Film reviews: Snow White, Death of a Unicorn, and The Alto Knights

Snow White

Directed by Marc Webb (PG)

Disney’s new live-action redo of Snow White is “neither good enough to admire nor bad enough to joyfully skewer,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. After all the “nitwit controversies” it stirred up during its long gestation, including an ugly kerfuffle about its Latina star being insufficiently pale, the film itself turns out to be “perfectly adequate.” It’s also lucky to have Rachel Zegler as its titular princess, because the former West Side Story standout “has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs.”

But despite Zegler’s admirable work, the movie is “bad in all sorts of ways,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. Gal Gadot is “god-awful” as the Evil Queen who wants Snow White killed, and the seven dwarf characters, created via CGI and motion-capture animation, “look like Claymation versions of the Keebler Elves.” Meanwhile, the uneven attempts to update the plot, such as by recasting the prince as a Robin Hood–like forest rebel, result in a story that “feels lopsided and confused.”

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Still, Snow White is “certainly not the disaster a lot of people seem to have hoped for,” said Ty Burr in The Washington Post. Faithful enough to the original, it has “a ton of theater-kid energy,” and “girls and boys of all ages might even welcome a Snow White who slightly more actively resists a dictatorial ruler.”

Death of a Unicorn

Directed by Alex Scharfman (R)

The latest horror-comedy from A24 rests upon “a potentially intriguing concept,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. A father and daughter driving toward a billionaire’s home in a wilderness preserve strike a unicorn and throw the body in their trunk. But when their wealthy hosts discover that unicorn blood cures any human ailment and greedily attempt to harvest and sell the elixir, everyone at the estate becomes a target of violent attack by the forest’s remaining unicorns.

Unfortunately, “this agonizingly unfunny send-up of Big Pharma and Jurassic Park–scale tentpoles” lacks the bite and wit of several other recent eat-the-rich satires. At least Unicorn is “silly fun at a time when it feels like we could all use an escape,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. While it “feels like the kind of project that collapses with the wrong people in it,” every one of its cast members “understood the assignment,” starting with Paul Rudd as a corruptible corporate apparatchik and Jenna Ortega as his college-age child. With Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni, and Barry’s Anthony Carrigan also on board, the cast is indeed “good enough to sustain the movie’s momentum for longer than it merits,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. But the main characters are all two-dimensional, and the film relies heavily for its humor on the shock of seeing unicorns suffer or inflict gory violence. That shtick “doesn’t feel especially edgy by the third or fourth time.”

The Alto Knights

Directed by Barry Levinson (R)

“A Manhattan mafioso power struggle should drip with drama,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. But nothing goes to plan in the new Barry Levinson film that features Robert De Niro in dual roles as the 1950s rival crime bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. Sure, De Niro “pulls off the experiment,” imbuing Genovese with a spiky personality while Costello gets “De Niro classico.” But the “wacko double act” remains a constant distraction, as the film’s “potentially meaty” tale devolves into “a dense, unfocused history lesson that rambles on and on.”

The movie proves “more interesting in the context of De Niro’s filmography than it is as a stand-alone picture,” said Katie Walsh in The Seattle Times. Given the actor’s singular place in the history of mob cinema, “there simply isn’t anyone else who could go toe to toe with him, other than himself.” And despite the gimmick at the film’s heart, “by the time The Alto Knights arrives at its blockbuster scenes, it’s easy to be transported.”

So much of it, though, “boils down to old folks complaining about each other,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Costello complains about Genovese, who ordered a hit on him that failed. Genovese complains about Costello, and Genovese’s wife does a lot of complaining, too. “There is a certain lack of youthful vitality in the picture,” as perhaps should be expected when the screenwriter, Nicholas Pileggi, is 92, and Levinson is 82. De Niro, at 81, is “effectively their kid brother.”