Review: Hit the road with The Mitchells vs the Machines, an agreeable Netflix family distraction msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By JAKE COYLE
AP Film Writer
Easily the most heartfelt movie about family life that also includes a robot apocalypse and a pug often mistaken for a loaf of bread, âThe Mitchells vs. the Machinesâ is an antic, irreverent animated delight that somehow doesn t sacrifice depth even as it hurtles forward at breakneck comic speed.
Director Mike Rianda s film, produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, shares much of the DNA of Lord and Miller s other cartoon adventures ( The Lego Movie, âSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verseâ) in its ability to remake movie cliches with madcap irreverence, youthful zeal and a contemporariness that often eludes less freewheeling films.
Welcome to the highly specific golden age of animated movies about complicated father-daughter relationships. In the Oscar-nominated (and unjustly Oscar-losing)
Wolfwalkers, a fearful English soldier counsels his wild-hearted daughter to collaborate in the occupation of Ireland, lest her disobedience draw the vengeful eye of Oliver Cromwell. And in
The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which arrives on Netflix on Friday, a technophobic dad frets about his daughter’s decision to major in filmmaking instead of choosing a more practical career path. In other ways, the two movies are diametrically opposed.
Wolfwalkers is hand-drawn, while the digitally animated
Mitchells takes its cues from the frenetic style of online memes and frequently annotates its action with bursting hearts and crude squiggles.
Four Good Days
About Endlessness Over the course of 20 years, Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson has remained committed to his stylistic gimmick master-shot tableaux of simple situations, often building to absurdist punch lines to the point where it’s not clear what more he might have to say within this framework. Once again, his episodic scenes aren’t really connected to any overarching narrative, though a couple of characters including a minister despairing over his loss of faith do recur at various points. Mostly, however, we have moments in the lives of everyday people, here supplemented with the voice of an omniscient narrator (Jessica Louthander) whose observations at times step on whatever simple emotion might have been found in a bit like a father pausing during a downpour to tie his young daughter’s shoes, or a woman arriving at a train station to find no one waiting for her. At their best, Andersson’s meticulously constructed shots can hit their black-humored