Back in the 1990s, as Disney’s second golden age of animated
movies surged, the company entered the sequel business, churning out follow-ups
to their popular titles. For the most part, these represented inferior products
and Disney knew it, but the goal was to expand branding rather than create art.
Although featuring the original voice actors, even the best were characterized
by shallow stories, cut-rate animation, and lackluster songs. Instead of going
the theatrical distribution route, Disney opted for direct-to-video releases –
a decision that created a lucrative revenue stream for more than a decade. In
some ways, Moana 2 feels like a throwback to those ‘90s sequels – a movie
that was made more to capitalize on the popularity of a character than because
there was a compelling new story to tell. Moana 2 features top-notch
animation and songs that are better than passable but the plot feels like a regurgitation
of elements from the first movie combined with bits and pieces of other Disney
animated projects from across the years.

Moana 2 began life as a planned Disney+ series taking
the character on new adventures. Upon seeing footage from the series, Disney
CEO Bob Iger thought it was “too good” for direct-to-streaming and had the production
team rework the series into a movie. Although the result feels reasonably
self-contained, an unevenness in pacing and some narrative hiccups are evidence
of the late-innings metamorphosis. The result will likely please the legions of
Moana fans and is easily digestible for accompanying parents even if Moana
2 falls short of being the next Disney classic.

The story transpires three years after the original (even if
Moana’s little sister, Simea, seems only a little older). Moana, now a revered wayfinder,
has been taking long trips away from home in the company of her pet rooster,
Heihei, and pig, Pua, seeking to find other tribes of humans. She learns that
the storm god Nalo has cast a curse that prevents diverse groups of people from
contacting each other. In order to reverse the curse, she must find the mystical
island of Motufetu and raise it from the ocean depths. To this end, she builds
a bigger canoe and recruits a crew of three: warrior Moni (Hualalai Chung),
engineer and craftswoman Loto (Rose Matafeo), and grumpy farmer Keke (David
Fane). As she sets out, the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), who is separately on
his own quest to find Motufetu, is captured by one of Nalo’s allies, Matangi (Awhimai
Fraser), possibly to be used as bait to lure Moana.

Moana 2 features surprisingly little in the way of
conflict – the climax, which is sufficiently suspenseful, is more of a
human-versus-nature battle – and the main villain, Nalo, appears sparingly. It seems
that the filmmakers may have visions of making him a Thanos-style “Big Bad” who
remains in the background (at least for now). This ongoing-adventure approach
makes more sense for a TV series than in a movie, although a box office win for
Moana 2 would guarantee the greenlighting of more sequels. Visually, the
movie pops although there are no noticeable advances from the first film
(perhaps because this form of animation has reached full maturity). Although
the first half of the story is light on action, things ramp up during the final
45 minutes.

One of the biggest disappointments in Moana 2 is the
lack of direct interaction between Moana and Maui. Once they are co-located,
the camaraderie from the first film re-ignites but it takes nearly an hour
before the two share the screen. For kids wanting to see the characters resume
their banter, that’s an awfully long time to wait.

With Lin-Manuel Miranda having stepped away from songwriting
duties to work on Mufasa, Abigail Barlow & Emily Bear came on board
to collaborate with composers Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i. Although the
movie’s songs are a step up from generic, they lack the dynamism evident in
Miranda’s contributions to Moana. Moana’s new anthem, “Beyond,” echoes “How
Far I’ll Go” without reaching the same emotional heights. Likewise, while Maui’s
“Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” is fun and energetic, it’s not “You’re Welcome.” An
argument can be made that the musical highlight of Moana 2 is “We Know
the Way” – a reprise of the Miranda-penned song from the first film.

Overall, Moana 2 does enough to fit the bill of solid
family entertainment. It accomplishes the most important thing for any sequel: reunite
the original characters with each other and the audience. Its high points lack
the amplitude of its predecessor’s pinnacles but it avoids craters. Rather than
taking any sort of bold step forward, Moana 2 is more of the same.
Although that can be seen as a positive, it feels a little disappointing that this
is the best Disney was able to craft after an eight-year wait.

Moana 2 (United States, 2024)

“Ghosts of Red Ridge” is a low-budget Western that tries to be a ghost story. It’s not anything to write home about in either genre.

There’s some nice lived-in detail in the locations, the dusty, dirty costumes and almost-colorful characters. But that plot. Those characters.

Owen Williams stars as the sheriff of Red Ridge, a guy so haunted by the violence of the place and his job that he starts seeing the dark-eyed dead.

This little piece of Texas (a long-standing movie set in Arizona) popped up as a mining town, but the precious metals rush was a bust. Even waiting for the railroad to come through isn’t enough to keep the locals from lashing out.

With Trent (John Marrs) and Gretchen (Lena Wilcox) running a gang bent on robbing the general store (by proxy) and a stagecoach converted to freight hauling, it’s all Sheriff Dunlap and his deputy (Trent Culkin) can do to go a whole day without a shootout.

There’s backstabbing afoot, and a land scheme in play. Neither of them makes any sense.

The period-correct but sparse Gammons Gulch Movie Set (Is it still for sale?) lays out a common problem for no-budget Westerns — more extras and cast members than buildings to house, feed and employ them. It’s a convincing looking village, but just a bare bones “movie” version of an Old West town.

That’s quibbling, as is any mention of the movie’s dialogue anachronisms and the screwy choice to have the sheriff a well-read man into thermodynamics, “kinetic theory” and the like.

Maybe he should be reading up on the law — misexplaining “due process” to a stranger (Griffin Wade) who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“You’re a good man,” saloon gal Mary (Mercedes Peterson) declares. “Some things ‘good’ can’t fix.”

That might be the best line of dialogue. The worst?

“They went THATaway!”

There’s a hold-up by highwaymen (and a highwaywoman), a shipment of nitroglycerin to contend with and with every new body, the sheriff has another face to put on the apparitions that fill his dreams and rattle his waking hours.

I always appreciate the degree of difficulty filmmakers take on when they tackle a period piece, especially a Western, instead of the broke movie maker’s favorite genre — horror.

But director Stefan Colson and screenwriter Brandon Cahela take their shot at trying it both ways, and fail in both genres.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Owen Williams, Trent Culkin, Griffin Wade, Lena Wilcox and John Marrs.

Credits: Directed by Stefan Colson, scripted by Brandon Cahela. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:21

It seems like only the week before last that I was reviewing two thrillers — “Cross” and “Day of the Jackal” — in a single review. (Because it was.) And now I’m going to review three more, similarly grouped. I guess it’s a thing! And there are more on the way.

Why so popular? Thrillers promise … thrills. Even the less good ones can sustain interest over several episodes, if they throw in enough red herrings, amazing reversals, a modicum of action and suspense and an amazing revelation held back to the end of the series like a carrot on a stick. You may be disappointed when you get there, but you will get there.

Doing everything right is “Get Millie Black” (HBO at 9 p.m. PT Mondays, first episode now streaming on Max) — the echo of “Get Christie Love!,” the mid-’70s Teresa Graves detective show, a rare series with a Black woman in the lead, doesn’t seem a complete coincidence — is set primarily in the humbler precincts of Kingston, Jamaica; Tamara Lawrance plays Millie, who was sent away as a girl to live in England, where she becomes a Scotland Yard detective. After her mother’s death, she learns that her brother, Orville, whom she believed dead, is alive.

Suddenly, it’s one year later; Millie is working for the Kingston Police, and brother Orville has become sister Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen), living with a tribe of gay and transgender outcasts in the system of storm drains called the Gully. “Most people would call this place a sewer,” Millie says. “My sister calls it home.” The Gully is a real place; Jamaica is notoriously homophobic — “The most homophobic place on Earth?” Time magazine asked in 2006 — with anti-gay laws still on the books, which keeps Millie’s partner, Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr) in the closet.

As in most — all? — detective fiction, one case reveals another; suspense springs from never knowing exactly where we’re headed. Millie’s search for Janet Fenton (Shernet Swearine), a missing teenager, is complicated by Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), a (white) British detective who arrives from London looking for (white) rich kid Freddie Summerville (Peter John Thwaites). Freddie, he says, is needed in England to help take down a major gang; but he’s a person of interest to Millie, as well. As these storylines collide and various factions jockey for advantage in the wreckage, there will be murders and attempted murders and more murders.

The characters are vivid, unpredictable in a human way and perfectly played. The five-part series feels original, not quite like anything we’ve seen before. Created by the Booker Prize-winning Jamaican novelist Marlon James, it registers as authentic to its place and people, while being true to the noir tradition — tropical Raymond Chandler.

Created by Stephen Belber, the old-school conspiracy thriller “The Madness” (Netflix, premiering Thursday), proceeds from the Hitchcockian device of a regular Joe who finds himself at the center of, and a suspect in, a mystery, and goes on the run to clear himself, like Robert Donat in “The 39 Steps” or Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” Alfred Hitchcock kept these stories down to a couple of hours, and I do believe that given the opportunity to stretch out over several episodes, he’d have stuck to two. “The Madness” does its work over eight, which strictly speaking is more than it needs. But there’s a lot to like about it.

Colman Domingo plays Muncie Daniels, a Black, Philadelphia-based CNN pundit and fill-in anchor, who in the series’ opening moments is attacked by a guest for no longer being involved in “the fight,” limiting himself to Harper’s magazine or an Ivy league lecture, when he once ran a non-profit “that took on racist landlords.” The implication, which subsequent comments will make explicit, is that he has lost himself — as one friend says, “going with your career, your ambition, your whims, then lying to yourself about it the whole while.” People are not shy about telling Muncie where they think he’s failing.

A distracted father to teenage son Demetrius (Thaddeus J. Mixson) and adult daughter Kallie (Gabrielle Graham), he’s dragging his feet on a divorce from Elena (Marsha Stephanie Blake). Looking to get away, Muncie repairs to a borrowed cabin in the Poconos, where, almost immediately he finds the body of a neighbor chopped up in a sauna — so much for relaxing. After escaping a pair of masked assailants, he brings the police around; the sauna, you will have guessed, is clean as a whistle. Meanwhile, evidence is being planted to frame him.

Domingo is required to spend a lot of time looking worried or otherwise pained; his stress wears on you after a bit, and so it’s a relief to find him (briefly) at a backyard barbecue, in relative safety. (And the whole megillah does seem to have a positive on his marriage, which is nice.) Also lifting the mood are John Ortiz as an FBI agent, Deon Cole as Muncie’s friend and lawyer and Stephen McKinley Henderson (appearing currently in “A Man on the Inside,” having a season at 75) as a wise old family friend and cigar store proprietor.

The action sweeps through some colorful locations — a chase in an empty theater, a meeting in a colonial recreation village, reconnaissance at a suburban swingers bar — that would not be out of place in a Hitchcock film, if he’d worked into the age of suburban swingers bars. The plot brings in white supremacists, militant anarchists (“basically Antifa on meth with Uzis”) and a couple of gazillionaires, one played by Bradley Whitford, as the trail leads, as it must, higher and deeper, into the dark heart of capitalist America. (“Maybe this is all a bit bigger than you thought,” someone suggests to Muncie.) Of course, these days, the (real) conspiracies seem to be all out in the open, making “The Madness” feel sort of quaint.

Showtime’s “The Agency” stars Michael Fassbender as a covert CIA agent, and Jodie Turner-Smith as his love interest.

(Luke Varley/Paramount+ with Showtime)

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Premiering Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime (Showtime at 9 p.m. PT Sunday) is “The Agency,” as in Central Intelligence. Based on a French series, “Le Bureau,” and set largely in London, it has been “created for American television” by Jez Butterworth, a Tony-winning British playwright, and his brother John-Henry Butterworth, who earlier collaborated on the screenplays for “Ford v Ferrari,” the James Brown biopic “Get on Up” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” It is the least thrilling of these thrillers.

Michael Fassbender plays Martian, the code name his colleagues address him by (he’s got a couple of other names as well, used as convenient); as the series begins he’s ordered back, with only two days notice, from Ethiopia, where he has been undercover for some time, to the agency’s London station — which necessitates telling new lies to his already lied-to married lover, Samia (Jodie Turner-Smith). Samia, after some time, will arrive in London, where they will covertly take up again. Coincidence?

Back in London, Martian connects with handler Naomi (Katherine Waterston), whom he has only ever met over Zoom, boss Henry (Jeffrey Wright) and bigger boss Bosko (Richard Gere). It’s not a seamless transition. His agency-provided apartment comes bugged and his movements are tracked. (The scruffy agents assigned to follow him represent the series’ only real attempt at humor.)

Dr. Blake (Harriet Sansom Harris), one of the series more centered characters, arrives from Langley “to evaluate mental health across the department,” and though this seems particularly, if not exclusively, for Martian’s benefit, it’s true that nearly all these folks seem unhappy — with the notable exceptions of Blake, Naomi and Owen (John Magaro), another handler — as a result, they’re the people you’re the happiest to see. Martian is especially a pill, at work, at home with his teenage daughter, Poppy (India Fowler), and even with Samia. We do understand that he’s good at his job and a person of some authority, and torn between love and work, but when has that ever been an excuse?

The series has the strange quality of being under- and overwritten; people don’t talk much, and when they do, they don’t necessarily talk like people: “There are 170,000 words in the English language,” says Bosko. “Each year 2,000 of them become obsolete; they enter the great verbal bathtub of our collective being. Presently circling around that open drain are these words: stoicism, fortitude, duty, honor, sacrifice.”

Of 10 promised episodes, as of this writing only three were made available for review, at the end of which things are only beginning to come together. One assumes — hopes, anyway — that something compelling is going to happen in those remaining seven hours, but the direction is so thick with style and the characters so little developed, that it’s hard to work up more than a cursory interest in anyone’s fate.

That might change, of course. Disparate plotlines will presumably converge. There’s a compromised double agent on the run in Eastern Europe, leading to some skippably torturous scenes of torture, and a new recruit, Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) being sent on her first assignment with what feels like little to no preparation.

“There’s a cost for doing this work,” she’s told. “A price. Are you sure you want to pay it?” (The price is “surviving totally alone forever.”) Run away, I want to say. There are so many other series you could be in.