Totsuko is a student at an all-girls Catholic boarding school. In the movie’s opening, she explains how she experiences colors differently. She feels colors more than sees them, like an aura she senses from another person. “When I see a pretty color, my heart quickens,” she says.

Totsuko, an exuberant, uncensored soul, has the tendency to blurt things out before she quite intends to. She accidentally tells a nun that her color is beautiful. In the midst of a dodgeball game, she’s transfixed by the purple and yellow blur of a volleyball hurtling toward her — so much so that she’s happily dazed when it smacks her in the head.

Like Totsuko, “The Colors Within” wears its heart on its sleeve. Painted with a light, watercolor-y brush, the movie is softly impressionistic. In one typically poetic touch, a slinky brush stroke shapes the contours of a hillside horizon. That evocative sensibility connects with the movie’s spiritual underpinnings. Totsuko prays “to have the serenity to accept the things she can’t change.” In “The Colors Within,” a trio of young loners bond over what makes them uniquely themselves, while finding the courage to change, together.

The ball that knocks down Totsuko is thrown by a classmate named Kimi , who not long after that gym class drops out of school — hounded, we’re told, by rumors of a boyfriend. Totsuko, curious what’s happened to Kimi, sets out to find her, and eventually does. At a local used bookstore, she sits working behind a desk, strumming her electric guitar.

To speak to Kimi, Totsuko grabs a piano book for an excuse. When a bespectacled boy named Rui approaches and says he plays the theremin, Totsuko blurts out that they should start a band. They aren’t much more than strangers to each other, but they do — a group urged together by Totsuko’s earnest positivity and her instinct that they are suited to one another.

Despite their relatively scant experience , the trio begin making music together. They practice in an old church near Rui’s home that Kimi and Totsuko take a ferry to get to. They don’t share much about their lives, but enough to know, roughly, what each is wrestling with. Kimi hasn’t yet told her grandmother, who raised her, that she’s out of school. Rui, headed next year to college, loves music but has parents who expect a different professional path.

But much goes unspoken in “The Colors Within.” If there’s a character who voices what isn’t articulated, it’s the kindly Sister Hiyoshiko , the nun with the “beautiful” color. As she subtly encourages them, it’s clear that her sense of guidance and atonement goes beyond school policy. “We can chart a new course any time we wish,” she says.

But much of what matters in “The Colors Within” isn’t said aloud. It comes, like Totsuko’s feelings of color, through an essence of character that, regardless of any missteps or disappointments by these three young people, emerges loud and clear in music. Are they songs? Or hymns? Either way, in the climactic concert, Naoko, the filmmaker of 2016’s “A Silent Voice,” allows all the dialogue to subside and let their music do the talking. And it rocks.

“The Colors Within,” a Gkids release is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for mild thematic elements. Running time: 100 minutes. Three out of four.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.

Doctor Strange is going on hiatus in the next Marvel sequel, “Avengers: Doomsday,” according to a spoiler-happy, secret-spilling Benedict Cumberbatch.

“Is that a spoiler?” the actor asked Variety in a recent interview. “F— it!”

Speaking of no effs to give, the Oscar-nominated “The Imitation Game” and “The Power of the Dog” star also helped explain a “good WTF,” thanks to Marvel and Robert Downey Jr.’s surprise announcement at Comic-Con last summer that Downey would be returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as someone other than Iron Man.

Cumberbatch found out about Downey’s Marvel homecoming while watching live coverage of the 2024 Comic-Con presentation. So, according to Variety, he immediately grabbed his phone and sent a message to Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige.

“I texted, ‘What the f—?’ and then quickly added, ‘Good what-the-f—. I mean, good what-the-f—,’” the 48-year-old star told the outlet.

For Cumberbatch, Downey’s return is a good WTF that would keep things light on set, despite the pressure of making the multimillion-dollar movies, he said. The British actor, whose parents also were thespians, told Variety that Downey would refer to him as “Mr. Shakespeare” and make quips about them both playing literary detective Sherlock Holmes onscreen. (Unfortunately, a meta line about their past roles didn’t make it into the film, he said.)

The “Sherlock” and “Star Trek Into Darkness” star, who joined the MCU with 2016’s “Doctor Strange,” said watching Downey play billionaire playboy Tony Stark and hearing his banter with Spider-Man Tom Holland in 2017’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” helped him take a looser approach to his character, whom he believes he played too stiffly in early appearances.

“I learned a lot by seeing how at ease and improvisatory they are,” Cumberbatch said. “It’s hard because you have this huge apparatus around you, but it’s so important.”  

Cumberbatch, along with his SunnyMarch production company, has been leaning slightly toward “European sort of world cinema” with his latest projects, including “The Thing With Feathers, which premieres at this week’s Sundance Film Festival, and Netflix’s “Eric” and “Roses.” Although the Marvel films take time away from his auteur-driven projects, Cumberbatch describes the franchise — with its 34 films and counting — as “the modern myths of our times” and appreciates how the epics “transport” audiences to different worlds.

“Yes, it’s huge and unwieldy, but Marvel is so committed to getting it right,” Cumberbatch said. “Even when we make one of these Avengers films and it gets exponentially huger, we’re still just kids playing in the sand pit. We’re still just making s— up and having fun with it.”

Oscar winner Downey famously launched the blockbuster MCU when he starred as the title superhero in the 2008 comic-book adaptation “Iron Man.” He concluded his run as the lead Avenger when his character sacrificed himself to save the universe in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.” Downey is set to take on the role of the villainous Victor von Doom, a.k.a. “Doctor Doom,” a character who originated in Marvel’s “Fantastic Four” comic books. The new villain in “Doomsday” is believed to be a variant of Stark, according to reports.

Alas, with all that groundwork to lay, rebooted “Fantastic Four” characters to introduce this summer and a reported return of Chris Evans to the MCU, “Doomsday” is getting awfully crowded. So, it appears, Cumberbatch’s neurosurgeon-turned-Sorcerer Supreme will not return in the May 2026 film. Although “momentarily horrified by his candor” about that plot point, Cumberbatch proceeded to spill the beans about the ultra-secretive studio’s plans for the next phase of Marvel movies.

The actor explained that much had to change when Jonathan Majors was fired last year after being convicted of assault. Majors, who played the enigmatic villain Kang the Conqueror, was lined up to be the main antagonist in the upcoming installments, but the studio had to pivot after letting him go.

Enter: Downey’s big bad Doctor Doom. With that reshuffle, Cumberbatch, whose character last appeared in 2022’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” said he won’t be in “Doomsday” because his character is “not aligning with this part of the story.”

Again acknowledging that he probably shouldn’t be saying it, Cumberbatch revealed that his Doctor Strange is “in a lot” of the “Doomsday” sequel “Avengers: Secret Wars,” which is slated for theatrical release in 2027. Both films will be directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, who co-directed the climactic “Infinity War” and “Endgame” installments.

“[Doctor Strange is] quite central to where things might go,” Cumberbatch said, hinting that the character will appear in a third stand-alone film.

He also praised the Disney-owned studio for being collaborative, saying that it was open to discussing where Doctor Strange goes next, who he would want to write and direct the forthcoming film, and what part of the character’s comic lore he would want to explore “so that Strange can keep evolving.”

“He’s a very rich character to play. He’s a complex, contradictory, troubled human who’s got these extraordinary abilities, so there’s potent stuff to mess about with,” Cumberbatch said.

Companion, 2025.

Written and Directed by Drew Hancock.
Starring Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillén, Rupert Friend, Jaboukie Young-White, Marc Menchaca, and Woody Fu.

SYNOPSIS:

After being invited to a weekend trip at her new beau’s lakeside estate, Iris uncovers a terrible secret.

Although Companion is Drew Hancock’s co-writing/directorial debut, it has a producing credit from Barbarian filmmaker Zach Cregger, who was reportedly eyeing it as a sophomore feature. Small trivia aside, this also should make clear that this is a twisty flick operating within multiple subgenres. Impressively, those pieces fit together, coming from a place of character. There isn’t anything as jarring as the act 1-2 transition of Zach Cregger’s debut, but the films share a similar DNA with the welcome exception that with Companion, Drew Hancock is psychologically breaking down why men do some of the horrible things they do, dressed up as a cautionary tale about a depressing future society could be headed to when it comes to technology and relationships. There is also a third aspect to the narrative involving the takedown of a sketchy billionaire.

This will be a spoiler-free review that doesn’t even get at the first major plot discovery that the most recent trailer bafflingly revealed; there is enough tantalizing nuttiness here to cut together a compelling trailer that doesn’t give anything away, so shame on the marketing department. What can be said is that Sophie Thatcher’s (outstanding in faith-centered talky horror drama Heretic, released late last year) Iris is in love with Jack Quaid’s Josh, coming across as a docile, compliant companion. Even though Iris is generally happy around Josh, with vivid memories of their quirky meet-cute inside a supermarket, there is something immediately discernibly off about the relationship and how much she is dedicated to ensuring his wants and desires are fulfilled. Meanwhile, Josh gives off a deceptive vibe, a self-professed “nice guy” who hasn’t always been dealt good cards.

Josh has planned a vacation getaway to a billionaire associate’s remote extravagant home, insisting that everyone there likes Iris even though she mentions that she has never felt that way. Iris’ intuition is correct, although the stay takes a dark turn when the rich Sergey (Rupert Friend) attempts to sexually assault her when isolated, an incident that turns out to be the catalyst for an assortment of messes. Rather than showing any concern or disgust that one of their friends just tried to abuse someone physically, they – including a gay couple played by Harvey Guillén and Lukas Gage with a relationship similar to the dynamic between Josh and Iris but with slightly more genuine love, and Sergey’s fed-up wife Kat played by Megan Suri – are more taken aback with how Iris defended herself. There also happens to be something else going on at the home she isn’t supposed to know about, which she could throw a wrench into.

Tackling a specific trendy subgenre with more detail and imagination than most stabs, Companion quickly and smartly descends into a cat-and-mouse game of wits that threatens to erupt in violence at any moment. In a word, it’s about control, with clear juxtapositions between the central relationships, how Josh is willing to manipulate people of different genders, and how he weaponizes trust and love. Those specifics also allow Sophie Thatcher to deliver a transfixing performance of shifting personalities, resourcefulness, and complicated feelings toward Josh.

As Iris continues to blow up Josh’s dastardly plans, he gradually becomes angry, reckless, and more monstrous in direct response to his partner, who is no longer brainwashed. It’s a devious and nasty turn from Jack Quaid with a how-far-will-he-go ruthlessness. The rest of the characters, while amusingly performed or shockingly violent, are meant to serve the plot and core ideas. Perhaps the same could arguably be said for Josh and Iris, as Companion is less a film that digs into its themes and messages but instead observes a situation spiraling out of control because of them.

There are still some curious observations about modern (and likely future) relationships, but Companion is more about reveling in a twisty situation and smartly going off the rails while making those points. It delivers on that front, with Sophie Thatcher gradually evolving into a must-watch talent. It might sound strange to say that Zach Cregger has a protégé already, but he is likely smiling and approves of what Drew Hancock has accomplished here.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd 

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