The New Yorker:

Even a child is unlikely to be entertained by the film’s stream of Minecraft in-jokes—but fans of the director Jared Hess may find something else to excavate.

By Richard Brody

I’ve never played Minecraft in my life—but then I’m not a Christian, either, and have always delighted in the distinctly Mormon cinematic universe of Jared Hess, the director of “A Minecraft Movie.” He’s best known for “Napoleon Dynamite,” from 2004, which evokes its spiritual milieu only implicitly, by the absence of secular pop culture and of teen-age ribaldry. He followed it with “Nacho Libre,” starring Jack Black as a friar who enters the wrestling ring to save a convent, and, in 2009, with “Gentlemen Broncos,” a celestial gross-out vision of an adolescent gospel. His satire “Don Verdean,” from 2015, is explicitly set in church communities and involves relic smuggling in Israel; his 2016 comedy, “Masterminds,” is a heist film that’s centered on grace and holy innocence.

With “A Minecraft Movie,” I was impatient to see what Hess would do with another world of extreme fantasy, akin to that of “Gentlemen Broncos.” The short answer is, too much and not nearly enough; the I.P. is the boss, the characters are its minions, and Hess—constrained both by a script that he didn’t write and by the demands of complex C.G.I.—struggles to live up to his own œuvre, which is among the most substantially loopy (or loopily substantial) in modern cinema. “A Minecraft Movie,” which moves between realistic settings and the video game’s synthetic worlds, is nowhere near as wildly idiosyncratic, as imaginatively crafted, or as deeply personal as his other features. It’s no “Barbie”; the action is blatantly promotional and brazenly conventional. Nonetheless, it’s got enough personality to make me wish that Hess had had a still freer hand.

Go to link