Movie Nation

“Juliet & Romeo” isn’t an “updating” of Shakespeare’s immortal star-crossed lovers. It’s still set in the Renaissance, with doublets and dirks and dueling, a prince trying to end an ancient family feud, with a not-quite-helpful friar, nurse, etc.

It features almost all of the characters from the play — some with more prominent roles in the story than ever before.

But it’s a musical, littered with instantly forgettable songs by Evan Bogart and Justin Gray and a decent dance number or two that still doesn’t answer the questions posed by many of the singers.

Did all of them do their own singing? Even Dan Fogler as the Apothecary? And did they have autotune in the Italian Renaissance?

Long review short, this is Shakespeare’s play without the poetry.

Throw in that it also lacks a balcony scene, but with added political intrigues that drive the competing Montagues and Capulets as they try to either win favor with the Prince of Verona (Rupert Graves) or outflank him in the era’s struggles between Italian rule and a papal empire.

It’s not rubbish, just completely and utterly unsatisfying.

Clara Rugaard and Jamie Ward are the pretty but bland, colorless leads. The hothead Tybalt (Ferdia Walsh Peelo) towers over his dueling foe Mercutio (Nicholas Podany), making us wonder if that was ever a fair fight.

Rebel Wilson hisses and sings as the mother of Juliet.

Rupert Everett and Jason Isaacs are the Capulet and Montague patriarchs, famed actors in fabulous costumes with nothing much to play.

The legendary Derek Jacobi lent his presence to this, bringing a little gravitas to Friar Lawrence, but like the rest of the cast, condemned to recite writer-director Timothy Scott Bogart’s lines and not the Bards. For shame.

Because woe, woe unto this show, a misguided misfire on so many levels one cannot ennumerate them. Let’s just say the costumes and settings are first rate and wait for one and all to erase this from their resumes as we erase it from our memories.

Rating: PG-13, bloody violence, “suggestive material” (hanging out in a brothel)

Cast: Clara Rugaard, Jamie Ward, Ferdia Walsh Peelo, Nicholas Podany, Rebel Wilson, Rupert Everett, Dan Fogler, Jason Isaacs, Rupert Graves and Derek Jacobi.

Credits:Directed by Timothy Scott Bogart, scripted by Timothy Scott Bogart, based on the play by Wm. Shakespeare.

Running time: 2:02

You’re going to have to make an effort to find a theater (or very soon a streamer) playing “Watch the Skies.” And the whole point of this review is to ensure that sci-fi fans make the effort.

Smuggled into cinemas three years after its Swedish release by minor distributor XYZ Films, “Skies” is a plucky, low-budget action comedy about UFO hunting, and a lightweight thriller that wears its inspirations and plot point borrowings with pride.

With a little “Stranger Things,” a bit of “Interstellar, a touch of “Back to the Future” featuring a Saab, not a DeLorean, and a heaping helping of “Safety Not Guaranteed,” it’s about UFO hunting the Swedish way — dogged, organized, occasionally anarchic but always accompanied by paper work, tarts and fresh pots of coffee.

Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug) grew up in the swirl of her father Uno’s (Oscar Töringe) obsession. He was a founder of the ragtag group of “Truth is Out There” fanatics — UFO Sweden. We meet Denise when she’s 8 (Lilly Lexfors) and already game for any crazy quest Dad cooks up.

But that’s when Uno and his Saab disappeared into the Swedish mountains — back in 1988. His risk-taking got astrophysicist and fellow UFO Sweden enthusiast Lennart (Jesper Barselius) fired, as their biggest stunt was stealing data from the Swedish weather bureau.

Uno’s big theory was that botched weather forecasts are connected to UFO sightings, and that this ties into peak nights of the Aurora Borealis (the Northern Lights). But after his disappearance, even Lennart can’t make heads or tails out of Uno’s mathematical scribblings.

Denise grew up orphaned and troubled, hanging with vandals, mastering breaking and entering and the birth-of-the-Internet hobby of hacking. It’s 1996, and seeing her father’s empty Saab after it crashes through a farmer’s barn convinces her “My Dad is still alive, ‘out there'” somewhere.

There’s nothing for it but to reconnect with Lennart, biker babe gone to seed
Töna (Isabelle Kyed), flaky magical thinker Karl (Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson), aged plodder Gunnar (Håkan Ehn) and edgy and sometimes armed Mats (Mathias Lithner), the relics of UFO Sweden who will pile into Lennart’s VW Vanagon to help her discover the “truth.”

Eva Melander plays Kicki, the sketchy head of Swedish weather research, who seems to be hiding something — perhaps their own investigation of Uno’s theories. The idea that she might steal credit for Uno’s insights makes her the villain of the piece.

Denise also has to evade a cop (Sara Shirpey) who has taken an interest in her welfare, but won’t have her stealing government secrets to feed her obsession. Denise and her motley crew will go into the country, into the woods, into a lake and into government labs looking for answers.

But before any and every step they take, Gunnar has to make the coffee and pull the tarts out of the UFO Sweden HQ refrigerator.

Votes must be taken, risks avoided and Denise recruited and pinned as a member of this venerable — at least in their own minds — organization — all according to Roberts Rules of Order and their own bylaws.

The comedy comes from the officious slow-walking UFO Sweden way of things, and the way nothing-to-lose-Denise revives their more gonzo “X-Files” fanatical past.

And the picture’s heart is its coming-of-age story, a child seeking the truth about her Dad, come what may.

Torhaug makes a fiesty lead, literally bouncing off older, more staid other characters.

Director and co-writer Victor Darnell keeps the movie more or less on the move, and he drifts late model Volvos and Saabs in the car chases, and does things to a classic Saab 90 that would get him locked up anywhere but Sweden.

The effects have a hint of “Close Encounters” polish, but on a “Safety Not Guaranteed” budget.

It’s dark and silly, fun and even touching. The Swedish cast does a decent job of performing it in English (almost 1970s ABBA phonetically at times) and the laughs land.

It won’t be in theaters long, so watch the streaming menus for “Watch the Skies” if you miss it at the multiplex.

Rating: PG-13, bloody violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Inez Dahl Torhaug, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey,
Håkan Ehn, Eva Melander, Isabelle Kyed, Mathias Lithner, Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson and Oscar Töringe

Credits: Directed by Victor Darnell, scripted by Victor Darnell and Jimmy Nivrén Olsson. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:55

Will it be as good as “Watch the Skies” (review here) or more on a “Surfer” level?

Gotta be better than “Juliet & Romeo.” Then again, maybe not.

Some days, one feels the need to catch up with a few titles high maintenance dogs, farms, aged parents etc. kept you from catching on opening weekend.

One “Clown” I hope to get around to. Sometime. IFC never pitched it my way, alas.

If I hadn’t seen it in a cinema packed with children, I’d have never believed “Chicken Run” was a kids’ film.

The conceit, the jaunty Englishness of it all, the very dated references and the homages are all elements only adults could get.

And yet here it is, an Aardman animated marvel that turns 25 this year and becomes what those of us who saw it in 2000 realized in an instant. It’s a classic.

The “Wallace & Gromit” folks looked at Britain’s decades-long obsession with WWII movies, especially POW tales, and sent them up by turning the POWs into chickens and the “escape” into a high-stakes get-away from an egg farm about to transform into a chicken pot pieworks.

It’s ingenious, twee and jolly good fun all around.

Ginger, voiced by Julie Sawalha (the long-suffering daughter on TV’s “AbFab”), is the plucky ringleader, a hen determined to lead a breakout of the concentration camp known as Tweedy’s Egg Farm. She takes her shot with one “plan” after another, conspiring with the Scottish Mac (Lynn Ferguson) to tunnel, climb the fence or trick her way out, leading dizzy Babs (Jane Horrocks), blunt Bunty (Imelda Staunton) and the rest to freedom.

The huffy old RAF veteran rooster Fowler (Benjamin Withrow) cheers them on and insists on “discipline,” “order” and “morale” in the ranks, “What what?”

But every time she fails, Ginger is tossed into the coal bin, “the cooler,” where she bounces a tennis ball off the walls (Steve McQueen style) awaiting her next release. The Tweedys (Miranda Richardson and Tony Haygarth) can’t kill and eat her. She’s too productive as a layer.

But egg farmer Tweedy has his suspicions.

“They’re organizing! I KNOW it!”

Things are dire enough as it is, with any hen who isn’t laying enough destined for a head-lopping. Then the machinery arrives for Mrs. Tweedy to transform a struggling 1950s egg farm into a profitable chicken pot pie factory.

That’s the perfect moment for a rooster, hurtling overhead, to drop into their laps. If he can fly, he can teach them to, or so the reasoning goes. How does Rocky Rhodes (Mel Gibson) manage it? And can he be trusted? He’s a Yank, after all.

“Overpaid, oversexed and over HERE” Fowler huffs, repeating the best British WWII joke describing U.S. troops in the U.K.

Rocky, the “lone Free Ranger,” is hip, cool, a hustler escaped from a circus and all about entertaining the hens as he leads them through pointless flying lessons, calisthenics and the like.

“Flying takes THREE things — hard work, PERSEVERANCE…and hard work!”

They’ll need the help of some POW camp scavengers, packrats Fetcher (Phil Daniels) and Nick (Timothy Spall). Radio, tools, disco lights? Whatever you need, guv’nah.

The glories of the stop-motion animation of Aardman are the sight gags and slapstick tumbles, and attention to hand-animated details — dizzy Poppy (Horrocks) always figures any hen missing (and dead) just went “on holiday.” We always see her knitting with real wool.

Rocky and Ginger have to survive getting caught in the comically complex chicken pot pieworks machinery. Hens in a panic looks exactly the way you’d expect — sans feathers (hard to make out of plasticine).

And then there’s the Britishness of their best films. Here, they rip off “The Great Escape,” give a nod to “Stalag 17” and remember the punchline to “The Colditz Story,” a famous prison escape story that involved wings.

Vintage “Star Trek” Scottish jokes, a morale-boosting dance to “Flip, Flop and Fly” and Mel Gibson riffing on being a roguish flirt and fraud, with a tendency to get punch “drunk” after tumbles both date the film and give it a timeless nostalgia.

It’s more complex than the simple elegance of the “Wallace & Gromit” films, a chattier, more plot centric version of their escape-prone “Shaun the Sheep” comedies.

And for a film buff, the laughs come quickly and often at all the riffs, references and gentle jabs on Britain, Britishness and the singular obsession with “their finest hour,” especially stories about the ingenuity and (pardon) pluck of those trapped in the clutches of sworn enemies who mean to put an end to them.

Long before the requisite 25 years had passed, the ruling was already in on “Chicken Run,” an “instant classic” if ever there was one.

Rating: G

Cast: The voices of Julie Sawalha, Imelda Stanton, Jane Horrocks, Miranda Richardson, Benjamin Withrow, Lynn Ferguson, Timothy Spall, Phil Daniels. Tony Haygarth and Mel Gibson.

Credits: Directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, scripted by Nick Park, Peter Lord and Karey Kirkpatrick (additional dialogue by Mark Burton and John O’Farrell). An Aardman production, a Dreamworks release on Amazon Prime, other streamers.

Running time: 1:24

The fake trailers for this MGM/Amazon project have flooded the Internet this year.

Nicolas Cage in the Spidey suit, with a fedora and trenchcoat. This 1930s set alt universe Spider features Li Jun Li, Brendan Gleason, Lamorne Morris and Jack Huston.

Eight episodes, 2026 on Amazon Prime.

A “strictly family time” vacation with the kids, wife (Connie Nielsen) and Christopher Lloyd along for the ride?

Sharon Stone and Tom Hanks’ kid as villains? Beating your way through a tsumani of rural America carnies?

Mark me “PRESENT.”

Michael Ironside, John Ortiz and Colin Salmon are here to lend support.

August 15.

“The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Rome” star, the ostensible love interest for this June 27 release, sets out the stakes and the “team sport” nature of Formula One racing.