‘Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’ Review: Daniel Radcliffe Gets His Goof On in a Daffy-Droll Music Biopic That Skewers Its Hero and Itself

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Smile” is a horror film that sets up nearly everything — its highly effective creep factor, its well-executed if familiar shock tactics, its interlaced theme of trauma and suicide — before the opening credits. In an emergency psych ward, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon), a diligent and devoted therapist, is speaking to a woman who sounds like her soul went to hell and never made it back. Her name is Laura (Caitlin Stasey), and she describes, in tones that remain rational despite her tremulous panic, the visions she’s been seeing that no one else can. She sees faces — or, rather, a spirit, a something, that reveals itself in people’s faces. She can feel it lurking; the spirit’s signature is a face that will stare back at her with an evil smile, a scary grin of the damned. Describing all this, Laura becomes so distraught that she starts to convulse. Then the doctor turns around, seeing a smashed flowerpot on the floor, and Laura has disappeared. But no! She’s there, with a pottery shard in hand. And now she’s the one smiling, as she digs the shard into her neck and scrapes it along, slitting her throat in blood-gushing slow motion. Put on a happy face!

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story has been praised in early reviews following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.Directed by Eric Appel in his directorial debut, the biographical parody film stars Daniel Radcliffe as ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and loosely follows the musician’s life and career, while serving as a satire of the biopic genre.Alongside Radcliffe, the film stars Evan Rachel Wood as Madonna, Rainn Wilson as Dr. Demento, and Toby Huss and Julianne Nicholson as Al’s parents.

Wilson Chapman editorAlejandro González Iñárritu has released the first trailer for his Netflix Oscar contender “Bardo” — and the entire movie is now 22 minutes shorter.The Mexican filmmaker and two-time best director winner’s eighth film, “Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths),” premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival. After screening at Venice and Telluride, Iñárritu went back into the edit room and cut down 22 minutes from the film, bringing its runtime to two hours and 32 minutes, without credits.“The first time I saw my film was with 2,000 people in Venice,” Iñárritu told IndieWire. “That was a nice opportunity to see it and learn about things that could benefit from being tied up a bit, add one scene that never arrived on time, and move the order of one or two things. Little by little, I tightened it, and I am very excited about it.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re someone who considers themself a foodie (and I totally am), chances are there was a moment in the last few years when you had The Awakening. It may have been when the waiter was describing the veal marrow with beat foam served with baby lettuces from New Zealand. It may have been when you were eating the red snapper that was cooked halfway through, like a rare steak, and you thought, “I love sushi, I love cooked fish, but I’m not sure this is really the best of both worlds.” It may have been when you saw the bill. Whatever the trigger, that was the moment you looked up from your plate and realized that high-end foodie culture has become a serious annoyance. It’s gotten too fussy, too pricey, too full of itself, too not filling (of yourself), too avant-garde and conceptual, too tied to The Salvation of the Planet, too much of an ordeal. Did I mention too pricey? It used to be that if you wanted to ridicule culinary mania, you mocked someone like Guy Fieri. But he has risen from the ashes of infamy to a kind of born-again respectability (and yes, “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” was always a great show). Now, if you want to ridicule culinary mania, the most natural targets are restaurants like The French Laundry in Napa Valley or Bros’ in Southern Italy, places where the 12-course “tasting menu” can inspire you to think, as one blogger put it, that “there was nothing even close to an actual meal served.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Like an ice-cream shop that offers you the choice of pistachio or strawberry and nothing else, the movies Tyler Perry has been churning out for 20 years come in just two flavors: comedy and soap opera. It’s worth noting, in this case, how the flavors blend. Most often, they’re stacked right next to each other, as when Perry’s great sass-mouth frump Madea suddenly plops into the middle of a dramatic scene. Yet there’s a way that the antic, ribald broadness of Perry’s comedy bends the drama into being more over-the-top. That’s why his movies are all of a piece even when they’re all over the place. They feed you pistachio and strawberry, and by the time that’s all melted together you’re tasting one flavor. Call it Tyler Perry with Nuts.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Causeway,” starring Jennifer Lawrence as a U.S. Army soldier recovering from injuries that are physical, mental, and spiritual, is the furthest thing from a genre film. Yet it belongs to what I’ve come to think of as a genre: the slow-burn non-verbal indie gloomfest. In saying that, I don’t mean to make light of the subject. Lawrence plays Lynsey, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who returns from Afghanistan after riding in a vehicle that was struck by a bomb, which caused her to have a cerebral hemorrhage. At the start, she’s seated in a wheelchair, waiting for the home health-care worker (Jayne Houdyshell) who’s going to look after her as she undergoes rehab. Tentatively, Lynsey starts to walk, but for a while she struggles to bathe, drive, remember things. The brain injury has smashed and weakened her; she’s a person in fragments.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s in the nature of cinema that when a hugely popular and beloved movie is grand enough, the sequel to it almost has to try to top it in a go-big-or-go-home way. For a long time, each new James Bond adventure was more lavishly scaled, baroque, and stunt-tastic than the last. “The Godfather Part II” was darker and longer than “The Godfather,” “The Empire Strikes Back” enlarged the awesomeness of “Star Wars,” and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” made the first “Terminator” look like a minimalist trinket. So how does that apply to “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”? Three years ago, Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” was a seamlessly debonair retro whodunit, set in the mansion of a murdered mystery novelist, that not only evoked the edge-of-your-brain storytelling panache of Agatha Christie but expanded the Christie genre into something delectable in its meta cleverness. At a time when comic-book films, action films, and other forms of kinetic fantasy appeared to be in the final stages of killing off everything else, “Knives Out” was a cathartic reminder that a movie mode we associate with vintage Hollywood — dialogue of airy density and wit, characters who pop with all-too-human flaws and foibles, a plot that zigs and zags until you’ll follow it anywhere — could still make a righteous stand at the megaplex. Holding it all together was Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the film’s Southern-gentleman re-imagining of a Hercule Poirot/Sherlock Holmes sleuth, whose wryly deceptive genius made him, for some of us, more super than any superhero.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re a fan of “The Trip” and its sequels, those semi-improvised road comedies in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play slightly exaggerated versions of their real-life selves, you’ll know that they’re about more than just two men driving through the European countryside, eating fabulous food, trying to top each other with their Al Pacino impersonations. Coogan, in particular, comes off as a fellow who, for all his larkish narcissism, is so steeped in history that it’s literally alive for him. And that’s the feeling that courses through “The Lost King,” the new movie written by Coogan and Jeff Pope and directed by Stephen Frears. They’re the team that gave us “Philomena” (2013), the sharp-tongued heart-tugger that cast Judi Dench as a real-life Irishwoman tracking down the son she’d been forced to give up for adoption 50 years before. That movie was fine (a tad too sentimental in my book), but “The Lost King” is a growth ring, a richer, stronger, and more moving piece of work, a historical detective story that carries the kick of a true-life “Da Vinci Code.”

The secret to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s estimable powers is that he’s flagrantly, proudly, irresistibly uncool. He plays the accordion, one of the few instruments that no musician in human history has ever gotten laid for mastering, and he uses it to perform polka-themed parodies redolent of cornball Borscht Belt acts far from any sector of comedy even adjacent to ‘edgy.’ His songs reflect this much in that they’re basically about nothing, riffs on relatable banalities like finishing your dinner, or absurdities like Amish hip-hop.

Marilyn Monroe biopic “Blonde” starring Ana de Armas premiered at the Venice Film Festival Thursday, earning praise from several critics for its portrayal of the 1950s blonde bombshell. Adapted from the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, the film runs nearly three hours and received a 14-minute standing ovation from the crowd, which caused de Armas to break down into tears, according to Variety.“Andrew Dominik’s Venice Film Festival competition entry ‘Blonde’ takes a blowtorch to the entire concept of the Hollywood biopic and arrives at something almost without precedent,” Deadline’s critic said.“[‘Blonde’] is simply inventing fresh indignities for the most positively, permanently persecuted heroine outside of a John Waters movie ever to have to suffer.” As Netflix’s first film with an NC-17 rating, “Blonde” sparked backlash almost instantly when it debuted its first trailer in July over the casting of de Armas due to the fact that she is Cuban and her accent was not “authentic.”Variety’s critic Owen Gleiberman disagreed in his review, saying the film is “built around a performance, by Ana de Armas, of breathtaking shimmer and imagination and candor and heartbreak.

rocky romance with Madonna, who then became a Yoko Ono-esque wedge between him and his band. Michael Jackson definitely did not release “Beat It” after Yankovic wrote “Eat It.” Was cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar a Weird Al superfan who offered him 1 billion pesos to perform at his birthday party? Who’s to say?What Yankovic and director/co-writer Eric Appel have done, brilliantly in spots, is parody Yankovic’s own life while sending up the whole biopic genre.

Al Yankovic (Daniel Radcliff) is a curly-haired, awkward kid with no friends and no excitement in his life. Until one day when he ends up at a turnt-up polka party where he wow’s the party crowd by shredding on the accordion. His parents, Mary and Nick Yankovic (Julianne Nicholson and Toby Huss), disapprove of him playing, and his relationship with them becomes strained.

lot, “Rocketman” set out to be true not in a literal sense but only in an emotional one (and was all the better for making its fakery transparent), and “Elvis” was a freewheeling mixture of semi-reality and extravagant fantasy.So if it’s the case that regular rock biopics are weird, what of one whose title begins with the word weird? It certainly doesn’t figure to be one for the nitpickers (which at times have definitely included me) who point out that a song is in the wrong place chronologically or that this character is a composite or that so-and-so never did such-and-such.Questions like that don’t mean a damn thing when it comes to “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a churning and very entertaining load of poppycock that makes not the slightest pretense of being an accurate retelling of the story of everybody’s favorite song parodist, Weird Al Yankovic.In fact, the whole point is that it isn’t accurate, that it’s a whacked-out alternate reality in which young Al got his first accordion after his father beat a door-to-door accordion salesman to a bloody pulp, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was a parody of Weird Al’s “Eat It” and Madonna (played by Evan Rachel Wood with gum-snapping zest) was both Al’s girlfriend and a murderous psychopath.The film, directed by Eric Appel, produced by Funny or Die and distributed by Roku, takes Weird Al’s approach to music – take a well-known song and change the words to make them funnier – and applies it to the rock biopic.

Daniel Radcliffe is making a rare red carpet appearance with his girlfriend!

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A good biopic invites the audience to experience, from the inside out, who the subject really was. That’s the level that “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s film about Marilyn Monroe, operates on for most of its 2 hours and 46 minutes. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel, the movie is a hushed and floating psychodramatic Klieg-light fantasia, shot in color and black-and-white, that presents a fusion of reality and fiction. But most of it is torn from reality. In “Blonde,” we glimpse Monroe’s cataclysmic childhood, watch her shoot key scenes from her movies or stare up at them from the audience of a Hollywood premiere (where the red-carpet flashbulbs sound like guns), see her turn the incandescent Marilyn wiggle and pizzazz on and off, see her caught in a maelstrom of drugs, gossip, self-hate, and unfair studio contracts, and watch her melt into the glow of pregnancy only to lose one baby after the next. Mostly, we eavesdrop on her relationships with men (Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, JFK) who become, for Marilyn, a dysfunctional daisy chain of honeymoon-turned-nightmares.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The title of Walter Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar” makes it sound like a spaghetti Western, and the picture opens with stunning vistas and a wistfully valorous neo-Morricone score that gives you the impression — maybe the hope — that it will be. It ends on a very different note: a series of titles explaining, with precise dates and details, what happened to each of the main characters, as if the film were based on a true story. It’s the “American Graffiti” gambit of treating fictional characters as though they were real, only in this case it ends up revealing something essential about the drama we’ve been watching. Namely, how it could be so avid, specific, and scrupulously carpentered…yet remote.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling” is a movie that, in recent weeks, has been besieged and consumed by offscreen dramas, none of which I’ll recount here, except to note that when a film’s lead actress seems actively reluctant to publicize the film in question, that’s a sign of some serious discord. Yet it would be hugely unfair to allow this tempest in a teapot of gossipy turmoil to influence one’s feelings about the movie. If you want to talk about problems related to “Don’t Worry Darling,” you need look no further than at what’s onscreen. The film, written by Katie Silberman, with the brilliant production design of Katie Byron, is a kind of candy-colored “Stepford Wives” in the Twilight Zone meets “The Handmaid’s Tale” for the age of torn-at-the-seams democracy. In theory, this should add up to a juicy watch. Wilde, whose first feature was the witty and vivacious 2019 girls-on-a-bender comedy “Booksmart” (this is her second film), is a gifted director who knows how to set a mood. In “Don’t Worry Darling,” she does that to the max, and for a while you get caught up in it (or, at least, I did). Between the pop ambition, the tasty dream visuals, and the presence of Harry Styles in his first lead role, “Don’t Worry Darling” should have no trouble finding an audience. But the movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The return of Brendan Fraser — not that he ever really went away — has been a reminder of how much affection so many of us had for him back in the ’90s, when he had his moment in movies like “School Ties” and “Encino Man” and “Gods and Monsters” and “The Mummy.” Yet let’s be honest: This is not the comeback of John Travolta or Mickey Rourke. Fraser was always, in the best way, a lightweight actor: the clear blue eyes, the pin-up sexiness, the shaggy warm boyish innocence. The fact that, at 53, he’s no longer as beautiful as he once was is part of the Brendanaissance. He can no longer hold the screen as a cutie-pie hunk; he has to do it in other ways. And in “The Whale,” directed by Darren Aronofsky (who shepherded Rourke’s return in “The Wrestler”), Fraser is a better actor — slyer, subtler, more haunting — than he has ever been.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In vampire movies, from “Nosferatu” to the “Twilight” films to “Only Lovers Left Alive,” bloodsucking is usually more than just bloodsucking — it’s about sex, addiction, power — and that’s why the main event in a vampire movie doesn’t have to be the literal spectacle of watching fangs tear into human flesh. The elegance of the genre is that it has a built-in metaphorical sweep. “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s YA road movie about a couple of lost souls who happen to be cannibals (it’s adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis), is a film in which the characters behave very much like vampires. They blend into society, but they’re really a breed apart, with the ability to smell fresh meat (and one another) and a consuming desire to “feed.”