By M. Faust

I cannot remember the last time I was as charmed by an animated movie as I was by Flow. I put that right at the beginning because I hope that someone will decide from that sentence alone to go out and see the movie, preferably on a big theatrical screen, knowing nothing about it but open to a transfixing experience. 

Flow is populated entirely by animals, primarily a sleek black cat with luminous, inquisitive yellow eyes. These are not talking creatures, and with a few minor exceptions they do not act like humans, which is a large part of the film’s appeal. They are riding on a boat, a rickety old sailboat but good enough to keep them out of the waters of a massive flood that has apparently covered the earth. 

When the cat is lucky enough to get on board, the boat already bears a capybara, a giant pudgy rodent. (You may remember when one escaped from the Toronto Zoo a few years back.) Along the way they are joined by a genial golden retriever, a tall, slightly injured secretary bird and a materialistic ring tailed lemur that collects shiny objects it discovers along the way. 

Where, when and why are not questions you should worry about here. There are moments of danger, but none so bad that you should worry about taking children to see it. There is certainly nothing like the scene in Life of Pi where the inhabitants of another boat are reduced to one human and one tiger. (It helps that none of these crew are natural predators of any others.) 

This is a movie to be experienced primarily as a visual pleasure. And an auditory one, as well: even during moments of danger, like a thunderstorm that threatens to capsize the boat, the soundtrack is sedate, comprised of natural sounds, animal noises and occasionally pulsing music.

Flow is primarily the product of Gints Zilbalodis, an animator working in Latvia, who has a breathtaking imagination. Though he works with CGI programs, the film is richly detailed, but not in the ways you might expect. The animals are relatively low-tech compared to the ones in other animations, where you can see every hair on their bodies. But they have individual and distinctive characters, and they exist in a world of perpetually shifting imagery that can’t really be described.

Zilbalodis, who is 30, has one other feature to his credit, Away, which you can see on Amazon Prime. On the basis of Flow alone, I expect him to be as important a figure in his craft as Hayao Miyazaki has been for the past 40 years. It’s at the Regal Walden Galleria and Regal Quaker theaters. 

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Watching The Order at times made me feel as if I had entered a time warp back the late 1980s, when Hollywood delivered a series of audience-friendly thrillers about the dangers of white supremacists: Mississippi Burning, American History X, Betrayed, Ghosts of Mississippi, Talk Radio. It even shares a plot point with that last one, concerned with the neo-Nazi group that, among other crimes, murdered talk show host Alan Berg. 

Jude Law stars as an FBI agent assigned to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1983, presumably to cool off after a previous assignment went awry. Investigating some unexpected similarities in a string of robberies, he learns that they are the work of a group spun off of a local white supremacist church. Using the book The Turner Diaries as a blueprint, they are amassing funds and materiel to launch an attack on the United States government. 

Law’s character gives us a traditional action movie entre into this story, and the movie has some beautiful cinematography by Adam Arkapaw to make you think every prospect pleases, and only man is vile. And none are viler than Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews, a charismatic young leader of a type that will be all too familiar to viewers in 2024. It may play like a popcorn entertainment, but you won’t be able to shake it off after it’s over. 

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The bearded, bespectacled British actor Nick Frost is best known to American audiences for co-starring with Simon Pegg in director Edgar Wright’s string of genre-movie parodies: Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End.

Frost is on his own for Get Away, a spectacularly stupid comedy from the same playbook. Working from a script he wrote, he stars as the head of a family that books a vacation on an isolated Swedish island where, 100 years ago, the natives were forced to cannibalism after an unjustified British blockade. (If you’re vaguely reminded of Midsommar, I’m sure that’s the point.)

There is a plot twist that is potentially clever, but it’s handled so badly that the result plays as if the filmmakers gave up on the story halfway through and decided to change it. I can’t properly describe the ineptitude of this without giving away the twist, but it’s so clumsy that I’m almost tempted to go back and rewatch it to see if I missed something. But only almost.