A man made of wicker features in one movie while the other consists of remarkable stop-motion animation.
“Wicker”

⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4
In “Wicker” it turns out a decent man requires a little basket weaving. At least, that’s the hook in this bawdy fairy tale, adapted by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer from Ursula Wills’ acclaimed short story “The Wicker Husband,” in which a woman’s pursuit of companionship sends a dour village into a tizzy. The premise is fanciful, but the sexual double standards, marital dissatisfaction and resentment of another person’s happiness are familiar enough.
Olivia Colman (“The Favourite,” “The Lost Daughter”) plays an unnamed fisherwoman who lives on the outskirts of a seaside village and occupies a similarly marginal position in its social order. Ridiculed for her dowdy appearance and fishy smell, she commissions a local basket maker (Peter Dinklage) to fashion her a husband. What arrives is Alexander Skarsgård in woven form, somberly polite, virile and more than dutiful in attention—got a leaky roof or a squeaky bed, he’ll have it fixed in a jiffy. Just don’t ask him to do anything with fire. His existence becomes an affront to the community’s understanding of how marriage, and women, should work.
“Wicker” falls somewhere between “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Caligula” (1979), with its mystical underpinnings — Dinklage’s conjurer feels more amiably puckish Rumpelstiltskin than maniacal Frankenstein — medieval-
adjacent setting and frothy talk of shagging and making babies. You could think of it as King Richard’s Faire dialed up to 11 on the naughty scale.
The perceived marital bliss of Colman’s fisherwoman overthrows social norms, making it the bane of those atop the social hierarchy, especially Elizabeth Debicki’s judging matron, a Karen OG constantly relegating others to places below her station.
Colman anchors the story’s emotional center with assurance, while Skarsgård’s casting supplies a layer of absurdity, putting the hulking berserker from “The Northman” inside an unfamiliar body, with Debicki (“Tenet,” “The Crown”) as the face of the village’s traditionalist status quo.
As lithe and sprite as “Wicker” is, the osiers of its are novel concept are stretched thin by as the plot gets deeper into the woods. The organic nature of a woman’s quest for companionship and respect becomes subsumed and the cheeky, burlesque-leaning humor fades. Still, its apt, able ensemble renders it a merry mug of cinematic mead.
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Co-written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Nomura, the action takes place in the aptly if generically named fictional city of Megasaki, where an outbreak of snout fever (dog flu) strikes and the metro’s Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Nomura with abrupt, macho intonations suggestive of indelible Japanese cinematic icon Toshiro Mifune), banishes all dogs to a “trash island” where waste is carted by unmanned trams across the watery expanse and processed through a series of “Wall-E”-esque automation facilities. The result is an ever-rising mass of neatly stacked cubes of rubbish that take on the effect of tiered stadium seating. No humans, unless in hazmat suits, visit.
If you haven’t experienced the game, wasting away the hours by mindlessly launching flightless birds beak-first at roly-poly laughing green pigs in rickety fortresses, consider yourself lucky. Even if you got caught up in the craze, you probably had no idea why the birds couldn’t fly. The bigger-screen animation, in which flightless avians live on a remote island in a bird-only community, never really answers the question either, but we do gain insight into Red (Jason Sudeikis), the stout ostensible cardinal with Groucho Marx eyebrows and anger issues. The sassy bird, we learn, was an orphan. As a result of his intolerable behavior, Red lands in an anger management school led by a yogini who farts sparkling radiation that can take out a few houses. She’s not the only one with odd talents; there’s a pudgy grouse called Bomb (Danny McBride), who can level a treehouse with his flatulence if riled. It brings a whole new meaning to “Birdie, birdie, in the sky.”

