Soul

The new Pixar movie is very clever and very sweet. I liked the bustling New York scenes better than the Great Before, with its indistinguishable pale green bubblehead spirits and Calder-esque bureaucrats. I especially loved the jazz itself, which is played in a straight-ahead modern style, no concessions to pop, just what you would expect to hear in a downtown club like the barely fictional "Half Note." Tia Fuller's alto sax is awesome, and Jon Batiste, whose stylistic choices are not always to my liking, gets it just right. The rest of the animated band is as good as you would expect it to be given the roster of real-life musicians who played the notes.