The Wild Robot (in theaters)

Love can change everything.

That’s just one of the many profound messages woven through “The Wild Robot,” the beautiful, delightful new movie from Dreamworld. Based on the beloved book, the movie combines gorgeous visuals with the touching, funny, and profoundly emotional story of a robot in over its head. You’ll laugh at the silliness of the opening scenes, but by the end you might just find yourself as profoundly changed as the characters.

The movie starts with a consumer robot (think Alexa with actual intelligence and a robot body) who crashes onto a human-free island instead of getting delivered to whoever bought it. After scaring a bunch of animals with its preprogrammed greetings and attempts to find a task, it learns how to decode animal languages. A tragic accident also gives the robot its first task, raising an orphaned gosling and teaching it everything it needs to know to migrate the following fall.

This is a movie that touches on everything from growing up to parenthood to the power of community, but it all springs organically from the story rather than getting in its way. It’s deep and rich enough to resonate with all kinds of different people, which means there’s no telling when you’ll get choked up. And it’s all pure emotion, not sentimentality, so it’ll sneak up on you no matter how hard you try and fight it.

It’s also beautiful to look at. The movie does a wonderful job of combining realistic and artistic styles, giving us exquisitely detailed animation that feels perfectly suited for both nature and a story about nature. No matter what’s happening, it’s immersive in the best way.

It’s a world I’d be happy to return to, over and over again. Hopefully, we’ll get that chance.

Grade: Four stars

Fly (Disney+ and Hulu)

“Fly” has some gorgeous aerial shots, but it never soars the way it wants to.

The National Geographic documentary, which follows base jumpers through several years of their lives, is full of all the beautiful scenery you could hope for. What it’s missing, however, is the kind of depth that made similar documentaries like “Free Solo” so popular. It’s pretty to look at, but you leave the movie not understanding base jumping any better than you did when you started.  

Frustratingly, the potential is there. The jumpers spend the entire movie dealing with questions of life and death, but the documentary rarely lets us see them wrestle with them. You get hints of the questions the filmmakers should have asked, leaving it impossible not to feel the empty spaces where the answers should have gone. The occasional brain-rattling comment goes completely unexplored, left echoing only in your memory.

So what we’re left to focus on is the visuals. The jump shots are truly stunning, incredible even on the small screen, and the helmet cam shots give you some of the sense of rush. On the other side, the shots that depict jumps that don’t go well can be chilling.

They linger in your memory in a way the rest of the documentary can’t quite manage.

Grade: Two and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Utah Film Critics Association. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at [email protected].