye to his home for the last time (when in reality he’s about to launch it into the air). One of the workers says that he’s “probably going to the bathroom for the 80th time.” Speaking of bathrooms, Russell relieves himself in the jungle. (The act takes place offscreen, but we see the boy tamping down a pile of dirt that covers his makeshift latrine.)

“A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves,” wrote Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri. “Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.”

Up is exactly the kind of thing Okri was talking about. It transcends cartoon . It transcends film . It is a story , and a story in the word’s best, most mythical sense—a narrative that educates and entertains, a fairy tale that can make your heart larger. It makes me wonder, again, why more people aren’t making films like this. And I’m beginning to think they simply don’t know how.

Pixar, though, has been making worthwhile movies for nearly 15 years now, and the stories keep getting stronger. Up ‘s sense of literature and symbol could be studied on many a college campus, and its themes would not be out of place in a church service. While it doesn’t deal in theology or spirituality, its morals are from time-tested biblical bedrock: Keep your promises. Treasure people, not things. Spend time with your kids. Honor your elders. Respect. Trust. Love.

And it’s a gut-busting hoot to boot.

A postscript: I’ll have to spoil a rather major plot point as I write the next few paragraphs—but it’s worth it, I promise. In many (most) modern kid flicks, young audiences are told to “follow their dreams.” This is a message that simultaneously resonates and repels. While there’s real value in dreaming big, we shouldn’t let those dreams sidetrack us from what God has in mind for us: As painful as it can be, sometimes our dreams need to melt.

In Up , we see a dreamer disappointed. A dreamer who feels betrayed by life’s circumstances. His eyes tear up when he thinks of Ellie’s apparently empty scrapbook—the one that was to hold pictures from all their daring adventures together, the one in which Ellie wrote, as a child, “Stuff I’m going to do.”

But then, as he sits in his gray, lifeless house, now settled snugly beside Paradise Falls—a dream too long in coming—he opens the book and finds … pictures. And more pictures. And still more pictures. Carl. Ellie. Ellie. Carl. Weddings. Car trips. Quiet days at home. Pictures and pictures and pictures.

On the last page is a note from Ellie. “Thanks for the adventure,” it reads. “Now go out and get a new one!”

Few of us live our lives exactly as we plan them. Some of our dreams go unfulfilled. Some of them are unfulfilling.

Yet even in the midst of final exams, trips to the grocery store and even tragedies we can never prepare for, we’re still impossibly, gloriously blessed. Sometimes we just need to forget the snowmen that’ve melted and look at the living, lush grass underneath.

Up helps us do that.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Movie Reviews

This recycled 'road house' can't capture the b-movie spirit of the original.

Justin Chang

Jake Gyllenhaal is a former UFC star who becomes a bouncer in Road House. Laura Radford/Prime Video hide caption

Jake Gyllenhaal is a former UFC star who becomes a bouncer in Road House.

There's been so much conflict behind the scenes of the new Road House remake that the fighting on-screen almost pales by comparison. Last month, R. Lance Hill, a writer on the original 1989 film, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the companies behind the remake, MGM Studios and its parent, Amazon Studios. Meanwhile, Doug Liman, the director of the remake, has publicly blasted Amazon for bypassing theaters and giving the movie a streaming-only release.

I can't help but empathize with Liman. His Road House isn't a great movie by any stretch, but what pleasures it has are best experienced on a big screen in a packed house. The original Road House did decent theatrical business back in 1989, before becoming a cult classic on home video. Watching it today, you can see why: It's dumb and satisfying, a straight-no-chaser shot of sex and violence. And Patrick Swayze remains irresistible as Dalton, a strong, silent, frequently bare-chested bar bouncer who gets sucked into a crowd-pleasing maelstrom of small-town mayhem.

Movie Interviews

Jake gyllenhaal on throwing (and taking) punches: 'it's very primal'.

The remake, written by Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry, mostly sticks to the original template. In this version of the story, Dalton, played by Jake Gyllenhaal , is a former Ultimate Fighting Championship star who's fallen on tough times. He's run out of options when he's offered a job cooling down the riff-raff at a roadhouse in the Florida Keys. When he shows up, he teaches the other bouncers to de-escalate the violence that flares up night after night among the bar's very mean, very drunk patrons.

Even so, Gyllenhaal's Dalton feels like less of a pacifist than Swayze's, and he's not afraid to stir up trouble. At one point, a nasty biker gang shows up and starts wreaking havoc inside the roadhouse. Dalton lures them outside and gives them the chance to walk away. They mock him, clearly not knowing what they're dealing with.

This isn't the first time Gyllenhaal has played an ultra-shredded fighter, as he did in the 2015 boxing melodrama Southpaw . His Dalton is a pretty standard-issue protagonist, complete with a troubled past that haunts his dreams. But Gyllenhaal, who's always brought a touch of wild energy even to his good-guy roles, makes those demons more convincing than you'd expect.

None of the other actors are especially persuasive, except Jessica Williams as the roadhouse's tough-minded owner. As a snarling hit man who tries to take Dalton down, the Irish professional fighter Conor McGregor does make an impression, in the same way a wrecking ball makes an impression.

Probably my favorite performance is given by a hungry crocodile who makes short work of one of the more annoying members of the cast and gives the movie some authentic Florida flavor. Most of the other key characters have been recycled from the first film, from the flirty doctor who gives Dalton more than strictly medical attention to the wealthy villain who has his own designs on the roadhouse.

But for all its attempts to recapture the B-movie spirit of the original, this Road House winds up stuck somewhere in the middle, caught between unironic '80s homage and a more wised-up contemporary sensibility. In the first Road House , there was nearly as much free-flowing sex as there was violence; here, the violence has been amped up to even more bone-crunching extremes, while the sole instance of nudity is played strictly for laughs. And some of the dialogue feels too arch and knowing, like when a friendly local compares Dalton to a character in a Western.

As we've seen from his earlier movies, the best of which include The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow , Liman is a more-than-capable director of action. The bar brawls here are well choreographed and cleanly shot, and the fighting encompasses everything from intimate fisticuffs to grander-scale set-pieces.

But there's something too artificial about the action, with its often distractingly obvious CGI touch-ups. I saw Road House at a screening in a theater, and it's possible the technical flaws were magnified on the big screen in a way that they won't be on your TV. Even so, it's too bad that audiences won't get a chance to decide for themselves.

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Legend of Zelda movie director teases "awesome idea" and says he wants to create something "serious and cool, but fun and whimsical"

Exclusive: Wes Ball talks to Total Film about his vision for The Legend of Zelda movie

A live-action Legend of Zelda movie is on the way from Wes Ball and, now, The Maze Runner director has outlined his exciting vision for the upcoming Nintendo project.

"I have this awesome idea," Ball tells Total Film in our new issue out on Thursday March 28, which features The Fall Guy on the cover . "I’ve been thinking about it for a long freakin’ time, of how cool a Zelda movie would be... I want to fulfil people’s greatest desires. I know it’s important, this [Zelda] franchise, to people and I want it to be a serious movie. A real movie that can give people an escape."

Ball even points to that escapism ("I want to live in that world," he says) as the driving force behind The Legend of Zelda movie.

"That’s the thing I want to try to create – it’s got to feel like something real. Something serious and cool, but fun and whimsical."

The Zelda movie, announced in November in a joint partnership between Nintendo and Sony Pictures , will bring to life a video game franchise that's thrived for almost 40 years.

Often focusing on the tunic-clad Link in his battle against series villain Ganon (or other evildoers), the series has sold over 150 million copies. Its most recent entry, Tears of the Kingdom , was among the highest-selling games of 2023.

Pre-order The Fall Guy issue of Total Film

Before he gets to grip with the Hero of Time, Wes Ball's new movie Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is released on May 10. And you can read more about it and a whole lot else besides in the new issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, March 28.

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Check out the covers below:

Pre-order the issue here to bag your copy, or click here to subscribe to Total Film and never miss another exclusive. You’ll get every issue before it's in stores, and you’ll get subscriber-exclusive covers.

I'm the Senior Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, focusing on news, features, and interviews with some of the biggest names in film and TV. On-site, you'll find me marveling at Marvel and providing analysis and room temperature takes on the newest films, Star Wars and, of course, anime. Outside of GR, I love getting lost in a good 100-hour JRPG, Warzone, and kicking back on the (virtual) field with Football Manager. My work has also been featured in OPM, FourFourTwo, and Game Revolution.

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‘Night of Nights’ Review: A Pandemic Documentary That Plays Like a Horror Movie

Made by anonymous filmmakers, the doc captures the first few months of COVID-19 in Wuhan and Shanghai with unvarnished honesty.

By Murtada Elfadl

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“Night of Nights” throws the audience immediately into the action. A sick man in a wheelchair and his companion are stopped outside a hospital by a security guard. All three men are masked and speaking Chinese. He urgently needs a catheter but is treated with suspicion and without courtesy, a negative COVID test is demanded and the patient is turned away because they can’t provide one. It becomes apparent that this documentary chronicles the early days of the pandemic — and the accompanying existential chaos and horror. It has a no-frills approach, showing what the filmmakers could capture at that time of utter confusion.

With a haunting eerie quality, this documentary does not follow any specific person or subject, just COVID and its repercussions. As the camera captures empty cities, military personnel marching and health workers in full white hazmat suits, everyone wearing masks and gloves, the collective trauma of the pandemic is rendered like a horror film. The audience relives how humanity and compassion were stripped away, as life became about recording names, taking body temperatures, panic and isolation.

The filmmakers allow the scenes time to build, most telling a complete story. Consider such startling yet completely plausible scenarios: a rude emergency doctor chastising a patient for not revealing their status, health workers knocking on doors and forcefully spraying people with disinfectant as if they were insects. The camera rolls in the midst of all this chaos, capturing it in intimate ways. It doesn’t show just what’s happening but also the debilitating fear that has taken hold of everyone.

As a political statement, “Night of Nights” offers different avenues for interpretation. While it nevers directly implicates any entity, it functions as a record of failure of both people and organizations to deal empathetically with this calamity. A comparison of the differences in how Americans and Chinese people reacted to the restrictions imposed raises interesting questions. Are the people praising the Chinese reaction, especially that of the state, doing it out of conviction or just reiterating propaganda? Perhaps the biggest indictment of China comes from the secrecy surrounding who the filmmakers are and how they made this movie. The film becomes a document recording not just fear of a deathly disease but also the filmmakers’ fear for their lives and for the people whose stories they are telling.

“Night of Nights” is documentary filmmaking at its most raw. A journalistic endeavor that’s also concerned with human attitudes, it captures not just the facts but also the experience. The camerawork might be simple, without much care about how it looks, but it has texture, capturing pain, bewilderment, fear and ultimately survival.

Reviewed at CPH:DOX. Running time: 86 MIN.

Production: (Documentary) A Fish and Bear Pictures production. Producers: Anonymous, Violet Du Feng.
Crew: Director: Truman. Camera: Xiao Ming, Bingjun. Editors: Van Oalt, Isabella.

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Entertainment | Movie review: ‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’ a…

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Entertainment, entertainment | movie review: ‘ghostbusters: frozen empire’ a lukewarm franchise entry.

A man walks next to a Ghostbusters Ectomobile in a frozen landscape

It doesn’t feel good to beat up on a movie like “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” which is a film with the right intentions: to entertain families looking for spectacle that will please both kids and their Gen X/millennial parents. It’s at least slightly better than its ghoulish predecessor, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” because at least there aren’t any holograms of deceased actors in this one, which is a relief.

Still, there’s very little opportunity for critical examination of this sequel to the “lega-sequel” of the “Ghostbusters” franchise, which already has one failed reboot on its record. What else could one possibly say about “Ghostbusters” in general, and this perfectly fine, but incredibly dull installment specifically? It does exactly what it needs to do for die-hard fans and families seeking a night out at the movies. As a cultural industrial product, it’s emblematic of Hollywood’s obsession with reboots, nostalgia and IP, but that subject has already been talked to death and doesn’t bear repeating.

Those arguments aren’t worth making again, especially when “Frozen Empire” is such an uninspiring example. In its favor, it does try to do something that is both familiar and expansive. The script is by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman, the son of original “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman, who passed in 2022 (the film is dedicated “For Ivan”). Though Jason Reitman helmed 2021’s “Afterlife,” Kenan (“Monster House,” “Poltergeist”) steps behind the camera here.

It may be a new generation of Ghostbusters, but the family of the late Egon Spengler find themselves back in New York, in that firehouse headquarters, following “Afterlife’s” jaunt to Oklahoma. In fact, the whole crew finds themselves in New York, not just Callie (Carrie Coon), and her kids, Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (McKenna Grace), but also Callie’s boyfriend Gary (Paul Rudd), who has joined the phantom-fighting family. Even the kids’ pals Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O’Connor) are also in New York, interning with the original Ghostbusters, Ray Stanz (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson). Yep, the gang’s all here, every last surviving Ghostbuster, including Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), and Annie Potts too, plus a few new characters to boot.

That’s one of the problems with the script, which is that there are far too many characters. Every arc is given short shrift, and most of the story beats are all too predictable. Phoebe’s too young for dangerous urban ghostbusting and feels out of step with her family, Gary doesn’t know how he fits in with the rest of the Spengler clan, etc., etc. These characters may all be in the same place, but every person feels disconnected, preoccupied with their individual dilemma or task. Phoebe makes friends with a ghost who died in a tenement fire; Trevor tries unsuccessfully to catch Slimer. There’s very little chemistry or connection among them, resulting in an unengaging, totally trite and lackluster story.

The one new character who brings some spark is Kumail Nanjiani, playing a burnout loser named Nadeem who pawns his grandmother’s orb at Ray’s paranormal shop. Listen up: never trust an orb. This one houses an ooky-spooky ice lord demon type named Garaka, and he’s the evil Elsa of this land, breathing ice over Manhattan and threatening to unleash every captured ghost. Only Nadeem may have the hereditary gifts to battle such a creature — alongside the brilliant and resourceful young Phoebe Spengler, of course.

The good thing about “Frozen Empire” is that it’s less of that “Easter egg hunt” type cinema that Reitman extolled “Afterlife” as, instead utilizing elements of the original “Ghostbusters” in ways that work within the story. Yet there’s the lingering sensation that it’s still just reconstituted bits and pieces weaponized for a warm reaction. The lore may be better integrated into the story than it was in “Afterlife,” but “Frozen Empire” will still never beat the allegations that it’s merely regurgitated nostalgia aimed at a kiddie crowd.

The good news is that most everyone seems to be having fun. Coon is relaxed, Rudd recites the theme song to great comedic effect, and Murray, Aykroyd, Hudson and Potts are in warm spirits. Everyone else, including Nanjiani and Patton Oswalt, who shows up to deliver some folkloric backstory, just seem happy to be there. British stand-up James Acaster is a welcome sight, even if he is woefully underutilized (once again, there are simply too many people in this movie). But even this cast can’t save the rote machinations of “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” as it dutifully delivers morsels of memory. And yet, it’s likely we’ll be back here in a few years to hash out yet another “Ghostbusters” installment. Fingers crossed there will at least be more to chew on then, good or bad.

‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for supernatural action/violence, language and suggestive references)

Running time: 1:55

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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Review: An investigator on a cold case finds isolation in an outback town called ‘Limbo’

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Outback noir gets an Antonioni-esque existential once-over in writer-director Ivan Sen’s aridly brooding mystery “Limbo,” a tale of the missing and what’s ever-present in a place of stark beauty and deep-seated racial injustice. Come for the cold case, stay for a couple of remarkably lived-in performances from Simon Baker and Natasha Wanganeen. But understand that the true spell here is multihyphenate Sen’s monochrome cinematography, capturing a desolate South Australian town as if it were a moonscape, light-years from the comforts of Earth.

Sen’s brand of socially conscious, dusty, “Bad Day at Black Rock”-adjacent crime saga has already delivered sturdy returns with his earlier features, “Mystery Road” and “Goldstone,” each of which starred Aaron Pedersen as an Indigenous detective poking around rural communities thick with corruption and secrets. (Sen himself is of Indigenous and European descent.) “Limbo” also is built around a man looking for answers, in this case about the 20-year-old disappearance of an Indigenous schoolgirl in the titular town, a remote, depressed opal mining outpost. This time, however, our visiting, taciturn investigator is white, although no less affected by a hard land’s lingering hurts.

Travis (an unrecognizably weathered Baker) has rolled into Limbo and its patchwork of waste soil mounds, open caves and sparse businesses to see if the girl’s likely murder, never officially solved, is worth reopening. That this stoic, tight-lipped man listens to Christian sermons on the radio, but quickly shoots up once he checks into his motel room, tells us that there are other demons on his mind besides the ones he may be unearthing.

What he finds initially is a reluctance to participate on the part of the missing Charlotte’s surviving kin. Her stepbrother Charlie (Rob Collins) lives alone in a trailer, usually morose and often drunk, and still bristles at the racially targeted harassment he received from the white cops who barely investigated at the time. Charlotte’s older sister Emma (Wanganeen) is estranged from Charlie but is raising his two kids, as well as her own daughter. They live on her meager waitress wages, and whatever they fetch from scrounging for opals from the countless rock piles.

Los Angeles, CA - February 20: Actor and producer Sydney Sweeney poses for a portrait ahead of the SXSW premiere of the religious horror-thriller "Immaculate," at Smashbox Studios on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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Even Travis’ search for the man whom everyone accepted as the prime suspect — a skeevy white local once notorious for plying the area’s teenage girls with alcohol and drugs — seems futile: Travis learns from the guy’s reclusive brother (Nicholas Hope) that he’d died the year before. New information bubbles to the surface as Travis tracks down leads, but it’s as if traveling to the middle of nowhere to unravel one crime revealed a wasteland of dislocation and pain, the result of years of wrongdoing. Even a deepening bond with Emma — one that elicits details of his scarred past, and playful teasing from her kids — is approached cautiously, with Baker and Wanganeen serving up a master class in synched underplaying. This extracted land may be full of holes but also, we sense, emotional mines.

“Limbo,” which Sen also scored and edited, is ostensibly a murder mystery, complete with clues and, though obliquely rendered, a solution both stinging and believable. The narrative invariably feels like merely a framework for Sen’s carefully cultivated black-and-white mood, immersing us in a parched, faded world of loss, anger and hiding. With only a handful of characters populating this spare tale — led by Baker’s compassionate cowboy melancholia and Wanganeen’s hardened loneliness — “Limbo” is as much last-chance western as it is crime story.

There’s no truer visual metaphor for this than Sen’s canny choice of town to play his fictional Limbo: real-life Aussie settlement Coober Pedy, where most homes and businesses are subterranean, built right into the region’s sandstone, as if cave times had returned. It’s clearly a heat-avoiding measure. But for a noir of isolation and concealment, about how the past can often feel inescapable, these shadowy dugouts — Travis’ motel, a church and one character’s lonely lair — are an atmospheric mother lode.

Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes Playing: Starts Friday at the Laemmle Monica, Santa Monica; Simon Baker will participate in a Q&A after the 7 p.m. screening March 22, moderated by The Times’ Carlos Aguilar.

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‘Road House’ Review: This Remake Amps Up the Action

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a pro fighter turned bouncer at a juke joint in the Florida Keys, taking on Patrick Swayze’s role in the original.

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In a bar, two men in a square-off stare at each other, one with a full beard.

By Glenn Kenny

The 1989 blockbuster “Road House” was something of a pastiche. It delivered disreputable B-picture thrills with big-picture production value. The lead actor Patrick Swayze, playing a philosophizing roughneck, smirked with unshakable confidence while breaking arms and jaws, as cars and buildings blew up real good around him. The action was served up with glossy studio polish.

Hence, a remake of the film, some might argue, is destined to be a pastiche of a pastiche. But as we move further into the 21st century, we find the notion of authenticity ever more devalued. And who needs it when you’ve got Doug Liman directing the whole thing? He is, after all, the J. Robert Oppenheimer of lunatic action set pieces (“The Bourne Identity,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Edge of Tomorrow” to name a few).

Taking on Swayze’s role, Jake Gyllenhaal plays the pro fighter turned bouncer Elwood Dalton, here protecting a juke joint that sits on a valuable piece of real estate in the Florida Keys. At his most winning despite his character’s lethal nature, Gyllenhaal keeps up the one-liners and drollery. In lieu of Swayze’s Zenlike musings, he gives us dry inquiries about whether his challengers have medical insurance before pummeling and delivering them to a hospital.

This movie delivers a lot of the same kicks as the first, but with contemporary tuneups like a villain played by Conor McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting Championship star who’s first seen stark naked, except for shoes and socks (so he can carry his phone). Though two hours long, the movie moves as swiftly as a greased ferret through a Habitrail and delivers hallucinatory action highs for its extended climax.

All this and a pretty funny “The Third Man” reference too.

Road House Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Prime Video.

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Disney's UP Movie Review: Up Up and Away My Beautiful Balloons
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Up movie review & film summary (2009)
Up. Balloons, house, dog, boy, man: "Up." "Up" is a wonderful film, with characters who are as believable as any characters can be who spend much of their time floating above the rain forests of Venezuela. They have tempers, problems and obsessions. They are cute and goofy, but they aren't cute in the treacly way of little cartoon animals.
From Pixar, the House That Soared
Up. Directed by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson. Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family. PG. 1h 36m. By Manohla Dargis. May 28, 2009. In its opening stretch the new Pixar movie "Up" flies high, borne ...
Up
Audience Reviews for Up. Jun 19, 2016. With stellar animation and a great story, Up offers both a fun adventure for the kids and strong emotional depth for adults. It's first 10 minutes are among ...
Up Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 248 ): Kids say ( 263 ): Pixar has brought to life a multi-generational odd couple in a film that's visually stunning, surprisingly touching, and unsurprisingly delightful. After nine films, Pixar's legend is well known; it's the only studio with a perfect record both commercially (each of its releases has grossed more ...
Up
Eventually, the two bond on their way to Paradise Falls, and the irascible Carl discovers both the son he never had and his own youthful self by fulfilling the adventure he and Ellie didn't manage ...
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Showing Up. "She's got it figured out." Lizzy ( Michelle Williams ), a sculptor living and working in Portland, says about Jo ( Hong Chau ), her landlord, fellow artist and seemingly only friend. It's not a smooth relationship. Jo, who lives in the unit next door to Lizzy, is an inattentive landlord. Lizzy has no hot water, Jo keeps saying she ...
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Executive producers: John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton. Producer: Jonas Rivera. Production designer: Ricky Nierva. Music: Michael Giacchino. Editor: Kevin Nolting. MPAA rating: PG, 90 minutes. Winsome ...
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Up is breathtaking in its imaginative detail and astonishing in its emotional range. Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 11, 2014. Rotten Tomatoes, home of the Tomatometer, is the most trusted ...
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Up is a comedy adventure about 78-year-old balloon salesman Carl Fredricksen, who finally fulfills his lifelong dream of a great adventure when he ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies away to the wilds of South America. But he discovers all too late that his biggest nightmare has stowed away on the trip: an overly optimistic 9-year-old Wilderness Explorer named Russell. (Walt ...
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Up: Directed by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson. With Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, Bob Peterson. 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen travels to Paradise Falls in his house equipped with balloons, inadvertently taking a young stowaway.
Movie Review: Up (2009)
Continuing through the door that WALL-E ripped open, Up too, tells a powerful tale without wasting words or packing the 96 minute running time with unneeded filler material. It gets going with an unexpectedly moving and heartfelt montage laying out the younger years of Carl Fredericksen (voiced by Edward Asner).
Up (2009 film)
Up is a 2009 American animated comedy-drama adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures.The film was directed by Pete Docter, co-directed by Bob Peterson, and produced by Jonas Rivera.Docter and Peterson also wrote the film's screenplay and story, with Tom McCarthy co-writing the latter. The film stars the voices of Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer ...
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Up transported me to another world and allowed me to experience that thrill of adventure, previously felt only in films as great as Raiders of the Lost Ark. But perhaps the film's biggest ...
Up (2009)
Pixar Animation Studios has captured it before, but never so precisely as in Up. The themes throughout the picture address li. Reviews; The Definitives ... Patreon; Search for: Up 4 Stars ☆☆☆☆ Review by Brian Eggert May 29, 2009. Director Bob Peterson, Pete Docter Cast Ed Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, Delroy Lindo Rated PG ...
'UP' Review
There's nothing better than an easy review: Pixar's latest summer offering, UP, is a fantastic film.Simply fantastic. Seriously, if Ratatouille and Wall-E deserved to be in the running for Best Picture of the Year (as many said they did at the times of their releases) then UP certainly does.. It's that good.. The film - which was written by Bob Peterson (Finding Nemo, Ratatouille) and directed ...
UP
UP is a terrific movie full of crazy hilarity, hairbreadth escapes, enchanting characters, thrilling suspense, brilliant wit, and incredibly poignant, touching moments that remind one of the most heartfelt moments in one's favorite movies. In fact, UP has one of the most adorable, winsome and extraordinarily tender openings ever seen in a movie.
Up (2009)
User Reviews. Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) as a young quiet kid idolized explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer) and his discovery of Paradise Falls. Ellie is much more animated and also a great fan of Muntz. Together they would marry and live their lives together until the day she dies.
Up (2009)
A three-hankie weepie and a cliffhanging thriller. A cross-generational odd-couple buddy movie; a story of man and dog. A tale of sharply observed melancholy truths and whimsically unfettered nonsense. Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson. Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai, Bob Peterson, Delroy Lindo, Jerome Ranft.
Up, Up, and Away Movie Review
The Marshall family are supportive and loving. Sco. Mild peril but no harm comes to any characters. Ch. Parents need to know that Up, Up, and Away is a Disney comedy about a family of superheroes. It has many hallmarks of a TV movie -- most notably the laughable special effects -- and subsequently might not hold the attention of media-savvy ...
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A dog bites Kevin's leg, drawing blood. As a child, Carl falls through an attic floorboard and accidentally smacks himself in the face with his own arm cast. As an adult, he thwacks a poor, innocent construction worker with his cane. (The construction worker's knocked out, and he appears to bleed a bit.)
Up Up & Up
Rotten Tomatoes, home of the Tomatometer, is the most trusted measurement of quality for Movies & TV. The definitive site for Reviews, Trailers, Showtimes, and Tickets
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Simon Baker and Natasha Wanganeen deliver a pair of remarkably synchronized, understated performances in director Ivan Sen's "Limbo," as much last-chance western as stark crime drama.
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