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Stream These 8 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in July
The best James Bond movie of recent years is among a handful of great titles leaving soon for U.S. subscribers.This July, several Oscar-nominated performances will depart from Netflix in the United States, along with two top-notch genre films and one of the most successful entries in the James Bond franchise — and that’s saying something. Here are a few of the highlights. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Ip Man’ (July 21)If you were taken by Donnie Yen’s electrifying supporting turn in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” well, add this one to your queue posthaste. Yen stars as Grandmaster Ip Man, the legendary martial artist and Wing Chun instructor. But this is no staid biopic. It’s an action epic — packed with lightning-paced set pieces, death-defying stunts and bone-crunching fights — that just so happens to concern a real hero. The director Wilson Yip and the martial arts choreographer Sammo Hung supplement the fist-flying action with flashes of wit and ingenuity. They end up with one of the best martial-arts movies of the 21st century. (The sequels “Ip Man 2,” “Ip Man 3,” and “Ip Man 4: The Finale” will also leave Netflix on the 21st.)Stream it here.‘August: Osage County’ (July 26)Tracy Letts’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama gets the big-screen, prestige treatment, with Letts adapting the screenplay for a cast of heavy hitters. Meryl Streep gets the juicy leading role of Violet, the hard-living, straight talking, terminally ill matriarch of the family at the story’s center; Julia Roberts is Barbara, Violet’s oldest daughter and most frequent adversary. Letts’s brilliant script magnificently captures how long-simmering resentments and decades’ old slights are perpetually on simmer in a family like this, and the director John Wells smoothly orchestrates a cast that includes Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroney and Sam Shepard.Stream it here.‘Flight’ (July 31)Denzel Washington was nominated for an Academy Award (for the sixth of eventually nine times) for his wrenching and powerful lead performance in this 2012 drama from the director Robert Zemeckis. Washington stars as “Whip” Whittaker, a commercial airline pilot whose quick thinking during a mechanical failure initially makes him a Sully-style hero. But when the crash is more thoroughly investigated, that perception is complicated considerably. What begins as a thrill ride becomes a nuanced addiction drama, with Washington playing Whip’s descent into darkness with genuine pathos. The top-shelf supporting cast includes Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Melissa Leo and Kelly Reilly.Stream it here.‘Julie & Julia’ (July 31)Julia Child was an easy figure to impersonate but perhaps not so simple to inhabit. Meryl Streep masters the look and distinctive sound of the character but also finds the character’s emotional spine, a sense of displacement that can be cured only by cooking; she shares that quality with Julie Powell (Amy Adams), the central character of the film’s parallel story, in which a modern blogger attempts to recreate every recipe in Child’s beloved book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The Childs story is decidedly more compelling, but the writer and director Nora Ephron (making her final film) makes ingenious connections between these two women and coaxes delightful performances from both actresses, as well as from Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina as their (mostly) supportive spouses.Stream it here.‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ (July 31)This 2006 drama from Gabriele Muccino adapts the memoir of the motivational speaker Chris Gardner, who went from being a homeless single father to becoming a successful stockbroker and entrepreneur. The film focuses on Gardner’s period of homelessness and the sacrifices he made while completing an unpaid internship at a prestigious firm. An Oscar-nominated Will Smith finds just the right notes as Gardner, whose pride and stubbornness prevented him from sharing his dire circumstances during his internship; Smith’s real-life son Jaden plays Gardner’s son, and their genuine emotional connection pulls the picture through its rougher patches. It’s a formulaic piece of work but a nevertheless affecting one.Stream it here.‘Skyfall’ (July 31)The Daniel Craig era of the James Bond franchise reached its zenith with this 2012 installment, which combined the lean, mean, “Bourne”-influenced approach of recent Bond pictures with an Academy Award winning director (Sam Mendes), his regular team (including the ace cinematographer Roger Deakins and the composer Thomas Newman) and Javier Bardem, fresh off his own Oscar win for “No Country for Old Men,” as a seductive villain. Mendes’s elegant direction gives viewers the best of both worlds; the picture has the globe-trotting locations, bold action set pieces and unapologetic sensuality of classic Bond but the snappy pace and grounded action of contemporary blockbusters.Stream it here.‘Stepmom’ (July 31)The “Home Alone” director Chris Columbus continued the softening of his touch that began with “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), moving from familial comedy to full on four-hanky drama with this 1998 tear-jerker. Julia Roberts plays the title character, a fashion photographer who is dating, and then marries, a much older, divorced father (Ed Harris). Susan Sarandon plays his ex-wife, whose difficulties maintaining a relationship with their two children — and her combination of genuine dislike for and quiet jealousy of the new woman in their lives — are complicated further by a terminal illness. It’s not exactly a subtle piece of work, but it’s an earnest one, and the leads find and play the complexities of what could have been cardboard characters.Stream it here.‘Underworld’ (July 31)When this action-horror-sci-fi hybrid opened quietly in the fall of 2003, few could have predicted it would initiate a lucrative and long-running series — five feature films (plus a video game), concluding with “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017). But it shouldn’t have been a surprise: This story of battles (and forbidden romance) between vampires, werewolves and humans was hitting the same early-21st century sweet spot of fantasy, gore and romance as the “Twilight” saga. And the films (particularly this first one) provided a rare opportunity for its star, Kate Beckinsale, to show what she could do with a full-on action-hero leading role.Stream it here. More
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‘Every Body,’ a Documentary on Intersex Lives, Champions the Power of Activism
With “Every Body,” Julie Cohen looks at both what her subjects have been through and how they are translating those experiences into action.The new documentary “Every Body” gets intimate with its subjects, from their birth records to their body parts. The film is about being intersex, an umbrella term for people who were born with anatomic or genetic characteristics that don’t match the typical definition of male or female.By some estimates, said Julie Cohen, the writer-director of “Every Body,” one in 1,500 people have intersex traits “significant enough that they may receive medical intervention.”“Part of the point of the film is there are more intersex people out there than you know,” she said in an interview by phone.But until recently, they were often closeted, told by the medical establishment and family members to keep their conditions secret. That may now be changing.The film, out Friday, focuses on three intersex activists: Alicia Roth Weigel, a political and business consultant and the author of a forthcoming memoir, “Inverse Cowgirl”; River Gallo, a filmmaker and actor; and Sean Saifa Wall, a public health researcher and a founder of the Intersex Justice Project, which opposes medically unnecessary and invasive surgery for intersex children.All three had procedures as children, to remove or add testes, surgeries they wish had not been done. On one of their first outings together, at a demonstration for intersex rights, “River was telling their personal bodily story through a bullhorn,” Cohen recalled. “We were all like, whoa, this person is amazing.”Cohen was an Oscar nominee in 2019 for the hit documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “RBG,” which she directed with her frequent collaborator Betsy West. They have also made films about the legal scholar and activist Pauli Murray, and Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman.“Part of the point of the film is there are more intersex people out there than you know,” said Julie Cohen, right, the director of “Every Body.” Laura Nespola/Focus Features Cohen was drawn to the subject of intersex activism through the story of David Reimer, who was born a boy but raised as a girl after a botched circumcision. He resisted the gender reassignment, which was falsely claimed as a success by the Johns Hopkins psychologist who oversaw it. Reimer eventually came forward publicly, to prevent others, he said, from going through what he did. (He died by suicide in 2004.) His honesty helped debunk the idea that social conditioning could determine his gender identity.Depicting the startling reality of many intersex people’s lives offers what Cohen called “a holy crap element.”“I like a holy crap documentary,” she said. “But I also really like what I think of as hug documentaries, where you kind of want to hug everyone that’s in it.” Her movie, she said, is both: “It’s a holy crap documentary, but it also makes you want to hug the people that have been through what our participants have been through.”These are excerpts from our conversation.In light of David Reimer’s death, did you purposely choose people who were already public about being intersex?Exactly. I didn’t want the interview with me to be their first or even their second experience with this. And I was taken aback — it turned out that I had to ask very few questions before they started talking extremely personally. They tell me that their whole lives — between not only their doctors, but whole groups of residents who come in — they’re just used to talking about their bodies. They feel like that’s something they do on command and that’s part of their activism.Were there still details that surprised you in their stories?Seeing Saifa’s neonatal medical records. There are three boxes: male, female and ambiguous. Someone had literally checked ambiguous, crossed it out and then checked female. And then put a note underneath — which Saifa reads aloud in the film — saying basically, just to keep everything easier for everyone, Mom has been told that this baby should be raised as a female. And whatever surgeries are necessary to lock down this baby being female, that’s what we’re going to do.River Gallo in “Every Body.” The director said that because of their dealings with doctors, the film’s subjects were used to talking about their bodies “and that’s part of their activism.”Focus FeaturesThe film is arriving at a time when anti-trans legislation is surging. How do intersex rights get caught up in that?The majority of the legislation against gender-affirming care for trans children and teens has what I call the intersex loophole. So actually you can do surgery on infants or children, you can get hormones. Alicia summarizes [those contradictory views] in the movie, saying, you know, “We don’t think trans kids are normal, so you’re going to withhold all care for them. And we don’t think intersex kids are normal, so feel free to enforce whatever treatment you may want.”What is the connection between this film and your other films?A lot of it has to do with the power of activism, how people can make changes by taking on fights that seemed so challenging.Another big connection would be finding joy and humor and the life-affirming side of very difficult situations. RBG was fighting against some really ugly and mean sexism and misogyny through a lot of her early career. And yet she did it with grace and strength and humor, and found love and romance. Same thing with Pauli Murray. Gabby Giffords’s story has so much trauma in it, but she came through with just this exuberant, won’t-be-kept-down life force.I actually asked Saifa at one point: Can trauma and joy be part of the same story? And he looked at me like it was kind of a stupid question. Like, of course, that’s the human condition. Trauma and joy always coexist. Do you think that these stories may be more readily accepted now because of a new understanding of the fluidity of gender?The growing awareness of the existence of people who identify as nonbinary is very relevant to this movement. I think one of the original concerns [was that] every person needs a gender immediately.But no, you can come up with a best-guess gender and raise the child that way, so that by the time your child starts to express a gender identity — which experts say is happening by 5 or 6 anyway — then you can go in that direction. And you haven’t mistakenly done irreversible, or reversible only with great pain, medical and surgical interventions.Or maybe you don’t have to do surgery at all. Why is it that important to have reproductive organs fit some textbook idea of what normal is? When we’re all starting to understand that there’s a fair amount of variation in people’s bodies — whether they’re intersex or not. More
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How ‘Nimona’ Helped Its Creator Explore His Emerging Identity
The graphic novelist ND Stevenson wrote the trans allegory long before he came out. When it was time to adapt it for a new film, he was ready to go further.In the new Netflix animated film “Nimona,” the titular character makes its first appearance as a redheaded teenage girl before transforming into a charging rhino, then a grizzly, then a songbird and so on, with brief stopovers as a gorilla, an ostrich and an armadillo.After Ballister Boldheart (voiced by Riz Ahmed) a prim, by-the-book knight, asks her, “Can you please just be normal for a second?” he wonders if all that shape-shifting hurts. “Honestly? I feel worse when I don’t do it,” Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz) replies.ND Stevenson, who wrote and drew the graphic novel on which the film is based, said he had always loved shape-shifters. But his animated film explores elements of the trans experience — the clumsy questions from well-meaning friends, the outright hatred from strangers — only hinted at in his award-winning book, a beloved staple of the L.G.B.T.Q. literary canon.“The themes have their roots in the comic,” Stevenson explained. “But it would be years before I came out as gay, years before I came out as trans. Narratives have been my way of exploring those identities, even as allegory.”The film brings those themes to the fore at a time when trans rights have come increasingly under attack. “We knew what we were doing,” Stevenson said of the filmmakers. “We knew what we wanted to say.”“But even back then,” he continued, “I don’t think any of us knew how bleak things were going to get, the backlash against trans and queer people, and how much the movie was going to speak to that.”In “Nimona,” the title character is a shape-shifter who joins forces with a lovelorn knight. Netflix“Nimona” focuses on the budding friendship between Nimona and Ballister, who is wrongly accused of murdering his queen. The film also features a sweet, star-crossed romance between Ballister, who is already mistrusted because he’s a commoner among nobles, and Ambrosius Goldenloin, a dreamy, lovesick knight (Eugene Lee Yang).“This is a story that is, at its heart, a love letter to anybody who’s ever felt different or misunderstood,” said Troy Quane, who directed the movie along with Nick Bruno.The film had its beginnings in 2015, the same year the book was published, and is that rarest of Hollywood literary makeovers. For decades, gay characters and relationships in literary classics were straightwashed on the big screen, whether in “The Maltese Falcon” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “The Color Purple.”In “Nimona,” the story became more queer friendly on its way to Hollywood, not less.For Stevenson, much of the book spoke to his own upbringing and experiences. “Coming from a really conservative family and the evangelical church in the South,” he said, “the story is definitely a reaction to that.”On a recent afternoon, Stevenson was at the Netflix Animation studio in Burbank discussing how his film came to be. Dressed in a green “Big Sur Monterey County” sweatshirt and flannel trousers, his red hair cut short, Stevenson talked about his background, his beginnings as an artist and how the story morphed — much like the shape-shifting Nimona — on its way from book to screen.Stevenson, 31, was born and raised in Columbia, S.C., the middle child of five siblings. After years of home-schooling and two more at the local high school, he went to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he began posting Nimona comics online in 2012, a project that became his senior thesis. “When I first started making the comic, I didn’t consider myself a writer,” he said. “I was in school for illustration. But comics was kind of my way of tricking myself into thinking like, no, I am a writer.”Online, the series quickly gained fans, and in graphic novel form, “Nimona” won several awards including an Eisner, the comics industry’s most prestigious honor, and was a National Book Award finalist. Stevenson was 24. That year, Fox Animation acquired the rights to make an animated feature based on the comic, and called on Blue Sky Studios (the “Ice Age” franchise) to make it.The next five years were busy and creative ones. In addition to adapting “Nimona,” Stevenson collaborated with several others in creating and writing “Lumberjanes,” an Eisner-winning comic book series set in a summer camp for “hardcore lady types.” He also became the show runner of the DreamWorks series “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” a fantastical, queer-friendly reboot of the 1980s cartoon, which went on to win an Emmy and a GLAAD Media Award.In 2020, Stevenson published the memoir “The Fire Never Goes Out,” a collection of “year in review” comics that run from his college days and subsequent creative triumphs to his marriage, in 2019, to fellow cartoonist and writer Molly Ostertag. In the book, he writes about coming out, the joys of life with Molly, and his struggles with body image and mental health; in several, he draws himself with an enormous hole in the center of his torso or consumed by flames.“I can’t literally grab my emotions and shape them into something that makes sense,” he said. “But I can wrestle with a drawing and try to make it make sense.”“Coming from a really conservative family and the evangelical church in the South, the story is definitely a reaction to that,” Stevenson said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesMeanwhile, at Blue Sky, the filmmakers worked to find the heart of “Nimona,” a way into a character who was, by definition, ever-changing and hard to define.“It was a difficult thing to capture,” Moretz said. “It was so fun, but I would come home and I would look at my partner and be like, I can’t talk. I can’t do anything but rest.”Early versions, Stevenson said, ended up with Ballister as the focus and Nimona as some sort of manic pixie dream girl, playing second fiddle to the lovelorn knight.Nobody wanted that. Somehow, they had to find the human core of a character who was, in many ways, anything but. “Everybody was very clear that ‘Nimona’ was this universal story, a love story,” Bruno said. “But there was a particular group of people who were really passionate about it, and those were the people at Blue Sky who were members of the LGBTQ+ community.”In group discussions, they were sharing their stories and what the book meant to them. “We thought, why not, if this group feels OK with it, incorporate some of these stories in the film?” Bruno said.In the book, the Ballister-Goldenloin romance is only hinted at. In the film, however, there’s a kiss, an “I love you” between the knights, and even a back story to explain why they’re so nuts about each other in the first place. As for Nimona, the character is not trans, per se (or even, as the filmmakers note, female, although Nimona can be, should the mood strike). But the parallels are there, for those who care to look.In 2021, Disney, which had acquired Blue Sky in its acquisition of Fox, shuttered the studio and “Nimona” with it, only two days before a planned screening for the cast and crew. “Just like that, 450 people were out of a job,” Stevenson recalled. “It was heartbreaking.”The team decided to go ahead with the screening, a premiere of sorts as well as a goodbye. “No one wanted to click out of the Zoom meeting,” Quane recalled.The following year, after the creators spent months shopping the project, Annapurna Pictures opted to revive the film. “We all got together and just wanted to cry, because we were like, Nimona survived,” Moretz said. “It was such a testament to who she is, and her resilience.”If you want to watch the film as a trans allegory, there’s certainly a lot there. But if you just want to watch a beautifully animated adventure story filled with castles and knights and laser cannons and flying cars, starring a shape-shifting force of nature who likes to blow stuff up, there’s that, too. Stevenson thinks there’s room for both readings.“My opinions of that continue to evolve,” said Stevenson, who is working on developing “Lumberjanes” and a project based on a novel he wrote at 15. “On the one hand, I think that explicit representation is really, really important. But I also know there’s certain media that I never would have gotten to read as a kid if it had been marketed that way.”“I think if I were making the comic now, there’s a lot more I would have done with it, and it’s cool to see the movie do that,” he continued. “But I also think there’s a certain power in having a story that clearly expresses that, but maybe flies under the radar of parents who might be less willing to put that book in their kids’ hands.” More
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‘Every Body’ Review: Celebrating the ‘I’ in L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+
The documentary follows three openly intersex people, set against the larger backdrop of decades of secrecy and unnecessary surgeries.In medical literature, intersex is a term used to describe individuals who are born with physical, chromosomal or hormonal characteristics that are consistent with both male and female sex traits. In the world, intersex people are the “I” in L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+, and they have built a community around common political interests. The warmly engaging documentary “Every Body” follows three interview subjects, all of whom are openly intersex. The film’s subjects — Sean Saifa Wall, River Gallo and Alicia Roth Weigel — discuss their personal medical histories and place their experiences in context with a larger political fight for intersex bodily autonomy.As intersex people, Wall, Gallo and Weigel share the common experience of receiving medically unnecessary surgery intended to bring their physical appearance in line with the gender identity that was assigned to them at birth. They were told as children to keep their medical status secret. Now, as adults, all three engage in political activism to put an end to such medically unnecessary surgeries.The film benefits from its choice of subjects, as Wall, Gallo and Weigel are all endearing and deeply informed. Their candor animates the unimaginative talking head interview footage from the director Julie Cohen (“RBG”). But beyond casting, Cohen’s best directorial choice is to show examples from the history of intersex medical care.Cohen highlights the influence of Dr. John Money, a Johns Hopkins psychologist who helped to establish the standard for treatment of intersex individuals. The film compellingly uses clips from the interview program “Dateline” to show the devastation that was inflicted upon David Reimer, the most famous of Money’s patients. The contrast between Reimer’s archived grief and the hope of the film’s interview subjects is powerful, effectively demonstrating the life and death stakes of intersex liberation.Every BodyRated R for nudity. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer
A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken’ Review: Coming of Age is a Sea Change
The newest animated adventure from DreamWorks follows a high schooler who transforms into a giant tentacled sea creature.The protagonist of the clunkily named “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken,” a DreamWorks production directed by Kirk DeMicco, is a headstrong high schooler with a secret: She and her family are aquatic animals passing as humans. Desperate to fit into the social scene in her seaside town, Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) dutifully keeps up the ruse, but gripes about her parents’ cardinal rule against going in the ocean.One day, the teen tumbles into the waves and realizes their reason: Upon submergence, Ruby, like her mother (Toni Collette) and grandmother (Jane Fonda) before her, metamorphoses into a colossal tentacled sea creature. This device — conspicuously like the one in Pixar’s “Turning Red” — would be enough to motor a movie. “I’m a monster,” Ruby exclaims after a destructive mishap on terra firma, sending the needle on the viewer’s gauge for puberty metaphors flying into the red.But in this chaotic, family-friendly affair, a lone figurative image amid teenage drama will not do. Ruby soon ditches the shore, and her stresses expand to involve conniving mermaids, a salty, peg-legged seaman (Will Forte) and a magic trident tucked inside a submarine volcano. Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.Some evocative visual detail helps unify Ruby’s unruly world. The architectural design in her coastal hamlet is a considered hybrid of midcentury modern and nautical kitsch, and characters’ facial expressions are richly emotive. Underwater aesthetics are sadly sparer, accentuating the fluorescent marine fauna. Lurid neon blobs, like celebrity voice actors, seem a prerequisite for animated adventures these days.Ruby Gillman, Teenage KrakenRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Nimona’ Review: Fright the Power
A zingy, chintzy, idea-driven animated feature based on the ND Stevenson comic.Imagine Bugs Bunny blended with the Joker and you’ll get a sense of Nimona, an impish, shape-shifting villain who presents as a pink-haired, miniskirted punk but prefers to buck description. “I’m not a girl, I’m a shark!” Nimona (voiced by a vibrant Chloë Grace Moretz) insists. At will, Nimona is also an otter, ostrich, rhinoceros, gorilla, girl-shaped humanoid, boy-shaped humanoid, kitty cat, pizza rat and blue whale who swallows its enemies and squirts them out of its blowhole with a filthy snicker.Likewise, “Nimona,” a zingy, chintzy, idea-driven animated feature, was once a Tumblr comic, an art school thesis and an award-winning graphic novel (all three incarnations by the author ND Stevenson). Then, in 2021, it became an internet cri de coeur when Disney shut down production on a feature. Annapurna and Netflix stepped in, and the final film version, directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane from a script by Robert L. Baird and Lloyd Taylor, is a rush job with little resemblance to the much bleaker web comic. But it’s a vivid creature all its own.The story is set in a futuro-medieval walled city with jumbotrons and knights who say, “Bro.” Fear has reigned for a millennium, ever since the hero Gloreth battled back a monster. Now, Gloreth’s Valkyrie-esque statue looms large over the populace, casting a shadow that extends over billboards that blare, “If you see something, slay something,” and an outlaw knight, Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed), cowering in disgrace from a wrongful accusation of regicide.Ballister yearns to be once again embraced by the kingdom, and his ex, the lustily named Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), who broke Ballister’s heart and sliced off his arm. Enter Nimona, a bloodthirsty wrecking ball who wants to use Ballister to destroy the entire system. To do so, Nimona brings further shame upon the exile, even publicly claiming that Ballister likes — Egads! — freestyle jazz.At first, the look (particularly the lifeless backgrounds) is so slapdash that you’re tempted to flee. But jokes litter the film like scattered Legos, making you hesitate long enough to appreciate how the light glints off Ballister’s armor-plated shoulders. Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.This is a big message film that wants audiences to reflect on social paranoia. At its heart, it’s a pointed allegory about politicians who build their national profile on the backs of queer and transgender children. Nimona the character doesn’t claim to speak for them, but does try to speak to them and to others grappling with the concept of what it might feel like when your shell doesn’t match your soul. “I feel worse when I don’t do it,” Nimona says of metamorphosing, “like my insides are itchy.” But the movie is also willing to poke fun at its own politics when, minutes later, Nimona sabotages a losing game of Monopoly with a comic rant about overthrowing our oppressors, and, as a capper, feigns sudden death.NimonaRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
