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The ironically titled “Luck” marks the inauspicious return of John Lasseter , the former Pixar Animation chief who was ousted in 2017 from the company he co-founded over allegations of inappropriate workplace behavior. Now he’s back at Skydance Animation, serving as head of animation and a producer on “Luck,” which is streaming on Apple TV+.

But you don’t need to know any of that to realize this movie is a mess, and one of the worst of the year. It’ll be obvious from the start to anyone who isn’t a very small child. The character design is rubbery and off-putting, the dialogue is inane, the antics are forced, and the mythology is mind-bogglingly convoluted. Worst of all, there’s little magic in director Peggy Holmes ’ tale of a trip to a magical land. Sure, there’s a cool contraption or clever mode of transportation here or there. But the characters who populate both this place and the real world are so woefully devoid of personality, it’s impossible to care about whether they ever achieve their needlessly elaborate goals.

The young woman at the film’s center is the blandest of all. Her name is Sam, and she’s voiced with steadfast perkiness by Eva Noblezada . Sam has bounced between various foster homes and orphanages her whole life in hopes of finding her forever family; now, at 18, she has aged out of the system and must live alone in a tiny apartment in her generically quaint town. Not that the script from Kiel Murray , Jonathan Aibel , and Glenn Berger is even the slightest bit interested in this young woman’s interior life, but how does Sam feel about this prospect? How does she feel about never having been adopted? It’s hard to be interested in how the story will shape her if we have no clue who she is at the start.

Life on her own is an even more of a daunting task for Sam than it would be for the average person, though, because she’s plagued by perpetual bad luck. This is her signature trait. We know this because her plucky young pal at the orphanage, Hazel ( Adelynn Spoon ), announces: “You sure have bad luck, Sam Greenfield,” when Sam turns their makeshift music video shoot (to Madonna’s “Lucky Star,” of course) into a fiasco. She’s clumsy, she drops stuff, she gets trapped in the bathroom, she can’t make the toaster work. A job at the neighborhood crafts store (where Lil Rel Howery provides the voice of her boss) provides further opportunities for chaos, but now they involve glitter, ribbons, and cacti. It’s all depressingly predictable.

But no matter the challenge or setback, Sam is sunny and upbeat. This is also depressingly predictable. Watching her stumble and bumble cheerfully through life makes you wish she’d let loose with an actual emotion from time to time. The film’s young viewers certainly could relate to such volatility.

Things start to look up, though, when a snarky black cat with a shiny penny accidentally leads her through a portal to the Land of Luck. Similar to the factory in “Monsters, Inc.”—the rare glimmer of Lasseter’s influence here—this is the secret place where leprechauns manufacture nuggets of good luck for random delivery worldwide: everything from finding good parking to falling in love. Characters stand around explaining the mechanics of this place to each other in scene after scene; you’ll still need a flow chart to understand it all.

But because she’s so freaking nice all the time, Sam doesn’t want good luck for herself. She wants to procure a lucky penny for Hazel, who’s on the brink of adoption. This leads to an overly complicated series of events in which Sam and her cat friend, Bob ( Simon Pegg , doing a Scottish accent), sneak through various corridors and into labs, with Sam insisting that she’s Latvian, and that’s why she’s so tall compared to everyone else. It’s a joke that gets hammered ad infinitum, but it isn’t even remotely funny the first time. (This plot point did inspire a particularly clunky piece of dialogue—“I’m not a Latvian leprechaun, Gerry. I’m a human!”—which my son and I have been saying to each other around the house for days.)

With its whimsical creatures and colorful palette—as well as supporting characters like Jane Fonda ’s fuchsia dragon and Flula Borg as a flamboyant German unicorn—“Luck” truly is best suited for small children with low standards. Older kids will be bored. Adults will find it especially dreary, even though there’s actually a relevant message in here about the merits of failure and the perils of lawnmower parenting, buried somewhere beneath all the sparkles and desperation.

On Apple TV+ today and available in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Luck (2022)

105 minutes

Eva Noblezada as Sam Greenfield (voice)

Simon Pegg as Bob (voice)

Jane Fonda as The Dragon (voice)

Whoopi Goldberg as The Captain (voice)

Colin O'Donoghue as Jerry (voice)

Lil Rel Howery as Marvin (voice)

Flula Borg as Jeff the Unicorn (voice)

John Ratzenberger as Rootie (voice)

Adelynn Spoon as Hazel (voice)

• Peggy Holmes
• Glenn Berger
• Jonathan Aibel
• Kiel Murray
• William J. Caparella
• John Debney

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Common sense media reviewers.

Colorful, charming animated tale has positive messages.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Kids can reflect on the value of family and the re

Family is who you make it. Learning to roll with t

Sam demonstrates gratitude for what she has in lif

Animated characters, including humans and leprecha

Characters do a lot of falling down and getting bo

A unicorn and a dragon fondly remember the time th

"Poop," "screw it up," "blabbermouth."

Drinks called Tangerine Tornados and Lucky Dragons

Parents need to know that Luck is an animated film about Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada), the unluckiest person in the world. She accidentally travels to the Land of Luck and learns positive lessons about overcoming challenges and managing disappointments. Characters face dangers and scary-looking monsters, but…

Educational Value

Kids can reflect on the value of family and the reality that sometimes bad things happen, an opportunity for learning and growth.

Positive Messages

Family is who you make it. Learning to roll with the punches when they come in life will make you more resilient. Be kind and compassionate to others, and don't judge a book by its cover. Everything that happens to you in life, good or bad, forms part of who you are.

Positive Role Models

Sam demonstrates gratitude for what she has in life, which is less than a lot of others her age. She maintains a positive, can-do attitude despite regular setbacks. She shows perseverance and empathy in tirelessly pursuing her goal to help her young friend Hazel, even if it puts her in danger. Bob tries not to form attachments, but he helps Sam despite possible risks to himself. He eventually learns to love her like family. Other characters help Sam and Bob, and even those who seem to be working against them ultimately come around and do the right thing.

Diverse Representations

Animated characters, including humans and leprechauns, represent different races and nationalities. Strong female leaders in the Land of Luck.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Characters do a lot of falling down and getting bonked by things; they appear to be in regular danger of getting hurt, but they always rebound unscathed. Sam has to enter a scary and unknown place by herself. Chase scenes and scary-looking monsters. Children hope and wait to be adopted but are frequently let down.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A unicorn and a dragon fondly remember the time they fell in love.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinks called Tangerine Tornados and Lucky Dragons are served in a juice bar/restaurant; they don't appear to be alcoholic, but they look very much like tiki bar drinks.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Luck is an animated film about Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada ), the unluckiest person in the world. She accidentally travels to the Land of Luck and learns positive lessons about overcoming challenges and managing disappointments. Characters face dangers and scary-looking monsters, but they always emerge unscathed. They demonstrate empathy and perseverance and discover that family is who you make it. There are some emotional scenes involving young children who are hoping to be adopted and end up disappointed. Characters use very mild taunts ("blabbermouth"), there's a "poop" research center, and a few scenes take place in a (juice) bar. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (31)
• Kids say (17)

Based on 31 parent reviews

Great to have another rated G movie for my daughter to enjoy

Fully watchable, what's the story.

The star of LUCK, Sam Greenfield (voiced by Eva Noblezada ), has always had bad luck. She is about to age out of the latest in a long string of foster homes, none of which ever found her a "forever family." This means that she has to say goodbye to bunkmate Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), a little girl also waiting to be adopted, and move into an apartment on her own. One day Sam finds a lucky penny left behind by a black cat. She plans to give Hazel the penny for luck in finding a family, but, bad luck being what it is, she accidentally flushes the penny down the toilet. When she again spots the black cat -- who can speak and is named Bob ( Simon Pegg ) -- she chases him and unwittingly follows him through a portal that leads to the Land of Luck. There, Sam's real adventure begins, as she enlists Bob's help in getting a lucky penny for Hazel, poses as a Latvian Leprechaun, and has to elude characters like the Captain ( Whoopi Goldberg ) and the Dragon ( Jane Fonda ).

Is It Any Good?

This charming animated film manages to maintain a sweet innocence without compromising its desire to layer in ideas and characters that can be appreciated by more mature audiences. Luck 's characters, animated with subtlety, are seemingly tailor-made for the high-profile cast. Bob's calm, cool, standoffish demeanor is captured in his cat poses and almond eyes, and Pegg's accent hilariously changes to fit the storyline. Goldberg infuses her wise-cracking Captain with a soft heart, and Fonda oozes seductive power as the confident dragon lady who recognizes that a lot of creatures are intimidated by "ladies of stature" and who just knows that she would "excel" at running the universe.

The Land of Luck is a magical place imbued with soft colors and made to look like the inside of a watch, constantly in motion and with Jetsons -style platforms transporting characters. There's magic in other scenes as well, particularly a dialogue-free sequence where Sam chases Bob through town. The cat is as suave as Fred Astaire as he glides nonchalantly over the tops of opened umbrellas. The entire film is set to an orchestral score that also has classical Hollywood nuances.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the idea that bad luck can bring good things, or at least teach us resilience, as it does for Sam in Luck . Has this been your experience? If so, what happened?

The Captain and the Dragon are both female characters in charge of the Land of Luck. Why is it unusual to see female leaders in animated films? What other examples can you think of?

How do Sam and Bob demonstrate empathy ? Do other characters show this trait as well? Why is this an important character strength ?

How does Sam show perseverance ? At what points might she have given up on her plan to help Hazel? Would it have been understandable if she had given up?

Do you believe in luck? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 5, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : August 5, 2022
• Cast : Eva Noblezada , Simon Pegg , Jane Fonda
• Director : Peggy Holmes
• Inclusion Information : Latino actors, Female actors
• Studio : Apple TV+
• Genre : Family and Kids
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Cats, Dogs, and Mice , Friendship , Great Girl Role Models
• Character Strengths : Empathy , Gratitude , Perseverance
• Run time : 97 minutes
• MPAA rating : G
• Award : Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Luck (I) (2022)

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Screen Rant

Luck review: apple tv+ movie has equal parts heart, humor & visual flair.

While short on laugh-out-loud moments, Luck is charming and whimsical, with a voice cast that brings their distinct talents to the film.

Following a person into fantastical alternate worlds is a common trope for animated movies, from  Monsters Inc.  and  Coco to  Soul and  Inside Out . Each of these has been received well and, in a way, Skydance Animation pulls from this Disney playbook for  Luck . The first movie in a deal between Skydance and Apple TV+,  Luck  feels familiar, but it still portrays a unique and weirdly charming world for Sam Greenworld, its main character, to explore. While short on laugh-out-loud moments,  Luck is charming and whimsical, with a voice cast that brings their distinct talents to the film.

Luck  follows Sam (Eva Noblezada), a girl who ages out of the foster system and is left to live her unlucky, but comfortable, life. About every possible problem imaginable manages to befall Sam, from getting injured on the job to locking herself in the bathroom with a broomstick. When Sam runs into a mysterious black cat one evening, that all changes. Sam finds a penny that grants her the luck of having a pretty normal life — until she flushes it down the toilet. When Sam finds out the black cat is actually named Bob (Simon Pegg), she follows the cat into the Land of Luck, a mysterious world populated by leprechauns, unicorns, dragons, and other mystical creatures.

Related:  Every Movie Releasing In Summer 2022

The voice cast, which also includes Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Flula Borg, and Lil Rel Howery, imbues each of their characters with a distinct personality and, by keeping its cast relatively small, Luck  ensures they each get their moment. Goldberg and Fonda are, of course, natural standouts as The Captain (a leprechaun) and Babe the Dragon (the head of the Land of Luck), respectively. Noblezada, in what is one of her first major roles, also does exceedingly well portraying Sam's wonder at the Land of Luck. She even gets to sing at one point, putting on a dance number to Madonna's "Lucky Star" as a slew of rabbits shimmies next to her.

The Land of Luck (and its hilariously bureaucratic intricacies) is surely a sight to behold and, as new layers are revealed about the fantasy world, it becomes a worthy setting for the majority of the film. One detour into the basement section where bad luck is made provides for a sequence that is equal parts exciting and funny. Still, the movie is otherwise short on laughs, relying heavily on slapstick that is sure to get a giggle out of younger audiences, but may leave older viewers wanting.

With any computer-animated movie bound to draw comparisons to Pixar,  Luck  certainly will. The formula is apparent from the film's opening minutes (and an expectedly heartbreaking flashback), but it doesn't try to hide its indulgence. It's a formula that works and, in a time where nostalgia at the movies is at its peak, it becomes almost a comfort in its familiarity. Conversely,  Luck 's Irish motifs make the film feel like a holiday movie for St. Patrick's day in some ways, providing an idiosyncratic touch that is both charming and endearing. That individuality falls away as the conflict rises and gives way to an inevitable conclusion, tying everything neatly in a bow, but there's really no other way to do it.

Holding it all together is Pegg's sardonic black cat Bob and the relationship between him and Sam is about as charming as any relationship between an anthropomorphic animal and its human friend. The Land of Luck itself is also a sight to behold, combining creatures of mythology, futuristic tech, and plain fun as it sits in the clouds somewhere in the universe.  Luck  may not reinvent the wheel — at this point, what can? — but it does what films like this do best, bringing forth a message about family and perseverance with humor, heart, and a lot of magic.

More: DC League of Super-Pets Review: Johnson & Hart Lose Their Magic

Luck  is begins streaming on Apple TV+ on August 5. The film is 105 minutes long and is rated G.

Where to Watch

Eva Noblezada (Sam) Simon Pegg (Bob) Jane Fonda (Dragon) Whoopi Goldberg (Captain) Colin O'Donoghue (Gerry) Lil Rel Howery (Marv) Flula Borg (Jeff the Unicorn) John Ratzenberger (Rootie) Adelynn Spoon (Hazel) Grey Griffin (Mrs. Rivera)

Peggy Holmes

The curtain is pulled back on the millennia-old battle between the organizations of good luck and bad luck that secretly affects everyday lives.

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• DVD & Streaming
• Action/Adventure , Animation , Comedy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Eva Noblezada as Sam Greenfield; Sim Pegg as Bob; Jane Fonda as The Dragon; Whoopi Goldberg as The Captain; Flula Borg as Jeff the Unicorn; Lil Rel Howery as Marv; Colin O’Donoghue as Gerry; John Ratzenberger as Rootie; Maurice J. Irvin as Phil the Pig Foreman; Adelynn Spoon as Hazel

Home Release Date

• August 5, 2022
• Peggy Holmes

Distributor

Movie review.

Sam Greenfield is about as unlucky as they come. On her first day in her new apartment, she wakes up late for work, gets locked in her bathroom, can’t seem to find matching socks and drops her toast—jam side down , of course. And her bike tire goes flat to boot.

Then Sam finds a penny on the ground, apparently dropped by a  black cat. And you know the old adage: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long, you’ll have good luck.”

The next morning, Sam’s luck changes. She wakes up right on time to a notification that her online homework was submitted successfully. The first two socks she grabs match. And the toast? Well, as long as Sam is touching the penny, it simply can’t fall jam side down.

Sam is ecstatic. And she knows exactly what to do with the penny: Give it to her good friend, Hazel.

Hazel and Sam lived in the same group home before Sam turned 18 and aged out of the foster care system. Hazel, being much younger than Sam, is still there, searching for her forever family.

It might be too late for Sam to get adopted, but it’s not too late for Hazel. And Sam will do anything to make sure Hazel doesn’t have to face the same disappointment she faced herself.

But then Sam’s luck turns again.

She sets the penny down just for a moment to use the bathroom. But that temporary separation is all it takes for Sam’s bad luck to return. And she accidentally flushes the penny down the toilet, along with any hope of helping Hazel.

But then, Sam spots the black cat who dropped the penny again. And the cat starts talking —chastising Sam for losing his lucky penny, in fact—before he runs off.

Sam chases after him—right through a portal to another land, the Land of Luck.

Bob (as Sam learns is the cat’s name) can’t get caught with Sam. For starters, he’ll be in huge trouble for allowing a human into the mystical world of leprechauns, unicorns and dragons. And he’s in enough trouble already: He’ll surely be banished to Bad Luck (home to roots and goblins where nothing lucky ever happens) for losing his lucky penny to begin with.

So, the two make a deal: Bob will help Sam obtain another penny to borrow for Hazel’s upcoming weekend visit to increase her chances of getting adopted. Then Sam will return the penny to Bob so he won’t get banished.

Surely nothing could go wrong, right? After all, they are traveling through the land of Good Luck.

Positive Elements

Despite Sam’s unfortunate circumstances, she maintains a positive attitude in all things and never gives up. Flat tire? That’s what the tire pump is for. Broken tire pump? Pssh! Nothing a stick of lip balm can’t fix.

Sam does become downhearted at some points, fearing that her bad luck will stop her from ever doing something good with her life. But when she does get discouraged, her friends build her back up. They tell her that she’s a kind person with a big heart—the kind of person who shares her panini with a stray, supposedly unlucky, black cat.

They reassure her that she’s already done something good just by being a good friend. Her first instinct is to share what she has and help where she can—even if that means she won’t get what she wants for herself. And Sam proves willing to endure all the bad luck in the world if it means she can give even the smallest amount of good luck to Hazel.

Eventually, Sam also learns that all the bad situations in her life actually helped build grit. They taught her how to “pivot” and find creative solutions. Her tenacity inspires those around her to roll with the punches as well. And when Good Luck falls on hard times, she’s able to share these lessons with those in charge and help them find solutions.

Bob, for his part, learns that having good luck all the time doesn’t necessarily mean you have good character. He treats Gerry and Jeff (two characters consider themselves to be Bob’s friends) like assistants. And he makes it a point not to get to know Sam too well.

However, Bob eventually learns the same lesson as Sam about bad luck. And he realizes that his avoidance of it never actually gave him what he wanted: a forever family of his own. He makes amends with Gerry, Jeff and Sam, discovering that a family can be forged by the bonds of friendship.

The Captain (a leprechaun who oversees the security of Good Luck) has it out for Bob since she thinks he’s shifty (which, as we later learn, is true). When she’s given the opportunity to arrest him, she takes delight in it. However, after Bob apologizes for his actions and takes a big risk to right his wrongs, she forgives him and changes her attitude toward him.

[ Spoiler Warning ] When the land of Good Luck is destroyed by bad luck, the creatures of Bad Luck come to help. Having experienced plenty of bad luck in their own lives, they are perfectly suited to find solutions to the problems that arise, and they rescue many Good Luck creatures trapped on ledges and platforms.

Spiritual Elements

There’s a lot of superstitions that pop up in this film—the penny adage, thoughts about black cats being unlucky and a variety of “good luck charms” to name a few. We’re told that all luck (good and bad) is manufactured, but the nature of that process is still magical. And while the film ultimately emphasizes that how we handle our luck is more important that the luck itself, we’re still dealing with spiritual beliefs that families may want to address.

Sam attributes her bad luck to the “universe” messing with her. Leprechauns, unicorns, dragons and goblins (not to mention talking cats) all make an appearance.

Sexual Content

Sam removes her pants (offscreen) to take a shower. We hear about a love story between two characters. In the background of a restaurant, two men and a child dine. Some could interpret the men to be a couple.

Violent Content

Sam’s (and others’) bad luck causes all sorts of mishaps. Characters fall, tumble and get tossed around. However, nobody is permanently injured. And when we hear that a Land of Luck cat was run over by a tricycle (and subsequently see the cat heavily bandaged on crutches), we’re told that Land of Luck creatures heal at the speed of light—and the injured cat waves merrily.

Crude or Profane Language

Just one questionable use of God’s name. Other than that, there are two uses of “heck” and one of “buttocks.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

None. However, there is a juice bar in Bad Luck (though it appears it doesn’t serve alcoholic beverages).

Other Negative Elements

Sam and Bob (and Gerry by coercion) break a lot of rules to achieve their ends. They lie, steal and sneak into places they aren’t allowed. And these bad behaviors directly result in chaos for Good Luck.

In two separate instances, we see young girls disappointed when their adoptions fall through.

There are several jokes about dog feces (since it’s considered bad luck to step in them). There’s a joke about kitty litter. We see a drone covered in sewage after retrieving a flushed penny from a sewage treatment plant.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: good luck vs. bad luck. The film’s plot is driven by this theme. And for Christian families watching, it’s worth a discussion over these spiritual elements.

However, Luck throws us a bone. Rather than emphasize the importance of any kind of luck, it focuses on how characters react to that luck. Several characters choose to share their good fortune with others, allowing everyone to experience the joy and hope that good luck brings. And when bad luck comes along, they pivot, learning from the experience and adjusting their approach to handle it.

All it takes is to swap the word “luck” for “circumstances” and you can have a quite meaningful conversation about how we respond when something happens—good or bad.

That in and of itself is a really nice message. But Luck has a second message to deliver regarding foster care and adoption.

Sam, as I mentioned in the introduction, aged out of the foster care system. She’s set up with an apartment and told that she needs to attend college and get a job. And other than a phone call in a few months to make sure she doesn’t have any additional questions, she’s completely on her own.

It’s really rough on her. She feels alone, because she is. And anyone who may have gone through similar circumstances—such as being disappointed by a cancelled weekend visit with a potential family—could experience some difficult emotions watching this film.

However, Sam learns an important lesson about “forever families.” She knows that a forever family is someone who sticks with you no matter what. They’re there for you, and they love you. But what she discovers is that doesn’t only mean adoption. It can also mean the family we find through friendships. And that’s how Sam finally finds her own forever family.

These two great lessons paired with the fact that there’s practically zero content (other than the luck aspect, which I addressed above), makes Luck a movie parents will want to enjoy with their families.

Emily Tsiao

Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.

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Movie Review – Luck (2022)

August 4, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Luck , 2022.

Directed by Peggy Holmes. Featuring the voice talents of Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Colin O’Donoghue, Lil Rel Howery, Flula Borg, John Ratzenberger, Maurice J. Irvin, Jayssolitt. and Adelynn Spoon.

The curtain is pulled back on the millennia-old battle between the organizations of good luck and bad luck that secretly affects everyday lives.

Sam Greenfield (voiced by the relatively unknown Eva Noblezada, who impressed in the musician drama Yellow Rose ) might be the unluckiest person in the world. Objects constantly fall on her, she’s always bumping into things, technology is regularly malfunctioning around her setting her day’s tasks back, and the world generally seems to be ensuring that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. She’s also on the verge of turning 18, nervously about to leave her group home and start living alone while working a standard cashier job. And while independence is always something to admire, one can’t help but wonder how the universe will continue to conspire against her, now solo.

Also present in the group home is Hazel (voiced by Adelynn Spoon), a young girl hoping to find her “forever home” through adoption. It’s something that never happened for Sam (something else to be chalked up to bad luck), but she’s also not too bothered about it anymore. A considerate and kind soul, Sam is first and foremost concerned with supporting Hazel and doing anything in her power to see the girl adopted into a wonderfully welcoming family.

While functioning as a one-joke animated feature that gets stale and corny fast ( Luck might have worked better if director Peggy Holmes and the screenwriting/storyboarding team of Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger had deployed the bad luck running gags with some restraint and moderation), Sam encounters a Scottish black cat named Bob (endearingly voiced by Simon Pegg) that accidentally leaves behind a coin that Sam mistakes for a penny (operating under the superstition of “find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck”) while becoming enticed by some shared food. It turns out that the coin is not a penny but a literal good luck token that Bob wears inside his collar as he comes from the magical Land of Luck.

Whatever investment one had into the adoption arc and Sam adjusting to the next stage of her life is upended for a journey to this fantastical location. In a nutshell, Sam begins experiencing good luck but not before losing the coin and following Bob into a portal leading to the Land of Luck, where they strike together a deal to help one another once they retrieve the cash. Naturally, Sam will help Bob relocate the coin (if they don’t, Bob will be found out by his superiors and banished to the bad luck section of this world, giving off some heaven and hell vibes) in return for using the luck factory to manipulate the universe into allowing a meeting for Hazel with the potential adoptive family to go off swimmingly.

Luck jarringly transitions into world-building, showing off the many different areas and associated leprechaun-operated jobs within the Land of Luck. This amounts to cleaning up some of the lucky coins, returning them to storage for safekeeping, a workshop specifically for writing up good and bad luck scenarios, a Randomizer contraption comprised of good and bad luck shards working in tandem to disperse different kinds of luck into Earth, a limbo space run by an amusing German unicorn (voiced by Flula Borg), and of course, a lower-level bad luck area inhabited by goblins. At the head of the entire operation is a dragon (voiced by Jane Fonda) with a sad romantic backstory involving luck.

As Sam and Bob navigate through these areas with varying degrees of success, it’s also made aware that the latter does not like questions and is not interested in making friends. Bob also believes that if Sam weren’t always trying so hard at everything she does, maybe some of her bad luck would organically disappear. Nevertheless, they bond throughout the journey, and it is typically entertaining considering the voice-acting chemistry.

The issue is that, while from an artistic design standpoint (whether it be the many tubes, rotating platforms, or floating city structure of the Land of Luck, all of which are bursting with bright greens and purples), Luck is visually engaging, the world itself depicted lacks a sense of awe. Suppose one also accounts for producer John Lasseter. In that case, Luck comes from a team that has worked on countless Pixar and DreamWorks Animation projects (the distributor here is Apple TV+, but the work comes from Skydance Animation), and the movie feels like a pale imitation of all three styles. Imagine if the imaginative worlds baked into a film like Inside Out were half-baked and didn’t realize their potential for a reasonably accurate comparison of what watching Luck resembles.

However, the message of Luck is both refreshing for animated features and valuable for children and teenagers. Without giving much away, the script explores the reality that, sometimes, things not going our way builds character and potentially leads to another door, particularly one with positives and rewards behind it. The animation itself is not up to par with recent offerings from other studios, and the climactic set-pieces are mostly forgettable, but the story is worth applauding.

Sure, it somehow fails at expanding on and making us care about whether Hazel gets adopted or not. Still, the core dynamic between Sam and Bob is lively, humorous, and surrounded by enough nifty concepts (even if they don’t always pan out into something remarkable). Everything else is flat and visually boring. One could say Luck , as a movie, is inside that limbo space between good luck and bad luck.

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

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Luck Review

05 Aug 2022

Luck is the first film produced at Skydance Animation under the stewardship of new Head Of Animation John Lasseter, following his high-profile exit from Pixar after accusations of sexual misconduct. He is only a producer here — choreographer-turned-filmmaker Peggy Holmes is in the director’s chair —  but Lasseter's influence on the project is self-evident, and the comparison to his former studio is openly invited, in fact — marketing for the film loudly trumpets “From the creative visionary behind Toy Story ”. It certainly borrows Pixar’s visual style (cutesy stylised animation interacting in near-photorealistic environments) and behind-the-scenes talent (Lasseter has poached many of his former collaborators). But some of that famous Pixar formula can be felt, too: like Monsters, Inc . or Inside Out , this is a story about a reality-adjacent fantasy world that controls some elemental force — a means of teaching kids some wisdom about the human condition. Luck never quite hits Pixar’s peaks, alas, but its creators give it a good shot.

The film begins in sentimental fashion, establishing Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) as an orphan at a foster home who never found her “forever family”. She is also, apparently, the least lucky person who has ever lived, which manifests as extreme clumsiness and constant debilitating misfortune. As she turns 18 and begins an independent life, Sam wishes for better luck for fellow orphan Hazel (voiced by Adelynn Spoon), her tiny roommate and effective little sister. It’s a sweetly pitched set-up but schmaltzy in the extreme; your tolerance for this level of cheese may vary.

Some of the pratfalls feel repetitive, but it’s bright, lively and engaging throughout.

Then along comes a cat named Bob, who bears more than a passing visual resemblance to Jiji, the talking cat from Kiki’s Delivery Service , and through Simon Pegg ’s performance sounds a little like Mike Myers’ Shrek. In fairness, his accent is one of the better ones, especially when held against some of the near-hate-crimes committed against the Emerald Isle once we’re whisked away to the fantastical Land of Luck. This is where good luck and bad luck are apparently manufactured; parts of it seemingly modelled on an American Irish bar on St Patrick's day, minus the booze.

Still, it’s a sparky and impressively realised place — if slightly complicated. Here, you’re never more than five minutes away from a bit of exposition, and as Sam and Bob embark on their mission, we’re constantly having in-universe rules explained to us: they must locate a ‘travel penny’, then a ‘good luck crystal’, a ‘bunny drone’, and, naturally, the joystick that controls the bunny drone.

But if you can keep up, there is some nicely staged visual comedy to be enjoyed. There is a very funny stand-off with an auto-flushing toilet, which behaves like 2001 ’s HAL, and an inspired dance sequence with a gaggle of bunnies that only the hardest hearts would begrudge. Some of the pratfalls feel repetitive — after a while, the bad-luck clumsiness feels like the same joke, over and over again — but it’s bright, lively and engaging throughout.

The ultimate message of the film feels slightly confused: it wants us to embrace the randomness of life (‘Bad luck can be good sometimes!’ is what we’re encouraged to think), without really pondering how much of life is actually driven by choice and personal responsibility. But if you can stomach the wobbly lessons, the sometimes clunky writing and the offensively bad Irish accents, this is a perfectly fine thing to pop your kid in front of for a couple of hours.

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Luck, John Lasseter’s return to animation, feels like Pixar gone wrong

It’s an overcrowded, busy film with a simple moral and a hard push for emotional relevance

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During the 2000s heyday of Pixar Animation Studios, the studio’s releases seemed absolutely guaranteed to get rapturous reviews and muscular box office. Pixar’s long roster of successes, from the Toy Story movies to Finding Nemo , Ratatouille , The Incredibles , and more, prompted plenty of profiles examining the company’s creative process, and its technique of “plussing” during story development, or offering positive suggestions and improvements for any elements that weren’t working, rather than negative critiques. It’s not unlike the ”yes and” technique seen in improv: A finished product built through plussing might not much resemble the original idea, but it will be built out from that idea, without the creative team getting distracted by second-guessing elements and tearing down their own work.

Luck , the inaugural feature film from Skydance Animation — and the first film produced by former Disney/Pixar animation head John Lasseter since the company ousted him over sexual harassment complaints — feels like plussing run amok. It’s a movie where uninspired ideas become the building blocks for more uninspired ideas, until the filmmakers have constructed an elaborate shrine to their own whimsical lore. This is a movie that whisks its perpetually unlucky heroine, Sam (Eva Noblezada), into a magical land of luck, a place crowded with leprechauns and various animals considered lucky across different cultures. But it doesn’t stop there; those animals are also deeply invested in the creation of magic luck dust. And also the preservation of magic luck rocks. And they’re powered by magic lucky pennies. Also, there’s a dragon voiced by Jane Fonda.

Despite all this magical bric-a-brac, Luck isn’t an especially magical experience. It feels more like a whiteboard full of brainstorms nobody had the heart to erase. It’s not generally that notable for a non-Pixar, non-Disney animation studio to make a big-budget misfire; in recent years, plenty of talented Disney staffers have defected to streaming services and produced feature-length animated films that don’t measure up to the likes of Pixar’s Turning Red , Disney’s Encanto , or the varied textures of non-American animation. But Luck ’s Pixar-related pedigree stands out. Lasseter looms large over the project, and Skydance Animation is now backed by Apple, whose former CEO, Steve Jobs, once served as chairman of Pixar.

Like so many other disgraced entertainers, Lasseter couldn’t stay away from the business for long. He joined Skydance in 2019, while the studio was already working on Luck . His role on this film was likely akin to the later-2000s non-Pixar Disney movies he reworked after becoming chief creative officer of all Disney animation. Lasseter hired credited director Peggy Holmes (who worked on a series of direct-to-DVD Tinkerbell movies for Disney in the 2010s) and screenwriter Kiel Murray (who worked on the Cars movies with Lasseter) to reconfigure Luck midstream — the same kind of retuning that often happened on past Disney and Pixar movies, successfully and not.

That’s a lot of backstory for just one family-friendly cartoon, though the behind-the-scenes process mirrors Luck ’s clogged, overelaborate plotting. Sam is a longtime resident of a home for orphan girls. Her self-diagnosed bad luck has kept her from getting adopted into a “forever family” — a term the movie uses over and over, lest its themes and concerns remain unclear. Now living on her own and determined to help her young friend Hazel (Adelynn Spoon) secure her own adoption, Sam happens upon a lucky penny dropped by a mysterious black cat named Bob (voiced by Simon Pegg). When she loses the coin, she follows Bob into the land of luck, hoping to retrieve it so she can bestow its magical properties upon Hazel.

This is where the business with the lucky cats, lucky pigs, and lucky rabbits mixes with the magical luck stones and luck dust, alongside various bad-luck equivalents on a different level of the land. There’s a randomizing machine that distributes good luck and bad luck to the human world, ensuring that neither type of luck overtakes the other. It’s a lot to keep straight. Where Inside Out threatened to over-literalize the workings of the human mind and Soul struggled to make its abstract metaphysical concepts more concrete, Luck is something far worse: a cartoon with mundane ideas about the flukiness of fate, expressed in convoluted and tedious ways. It’s like a “plussed” corporate impression of a Terry Gilliam movie.

It isn’t much fun as a sensory experience, either. There are flashes of animated wit, like a fun early scene where Sam chases a silent (and luck-blessed) Bob through the city streets, hot on his tail as he uses his good luck to continually zip just out of reach. But this sequence also emphasizes how much of the movie’s idea of “luck” has to do with physical dexterity; Sam doesn’t seem chronically unlucky so much as she’s something of a rom-com-style klutz. She’s all generic pluck, while Bob is all Scottish-accented reluctance to help or even engage. (Both the voice and the attitude unfortunately recall Shrek.) The supposedly emotional bond between the two of them is referred to more than it’s developed — and it’s still better than some of the dialogue between human characters, who can look and sound downright robotic. As high-end American animation, this is polished but unremarkable stuff.

In short, nothing about Luck is compelling enough to distract animation fans from its discomfiting status as Lasseter’s comeback project. Through this lens, the movie only looks stranger. Pixar movies like The Incredibles , Ratatouille , and Monsters, Inc. all champion the high-achieving exceptionalism that matches their corporate rep, so at first, even acknowledging both the existence and the randomness of luck seems like a different way of looking at the world, even an act of contrition from Lasseter. But maybe this story appealed to him because it allowed him to think of his active mistakes as simply bad breaks — as character-building obstacles, which is ultimately how the movie characterizes bad luck. Either way, it’s hard for in-the-know animation fans to ignore his presence behind the scenes.

Initially, Luck comes across as a watered-down version of Inside Out — a fanciful exploration of how life’s setbacks shape and even guide us, with generic “bad luck” swapped in for the vivid, personified Sadness of the Pixar film. But the Skydance version of that theme winds up looking more like Pixar’s movies about exceptional characters doing exceptional things. Luck makes the process of surviving bad luck suspiciously dependent on a character having sufficient pluck and grit. It isn’t interested in grappling with genuine unfairness, the way Inside Out admits there are authentic real-world reasons for sadness, and that it’s OK to experience it. And Luck politely passes on the chance to grapple with the causes of those unfairness, or the ways circumstances of class or race can make a streak of seemingly fluky “bad luck” far more damaging for some groups than for others.

The idea of pluck and resolve fixing any problem is par for the course in family movies (and fables since the dawn of time), and they fuel a pretty familiar plot in Luck , which is attempting to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. That’s also part of what makes it such an insistent, off-putting experience. Regardless of what Lasseter was thinking about in terms of shaping this misbegotten story, the film’s use of Sam and Hazel’s orphan status to provoke sympathy starts to feel pretty cheap and overplayed well before the movie gilds the lily by having characters say things like “It’s a happy cry” during the emotional climax. Lasseter’s time away doesn’t seem to have inspired much reflection on his end, or honed his once-unbeatable sense for a unique and personal story. Luck , though, unwittingly makes the case for his involvement as an unambiguous minus.

Luck is now streaming on Apple TV Plus.

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Luck review – pound-shop Pixar is a short straw for young audiences

This robotically made animated tale leads a young woman to a secret world that will surprise no one

A nother dismal, algorithmically produced digital animation here, evidently the first off the production line from a new US-Spanish company, Skydance Animation, which has the former Pixar chief John Lasseter as its creative head. Everything about this robotically made movie looks derivative and contrived; the videogame aesthetic is dull and the quirky high concept plays like a pound-shop knockoff of Inside Out and Soul.

Sam (voiced by Eva Noblezada) is an 18-year-old kid who has grown up in a quaintly imagined orphanage-slash-girls’-home in an identikit US city. She has been plagued by bad luck all her life, not merely in being an orphan (the backstory there is primly never mentioned) but in tiny little things such as bumping into objects and losing her keys – although this micro-level bad luck could also be called klutziness. Just as she is moving out into her own apartment with a job (I guess no question of higher education), Sam becomes sadly preoccupied with a little kid in the home who is poignantly failing to get a foster family, just as she herself failed to. If only Sam could somehow give her a piece of good luck.

Then Sam chances across a black cat in the street, and finds a lucky penny on the pavement; her luck changes, and she realises that this cat, called Bob (voiced by Simon Pegg) can speak – in a Mike Myers Shrek Scottish accent. And this adorable cat lives in the top half of a secret world where planet Earth’s good luck is manufactured: the bottom half, darker and gloomier, is where the bad luck is. Sam finds her way to this boring non-Oz and comes across many unfunny and uninspired characters, including lucky Irish leprechauns; it seems some stereotypes can be OK.

Luck’s script is utterly zingless and contorted; it fails to imagine what the “bad luck” half of this secret universe looks like and ties itself in theological knots trying to explain the purpose of bad luck. The target audience deserves better.

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Review by Brian Eggert August 3, 2022

Luck marks a few firsts. It’s the debut feature from Skydance Animation—a new animation house formed when Skydance Media acquired Ilion Animation Studios, the makers of Wonder Park (2019). After inking a deal to produce computer-animated movies and television shows for Apple TV+, the studio bows their first of two releases slated to appear on the streaming platform (and in limited theatrical release) in 2022. It’s also the first film with John Lasseter’s name attached since he stepped down from Pixar in 2017 following accusations of sexual misconduct. Lasseter was made head of Skydance Animation and serves as executive producer here, and his fingerprints are all over Luck’s premise. The story explores the notion of good and bad luck as elemental forces controlled by an elaborate system of machines and functionaries in a hidden dimension, similar to the raveled concepts in Pixar’s Inside Out (2015) and Soul (2020). Except, something’s lacking here. Despite the shimmering animation and intriguing setup, the film doesn’t crackle or astonish. On the surface, everything’s in place for an inspired work of animation, but the result is unremarkable.  

How surprising, since Luck boasts some impressive talent, starting with director Peggy Holmes, who worked as a dance choreographer before helming several direct-to-video Disney sequels. The screenplay comes from Cars (2006) co-writer Kiel Murray, as well as Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, who penned the Kung Fu Panda trilogy. The voice cast consists of recognizable names, while Lasseter’s oversight should have raised the standards of everyone involved. But the film feels less like a breakthrough than a work of reverse engineering, as though the filmmakers at Skydance watched the entire catalogs of Pixar and Studio Ghibli and tried to replicate their formulas. Bits and pieces from other, superior animated movies have been sewn together here to make a fine-looking garment. However, pull on its loose threads, and the entire thing reveals itself as a knock-off, albeit well-tailored. With the conceptual framework of a Pixar movie and a sprinkling of cute Minion-like bunnies over the proceedings, Luck is familiar stuff—even its poster resembles a famous image from My Neighbor Totoro (1988). 

The story opens with the world’s unluckiest person, Sam Greenfield (voiced by Eva Noblezada), who has just turned 18 and aged out of her orphanage. Sam has been constantly overlooked by potential families, a condition of her chronic bad luck that causes klutzy mishaps and everything in her life to go wrong. If there were a loose banana peel, she would slip on it. But Sam wants her young roommate at the orphanage, Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), to have a better childhood. Being superstitious, Hazel collects lucky charms that she believes will help get her adopted. So after moving into an apartment and getting her first job, Sam picks up a lucky penny for Hazel but quickly discovers the universe works in her favor when she possesses the coin, which isn’t actually a penny after all, given its curious shamrock insignia. With the coin in hand, she’s graceful, successful, and fortuitous—until she accidentally flushes it down the toilet. It turns out the lucky coin belonged to a talking black cat named Bob (Simon Pegg), who needs his coin back. Hoping to ensure Hazel finds a “forever family” with the coin’s help, Sam pursues Bob into the Luck World to acquire another like it. 

All this planning around the even distribution of luck raises questions about the main character. Sam’s bad luck, the source of countless accidents and setbacks in her life, seems to have been assigned randomly. But if these worlds are supposed to create an equilibrium between good and bad, why is Sam’s luck so awful? Another studio like Pixar may have found some degree of profound emotional reasoning or narrative conceit to explain this kink in the works. Maybe a villain has been targeting people with bad luck particles for some nefarious reason. But the screenplay never provides an adequate answer—it doesn’t even ask the question. Instead, it prompts more nagging plot holes than satisfying answers. When Luck ends with a message that good luck and bad are a matter of perspective—Sam’s bad luck wasn’t horrible after all; she just needed to adjust her outlook—it feels not only like a cop-out but causes the film’s entire concept to collapse. If Sam’s perspective is the answer, doesn’t that render the efforts of these two worlds that manage luck particles entirely pointless? And if the good luck particles are causing Sam bad luck and strain in the short term, maybe those in charge of the good luck need to reevaluate their approach. 

With its shaky story logic and a rather bland protagonist who’s just along for the ride, Luck contains plenty of cracks in its glimmering veneer, even in the animation. Notice how the mouths don’t quite move with enough expressivity or accurate articulation when speaking, lending characters a generic doll-like appearance, especially Sam. Skydance struggles with something Pixar wrestled with for years: natural human movements and faces. However, they have lighting elements and the more fantastical characters down—I especially liked the look of Bob and Jeff. The animators put on a splendid light show with adorable creatures, rollercoaster-like buildings, and fantasy tech, all in a convincing atmosphere you can almost touch. Unfortunately, some of the designs appear generic, almost emoji-like, and most of the Luck Worlds’ characters would look at home on a cereal box. Yet, many of these minor visual quibbles could have been overlooked with a tighter script. 

Overall, Luck is the type of G-rated fare that parents will load onto Apple TV+ for their children and soon realize that there’s not much here for adults, and they can leave the room. It has the quality of something manufactured to keep kids distracted—lots of moving parts, bright colors, cute talking animals, some obligatory dancing to Madonna’s “Lucky Star” (of course), and harmless potty humor. Whereas other animation studios attempt to mine deeper emotions, Luck is surface-level stuff, proving it takes more than Lasseter (and a minor role played by Pixar voice regular John Ratzenberger) to mimic the Pixar model. All of that said, Skydance demonstrates some impressive animation at times, suggesting that with the right script, they could be capable of something significantly better. We won’t have to wait long to find out, given that their sophomore feature, Spellbound , will arrive this fall, and their third feature comes from writer-director Brad Bird ( The Incredibles ). Here’s hoping that Luck allowed Skydance to learn some lessons and that what comes next is an improvement.

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Luck Movie Review: A Colorful Take On What Being Lucky Truly Means

August 4, 2022 By Ashley Leave a Comment

It is said luck is what you make it but what if you had the opportunity to change your luck? Skydance's newest film, Luck , dives into the concept of good fortune and what it means to be truly lucky. 

Luck Movie Review

Luck  tells the story of Sam (Eva Noblezada), an 18-year-old girl who must leave the children's home she knows to start her new life as an adult. Unfortunately, Sam is one of the most unlucky people on the planet. When the alarm sounds for her first morning at her new job, everything that could possibly go wrong does. From getting locked in the bathroom to her breakfast hitting the floor, Sam is just that unlucky. But all that changes when Sam encounters a lonely black cat. She finds a penny that quickly turns her luck around — until she flushes it down the toilet. As fate would have it, she finds the cat again, Bob (Simon Pegg), a resident of the Land of Luck and follows him back to the whimsical land he calls home. There she learns that luck isn't exactly what she always thought it to be.

Beautifully animated with a tender message, Luck sets out to explain what it means to be truly lucky. It is clear from the start, the team behind it are out to pull at heartstrings, and they do. But they also intend to make the viewers laugh and wonder at the sights on screen. Although stepping out of the human world into one of fantasy feels familiar, overall it still works thanks to an amazing voice cast and the vivid, whimsical Land of Luck.

RELATED: Interview: Simon Pegg Talks Luck and Relating To Bob the Cat

Visually, Luck looks like Willy Wonka and Dr. Seuss had an animation baby. Colorful, vibrant, and a little bit wacky, the Land of Luck comes across as a place you would want to live. Mythical creatures wander about using sci-fi level tech to distribute luck throughout the universe. What is sure to get a laugh, especially from parents, is that behind the walls of those pristine buildings and fairytale landscapes is a corporate way of life. Turns out no matter how fancy or magical the setting, day to day office life looks pretty much the same.  

Most computer-animated movies draw comparisons to Pixar, and Luck is no exception. But with former Pixar head John Lasseter as a producer, the “Pixar formula” feels more prevalent — including the heartbreaking flashback. However, Luck still stands on its own  two feet four paws distinguishing itself from other animated offerings out there for kids. 

As beautiful as it looks, it's the voice cast that shines here. Pegg is delightful as the grouchy Bob who eventually loosens up thanks to the charming Sam. As someone who adores black cats, I was thrilled to see one as a main character who brings good luck instead of bad. May this be a starting point for younger generations to be less superstitious. Also, for fans of   Kiki’s Delivery Service, Bob is likely to remind them of Jiji, another black cat who is a wonderful companion to his human friend.

The voice cast also includes scene stealers Jane Fonda as Babe the Dragon, Whoopi Goldberg as The Captain, and Flula Borg as Jeff the Unicorn. These three alone deserve a spin-off or at least some shorts about their lives. Meanwhile on the other side of the land where Bad Luck is manufactured, John Ratzenberger lends his voice to Rootie the Bartender. Kiel Murray’s screenplay allows these legends to do what they do best, bring out memorable moments and plenty of humor to their characters. Noblezada embodies Sam's frustrations, hopes, and ultimate optimism which makes everyone, audience included, adore her. 

Ultimately Luck  sets out to explain what it means to be truly lucky and succeeds. With its colorful visuals and charming voice cast, it captures the hearts and imaginations of everyone who watches. It may seem predictable at times, but that never detracts from the overall message rather makes it feel familiar in a big hug sort of way. Come for the whimsy and the magic but stay for the heartwarming lesson on being lucky. 

Luck  is available to stream on Apple TV+ on August 5, 2022. The film is rated G with a runtime of 105 minutes.

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Luck Parent Guide

With its profound messages about emotional resilience, this is exactly the kind of movie parents want to find for their kids..

Apple TV+: Sam is unlucky: everything that can go wrong will go wrong in her life. As she searches for good luck, she will learn how exactly how it all works.

Release date August 5, 2022

Run Time: 105 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kirsten hawkes.

Having aged out of the Summerland Home for Girls, Samantha (known as Sam and voiced by Eva Noblezada) is starting a new job and living in her own apartment. Cursed with a phenomenal amount of bad luck and general klutziness, Sam is thrilled when she stumbles across a lucky penny. Left behind by a black cat named Bob (Simon Pegg), the coin makes everything in Sam’s life go smoothly. The kindhearted young woman decides to share the penny (and the associated good luck) with a fellow orphan, so she’s devastated to lose it. When she comes across the black cat again, Sam follows him in search of more luck.

Much to Sam’s astonishment, she winds up in the Land of Luck, a bright, colorful place that operates like a giant Rube Goldberg machine . She persuades Bob to help her find another penny and he dresses her up as a leprechaun before they embark on a madcap adventure that has them meet a a dragon CEO, computer-using bunnies, magical swine, and lots and lots of leprechauns (with abundant Irish stereotypes). Not surprisingly, their scheme encounters numerous roadblocks and moments of peril before they confront their own mistaken beliefs and then save the world.

Surprisingly, Luck doesn’t stop there. A message about sacrificing for other people is great, but this script delves deeper and examines the value we place on good luck and success, questioning our desire to always be blessed with both. As Sam tries to rig the system to ensure good luck for everyone, she eventually comes to understand that bad luck can be a good thing. She realizes that her bad luck has made her resilient, adaptable, and empathetic and that a life filled only with good luck would have erased critical formative experiences and relationships. For a kids’ movie, this is an unusually sophisticated message. It fosters attitudes of gratitude, resilience, and courage and discourages entitlement and self-pity.

Fortunately, these wonderful themes aren’t offset by negative content. There are a few moments of peril and some brief scenes that might scare sensitive kids, but this film is less scary than almost every Disney movie I can think of, so it should be safe for most families. That’s not good luck – it’s good planning on the part of the studio and I hope we see more of it. Families need more films that provide entertainment and emotional education in equal measure.

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Kirsten hawkes, watch the trailer for luck.

Luck Rating & Content Info

Why is Luck rated G? Luck is rated G by the MPAA

Violence: A Murphy bed folds up with someone inside it. There are brief moments of peril involving heights and falls. There are a few scenes involving monsters which could scare sensitive youngsters. Sexual Content: None. Profanity: None. Alcohol / Drug Use: None.

Page last updated January 12, 2024

Luck Parents' Guide

Do you believe in luck? Do you think luck “just happens” or do you think people make their own luck? Do you agree that there are benefits to bad luck? What have you learned from difficult experiences in your life?

Aging out of foster care can be a risky period for foster children. What are the challenges they face when they hit 18? What can be done to help them with the transition?

Youth.gov: Young Adults Formerly in Foster Care: Challenges and Solutions

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PACEs: Aging Out Institute: The Best Collection of Resources for Aging out of Foster Care on the Internet

Loved this movie? Try these books…

We’ve all had runs of bad luck. Judith Viorst’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day puts a warm, comic spin on a boy’s difficult day.

Judy Moody has just lost her lucky penny in a toilet bowl. She desperately tries to find another way to hold on to good luck in Judy Moody and the Bad Luck Charm. This hilarious kid-pleaser is written by Megan McDonald and illustrated by Peter H Reynolds.

If you can’t get enough leprechauns, you can read Fiona’s Luck. Written by Teresa Bateman and illustrated by Kelly Murphy, this picture book tells the tale of a girl who comes up with a plan to regain the luck that’s been stolen by the Leprechaun King.

Middle school readers will enjoy The Things About Luck, by Cynthia Kadohata with drawings by Julia Kuo. In this Midwestern story, a young Japanese-American girl confronts bad luck and worse luck and the challenges of youthful romance.

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This storyline bears strong similarities to Pixar’s Monsters Inc ., in which a young girl winds up in a parallel monster world, leading to havoc.

A young girl builds the emotional resilience she needs to confront her mother’s illness when she winds u in the real version of her imaginary Wonder Park .

Related news about Luck

Best Films of 2022: Part 1

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Movie review: 'Luck' (2022)

The story follows Sam, an extremely unlucky 18-year-old. After years in an orphanage and never being adopted, she moves into her first apartment. When she encounters a black cat, her luck suddenly changes, becoming good - and when it reverts to her previous bad luck, she follows the cat into the magical Land of Luck, the source of all luck in our world (both good and bad).

Most of the film revolves around Sam trying to regain luck - not for herself, but to help a younger girl at the orphanage - while a series of evasions and accidents escalate into circumstances that threaten the Land of Luck itself.

It's an ok film, with a really nice magical world, although the story has tons of holes if you think about it too much. Furry-wise, besides the cat, most of the characters are leprechauns. Here and there are some cartoony bunnies and pigs, plus a couple of other background creatures that you don't often see anthropomorphized (goats and root vegetables). And a large, pink, six-limbed dragoness, in charge of good luck. She's not in too many scenes, but she's definitely one of the highlights!

Interestingly, this film lacks a clear antagonist; most of the conflict is situational in nature. I wouldn't say this movie is a must-see, but it's fine to pass the time with, and I think it shows a lot of potential for what Skydance could make in the future, if they polish up their writing a bit.

(Spoilers and griping under this cut.)

Production-wise, Skydance is a relatively recent production company who have been building up momentum. With Luck as their first animated feature, they picked up John Lasseter to co-produce it, previously of Pixar. The high point of his career was probably directing Toy Story in 1995 - after that... uhh... Cars ? And after that he became an executive producer. At least, until the accusations of sexual misconduct, leaving the company, and having to lay low for a little while.

Writing-wise, the film tries to be very safe, with a committee-like feel to its overall tone. I was expecting obvious visual placement of Apple products, but no! So that was nice. The plot didn't quite follow story beats I would have expected either, that was a good surprise. Some explanations felt a little contrived, and one important plot detail was only foreshadowed fleetingly (I didn't even notice it, I had to go back and check). Someone almost goes evil, then doesn't. Wha?

Several people are credited with the film's concept, which was then given to three people to write. Two of them, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berge , had written Kung Fu Panda , Trolls , and The SpongeBob Movie . The third writer also did Luck 's screenplay: Kiel Murray . She had been part of the story crew behind Raya and the Last Dragon , and did screenplay work for Cars . I'm glad to see more women getting work in the animation industry (despite people like Lasseter). And Luck 's director was Peggy Holmes , whose previous work as a director includes a couple of Disney direct-to-video films.

The music of the film is pretty unremarkable. For voice-acting, everyone did a decent job, with accents all over the place. Sam, the main character, was voiced by Eva Noblezada . The cat is Simon Pegg , the dragon is Jane Fonda , and Whoopi Goldberg is the leprechaun in charge of of security. For some reason I had a difficult time believing the characters were speaking in their own right (I kept thinking of them as voice actors speaking through the characters), until about 75% of the way into it, then suspension of disbelief kicked in. Weird, not sure what caused that. Maybe I was distracted by Sam's eyebrows, or because everyone's got really big eyes that don't blink enough? Seriously though, my brain's just odd like that. I think you'll be fine with the character designs! Well, not sure about the overweight unicorn, but at least he's in an open-minded relationship.

The story has a lot of unfortunate implications if you think about it. The Land of Luck is divided into two halves, good luck and bad luck. We don't spend much time in the bad half, but oh boy do things go wrong, constantly. In fact, at this rate I'm surprised that entire half of the world doesn't spontaneously burst into fire or explode. When Sam goes in, just by trying to get from point A to point B, she injures about ten people.

There are contradictory elements. On the one hand, luck is said to be distributed randomly, but in Sam's case it is definitely not random, it's outright cruel, and no explanation is ever given, nor sought for. (Bad luck attracts more bad, but by that argument, a large portion of the population should all be like Sam.) A pep talk during the film's lowest moment - "I was wrong to ever tell you not to try, because every time you do, you make things better" - is in direct opposition to everything that's happened.

In the Land of Luck, skill appears to be irrelevant. If you're lucky, you can do anything, recklessly, without a care in the world. Things automatically work out perfectly. Everyone's so happy, but can there truly be a sense of accomplishment, if you already know everything works in your favor, like throwing a ball through a hoop? What motivates the people in the bad luck half of the world to do anything? Is anyone actually in charge of bad luck production (besides that one guy)? We meet at least one character who's glad to have gotten out of there.

That being said, this film does a lot of positive messaging, that bad luck can bring people together, create friendships, build strength and resilience - I'm really happy they included this! (Another indirect lesson, carry lots of tools you can improvise with, and have two of everything, so when something breaks you'll have a backup.) Sam, also, is an exceptionally strong female character. She's obviously put up with a ton of bad luck and depression, but she goes on, she stands up, and she also has a strong sense of selflessness. Her priority isn't to get more luck for herself, but for another girl at the orphanage, so she won't have to go through the same hardships that Sam did. Good stuff.

Something I liked very much was the visual design. You can see the animation team was allowed to have a lot of creativity here. Much of the humor is physical and situational, with the way unexpected bad luck can manifest at almost any moment - the storyboarders obviously had a lot of fun with this, including the force of gravity! And there are little details in the world I noticed on going back to re-watch, like things to help smaller critters get around. A freeze-frame of one of the good luck security vehicles revealed a happy sign inside: "Lucky you! You've been arrested!"

For the furry characters, a lot of them looked alike. The bunnies were short and cartoony, with a comedic tendency to fall over. The pigs were rotund. The goats, we didn't get to see them much. The walking root vegetables were a change! And the dragoness had elements of both Eastern and Western design. Some characters had piercings. The black cat, the second main character - had his moments, but remained surprisingly stoic for most of the film, he didn't physically express much emotion until the end. He reminded me a bit of Jiji from Kiki's Delivery Service . I felt more invested in the cat in the computer game Stray , watching it walk around.

Finally, in terms of humor, there were a lot of visual gags that happened to the characters. I don't think there was much background humor going on. Still, a lot of the situational stuff felt rather contrived in terms of what the main characters were able to achieve without anyone noticing - it bordered on farce. If only the story writing could have been a bit more cohesive, the situations a little less idiotic... I wish the audience's intelligence had been given more respect, instead of taking a safe committee approach. I think this studio has a lot of potential! It's not a bad start, but we'll see if they challenge themselves in the future, or if they'll stick to one level of storytelling from here on out, like the Minions franchise has largely been doing.

Interesting to see that you don't seem to spend any time on what was the only thing I'd heard about this film before now, the pushing of the corporate world into supernatural phenomena. Does the corporate side of things play a major role? Is it something that you noticed or it's just so worn into the storyline of children's films that it becomes unremarkable?

"But in most of the films directed by his imitators, all the talk of quotas and promotions and performance reviews seems like a lazy gimmick, and a pretty depressing one at that. As charming as these cartoons can be, their underlying message is that the best way to facilitate anything – birth, death, joy, Christmas presents – is to have hordes of diligent employees devoting themselves to one monolithic company." https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/aug/02/all-work-and-no-play-why-the-cartoo...

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." ~John Stuart Mill~

Well, first off, a lot of the time I avoid reading any reviews before I write my own. With exceptions! Or occasionally I'll write the review, read other reviews before posting mine, and then either make small corrections or add observations, but when I do that, I keep almost all of my commentary intact, otherwise it would feel dishonest. In this case, I didn't read any reviews at all. The downside of that is I missed some details. Like, another reason the story probably suffered: actress Emma Thompson quit the project in protest over Lasseter being hired - and then a year later, director Alessandro Carloni quit too , citing "creative differences".

So now that I've looked up a review or two, I'm not seeing a lot of discussion about corporatism - but it's an excellent point. And it didn't even occur to me. Hey, new mental bias discovered! Woohoo! Which is odd, actually, because I lean left politically and am anti-large-corporate/monopoly. Welp, time for some personal background!

My parents definitely lean left, with mild activism. They'll go out and help a political candidate canvas the neighbourhood, that sort of thing. Or they'd go stand in front of a municipal building to protest, but that's pretty rare. My dad is a huge advocate for public transportation (especially trains), he was head of a group for that, and did a lot of letter-writing. Growing up with them, my sister and I both turned out left-wing as well, but without the activism. We vote; that's about it, and try to live by positive principles. My young nephew, not so much, he's right-wing, but it's his life, his choices.

My parents didn't push any big agenda on us with politics or religion, they let us ask questions and figure things out for ourselves, but of course there was some bias. I think the worst case was a tabletop board game called - I'm not kidding here - Class Struggle . I was young enough to know propaganda, and this wasn't my thing. It had about the same appeal as Monopoly, albeit with the addition of a square that could end the game in nuclear war. Anyway, although I was leftish, I didn't become a Marxist, activist, nor a railfan.

One thing I decided for myself was that I hated Disney. Sundays at home were the most boring days of the week, and there was nothing good on television all day. If there wasn't a hockey game (which I also didn't enjoy), Disney owned a good chunk of Sunday prime-time TV where I lived for something like 20 years. This was just as home video rental was coming in, and their strategy was to play bits of Disney classics, but never the full versions. Everything in the timeslot pushed other Disney products, it was insidious, along with an insistance of the MAGIC of Disney and Everybody Loves [insert Disney product here].

Even at a young age, I was thinking it wasn't entirely trustworthy for Disney to tell me how great Disney was. I was also really put off by the number of live-action Disney actors with blue eyes. I didn't know the concept of Aryanism yet, but damn, that was fucking creepy. Then as I realized how pervasive Disney products were, everywhere, that just solidified the distrust. Now, if anyone out there loves Disney and their products, that's fine, the world can be crappy, go to your happy place. I would never take the joys of The Lion King or Gargoyles away from my friends. The company's hugeness allows them to hire great talent, writers, and do stuff with high production values. But underneath all that, I wonder... what stories would we see if they weren't in control and had more competition? That's just one of the reasons why I don't like Disney, they're simply too big. Anyway don't bother arguing with me, this sort of thing is emotional and partially irrational and anyway it's not why I'm typing this extremely long response, but I thought you should have some context.

(Oh, I should say I do watch the occasional Disney thing, it's just very limited, and extremely random. I've got some massive gaps. Consequently I'm not that great at movie reviews, but pfff, not many other people are doing it on this site. Actually it's very unusual for me to have reviewed something as mainstream as Luck . But I've been so busy in the last year, I thought I should do something for a change.)

Right, so where were we... Corporatism as a theme in animated films. Excellent observation! So before I click that link you supplied, I'm going to try and think where I've seen that sort of thing before. (Thinks...) ...Actually this is pretty hard, I've never thought of animated films from that perspective. I'm going to look up some animated film lists. (Slightly later...) Ok, now let's look at the article, and see what it talks about. (Follows the link) Oh, it talks about some live-action stuff too. Well, here are the films they bring up. An asterisk (*) means I have not watched the film, and a check-mark (✔️) means the film was on my list too.

A Matter of Life and Death*, Beetlejuice*, Monsters Inc.✔️, Arthur Christmas✔️, Storks✔️, The Boss Baby*✔️, Soul*, Inside Out*, Coco*, Bee Movie*, Wreck-It Ralph✔️, and The Emoji Movie*.

Here are more from my list: Rise of the Guardians (the Tooth Fairy had some kind of organized franchise), Sing, The Lego Movie, Wonder Park*, Hotel Transylvania, Spirited Away, Big Fish and Begonia.

Not to disparage the commentary about Corporatism in that article - which is very much on point - there's a lot of variation. In Luck , The Lego Movie , Wreck-it-Ralph , and Big Fish and Begonia , the world is very much a job in of itself. In many of the others, it's a business enterprise set within a larger world, and we may (or may not) get to see the rest of the world it fits into ( Monsters Inc and Spirited Away show us more of their worlds). Sing is a notable exception for being a business being run badly . And the story of Santa with a toy factory goes back decades. (By the way, Arthur Christmas is a highly underrated holiday movie, I definitely recommend it. And Big Fish and Begonia is a beautiful if extremely bittersweet Chinese animated film.)

So now that I look at it from that perspective, Luck 's world - the good luck half, at least - is very weird. You don't see where people live or eat. It's not clear how many staff they have to manage the luck of several billion people on Earth. The dragon is their CEO. Someone else pointed out it feels like an ultra-clean "campus" like it was Google or Apple. The bad luck side seems to be an industrial hellscape, although they have a bar. That's the only non-corporate location we see.

As to why I didn't notice this theme, I don't know! I guess when one of these movies come out, I usually accept their universe at face value, and then examine the internal consistency and the implications it creates.

I also had an interesting discussion with a friend, who was immediately put off the film by my description. The story could have been so much more daring. What if Sam rejected the concept of luck entirely, and the privilege it gave people? For a similar example, look at the film Gattaca and the protagonist's quest to succeed, despite the dystopian society's insistence on biological determinism. Or look at - well actually, don't look, it's terrible - the Spanish animated film The Missing Lynx . The main lynx character is extremely unlucky, and during the climax he weaponizes it by yeeting himself onto the bad guy and clinging to him, causing him to run afoul of every single trap on the deadly obstacle course that's been set up.

So yeah, it's annoying to see more corporate culture as a plot point, and I wish they'd done something different and more challenging with the luck angle.

That was a long reply! Maybe even longer than the review and just for a small little question. Good to get another opinion on the topic though.

I watched The Missing Lynx, once, many years ago, but I honestly can't remember a thing about it.

One small comment (I don't all the films that you listed) but given some of the inclusions, I think you might have slightly misunderstood. It wasn't just that there are corporate aspects in the films but that they explain things like luck or emotions or babies as being the products of some supernatural corporation. So, from what I know of it, Sing wouldn't count because there's no supernatural aspect that I'm aware of.

I also wouldn't count Spirited Away as there isn't a corporate structure explaining something. There is the bathhouse but that is there purely to serve the spirits which have their own world and their own needs. It's like in Egypt you would bury the servants with the Pharaoh to provide services on the journey to the spirit world.

On one hand, I totally get what Rakuen is saying here about Sing , because it's a story about a business that is actually a business in the real world. They're producing shows, not, like, the concept of music itself. I mean, some cartoon exaggeration and simplification aside, that's how they make plays and concerts and shows like that. It's called show business , after all.

But, I also get why dronon is listing it, which is the same as why I'm not a big fan of either movie, and that's because it just feels very corporate. The characters in the movie, even the nominal protagonist, the Matthew McConaughey koala, whatever he was called, Mr. Moon or something, are more interested in making a hit show than a good show, but worse than that, seem to conflate them. If Luck is about turning, well, luck into a product, the Sing movies are about turning art into product. The only difference is that the second one is something we do in real life, but whether or not we should is just not a question Sing or Sing 2 is interested in at all.

(Okay, also one both the article and dronon missed, Turbo ; the snails eating food is treated as a punch clock job in the movie's opening.)

Gattaca rubbed me the wrong way, because you know, when the guy dies during a mission due to his latent issue, who's going to suffer? Everyone else on the mission. Plus all the people who pay for that rocket. It's not his capital he's putting at risk.

It had Uma Thurman being a social outcast at the company because she's not 'more superior' or something. I can't take the movie seriously enough to feel any capital was at risk other than the one spent on the movie's production. It's not an amazing movie, it's a pretty good one.

All I remember from that movie is the line "THERE IS MORE VODKA IN THIS PISS THAN THERE IS PISS!"

I really remember that line, though.

The idea, in the movie, that events are favorable or unfavorable not because of randomness, but because of a material force that is 'luck', that later shows to be distributed with a giant randomizer regardless... was ironic.

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Movie Reviews

'coup de chance' is a typical woody allen film — with one appalling final detail.

Justin Chang

Niels Schneider and Lou de Laâge star in Coup de Chance. GRAVIER PRODUCTIONS hide caption

Niels Schneider and Lou de Laâge star in Coup de Chance.

Once upon a time, it might have been strange to think that the arrival of a new Woody Allen movie in theaters would qualify as some kind of event. But much has changed, especially over the past decade, with renewed focus on allegations that Allen sexually abused his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow , when she was 7 years old — accusations that the director has long denied. Amazon Studios, which had been distributing Allen's movies, cut ties with him in 2018. His two most recent movies, the critically panned A Rainy Day in New York and Rifkin's Festival, were barely shown in the U.S.

And so it came as something of a surprise when news broke weeks ago that Allen's new movie, the romantic drama-thriller Coup de Chance , would be released in American theaters. The decision probably has something to do with the movie's strong reception last fall at the Venice International Film Festival, where more than one critic called it Allen's best film in years.

Abuse Allegations Revive Woody Allen's Trial By Media

That may not be saying much, given how weak his output has been since Blue Jasmine 11 years ago. But there is indeed an assurance and a vitality to Coup de Chance that hasn't been evident in the director's work in some time. That's partly due to the change of scenery, as Allen's difficulty securing American talent and financing has led him to the more receptive climes of Europe. While he's set movies in France before, this is his first feature shot entirely in French with French actors. It may have been done out of necessity, but it lends a patina of freshness to an otherwise familiar Allen story of guilt, suspicion and inconvenient desire.

It begins with a random reunion on the streets of Paris. Fanny, played by Lou de Laâge, works at an auction house nearby; Alain, played by Niels Schneider, is a writer. (Even if his name weren't Alain, it would be pretty clear that he's the Allen avatar in this story.)

Publisher Drops Woody Allen's Book After Ronan Farrow Objects, Employees Walk Out

This is the first time Fanny and Alain have seen each other since they were high-school classmates in New York years ago, during which time, Alain confesses, he had an intense crush on Fanny. There's an immediate spark between them, but alas, Fanny is now married to a wealthy businessman, Jean, played by Melvil Poupaud.

Before long, Fanny and Alain are having a full-blown affair, taking long lunch breaks in Alain's tiny apartment, which is homier and more appealing to Fanny than the spacious Parisian residence she shares with Jean. They also have a beautiful country house where she and Jean go for regular weekend getaways.

Jean often invites friends along to go hunting in the woods, and even before the rifles come out, it's clear that this romantic triangle is destined to end in violence. Many moviegoers will recognize the elements from films like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point : an adulterous romance, a premeditated murder and a darkly cynical consideration of the role that luck plays in human affairs. At one point, Jean notes that he doesn't believe in luck at all — which sounds like an echo of the nihilism that has long been at the heart of Woody Allen's work.

Nothing about Coup de Chance is terribly surprising, in other words. It's a decently executed version of a movie Allen has made many times before, enlivened by Vittorio Storaro's elegant if overly burnished-looking cinematography. As you'd expect, there's a lot of jazz and a lot of loftily repetitive dialogue, the effect of which is somewhat neutralized because the actors are speaking French. They all give crisp, engaged performances, especially Valérie Lemercier as Fanny's shrewd mother, who begins to suspect that Jean is not as trustworthy as he appears.

As the story unravels, one appalling detail sticks out. In a few scenes, Jean is shown playing with a large model train set — and as others have pointed out, it seems to evoke a key detail, also involving a train set, from Dylan Farrow's testimony. Could Allen be referencing his own off-screen scandals, and to what purpose? Perhaps, suspecting that he might be done with the movies at long last, as he's hinted in interviews, he wanted to thumb his nose at his detractors with a provocative parting shot. Or maybe it's just a reminder of something that, for better or worse, has always been true about Woody Allen: For all the many, many characters he's introduced us to over the decades, his truest protagonist and subject has always been himself.

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Woody Allen Reëmerges with a Movie About Getting Away with Murder

By Richard Brody

The most recent movie directed by Woody Allen, “Coup de Chance,” which opens in theatres this Friday, April 5th, is the most prominent theatrical release that any of Allen’s films have had since “Wonder Wheel,” six and a half years ago. But it’s not for lack of trying. In the meantime, Allen has been busy. In August, 2017, he signed a four-picture deal with Amazon. He started shooting “A Rainy Day in New York” a month later, with a cast that included such prominent actors as Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Rebecca Hall, and Liev Schreiber. But, that October, allegations of sexual abuse and harassment emerged against Harvey Weinstein —many of which were reported by Allen’s son Ronan Farrow , in The New Yorker —and against other powerful Hollywood men, energizing the #MeToo movement . That December, days after the release of “Wonder Wheel,” Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow, who had accused Allen of molesting her when she was a child, published a piece in the Los Angeles Times in which she went into detail regarding those accusations and asked why, at a time when other movie men accused of sexual misdeeds were being removed from positions of power, Allen appeared to continue his career with impunity. (Allen has always denied the allegations.)

After Dylan’s L.A. Times piece appeared, Amazon sought to terminate its deal with Allen. A small distributor, MPI Media Group, which specializes in horror films and stock footage and hadn’t had a significant theatrical release in more than a decade, acquired “A Rainy Day in New York” and released it in just a handful of theaters in the U.S. before bringing it to streaming services (including Amazon). Several of the film’s actors, notably Chalamet, Gomez, and Hall, expressed regret for having worked with Allen (as did others, including Greta Gerwig, Elliot Page, and Colin Firth). Allen’s next movie, “Rifkin’s Festival,” starring Wallace Shawn, was filmed in Spain, in 2019 and was again released by MPI, mainly via streaming. That company is also distributing “Coup de Chance”—its title means “stroke of luck”—but, this time around, it’s arranging a more vigorous theatrical release.

Made in France with well-known French actors, “Coup de Chance” is a comedic thriller on a prominent theme throughout Allen’s œuvre: getting away with murder. On a Paris street, a young French woman named Fanny (Lou de Laâge) bumps into Alain (Niels Schneider), a friend from high school. They rekindle their friendship and then start an affair; Fanny’s husband, Jean (Melvil Poupaud), suspects her of infidelity, hires a private eye, learns the details, and hires hit men to get rid of Alain in such a way that his body is never found. Fanny, heartbroken, thinks that her lover has simply abandoned her without warning, but her mother, Camille (Valérie Lemercier), suspecting foul play, conducts her own investigation, and plans to inform the police. When Jean gets wind of his mother-in-law’s intentions, he arranges to have her killed, too.

Allen’s movies have often displayed an obsession with the nature of evil, a fascination with those who are able to do evil and go on living normally—whose powers of compartmentalization, rationalization, or simple self-righteousness are stronger than their scruples. “Coup de Chance” is only one of the more brazen films in this vein. In “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” from 1989, a philandering husband conspires in the murder of his mistress; that he gets off scot-free is cited (by a character played by Allen) as evidence of the injustice and unfairness of the universe. Allen addressed the theme again in “ Match Point ,” from 2005, a movie in which he doesn’t appear, and this time—from the other side of the divide in his life, post-accusations—he approaches the subject with a triumphalist sense of grace. It’s the story of a down-and-out antihero who gets away with murder and thereby ends up a rich and successful socialite—a man on the make, eluding his fate by way of a concatenation of accidents that line up like a perverse theodicy. In that film, Allen no longer frets about the dark injustice of the world; he sees it as, in effect, God’s will to enable a man with big dreams and desires to realize them unimpeded by the petty mechanisms of human justice.

The quandary that Allen’s own troubled situation poses for his work—for his moralistic art—is dramatized in the 2002 comedy “Hollywood Ending,” in which Allen plays a director whose career is threatened when, the night before shooting a film that’s supposed to be his much-needed comeback, he’s suddenly struck blind (psychosomatically, as it turns out). What he does is pretend to direct while blind—an impairment that’s both the spark for some of Allen’s greatest physical comedy and a keen tragicomic metaphor for the desire not to see, not to bear witness, and for the artistic pretense that results.

That febrile, antic movie mines another of Allen’s longtime motifs: the plot point of hiding evidence. In “Scoop,” from 2006, one of his liveliest latter-day comedies, only the supernatural intervention of a dead investigative journalist brings crucial evidence to light. There, a man has murdered a woman who, he says, was blackmailing him; when Allen’s character, a magician, joins the investigation, he, too, gets killed. In short, the movie’s subject is the danger of opening one’s mouth and not keeping omertà. The big reveal of “ Blue Jasmine ,” from 2013, is that a middle-aged woman—whose husband was about to leave her for a nineteen-year-old—denounced him to the F.B.I. for financial chicanery. In “Irrational Man,” from 2015, the protagonist murders a judge who ruled, he thinks, unjustly in a family-court case, and nearly gets away with it—not hesitating to bump off someone he suspects of planning to turn him in. One of Allen’s strongest films, the ink-black tragedy “Cassandra’s Dream,” from 2008, centers on a rich businessman’s attempt to kill a business partner who is preparing to testify against him. In “Wonder Wheel,” from 2017, a woman who informs against her mobster husband spends the rest of her life in fear and on the run.

The crux of “Coup de Chance” is what Camille plans to do with the information that she gleans. But what tips her off in the first place to the possibility of Jean’s foul play isn’t physical evidence but a bit of gossip. Jean, a decade or two older than Fanny, is rich, powerful, and well connected—he’s a financier of a murky sort who tells Fanny only, “I help the rich get richer.” But his mysteries go deeper. Years ago, Jean’s business partner vanished without a trace; Jean profited greatly as a result. At the time, Jean came under suspicion but he was never officially implicated; now he dismisses those accusations as “a few weeks of gossip,” and calls his accusers “paranoid.” Yet in his social circles there are whispers that Jean indeed had a hand in the disappearance. One woman says, “Thank God for gossip. Without it we’d be stuck with real facts.” But, belatedly getting wind of the rumors, Camille notes their foreshadowing of Alain’s disappearance, and her D.I.Y. snooping generates both suspense and comedy.

The film’s skitlike-ness is emphasized in its form, with its many single-take scenes and long takes, which in effect treat the settings like stages and the actors like theatre actors. Allen clearly loves Paris—at least the cosseted parts, and he seems unable to see any other kind. Even Alain’s relative bohemia of a furnished sublet is absurdly comfortable; if Jean’s circle of bankers and politicians reeks of money, Alain’s artistic one is perfumed by it. The characters are stereotypes living their lives stereotypically; there’s no verve to the filmmaking. Moreover, Allen doesn’t speak French, and it shows in the actors’ performances, which, for the most part, come off as undirected—skilled, of course, but flailing in a void. Yet the movie, aesthetically as lumpy as a latke, nonetheless has a weird and lurid vigor that comes from an altogether different source: Allen’s pleasure in his own imagination—his delight in inventing the plot. Though the movie’s actual protagonist is Fanny, it’s Jean who gets the bulk of Allen’s attention—and Camille who gets its finest role.

To put perhaps too fine a point on it, the mother-in-law in “Coup de Chance” is a stand-in for Mia Farrow, Allen’s current mother-in-law and his former partner, whose accusations, more than thirty years ago, had led to investigations of Allen. Yet, as indicated in the title of the revelatory four-part documentary “Allen v. Farrow,” from 2021—which refers to the custody suit that Allen brought against Mia Farrow after Dylan’s accusations were disclosed—the focal point of Allen’s defense, and of his public hostility, has always been his ex-partner. The vigor of Allen’s characterization of Camille, and of Lemercier’s performance, comes from the fact that “Coup de Chance” is essentially another of Allen’s Mia Farrow movies. The character has the impulsive energy displayed by Farrow in “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” and the erstwhile couple’s other films together.

Allen’s films have always been sketchlike, but when he was younger they nonetheless seemed ampler. They were filled with first-person and nearly present-tense experience and a nuanced view of his own milieu, which was both at the center of the New York cultural-social set and a myth being made in real time. He was the nebbish hero, a man about town who floated above it, in tune with his carefully curated setting, and yet, with his noli-me-tangere chill , he also seemed somehow unreal. Much of the tension in his better films comes from a certain air of theatricality; it’s also why his more sombre-toned movies were rarely satisfying—he couldn’t keep his face quite straight enough. But his films’ sketchlike quality allows his voice to come through, directly, on the soundtrack, in action, even in direct address to the camera. The fiction was a flimsy dramatic framework for his voice, which, in his recent movies, has become strained, vain, confined as if to an official self-promotional, self-justifying role.

“A Rainy Day in New York” is Allen at his most perfunctory—yet also at his most enraged. Chalamet plays a trust-fund Bartleby, a chirpily discontented college student with the unlikely name of Gatsby Welles, whose girlfriend (Fanning) is sent by the school paper to interview a big-time middle-aged director (Schreiber). In short order, the director hits on her, a screenwriter (Jude Law) hits on her, and a heartthrob star (Diego Luna) hits on her. Allen’s dramatic assertions about the lusts of movie men for a nubile young woman are matched by his contemptuous depiction of her as a ditz out of her depth, especially as compared to the soulful rebel Gatsby, who throws her over for a younger girl (Gomez). (Along the way, Allen also jabs at journalists as unprincipled gossipmongers.)

Above all, “A Rainy Day in New York” is a story about every middle-aged Hollywood man who pursues a twenty-one-year-old woman, which is to say, it’s Allen’s own version, or inversion, or perversion, of the phrase “me too” as a form of whataboutism: yes, he has had relationships with much younger women (including Soon-Yi Previn, whom he married), and, yes, his films are rife with May-December relationships, as in “Manhattan” and “ Husbands and Wives ,” but whoever would criticize him should also cast stones at the whole movie business. And the world did, in effect, with the #MeToo movement.

“Rifkin’s Festival,” shot in 2019, is the story of an old man—a former film professor, played by Wallace Shawn, who sought the will-o’-the-wisp of art and culture and ended up a dried-out and lonely husk. The drama is sodden and mechanical, but what gives the movie a glimmer of life is Rifkin’s fantasy world: he imagines himself into comical parodies of scenes from classic movies that he loves, including “Jules and Jim,” “ Breathless ,” “ Persona ,” “The Exterminating Angel,” and “ Citizen Kane .” In the light of Rifkin’s diffident anguish, the heartfelt whimsy of these scenes plays like Allen’s own nostalgic reminiscence of his early, funny stuff—and of the way that his life used to be.

In “Coup de Chance,” Allen borrows from another classic, John Ford’s Western “ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ,” the story of a miscreant who has long evaded the law but eventually gets his extrajudicial, extramoral comeuppance. The ending of “Coup de Chance” offers a tragicomic surprise that echoes the key plot point—the shootout—of Ford’s film. Allen has suggested that “Coup de Chance,” his fiftieth feature, may be his last; if so, he goes out with a self-excoriating bang. ♦

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Review: Director Ken Loach’s compassion remains a sturdy, reliable virtue in ‘The Old Oak’

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When it comes to the fiercely political British director Ken Loach’s latest film, “The Old Oak,” a bit of classic Hollywood promotional language comes to mind: Ken Loach is “The Old Oak.” Because seemingly forever, the sturdiest, tallest figure in the cinema of working-class struggle has been Loach, the man behind such raw, forthright classics as “Kes,” “Riff-Raff,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” “I, Daniel Blake” and “Sorry We Missed You.”

If this is the final round for the 87-year-old filmmaker, he’s going out with a protest sign in one hand and a pint in the other. That’s because “The Old Oak,” written by longtime collaborator Paul Laverty and named for the last remaining pub in a downtrodden town in northeast England, shows Loach no less committed to the cause but also as faith-filled as he’s ever been.

It’s 2016 when we enter the story via black-and-white photographs of a busload of displaced Syrians, mostly mothers, children and the elderly, being dropped off in the mining town of Durham, the film’s audio dominated by locals loudly and bigotedly condemning their arrival. When the film itself starts (and cinematographer Robbie Ryan ’s clean naturalism takes over), we learn that the refugee documenting everything is a young woman named Yara (Ebla Mari), whose first interaction is with a brutish man who violently grabs her camera and breaks it.

One of the aid helpers appalled at his townsfolk’s behavior is divorced, middle-aged pub owner TJ (an affecting Dave Turner), a lonely man with a good heart and a lot of hurt. He offers to help get Yara’s camera repaired and the unlikely pair strike up a friendship borne of mutual empathy for each other’s pain: her homeland and family brutalized by war; his once-thriving community battered by economic neglect and a poisoning fear. The latter is routinely manifested in the churlish Old Oak regulars for whom nostalgia-fueled resentment is no longer a condition to be changed but a disturbingly snug set of clothes; they view TJ’s kindness toward Yara (or anybody’s charity toward the Syrians) as a betrayal.

But on the walls of the threadbare pub’s long-shuttered backroom is photographic evidence — a reminder to TJ, an inspiring history for Yara — of the country’s 1984 miners’ strike , when an embattled people looked out for one another. Soon enough, TJ is spearheading a revitalization of the room so two struggling worlds can meet: communal dinners to feed both the refugees and a deprived town’s isolated youth. As things play out, however, Loach and Laverty are realistic enough in their tale of invigorating compassion to grasp that, as difficult as it is to find and nurture hope, just as essential is recognizing the danger lurking in festering grievance.

As vitally angry as Loach’s films can often be about the issues they’re addressing, the secret glue to his unvarnished, in-the-moment style has always been what camaraderie and care look like within any maelstrom of injustice and oppression. The authenticity of his casting, including his unwavering belief in newcomers, is flawless here, with Mari’s portrait of resilience sharing the frame wonderfully with Turner’s bearish, wounded air. And in a key role as a pub regular, Trevor Fox makes palpable the injury and distrust that can warp an honest reaction to a stranger’s struggles.

Loach is the rare movie agitator who can point to results. In 1966, his television film “Cathy Come Home” rattled the U.K. into acting on homelessness. We may be too inured these days to the unceasing drumbeat of immigration’s realities and disinformation to expect “The Old Oak,” as deeply emotional as it is, to have a similar impact. But we can still feel thankful for this beautifully indignant director’s career-long, never-wavering theme of solidarity, of seeing others’ problems as ours too, worth striking about and fighting against. It’s a righteous oeuvre with marvelously strong roots.

'The Old Oak'

Not rated In English with English subtitles (due to strong regional accents) Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes Playing: In limited release.

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Woody Allen, Reputation Bruised, Finds Muted Reception to 50th Film

“Coup de Chance,” a milestone, is being released in the United States after opening in Europe months ago.

By Marc Tracy

This weekend, 13 movie theaters around the country will be showing “Coup de Chance,” a brisk French-language thriller about a bored wife in Paris who cheats on her wealthy, aloof husband with an old high school classmate, triggering fatal consequences.

Minus the opening credits and certain trademark elements — jazzy score, moneyed setting, themes of murder and luck, dry cosmopolitan banter — a typical viewer could watch the movie without knowing it is the 50th film directed by Woody Allen.

The foreign language (one in which Allen is not fluent — his original script was translated for filming), the absence of the kinds of American stars that typically crowd Allen’s casts, the low-key reception with which this milestone has been greeted: All suggest the awkwardness surrounding this new release by a filmmaker as distinctive as he is polarizing.

“We just continue to do what we’ve been doing, and we’re happy that it’s opening,” Letty Aronson, Allen’s sister, who has produced his films since 1994, said in an interview this week. She said “Coup de Chance” was financed in Europe, and declined to disclose its backers.

“I’m happy that it’s opening,” she added. “Woody is only interested in the creative part — once that’s done and he makes the film, he never sees it again. If you told him it wasn’t opening in the United States, it wouldn’t matter to him.”

Allen, 88, has a more than half-century career as a writer and director of influential classics such as “Annie Hall” (1977) and “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989). A late period commencing with 2005’s “Match Point” has featured collaborations with stars like Scarlett Johansson, Timothée Chalamet and Cate Blanchett, who won an Oscar for “Blue Jasmine” (2013). Allen’s 2011 comedy “Midnight in Paris” brought him his fourth Oscar, for original screenplay, and took in more than $150 million worldwide — a megahit by the standards of independent cinema.

But for many filmgoers, affection for his movies has been overshadowed by allegations against him personally. In 1992, his daughter Dylan Farrow, then 7, said Allen had sexually assaulted her, months after he had begun a relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the 21-year-old daughter of Mia Farrow, his former partner and Dylan’s mother. (Previn is now Allen’s wife of 26 years.)

Following an inquiry by child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven Hospital, Allen was never prosecuted. He denies having assaulted Dylan Farrow. He and his defenders have suggested Mia Farrow coached their daughter.

For decades, Dylan Farrow’s accusation, as well as Allen’s relationship with Previn, did not appear to hinder Allen’s ability to make movies — between 1982 and 2017, there were no calendar years when a new feature film directed by Allen was not released. His mainstream reputation remained largely intact until 2014, when Dylan Farrow, as an adult, reiterated her accusation (which was published on a New York Times Opinion columnist’s blog) shortly after Allen received a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.

“What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” Farrow wrote. “Before you answer, you should know: when I was seven years old, Woody Allen took me by the hand and led me into a dim, closet-like attic on the second floor of our house. He told me to lay on my stomach and play with my brother’s electric train set. Then he sexually assaulted me.”

Amid the #MeToo moment three years later, and following another essay by Farrow — this one asking, “Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?” — many film critics pointed to Allen as the quintessential instance of the emerging question: how to consider the work and legacy of an important, even beloved artist who stood accused of unforgivable acts?

Actors Chalamet and Rebecca Hall announced they would donate their salaries from “A Rainy Day in New York” (2019), and other past collaborators, including Kate Winslet, Mira Sorvino, Colin Firth and Greta Gerwig publicly expressed regret at having worked with Allen. (Still others, including Diane Keaton, who played Annie Hall, continued to defend him.)

In 2018, Amazon dissolved a multimillion-dollar movie agreement with Allen, citing a renewed focus on the allegations, and the next year dropped “A Rainy Day in New York.”

It is far from clear that audiences have decisively turned on Allen. “A Rainy Day in New York,” a romantic comedy starring Chalamet, Elle Fanning and Selena Gomez, with a different distributor made nearly $25 million at the box office outside North America, where its footprint was far smaller.

“Coup de Chance” (it means “stroke of luck”) premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival to a seven-minute standing ovation and protests outside. It opened months ago in France, Spain and a dozen other countries. On Friday, theaters in seven states will show it, including Quad Cinema in Allen’s adopted borough of Manhattan. It will be available to stream beginning April 12.

Allen’s 50th film may not even prove his last. A new movie, Aronson said, “is in the process of being negotiated.”

Aronson added, “Woody is working on a script. So we’ll see what happens.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Soon-Yi Previn when she and Allen began a romantic relationship. She was 21, not a teenager.

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Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York. More about Marc Tracy

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Civil War Plays Like a Nightmare. You Should Still See It.

A24’s most expensive movie to date is borderline incoherent. that doesn’t mean it’s not important..

The year is unspecified—it could be a few years into some alternate future, or it could be right now. The president, a clean-cut establishment type played by Nick Offerman, is unnamed, his party and political affiliations unclear (though his rhetoric in an address to the nation sounds disturbingly authoritarian). And the precise nature of the domestic conflict that has torn the United States apart and turned the nation’s major cities into zones of open warfare is unexplained. In Civil War , the provocative fourth feature from Alex Garland ( Ex Machina , Annihilation , Men ), the details about why and how America collapsed into violent chaos are immaterial. What Garland wants is to drop us into the middle of that violent chaos as it unfolds, to make us see our familiar surroundings—ordinary blocks lined with chain drugstores and clothing boutiques—recast as active battlegrounds, with snipers on rooftops and local militias enforcing their own sadistic versions of the law.

One thing Garland’s at times frustratingly opaque script does go out of its way to clarify is that the ideological fissures in this alternate version of America occur along different fault lines than the ones that remain from the country’s actual civil war. The main threat to what we’ll call the Offerman administration is the secessionist group the Western Forces, a Texas-California alliance that’s intentionally impossible to extrapolate from our current red state–blue state split. There is also a separate rebel movement of some kind based in Florida, but above all, there is unchecked street violence and general social disorder. One early exchange of dialogue suggests that the war has been going on for some 14 months, which seems like too short a time for the country to have fallen into the advanced state of dystopia in which we find it: highways choked with empty cars, most of the population in hiding, the internet all but nonfunctional except in a few urban centers. But again, the point is less plausibility than viscerality. Garland got his start writing a zombie movie, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later , and he has also co-written an award-winning action video game. Civil War , A24’s most expensive movie to date, sometimes plays like a mashup of those two genres, with the viewer as first-person player and our armed fellow citizens as the zombies.

As the film begins, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a veteran war photographer,  is in New York City, holed up at a hotel that doubles as a makeshift command center for the press. Knowing that the Western Forces are on the verge of taking the capital, Lee and her longtime professional partner, a wire-service reporter named Joel (Wagner Moura), are planning a perilous road trip from New York to D.C. in the unlikely hope of landing an interview with the embattled president. Lee’s longtime mentor, news editor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), warns them that the plan is sheer madness—then asks if, despite his age and limited mobility, he can get in on the action.

As they’re preparing to leave, they’re joined, despite Lee’s protests, by Jessie ( Priscilla ’s Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photojournalist in her early 20s who idolizes Lee’s work but has no experience in war zones. Bringing along the stowaway Lee disparages as a “kindergartner” will only, she argues, put all of them in even more danger. These doubts turn out to be justified: The presence of Jessie, a live wire with a penchant for unnecessary risk-taking, makes the journey to D.C. even more perilous, while forcing Lee to confront how jaded she’s become after years of compartmentalizing her most scarring memories. On the way to the capital, this multigenerational foursome encounters gas-station vigilantes, a shootout at an abandoned Christmas-themed amusement park, and a gut-churning encounter with a racist militant played by Dunst’s real-life husband, Jesse Plemons.

In its vision of journalism as a form of amoral adventure-seeking, Civil War belongs to a long tradition of films about hardened war correspondents in far-flung places, movies like A Private War and The Year of Living Dangerously . But the fact that the carnage these reporters are documenting is homegrown shifts the inflection significantly. Suddenly it’s impossible to exoticize or otherwise alienate ourselves from the bloodshed onscreen, which makes us ask ourselves what we were doing exoticizing it in the first place. This effect of moral immediacy is Civil War ’s greatest strength, and the reason it feels like an important movie of its moment even if it isn’t a wholly coherent or consistently insightful one.

Garland’s idea of throwing us in medias res during a civil war in progress is a bold gambit, and his cinematic instincts—his sense of where to put a camera and how long to draw out a moment of suspense—are often keen. The horrible realities he makes us look at—intra-civilian combat, physical and psychological torture, the everyday depths of human depravity—are summoned powerfully enough that Civil War remains emotionally and physically affecting even as the ideas it seeks to explore remain fuzzy. Is this a critique of contemporary journalism or a salute to the courage of reporters on the front lines? If it’s meant to be suspended somewhere in between, how does the filmmaker position himself on that line, and how should we, the audience, feel about the protagonists’ sometimes dubious choices?

Even as they document street battles and point-blank executions, adrenaline junkies Jessie and Joel occasionally exchange devilish grins. Meanwhile, Lee is all but incapable of normal human relationships because of her unacknowledged PTSD. A late sequence finds them unofficially embedded with an especially ruthless death squad; it would seem important to establish whether this alignment is meant to signify their ultimate journalistic corruption or a necessary compromise for the survival of the Fourth Estate. Even on the level of plot logic, the movie poses a question that the script’s curiously thin worldbuilding never answers: If the internet and most of the nation’s industrial infrastructure are in ruins, how are ordinary people reading Joel’s articles and looking at the photos that Lee herself struggles for hours to upload? If it is intended in part as a satire of journalistic opportunism, Civil War should be more specific about the conditions of 21 st -century media in wartime, especially given that it’s coming out at a moment when front-line reporters face more physical danger than at any time in recent memory.

All we learn of Lee’s background is that, like Jessie, she is from a farm town in the interior of the U.S., with parents who are in stubborn denial about the crumbling of the republic. But because Kirsten Dunst is a remarkable artist, she makes this somewhat underwritten character, who on paper could have been a stoic “badass” stereotype, into a complex and indelible presence. Dunst also, perhaps for the first time, loses the girlish quality she has brought even to middle-aged characters: Lee Smith is a plain, scowling woman with a glum, even abrasive mien. She’s a person whose perspective on life has narrowed down to the size of a camera lens, yet she’s also a committed journalist and a fiercely loyal colleague. As the other three sort-of protagonists, Moura, Henderson, and Spaeny all turn in finely tuned performances that bring a depth to their characters beyond what the script provides, but it’s Dunst whose thousand-yard stare and deep-buried grief will stay with me.

“What kind of American are you?” Plemons’ fatigues-and-pink-sunglasses-clad character asks the journalists one by one as he terrorizes them at gunpoint in the movie’s scariest and most successful sequence. (Not for nothing, it’s also the moment that suggests the most strongly that the vaguely defined conflict in this fictive America has everything to do with race.) That may be the screenplay’s smartest single line, in that it dispenses with the metaphorical quality of Civil War ’s imagined political dystopia and presents us with the real question many Americans are asking each other and themselves right now, sometimes in a self-reflective mode, sometimes in a contentious or overtly threatening one. As the unfolding of that encounter with Plemons makes clear, as soon as the question is asked with a weapon in your hand, it becomes a trick question, posed not to start a conversation but to set a trap. Civil War often leaves the audience feeling trapped in an all-too-realistic waking nightmare, but when it finally lets us go, mercifully short of the two-hour mark, it sends us out of the theater talking.

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Luck   photos.

Eccentric Shane (Luke Kirby) becomes obsessed with his friend, Margaret (Sarah Polley), after they kiss, developing an infatuation with her. However, when he cannot put his feelings into words, it seems he has lost her. He then seeks out another outlet for his fixations: gambling. As Shane's fortunes go up and down at the casino, he wonders if anything can win Margaret back, while the rest of Canada is riveted by the international ice hockey Summit Series against Russia.

Genre: Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Peter Wellington

Producer: Simone Urdl , Jennifer Weiss

Writer: Peter Wellington

Release Date (Theaters): Aug 29, 2003  wide

Runtime: 1h 31m

Distributor: Odeon Films

Production Co: Film Farm Productions

Sound Mix: Surround

Cast & Crew

Shane Bradley

Sarah Polley

Noam Jenkins

Sergio Di Zio

Brad Wietersen

Gambler's Anonymous Moderator

Peter Wellington

Screenwriter

Simone Urdl

Jennifer Weiss

Melissa Auf der Maur

Original Music

Luc Montpellier

Cinematographer

Christopher Donaldson

Film Editing

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