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      ‘Torn Hearts’ Review: Sequins and Savagery

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      In this horror movie with a Southern twang, an aspiring country duo seek guidance from their unhinged icon.With so many songs about burying cheating lovers, it’s a wonder the country music sphere isn’t regular horror movie fodder. “Torn Hearts,” which shows a hopeful Nashville duo beguiled by their deranged idol, tries to break that ground. The trappings, including Pepto Bismol-pink handguns, sequined white leather and gold records galore, are A-plus, even when the script could use a tuneup.The film follows Jordan (Abby Quinn) and Leigh (Alexxis Lemire), who, as the act Torn Hearts, are looking for their big break. Jordan, though messy and antisocial, is the band’s creative powerhouse — providing songwriting as well as backup guitar and vocals — while Leigh is its charismatic frontwoman. The two pounce on a chance to meet their hero, the reclusive singer Harper Dutch (Katey Sagal), but soon discover that the artist has bigger plans for them than they’d bargained for.The actor Brea Grant has recently shifted to writing and directing, and as a result has brought more messy female characters to the big screen. Now, she’s partnered with Blumhouse TV and Epix to bring to life “Torn Hearts,” from an original screenplay by Rachel Koller Croft. The performers and creative team have worked hard to give this story its due. The costume designer Eulyn Colette Hufkie and the production designer Ryan Martin Dwyer enshrine Harper in diamonds and decay. The music producer Alan Ett, aided by dazzling vocal performances from the three leads, dresses this flick up in some seriously catchy original tunes.Unfortunately, the script is too disjointed to keep its own complex characters afloat. Little is revealed as the plot bounces from one climax to another, making any eventual bloodshed feel exhausting and unearned. When the credits roll, you might find yourself feeling vexed — but you might also end up whistling one of the film’s many earworms for days to come.Torn HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Mondocane’ Review: Fractured Friendship, Fractured World

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      Two orphaned boys fall in with a criminal gang in this post-apocalyptic thriller.At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s “Mondocane” is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.Set in Taranto, an Italian port city where a contamination disaster has poisoned the area and caused the remaining residents to scrabble for survival, the story focuses on two orphans. Pietro and Cristian (Dennis Protopapa and Giuliano Soprano) are fast friends living hand-to-mouth on an old fishing boat. Cristian, who suffers from debilitating seizures, is the more reckless of the two, believing that his unidentified malady will kill him. So when they’re recruited by the Ants, a criminal gang of feral urchins led by the sociopathic Hothead (Alessandro Borghi), Cristian’s affinity for chaos marks him immediately for advancement.A derivative, dystopian fable (narratively indebted to the region’s longtime problems with steel-plant emissions), “Mondocane” paints a post-apocalyptic world in burnished copper and gleaming gold. As the two boys learn to shoot and conduct heists in the city’s wealthy neighborhood, their miseducation is bedeviled by erratic pacing and the distracting attentions of an obsessive police officer and her young informant.Sprawling action scenes feel more de rigueur than essential in a plot intent upon tragedy and betrayal; but when Celli relaxes enough to trust his young leads — as when, during a break-in, they delightedly discover a shower that delivers hot water — the movie charms with an effortless naturalism. Moments like this remind us that, for those on the margins, innocence is always the first victim.MondocaneNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Bruce Mau: A Designer Puts Life on the Drawing Boards

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      A new film about the celebrated graphic designer follows his career as the scale of his projects goes from small to extra large to global.In “Mau,” a new documentary-cum-biopic, the Canadian-born, Chicago-based designer Bruce Mau simply counts Coca-Cola bottles to give you a sense of the scale of the environmental crisis the world faces as its population approaches eight billion. He calculates that the sale of Cokes over the next 50 years, if uncorrected, will dump 2.7 trillion empty bottles into an environment already endangered.Hoisting a small fact to its statistical extreme, Mau concludes that a Coke bottle is not just a bottle, not simply a matter of an industrial designer shaping an icon. He advocates redesigning the corporate culture that produced it and the larger culture that drank it.Mau thinks big.In 2017, the Austrian filmmakers (and brothers) Jono and Benji Bergmann heard Mau speak at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, and, impressed by this environmental prophet, they wanted to both spread his message and ground the messenger in a biography that rooted his thinking.Mau’s Emeco 111 Navy Chair, made from recycled plastic bottles.via Massive Change NetworkThe film starts with glowing testimonials by famous colleagues: “powerful,” “brilliant,” “creative,” “visionary,” “optimistic,” “ingenious.” The filmmakers then whisk us to his origin story: Mau was born on the moon. When NASA sought a lunar environment in which to train astronauts, they booked his hometown, Sudbury, in Ontario, Canada, for a trial landing: Nickel mines had transformed swaths of the landscape into a chemical desert that Mau calls the “dead zone.” Miners here, including his father, spent perpetually “jet-lagged” lives in the darkness of the mines only to emerge after work into the night and the Canadian winter.On a filmed safari back to this landscape, the normally loquacious, suddenly hushed Mau finds the family’s abandoned farmhouse on a desolate road that dead-ends in an endless forest headed toward the North Pole. He steps into a frame building open to the elements, eerie with lacy curtains hanging limply. The camera spots the entry vestibule where, one day, he recalls, his alcoholic father crashed through the storm door in a rage after a brawl, swearing and bleeding.Life in a dead zone coupled with domestic violence prompted the teenage Mau to design his way out. He put his life on the drawing boards. “I didn’t even know the word design, but the moment that you have a particular outcome in mind, you become a designer. Systematically executing an outcome is design,” he explained in a Zoom interview for this article. “You either leave it to chance or design what you want.”This single realization gave him agency in both his life and career, and it forms the basis of an empowering public lesson that, as a design motivator, he tirelessly delivers in conferences and lectures: everything is design, everyone is a designer, and design can produce positive change at all scales.Bruce Mau returning to his childhood home in Sudbury, Ontario, in a scene from “Mau,” a film directed by Jono and Benji Bergmann.Greenwich EntertainmentThe film cuts to an overnight ride on a Greyhound to Toronto and the Ontario College of Art, where Mau discovers its advertising department and the “intersection of the word and image” that he finds riveting. His portfolio leads him to a job in London with the renowned graphics firm Pentagram, which he doesn’t find riveting. He decides to dedicate himself to working for the public good.Returning to Toronto in 1982, he co-founded Public Good Design and Communications, and tried to mate 9-to-5 reality with idealism: “How do we use the power and creative energy that we have to make the world a better place for more people?” he asks in the film. The group worked for the Red Cross, the nurses’ union, and small arts institutions.Feeling that he didn’t have an education, he built his own, through people. His “library of people” included Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Eileen Gray, the Eameses.With the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, he created “S, M, L, XL,” a three-inch-thick, six-pound almanac of Koolhaas’s built and unbuilt structures. Organized from small to large and extra-large buildings, the book is fat, brash and raw, with grainy, in-your-face images. With words and images toggling for position, Mau visualized the written word, giving the book the filmic impact of a flipbook.With “S, M, L, XL,” Mau became famous as an Andy Warhol of the page, in a high-impact form of intellectual advertising that sought to change the way readers process information. The book anticipated how the internet chunks language. Onstage the designer may speak in paragraphs and think in chapters, but Mau broke down the page itself into sound bites, headlines and blocks.As in the Koolhaas book, the scale of Mau’s projects in the film graduates from small to extra large and even super large, as he ramps up from the designed page to the designed earth. To get to super large, Mau breaks down the boundaries of graphic design to include art, science and technology in what he calls a “fact-based optimism” that propels him from city planning and country branding to exhibitions and even birch-bark canoes.The “Massive Change” exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, showing one of the themed rooms designed with page graphics turned into an environment.Massive Change NetworkAs a career biography, “Mau” shades into a history of design. Not since midcentury industrial designers aspired to elevate the quality of everyday life for everyone, everywhere, has a designer thought at such sweeping scale. With their potato-chip chairs, aerodynamic cars and aquadynamic steamships, designers like Charles and Ray Eames, Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Loewy shaped how America looked after World War II. Their futuristic designs gave form to progressive culture: “The best for the most for the least,” said Charles Eames. Mau was putting both scale and idealism back into design, necessitated by what he calls the possible coming “extinction events” that give urgency to his environmental call.In 2005, he exploded the graphic innovations from “S, M, L, XL” onto the walls of a 20,000-square-foot exhibition, “Massive Change,” in Toronto.Coca-Cola, which had worked with Loewy in the 1940s and ’50s to design its visual culture, contacted him to make sustainability a platform on which to restructure its organization and identity.City planners from Mecca found him, asking him to rethink how better to handle the Hajj.Guatemala found him, asking him to redesign and rebrand the country; 36 years of civil war had destroyed its citizens’ belief in a future.Acknowledging that “Massive Change” didn’t give people the tools to implement the change, Mau — acting on an invitation from China — planned an even more ambitious show, “Massive Action.” At 65,000 square feet, the exhibition was to be perhaps the biggest design show ever produced. But relations between Canada, where Mau was then based, and China soured, and the show has been shelved pending new venues.“Mau” marches to a triumphalist beat. But inevitably there are obstacles. The Mecca plan stopped: Mau was not Muslim. The initial success in Guatemala was cut short by suspicions of an outsider tampering with Guatemala’s identity.Glossing over failures and incomplete projects, the film seems colored by the very optimism — “positivity,” in Mau’s word — that makes his growing vocation at the pulpit so charismatic. Nor does the film follow up the glowing descriptions of Mau with any doubts or criticisms voiced by skeptics — megalomania, per one critic — that would dimensionalize the film, and Mau.A visual concept for “Mecca Vision,” Mau’s plan — in collaboration with Northwestern University Transportation Center and Antonio DiMambro & Associates — for safe handling of the pilgrimage for Mecca in Saudi Arabia.Massive Change NetworkThe designer who thinks big, for example, sometimes fails to think small. The reformer who diagnosed the health of a planet headed for eight billion people suddenly faced the prospect of his own extinction event because of an enlarged heart. “I had designed everything else but I had left my heart to chance,” he says in the film. “I wasn’t designing the health I want.”The value of the documentary is that for 78 well-paced, jump-cutting minutes, we see the cherubic face of Mau’s youth mature into its current, more prophetic Walt Whitman version. For all his exposure in lectures and conferences, as a motivational speaker, Mau has, like Greta Garbo, dodged the spotlight, the rare celebrity who doesn’t talk about himself. He does not use his fame as a mirror. The messenger is not the message.In our Zoom interview, Mau talked of other recent trips to his hometown, to work in design courses with Indigenous groups who teach him and students how to live with nature. He cites how they remove bark off spalling trees to craft canoes, for example, and then return the boats at the end of their life spans to the forest floor, to re-enter nature’s cycle. He is bypassing the city’s extractive mining culture to embrace the notion of a sustainable culture — “food for the next generation of life,” he says in the film.“Their cosmology puts life, not humans, at the center of life and the universe,” he told me. “Everything I’m working on now is to establish life-centered design, moving from designing the object to the ecology. Making one thing is not a problem. Making a billion of the things is a problem. The greater the problem, the more significant the design opportunity.”The answer to the dead zone was a living zone that was already in Sudbury’s backyard. Mau, a work in progress, has made a round trip.MauThe film can be seen in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and will be available for rent online starting June 7. More

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      ‘Fire in the Mountains’ Review: The Mother of All Struggles

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      Vinamrata Rai plays a rural Indian woman driven to the edge by family pressures in Ajitpal Singh’s tough and generous first feature.Pauline Kael once described “Shoeshine,” Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist heartbreaker, as “a social-protest film that rises above its purpose.” De Sica may have been motivated to expose the economic injustice and official cruelty of postwar Italy, but the movie, grounded in the hard circumstances of two impoverished Roman boys, finds an incandescent core of poetry and tragedy in the story of their friendship.What Kael observed about “Shoeshine” is also true of “Fire in the Mountains,” Ajitpal Singh’s tough-minded, openhearted debut feature. Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.That is especially true of Chandra (Vinamrata Rai), Singh’s beleaguered heroine. The title seems to promise an explosion of rage, but for most of the film Chandra smolders and sputters. Her daily routine is an endless cycle of chores, errands and demands. She lives in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, near Tibet and Nepal. Her house clings to a hillside overlooking a spectacular Himalayan valley, and the camera follows her up and down the same steep, narrow paths to the village in what seems like an endless loop.She is never empty-handed. If she isn’t lugging well water, groceries, freshly harvested tea or the suitcases of tourists who have come for the mountain scenery, she is carrying her preadolescent son, Prakash (Mayank Singh), who otherwise uses a wheelchair. At home, more burdens await, piled onto her by an independent-minded teenage daughter (Harshita Tewari), a resentful, widowed sister-in-law (Sonal Jha) and a husband (Chandan Bisht) whose kindness only occasionally peeks out from behind clouds of alcohol and frustration.Chandra is expected to manage all of their needs and moods, without much help or sympathy from anyone. She saves money for expensive medical treatments for Prakash, even though the doctors (and the audience) know that the boy’s legs work just fine. Dharam, her husband, whose halfhearted business ventures always end in failure, wants to use the cash for a religious ritual. Meanwhile, Chandra petitions the creepy, dishonest leader of the village to build a long-promised road. As indignities accumulate, her exhaustion does battle with rage, and suspense builds around the question of whether she will collapse or explode.But Chandra is neither a martyr nor a superhero, and “Fire in the Mountains” is more than a catalog of her miseries or a hymn to her indomitability. The beauty of her surroundings doesn’t make her life any easier, but Singh uses the sublimity of the landscape as a reminder that aesthetic delight is ineradicably woven into the fabric of life, no matter how grim or oppressive life may otherwise be.And family life, however strained or dysfunctional, is never without an element of comedy. Much of the time, Dharam is more foolish than menacing. “You’re so lovable when you’re sober,” their daughter says, and Chandra sees that, too, even as she bears the brunt of his sullenness and his outbursts of temper. As the daughter, Kanchan, a prizewinning student who posts flirty, PG videos on social media, Tewari brings a hint of salty teen-comedy energy. The household, with its shifting allegiances and frequent misunderstandings, teeters between melodrama and sitcom. (There’s also an element of satire. Radio and television broadcasts frequently trumpet the modernizing achievements of an unnamed prime minister, rhetoric that is mocked by conditions in the village, where nothing ever changes.)Chandra is everyone’s scapegoat and foil, as well as the engine that keeps it all running. Rai’s performance is a marvel — blunt and subtle at the same time, as committed to the character’s failings as to her virtues. The unfairness of her situation is overwhelming, but she doesn’t always treat the people around her fairly, either. This is especially true of Kanchan, whose academic success and curiosity about the world bother Chandra in ways she can’t explain, or even acknowledge.It’s a complicated family, and yet “Fire in the Mountains” observes its potential fracturing with impressive clarity. Singh, who came to filmmaking late — he wrote his first (as yet unproduced) screenplay in 2012, at 33 — has a storytelling knack that feels both hard-won and intuitive. There is an elegant simplicity to this movie, but nothing about it feels easy.Fire in the MountainsNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cordelia’ Review: Going Underground

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      A traumatized young woman and a strange musician form an unsettling connection in this disquieting psychodrama.Some films settle on your skin and are difficult to shake off. Such is the case with Adrian Shergold’s “Cordelia,” a capricious psychodrama that, despite clear reminders of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1965), is very much its own thing.Cordelia (an excellent Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who shares the writing credit with Shergold), is an anxious young actor whose career was stalled by a traumatic incident on the London underground. Now she lives in a faded basement flat with her twin sister, Caroline (also played by Campbell-Hughes), whose flinty demeanor suggests a growing frustration with her sister’s ongoing mental issues. Then Caroline disappears for a weekend trip with her boyfriend, and the flat that was once sheltering now seems sinister, the ringing landline and flickering light bulbs exacerbating Cordelia’s disquieting dreams.The possibility of romance with Frank (Johnny Flynn), a cello-playing neighbor, brightens the movie and softens Cordelia’s prickly personality. But Frank, too, seems off, his phone concealing creepy pictures of the sisters, whom he had thought were the same person. Venturing upstairs to Frank’s apartment, Cordelia finds it strangely decrepit, as if she inhabits the only livable space in a building that, like her sanity, is slowly decomposing.Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, “Cordelia” offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche. The bruised, green-washed elegance of Tony Slater Ling’s interior shots, rain sheeting against the flat’s windows, fashions an unreliable space where people and events could be real or imagined, alive or dead.“I don’t know who I am,” Cordelia tells Frank. The wise viewer won’t expect her to find out.CordeliaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’ Review: Gilded, Aged

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      The latest entry in the “Downton Abbey” franchise is amiable enough — though despite its subtitle, it rests most of its extravagant weight on cozy familiarity.The title of “Downton Abbey: A New Era” pledges that change has arrived at the Grantham family’s mansion after six seasons of television, a previous film and a zeitgeist shift that has caused a chunk of the show’s original audience to start regarding its characters’ generational wealth with disgust and relish, as though it were a wheel of rotten Stilton. The stately series that began its story with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has now arrived at the tail end of the 1920s. The choppy waters of modernity are materializing on the horizon. To stay afloat, this amiable sequel decides to ever so slightly democratize itself: The upstairs-downstairs division that has long separated the estate’s masters from their servants begins to leak.So does Downton Abbey’s roof, which motivates Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) to rent the cash-poor estate to a team shooting a silent film — makers of “kin-ema,” as Lady Mary’s father, Robert (Hugh Bonneville), calls it, disdainfully mispronouncing the name of the art form. (The moviemaking plot point may have been inspired by real life: The franchise’s shooting location, Highclere Castle, which resembles a vampire bat’s underbite, opened its doors to the show after Geordie Herbert, the Eighth Earl of Carnarvon and Queen Elizabeth II’s godson, realized that dozens of its rooms were rotting.)Simon Curtis, the director, and Julian Fellowes, the “Downton Abbey” creator who also wrote “A New Era,” proceed to have their own actors compete to see who can land the best meta-zingers about the profession. “I’d rather earn my living down at the mine,” Maggie Smith’s sniffy Dowager Countess quips. The obvious rebuttal is that her bloodline hasn’t earned its living at all — a dig that Fellowes is finally comfortable alluding to, if not saying outright, as when two newlyweds, Tom and Lucy (Allen Leech and Tuppence Middleton), vow to prevent their children from turning into the idle rich.Actors are just the people to upset the centuries-old social order. Two fictional movie stars, Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock) and Guy Dexter (Dominic West), dress splendidly and command deference, even though she was born to a fruit seller and he pops down to the servants quarters to hit on the butler (Robert James-Collier), albeit with such sexless decorum that the target of his affection barely notices. While the lower classes flirt with upward mobility, the Dowager Countess inherits a villa from a Frenchman she briefly knew in 1864. What did she do to earn it? The grande dame is irked by the innuendo those around her express (tactfully, with widened eyes and bitten lips) — though she’s more aggrieved that everybody seems to reach for their funeral hats whenever she yawns. “I feel like Andromeda chained to a rock with you hovering,” she groans.Fellowes’s screenplay seems antsy to usher its characters to either the morgue or the wedding chapel, lest they start rotting, too. Four couples partner off, their rushed romances giving a jerky momentum to a pace that otherwise bobs along like a canal ride at an amusement park, gliding past pleasant scenes of children playing croquet, cooks readying feasts and women beaming graciously in glittering dresses. The sequel still rests most of its extravagant weight on cozy familiarity. Not only does the film copy-paste an entire subplot from “Singin’ in the Rain,” its opening aerial shot of pennant-bedecked white tents could have been lifted from “The Great British Baking Show,” that other pinnacle of British comfort-food entertainment. Yet, Fellowes manages to navigate “Downton Abbey” to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries, finagling a sequence that allows the staff to usurp the formal dining room while the rich serve themselves at a buffet. The inversion gently rocks the boat, with no threat of tipping it over.Downton Abbey: A New EraRated PG for genteel allusions to adult situations. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Digger’ Review: A Man Defends the Land Against Development

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      The Greek filmmaker Georgis Grigorakis takes an elemental theme and layers it with family conflict.“Digger,” the debut feature by the Greek writer and director Georgis Grigorakis, is the familiar story of a local eccentric facing off against mercenary industrialists desperate to acquire and tear down his property.Nikitas (Vangelis Mourikis) is an aging farmer living alone in a mountain cabin in northern Greece, where the trees block out the sunlight and the air drips with moisture. Along with his drinking buddy neighbors, he resists the encroaching mining company, but his struggle is disrupted when his estranged adult son, Johnny (Argyris Panadazaras), appears, demanding compensation for his share of the land.This standard setup, in which an individual contends with the forces of modernization that wreak havoc on the environment and phase out traditional ways of life, also plays out in films like “Aquarius” (2016) and “Dead Pigs” (2018). Against those inventive and formidable dramas, “Digger” doesn’t exactly stand out — perhaps because its terse David and Goliath conflict doesn’t yield satisfyingly punchy results.Grigorakis describes the film as a “western,” with motorbikes replacing horses and muddy forestlands instead of empty plains. The brooding masculine showdown between father and son, however, is its greatest claim to that label, with the intergenerational rift also complicating the film’s anticapitalist stance.Years ago, Johnny’s mother left Nikitas, their rural abode and their unconventional lifestyle to raise Johnny in what she considered a normal environment. Abandoned, Nikitas dedicates himself entirely to preserving the land. When Johnny returns penniless decades later, after his mother’s death, he considers such devotion a testament to the ignorance and callousness of a crazy old man.These views are upended over the course of the film, which sees the two men laboring side by side, gradually revealing their unique skills and dilemmas. This makes for a predictably redemptive outcome, yes, but it also goes to show that choosing the right course of resistance — like escaping a pool of quicksand — might be counterintuitive.DiggerNot rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers’ Review: Remember Them? (No?)

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      This Disney reboot combines animation and live-action comedy with an irreverent, self-referential attitude.As a general rule, movie reboots proceed from a basic assumption about interest and familiarity — that audiences adore some bygone franchise, and will be eager to see it resuscitated.The charming conceit of the director Akiva Schaffer’s “Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers,” an ironic reboot of the short-lived cartoon series for children that aired on the Disney Channel from 1989 to 1990, is that hardly anybody remembers the original “Rescue Rangers,” and that few who do remember it fondly.A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.In the universe of this “Rescue Rangers,” cartoons live among humans. Chip (John Mulaney) and Dale (Andy Samberg), decades removed from the fleeting success of their Disney Channel series, are washed up and disconsolate, desperate for another shot at fame. After their former co-star Monterey Jack (Eric Bana) is abducted, they find themselves embroiled in a real-life caper — one that involves not only a helpful human detective (Kiki Layne), but also a variety of familiar cartoon faces, including a middle-aged Peter Pan (Will Arnett) and Ugly Sonic (Tim Robinson), the janky-looking version of Sonic the Hedgehog who was hastily redesigned after online backlash in 2019.These kinds of cross-universe cameos have been done before, notably in the 2012 animated movie “Wreck-It Ralph” and last year’s “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” But this odd “Rescue Rangers” menagerie is surprising and eclectic, with some niche nods and deep-cut references, which is fitting given the conspicuous insignificance of the material and its heroes.If there’s going to be a movie about nobodies like Chip and Dale, it only seems right that it should include such wide-ranging animated allusions as “South Park,” “Rugrats” and “The Polar Express.”Chip ’n Dale: Rescue RangersRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More