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    ‘The Pod Generation’ Review: Birthing 2.0

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    This satire on our techno-capitalist future is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.Here’s a new start-up idea: an advanced technology that allows fetuses to listen to podcasts lest they get bored in utero. That’s what the Womb Center offers in Sophie Barthes’s “The Pod Generation,” a wickedly funny and fun, if disconcerting, film that arrives right on time for our age of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence doomerism.In a sci-fi future where everything is ruthlessly, comically optimized by advanced tech, the Womb Center offers digitally monitored, egg-shaped pods that will carry one’s baby to term. It’s an enticing option that puts Rachel (Emilia Clarke), who works for an A.I. company, and her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a botanist frustrated by society’s disconnect from nature, at odds with each other.As the couple, played with a terrific chemistry by Clarke and Ejiofor, hesitantly opt into the process, the film satirizes our fetishization of a digital utopia, one in which techno-capitalism is the solution to all things, from education and health care to patriarchy and, apparently, all the unsightly, inconveniencing aspects of womanhood (i.e., pregnancy and motherhood). While its heady themes yield commentary that is ultimately just a tad thin, Barthes’s satire is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.Much of the fun comes simply in existing within the comedic dissonance between this absurdist reality and the dubiously soothing, richly observed utopia. The most telling and damning revelation can be found in considering the film’s immersive sci-fi world alongside its distant cousin that exists in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her”: the differences in their sensibilities offer a portrait of the downward progression between the tech optimism of the early 2010s, when start-up culture was still considered cool, and the terrifyingly rapid, consuming forces that our digital future has become since.The Pod GenerationRated PG-13 for suggestive material, partial nudity and brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Amazing Maurice’ Review: A Cool Cat and His Band of Merry Rodents

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      Hugh Laurie voices a quippy, self-referential cat in this animated adaptation of a popular Terry Pratchett book.“You know, in many ways, I don’t think the plot of this adventure has been properly structured,” observes the droll Malicia Grim (voiced by Emilia Clarke) during a brief lull in the middle of “The Amazing Maurice.”An animated comedy based on Terry Pratchett’s semi-parodic children’s novel “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,” the film abounds with this style of flamboyant, self-congratulatory humor, as Malicia and the talking feline hero Maurice (voiced by Hugh Laurie) routinely break the fourth wall with satirical commentary and glib meta wisecracking.The effect is a kind of self-important distance, as if the director Toby Genkel and his co-creators considered the material beneath them. What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”The foundation of the story derives from the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin — in particular the version made famous by the Brothers Grimm: Maurice and his band of friendly, intelligent rats (among them the voices of David Tennant and Gemma Arterton) travel from town to town feigning an infestation, then providing the helpful services of an ersatz pied piper, Keith (Himesh Patel), to clear it up.The modern, coolly sarcastic big-kid riff on a familiar fairy tale has been done before, most notably in “Shrek.” And while it might still have seemed somewhat fresh when Pratchett’s book was first published, in 2001, it now feels like a poor imitation — doubly so when one considers that the script for “The Amazing Maurice” was penned by the “Shrek” screenwriter Terry Rossio, who, with his constant gags about fairy tale clichés, does little to elevate the copy above the original.The Amazing MauriceRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More