The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

92 minutes, opens on Thursday

2 stars

The story: Based on Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros video games, this animated caper sees plucky Brooklyn brothers Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) falling down a pipe and being transported to a universe of fantastical kingdoms. When Luigi is captured by the evil Bowser (Jack Black), Mario teams up with new allies Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) to save his brother and the world.

This film hopes to leverage the popularity of the Nintendo franchise, which has made Mario the world’s most famous moustachioed plumber and the best-selling video game character of all time.

And the simplicity of the game play – which typically sees Mario leaping between platforms to rescue a kidnapped Princess Peach – leaves plenty of room for the cinematic embellishment.

But The Super Mario Bros Movie’s trite and forgettable storyline could have used a power-up or three.

There is much to admire about the animation itself, so impressively detailed you can see the threads in Mario’s denim overalls.

There are also some amusing, whimsical details, from the dynamics of Mario’s Italian American family – apparently one of the last groups Hollywood is fine with stereotyping – to the minutiae of the Mushroom Kingdom, with its floating bricks, edible fungi and mystical power-ups.

But instead of leaning into that trippy Alice In Wonderland quality, the narrative mostly sticks to the literal and simplistic.

Even the characters are flat. Donkey Kong has daddy issues, and Mario and Luigi have something to prove to their family, but these details are cursory, while Princess Peach has no layers to her at all.

Only Bowser, with his insecure infatuation with the princess, feels three-dimensional.

And even by animation standards, the laws of physics are extra loose here. With no price to pay for falling from a floating platform or a rainbow highway, there are no real stakes.

Hot take: As an exercise in firing up the imagination, you are better off playing the video game. – Alison de Souza

Huesera: The Bone Woman (R21)

98 minutes, opens on Thursday

3 stars

The story: There are difficult pregnancies. And then there is Valeria (Natalia Solian), whose joy at expecting her first child is cut short by a supernatural evil hungering for the soul of her unborn baby.

A much-praised multiple-award winner on the festival circuit, the Mexican body horror Huesera: The Bone Woman follows Valeria in Mexico City from the conception of her child to birth, as she becomes consumed by a demonic entity with crackling bones. The movie’s acoustics are dread-inducing.

“When you become a mother, you feel like you are split in two,” a matriarch says in reference to the central metaphor.

For Valeria, the sundering is more than corporeal. She loses her entire sense of self. Already, she has turned her back on the queer punk lifestyle of her youth for married domesticity, and now, she has to also pack away her passion for furniture carpentry and convert her workshop into a nursery?

Such are the societal pressures on a woman in a Latin American culture that venerates the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Only a coven of neighbourhood aunty witches – of all people – understand the danger is real and offer her shelter, while even her husband (Alfonso Dosal) tires of her “hallucinations”.

True, her condition could reasonably be postpartum psychosis, and the deliberately paced yet effective chiller, which is experienced wholly via the traumatised heroine in Solian’s sympathetic performance, never explains itself.

But Michelle Garza Cervera is no obstetrician. She is a debut feature director with a distinctive voice fluent in local lore, making a forthright statement on maternal ambivalence.

Hot take: This disturbing motherhood nightmare will do nothing for Singapore’s declining fertility rate. – Whang Yee Ling