Maestro (M18)
129 minutes, available on Netflix
4 stars
The story: Duetting with diva Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born (2018) was apparently not enough of a musical challenge. For his second round as star-director and co-writer, American actor Bradley Cooper orchestrates an overview of American maestro Leonard Bernstein’s life and loves.
Bernstein was a colossus of 20th-century American culture, a conductor with the New York Philharmonic at 25, and composer of operas, symphonies and the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story.
His prodigious creativity is ungraspable, and so Maestro is not about his music – despite being scored entirely by his compositions – but a biopic of Bernstein as an equally legendary bon vivant.
Cooper’s striking physical and vocal likeness encompass this carnal vitality.
Bernstein loved company, male and female: The opening scene is of him naked in bed, excitedly drumming on his boyfriend’s (Matt Bomer) bottom as if at a percussion rehearsal.
His great love, though, was his wife and the mother of his three children, Costa Rican actress Felicia Montealegre (played by an incandescent Carey Mulligan).
The movie is a three-decade chronicle of their complicated relationship, dating from their first flirtation at a 1946 New York party. It begins in black and white, like a romantic comedy from Hollywood’s Golden Age, before transitioning into colour, during which time the marriage buckles under the supernova’s self-absorption and flagrant gay dalliances.
“You’re going to die a lonely old queen,” the long-suffering spouse lashes out in a savage spat.
Mulligan’s display of toughness and fragility is a tour de force.
Cooper gives his co-star top billing, but he is the indisputable auteur of this passionate work: his passion for his subject, Bernstein’s for life and music, and the couple’s for each other.
Hot take: This beautifully played tribute to a flawed genius marries artistry and feeling.
Migration (PG)
92 minutes, opens on Dec 28
3 stars
The story: The Mallard family of migratory ducks convinces its anxious father to set out on an epic vacation. Its well-hatched plan quickly goes awry.
Illumination – the American studio behind the Minions (2015 and 2022) and Sing (2016 and 2021) franchises – may not be an animation brand as well-known as Walt Disney Pictures or Pixar, but its blockbuster streak is unassailable.
The Super Mario Bros Movie earlier in 2023 scored the biggest-ever opening for an animated film.
And Migration will tickle its pre-teen audience with its cute, comical critters and relatable family dynamics.
The Mallard dad (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) is overprotective, unlike mum (Elizabeth Banks): She shares their adolescent son (Caspar Jennings) and duckling daughter’s (Tresi Gazal) desire for discovery.
Hence, the brood migrate from their provincial New England pond to Jamaica for the winter in a travelogue of episodic adventures.
They survive thunderstorms and a pair of sinister herons that would frighten Japanese film-maker Hayao Miyazaki (The Boy And The Heron, 2023).
More hazards await when they lose their way in a New York City of rats, garbage and construction din.
The detailed visuals are by French director Benjamin Renner of the Oscar-nominated Ernest & Celestine (2012).
As for the wacky personalities, such as the leader of a local pigeon gang voiced by Awkwafina, they are a signature of writer Mike White, creator of the award-winning HBO satirical series The White Lotus (2021 to present).
Most flamboyant is a homesick Jamaican parrot (Keegan-Michael Key) caged in a Manhattan restaurant.
There are spills, thrills and merry antics as the Mallards’ daring mission to free him runs a-fowl of a demon chef arch-nemesis (Boris Rehlinger), who wants to serve them up as duck a l’Orange.
Hot take: Colourful fun, although for a fable about spreading one’s wings, this frolic is PG-conventional.
