For the 1993 live-action film, see Super Mario Bros. Scott calls the film “ a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art.” (For more character-driven drama, check out “ The Two Popes” and “ High Flying Bird.This article is about the 2023 animated film. Davis is superb as Rainey, chewing up her lines and spitting them out with contempt at anyone who crosses her, and Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020 and won a posthumous Golden Globe best actor award for his performance, is electrifying as the showy sideman, Levee, a boiling pot of charisma, flash and barely concealed rage. The setting is a Chicago music studio in 1927, where the “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and her band are meeting to record several of her hits, though that business is frequently disrupted by the tensions within the group over matters both personal and artistic. Wolfe brings August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winner to the screen, quite faithfully - which is just fine, as a play this good requires little in the way of “opening up,” so rich are the characters and so loaded is the dialogue. (For more family viewing, try “ Matilda” or “ Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.”) Watch on Netflix

“This rambling, anarchic tale is gratifyingly fresh and eccentric,” our critic raved. But Verbinski also doesn’t alienate the target audience: Children will likewise delight in this visually inventive and frequently funny treat. Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” even throwing in visual and verbal nods to that very R-rated adaptation. And he apparently instructed his leading man, Johnny Depp, to voice the role as a riff on his turn as Hunter S.

First, he constructs it as a kiddie “Chinatown,” with our hero stumbling into a Western town where the battle over water rights is getting ugly. But few have done it as unapologetically (and successfully) as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gore Verbinski, who livens up this story of a desert lizard’s adventure in several surprising ways. Plenty of filmmakers have livened up family movies by sliding in winking gags and pop culture references for the grown-ups.

List of universal pictures films