Movies to see this week: It’s been almost a decade. Was Zootopia 2 worth the wait?

Her boss, Chief Bogo – a Cape buffalo voiced by Idris Elba – initially assigns her to hand out parking tickets. Naturally, her colleagues hoot with derision and nickname her “meter maid”. But an unlikely alliance with a duplicitous fox – reformed confidence trickster Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) – produces results. Together, they solve the city’s most notorious crime and he joins the force, becoming her partner.

This may sound like a po-faced exercise in political message-making but the films’ screenplays are saved from any hint of the sanctimonious by the pleasure they take in playing around with this do-gooding concept.

Stereotypes are confounded, some bad guys turn out to be misunderstood good guys, others don’t, and the city’s boroughs and ghettos are populated with a hugely entertaining array of furred and feathered eccentrics.

Picking up just a week after the end of the original, the plot of this one hinges on one of Judy and Nick’s early cases as official partners. They go undercover to try to find an unwanted newcomer to the city – Gary De’Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a pit viper. Zootopia, it seems, has been free of snakes for a century, and it’s not going to change its ways now.

But before they take to the streets, we’re treated to one of the film’s best and most characteristic scenes. Because Judy and Nick have already messed up one case, they are sent to Partners in Crisis, a therapy session designed to help new police partners get along.

It’s conducted by the force’s psychologist, Dr Fuzzby (Quinta Brunson), a studious-looking quokka who has swallowed all the relevant cliches about harmony in the workplace. Naturally, she succeeds in leaving her patients feeling more neurotic than they were when they came in. Even Judy starts harbouring doubts about whether she and Nick are the right match.

Nonetheless, she’s as zealous as ever about the De’Snake hunt. As Nick reluctantly tags along, she sets off on a search which takes us on a comprehensive tour of Zootopia’s diverse districts. In Marsh Town, where the amphibians hang out, the pair navigate one of its waterways on top of a backstroking walrus.

In a previously unknown reptile ghetto, they go clubbing, and in snowbound Tundra Town, headquarters of the Lynxleys, a land-grabbing dynasty of lynxes, they begin to investigate a scheme involving so many long-buried secrets and fiendish conspiracies that it rivals the plot of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.

It’s a little too serpentine, spun out with so many twists that the film seems longer than it should, but retains enough of the charms that made the original such a hit to please the fans. They’ve had a long wait.
Reviewed by Sandra Hall

Zootopia 2 is in cinemas from November 27

Barb sets out, predictably running into a blizzard on the way, and she gets lost. When the outlines of a cabin materialise from the enveloping whiteness, she asks its suspicious-looking resident (Marc Menchaca) for directions and just as predictably, he turns out to be one of the villains. He’s not nearly as dangerous, however, as his wife (Judy Greer), who has talked him into kidnapping a young woman (Laurel Marsden).

The reason for this crime is not remotely plausible, but it matters less than the logistics of the plot and the role played by the weather in ensuring that Barb is the only one who can save the girl’s life.

She can’t call the police because her mobile phone has no signal, and she can’t drive to the nearest town because her truck has become bogged in the snow.

Everything depends on her guts and her ingenuity, which means that suspense lies in the detail as events are played out step by step in a manner of thrillers gone by. Can she find a way into the cabin’s basement, where the girl is chained to a post, before the kidnappers return? And can she keep herself alive when they realise what she’s up to?

It’s here that Thompson and her Minnesota accent come into their own. Barb has no flair for heroics. Her motivators are decency and sympathy for someone desperately in need of help. She’s improvising all the time with occasionally bizarre results. And she’s distracted by memories of happier days on the lake with Carl – memories dramatised in flashback with Thompson’s daughter, Gaia Wise, as the young Barb.

The conclusion, which also takes place on the lake, is pure pulp fiction with Greer working herself up into such a screaming frenzy that the whole film sinks into absurdity.

Nonetheless, Thompson emerges from the surrounding mayhem with a performance both credible and touching. It has no unnecessary flourishes and she and the landscape collaborate to compelling effect.

In cinemas Thursday, November 27.

But with Zwigoff in mind, it’s hard not to feel that this sentimental comedy-drama holds the potential for something much darker. Tory Kamen’s screenplay follows a familiar pattern where the consequences of a single lie keep snowballing – the grim twist being that the 94-year-old heroine Eleanor Morgenstein (June Squibb) is lying about being a survivor of the Holocaust.

When we first meet her, the widowed Eleanor has spent the past dozen years in Florida living with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar), who really is a Holocaust survivor.

Following Bessie’s death, Eleanor relocates to Manhattan, where despite her grief she retains her fighting spirit – especially when it comes to her unfortunate daughter (Jessica Hecht), into whose apartment she moves, occupying the bedroom recently vacated by her adored grandson (Will Price), apparently a Crumb fan.

With all this set-up in place, we’re primed for the moment when Eleanor wanders into a Holocaust support group meeting and starts blurting out Bessie’s tales of survival as if they were her own.

The satirical possibilities are considerable, or would be if Johansson and Kamen were prepared to risk the right sort of bad taste. We can see how the neglected Eleanor might leap at the chance to be pitied and revered by all – and even how she might envisage her planned future in a retirement home as akin to being sent to a death camp.

Still more complex ironies could emerge from the fact that playing the victim seemingly turns her into a nicer person, especially when it leads to a friendship with a teenage journalism student (Erin Kellyman) who’s dealing with a loss of her own.

Johansson tells this story briskly while being attentive to her cast – and aside from a few close-ups near the end, her visual style isn’t too overbearing.

But for the premise to work, it needs to acknowledge the deception Eleanor practises is truly appalling.

Alas, Squibb carries on being staunch and indomitable, and the film is constructed to suggest that despite everything, we’re supposed to be on her side. What Zwigoff would make of any of this I’d love to know.

Reviewed by Jake Wilson

Eleanor the Great is in cinemas from Thursday