Review: 'The Testament of Ann Lee' is a riveting and radical account of religious fervor, anchored by Amanda Seyfried's fearless performance

You may not believe me when I say that “The Testament of Ann Lee,” in its radical depiction of the founding of the Shaker movement and its adherence to musical movement and rigid celibacy, is the most profoundly moving film about religious ecstasy I’ve seen in I don’t know when. You’ll have to take it on faith, which is the point of director Mona Fastvold’s daring movie.

It’s the middle of the 18th century in Manchester, England, when Ann Lee — played as an adult by Amanda Seyfried — and her brother William (Lewis Pullman), who have lived a brutal but typical life so far. One of the traumas Ann experiences is seeing her parents having sex, which leads her to believe fornication is sinful and should always be avoided.

One day, Ann, along with Willam and their niece, Nancy (Viola Prettejohn), visit the home of Jane and James Wardley (Stacy Martin and Scott Handy). The Wardleys are Quakers who preach that Jesus will return to Earth as a woman. The Quakers also celebrate their faith with dance, song and impromptu shouting — and Ann quickly takes to this enthusiastic and physical form of worship. Soon she becomes a major member of this group of so-called “shaking Quakers,” or “Shakers.”

Facing persecution in England, Ann and her cohort — which includes her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott) — leave for New England. Once there, Nancy leaves the community to marry a new convert, while Abraham leaves Ann because she follows her vow of celibacy. 

The Shakers establish a settlement in upstate New York and begin to attract new followers. This time is only a few decades before various religious movements sprung up in this part of the country — notably, Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Fastvold, working from a script she wrote with her husband, “The Brutalist” director Brady Corbet, captures an era where people are yearning for spiritual answers and seeking them outside their familiar churches. So why wouldn’t a woman who preaches a chaste life filled with making elegantly simple furniture and ritualistically singing and dancing appeal to some people?

It’s in those rituals that Fastvold finds the movie’s power. The film is technically a musical, in that there are many scenes where people are singing and dancing to express their feelings. But it’s not the tuneful jukebox you’d recognize from Broadway or old Hollywood. Instead, Fastvold and composer Daniel Blumberg draw from Shaker hymns to create a series of songs that produce the droning, rhythmic sensation you’d expect from cloistered monks. It’s jarring at first, but as the movie goes, these songs convey a hypnotic grace.

All would be for naught, though, without Amanda Seyfried’s captivating performance at the movie’s center. Though seemingly thin, almost birdlike, Seyfried’s Ann shows herself to be a force of nature, creating a form of worship and an American community through sheer will — and by sharing a fervent conviction that her view of the universe is the correct one. Seyfried’s performance is fearless and astonishing, in a movie that breaks all the rules of what we think a biographical drama should be.

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‘The Testament of Ann Lee’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 23, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, violence and bloody images. Running time: 137 minutes.

Review: '28 Years Later: The Bone Temple' rattles the cage with its zombie energy, but director Nia DaCosta brings out her cast's best in the quiet moments

With “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” director Nia DaCosta jumps into the hellscape that Danny Boyle and Alex Garland have created with the frenetic zombie franchise — and finds her own vein of terror and deep emotion.

This thriller starts where “28 Years Later” left off, with young Spike (Alfie Williams) alone in the woods of England, trying to avoid The Infected, the ravenous flesh-eaters who have succumbed to the contagious virus that has hit much of the human population. He has left behind Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), the kindly physician who spends his days studying The Infected and processing the bones of their victims to create a massive memorial out of skulls and femurs. 

DaCosta, working off a Garland script, toggles between two stories. In one, Spike has reluctantly joined a pack of young survivors, led by the self-named Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who tells his teen followers that he’s the son of Satan and will lead them to destroy everyone who’s not them. (American fans may not pick up on the morbid joke that Sir Jimmy sports a look — platinum blonde hair, track suit and young acolytes — similar to that of the late British TV presenter Jimmy Savile, who after his death in 2011 was revealed to be a serial sexual predator.)

While Spike is learning to survive in Sir Jimmy’s gang, Dr. Kelson is continuing his work, extracting bones from bodies and moving corpses while cheerily singing Duran Duran songs. He also is making observations about the alpha of The Infected, whom he calls Samson (played by Chi Lewis-Parry), and starts to wonder if he can be treated so that his mind can break free of the zombie virus’ hold.

Of course, it’s inevitable that Sir Jimmy and Dr. Kelson will cross paths. What’s not inevitable is the way Garland, again acting as screenwriter, presents what happens to them. 

DaCosta — whose work ranges from last year’s Ibsen adaptation “Hedda” to the unjustly maligned “The Marvels” — doesn’t bring the frenetic energy Danny Boyle has demonstrated elsewhere in the franchise. That turns out to be a good thing, because for all the intense action and bloodiness that peppers the movie, what stands out are the quieter moments for both Fiennes’ Dr. Kelson and Williams’ Spike, strangers who have become bonded in survival.

Throughout “28 Days Later: The Bone Temple,” DaCosta keeps us off-guard, trying to guess what will happen next and rewarding us for answers more rich and powerful than what we in the audience would have conjured. She gives Kelson his grace and Spike a dose of empathy, things in short supply but greatly appreciated in this or any zombie apocalypse. 

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’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, graphic nudity, language throughout, and brief drug use. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' blends drama and documentary to tell a harrowing tale of trauma and compassion in the Gaza war

The trauma of war, as experienced by those on the ground and the people trying to help them, is depicted in emotionally stark terms in “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” one of the most immediate and necessary dramas about the war in Gaza to arrive in theaters.

Writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania doesn’t set her movie in Gaza, but in a call center in Ramallah, on the West Bank, miles away from the shooting and bloodshed. The center is operated by Red Crescent, the Muslim world’s version of the Red Cross, and operated by experts who field calls from Palestinians in Israeli-controlled territory. 

When the call comes from Gaza, the operators will find out where the injured person is, then give that information to a coordinator – here, a man named Mahdi (American Hlehel) — who will then call his counterpart with the Red Cross, to start a daisy chain of calls to get the Israeli army to allow a path for an ambulance to travel. 

On this day, Omar (Motaz Malhees) takes a call from a Palestinian living in Germany, who says his sister in Gaza is in trouble. Omar gets the sister’s number, and learns she’s in a car with members of her extended family, pinned down by soldiers and a nearby tank. Then Omar hears gunfire.

I should let you know right here about the choice Ben Hania makes with the calls we hear in this movie: They’re all real audio from Red Crescent’s call center.

After he hears the gunfire on the line, the line cuts out and Omar tries the number again. This time, a child answers. Her name, we’re told, is Hind Rajab, She’s 6 years old and she’s terrified, and Omar and another operator, Rana (Saja Kilani), soon learn why: Hind is surrounded by the corpses of her aunt, uncle and four cousins. 

For Omar and Rana, it’s now a race against time, as they implore Mahdi to work the phones harder to find one of the last ambulance crews in northern Gaza — and then to call in every favor to get the “green light” for a route to get an ambulance to Hind’s location. Meanwhile, the center’s therapist, Nisreen (Clara Khoury), splits her time between helping talk to Hind and keeping Omar, Rana and Mahdi from destroying themselves from the stress of the situation.

Yes, that voice is the real Hind Rajab, whose plight became international news when Red Crescent posted some of the moments re-enacted here on social media. At the time, that decision was made to perhaps coerce the Israeli military to call a temporary truce, so the ambulance could get through to the girl. Since then — and after the aftermath of this one day in Gaza was revealed — Hind Rajab became a symbol for the young victims of this war, killed and injured and orphaned only because they grew up in the wrong place.

Ben Hania stages the film like a claustrophobic thriller, similar in tone and scope to another great recent movie, director Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5.” This movie, like that one, consolidates all the action in one office, reliant on technology but also paralyzed by it, too far away to be anything other than a reassuring voice on the other end of the phone.

The quartet of actors are superb in reenacting the actions and emotions of the real-life Red Crescent team. Particularly good is Kilani as Rana, the one who was almost out the door when the call came in and pours her heart into trying to reassure a scared little girl.

Ben Hania employs a few maneuvers that blurs the line between re-enactment and documentary, such as a harrowing passage where someone holds up a cellphone to get video of the team, and for a moment we see actors on one screen and the real Red Crescent workers on the phone’s s screen. That scene, and others where the operators’ real voices briefly substitute for the actors’, don’t take the viewer out of the drama but plunge us deeper into it.

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‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 16, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for depictions of war and trauma, and for language. Running time: 89 minutes; in Arabic with subtitles.

Review: 'Is This Thing On?' explores stand-up as catharsis, but finds hope in strong performances by Laura Dern and Will Arnett

Love’s a funny thing, and so is divorce in “Is This Thing On?,” a shaggy comedy-drama from director Bradley Cooper that gives a rare leading-man spotlight to Will Arnett as a guy who finds a unique avenue for turning his life around.

Arnett plays Alex Novak, who has a finance job that we almost never see him do. Mostly we see him hanging out with his irresponsible actor friend, nicknamed Balls (and played by Cooper), and Balls’ overly understanding wife, Christine (Andra Day). Sometimes Alex’s wife, Tess (Laura Dern), is there, but that may soon change — because Alex and Tess are in the process of getting a divorce.

Cooper, who reworked a script by Arnett and Mark Chappell, presents the mechanics of the Novaks’ parting in a matter-of-fact style. There’s no precipitating incident, no screaming arguments, no revealed infidelity. It’s just two people who have decided, quite rationally, that the marriage has run its course. 

What we’re here to see is the aftermath. That starts when Alex, alone on a New York night, goes into a bar and learns that the way to get around the $15 cover charge is to sign up to perform stand-up comedy on open-mic night. He gets onstage without a prepared act, and starts unloading about his impending divorce. He gets a few mild giggles from the audience, but the experience is cathartic, and he wants more.

(The movie is based, loosely, on the story of English comedian John Bishop, who tried stand-up to cope with his own divorce. Americans might know Bishop from the short season he co-starred on “Doctor Who,” near the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run as The Doctor.)

While Alex is turning open-mic night into his personal therapy sessions, Tess is trying to figure out what’s next in her life. A former Olympic volleyball player, Tess is considering getting back into the sport as a college coach. The notion draws some attention, particularly from another coach, Laird, who might also be a potential romantic interest. (Laird is played, in an unusual bit of casting, by NFL legend Peyton Manning, who’s surprisingly not bad at this acting thing.)

Cooper spends most of the movie’s first half showing Alex building up his stand-up set, and his resilience to lukewarm crowds. The cast is populated with some real comics, and includes Amy Sedaris as the comedy club’s nurturing owner, who encourages Alex to dig deeper for his comedy.

The second half gets more interesting, as Alex and Tess finally have the heavy discussions they should have had earlier — about how their marriage fell apart and how they’re still strongly attracted to each other.

Some elements in “Is This Thing On?” fail spectacularly, and none harder than Cooper’s own performance as Balls, whose clearly limited acting talent is overwhelmed by his unjustly placed confidence in himself. It’s perhaps the most blatant act of cinematic self-sabotage I’ve seen in ages.

But it’s hard to stay angry when Dern and Arnett are on their game. Separately, they present a fascinating dichotomy in post-divorce coping, with one spiraling and the other blossoming. Together, they make one feel that love just might conquer all.

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‘Is This Thing On?’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, sexual references and some drug use. Running time: 121 minutes.

Review: 'Primate' is a chimp-centered slasher movie that lazily slaughters its young cast in order of stupidity

What is the strange magic that turns seemingly intelligent people in their 20s into complete idiots? It’s being written into a horror movie, like director Johannes Roberts’ chimp-driven splatter movie “Primate,” which is designed solely to find semi-innovative ways to slaughter its cast.

In a remote house on the coast of a Hawaiian island, Lucy (played by Johnny Sequoyah) is coming home from college, with her best friend, Kate (Victoria Wyant), along for company. Kate has invited another friend, Hannah (Jess Alexander), who flirts with a couple of frat bros (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon) on the plane.

Lucy quickly reunites with her family: Her father, Adam (Oscar winner Troy Katsura); her teen sister, Erin (Gia Hunter); and Ben (performed by Miguel Torres Umba), who is a chimpanzee who can communicate through sign language and a touchscreen with a symbolic vocabulary. Ben, we’re told, was raised as part of the family by Adam and his wife, a linguist who died from cancer.

Lucy’s barely unpacked her bags when Adam says he has to leave everyone for a day, while he goes off to a book signing where he also aims to pitch a movie based on the family’s life raising a chimp. That’s OK, though, because Lucy, Kate and Hannah have plans to party by the pool, with Lucy’s high-school crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng).

Everything seems to be going fine, except for the thing the audience knows because of a foreshadowing prologue where a veterinarian goes into Ben’s enclosure, and the chimp — who, we soon learn, was infected with rabies, rips the vet’s face off. And Roberts (who made the shark movie “47 Meters Down” and its sequel) is content with letting the audience see the repulsive gore and body horror images in all their blood-red disgust. 

There are moments to recommend in “Primate,” largely coming from Katsura. The actor, who won the Oscar for supporting actor as the deaf fisherman dad in “CODA,” brings some warmth to the patriarchal role — and his lack of hearing is woven into the script fairly cleverly. 

When Katsur’s not in the picture, which is the entire middle section, “Primate” plays like another dumb psycho killer movie, with the attractive young cast making inexplicably stupid decisions and getting ripped to shreds one by one. The only tension Roberts mounts is making us guess in what order the characters will be dispatched.

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‘Primate’

★1/2

Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language, and some drug use. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Greenland 2: Migration' presents round 2 of the apocalypse, and more chances for Gerard Butler's machismo and Morena Baccarin's fierce protectiveness shine through.

Surviving the apocalypse isn’t something you do just once, as the end-of-the-world sequel “Greenland 2: Migration” proves as it runs the Garrity family again through the aftermath of a cosmic cataclysm.

For those who don’t remember the first movie, “Greenland,” a quick recap: John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and young son witness part of a comet striking the planet, causing mass catastrophe around the world. The family’s only hope is to find the one safe space left, in Greenland.

The sequel picks up five years later, with the Garrity family — including a 15-year-old Nathan, played by Roman Griffin Davis (“Jojo Rabbit”) — living with a few hundred other survivors in a bunker in Greenland. But surviving isn’t the same as living, since the bunker dwellers seldom see the sun because of radiation let loose by the comet, as well as occasional fragments of the comet that have been caught in Earth’s orbit and sometimes come crashing down.

With tremors laying waste to the Greenland base, the Garritys have to hit the road for a rumored sanctuary in southern France, in the crater where the comet, Clarke, originally struck. The journey puts the family through unstable territory, and people occasionally shooting at them. A further complication is that John is suffering a persistent cough — and, to paraphrase Bowen Yang from a 2024 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, “that’s movie for ‘dying.’”

The script — by Mitchell LaFortune and the first movie’s writer, Chris Sparling — sets numerous obstacles in the path of the Garrity family, most of them setting up action sequences for director Ric Roman Waugh (who also directed Butler in “Angel Has Fallen” and “Kandahar”) to stage for maximum thrills. The script also conjures up a string of lucky coincidences to ensure the Garritys always find friendly allies with a filtered air supply and a handy vehicle.

There are worse ways, I suppose, to make an action movie that highlights Butler’s rugged intensity and Baccarin’s tiger-mom ferocity. “Greenland 2: Migration” is gritty, sometimes cliched and often in love with its reliance on SteadiCam shots. But it’s a get-the-job-done thriller that delivers the action without pretense.

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‘Greenland 2: Migration’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, bloody images, and action. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'No Other Choice' is Park Chan-Wook's brutal and morbidly funny take on downsizing, and what Lee Byung-hun's desperate character will do for a job

Park Chan-Wook’s new movie, the darkly comic “No Other Choice,” pairs well with “Decision to Leave” to represent the Korean director at his most down-to-earth — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry many of the outlandish flourishes and psychological horrors Park has brought to such movies as “Oldboy,” “Thirst” and “The Handmaiden.:

Lee Byung-hun — who worked with Park early in their careers, notably the 2000 thriller “Joint Security Area,” before Lee became a global star via “Squid Game” — plays Man-su, who has worked at a Korean paper company for decades. He argues that experience should count for something, but the American corporate types who buy the company don’t care, and Man-su is laid off.

Man-su goes through the different stages of post-employment indignity, including group therapy sessions and classes in how to present oneself in a job interview. But with few other paper companies hiring, Man-su knows the competition is tough, in part because they’re the people he used to work with. So Man-su slowly comes to create a new plan: Eliminating the competition, literally.

Park puts Lee through his own indignities, staging scenes that are both brutally funny and just plain brutal in their depiction of Man-su slowly rationalizing murder and discovering his ineptitude at pulling it off. 

The movie is bolstered by strong source material: Park and his three co-writers are adapting “The Ax,” a novel by American detective novelist Donald E. Westlake. Park doesn’t remove the menace Westlake’s hard-boiled plotting, but he adds a strain of morbid humor — particularly in Man-su’s stakeouts and his efforts to apply his paper-making managerial skills to the problem solving necessary to kill someone and not get caught.

Of course, what makes “No Other Choice” resonate is that it’s not something that only might happen to someone in South Korea. (It’s telling that an earlier adaptation of “The Ax” was made in France two decades ago.) Anyone fearing for their job in today’s corporate world can imagine being in the same position as Man-su, and making the same desperate choices.

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‘No Other Choice’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence, language and some sexual content. Running time: 139 minutes; in Korean with subtitles.

Review: 'The Plague' is an eerie and unsettling drama centering on a kid experiencing the cruelty of teen boys — and deciding whether to fight back or join in

Anyone who has had teen children, or has been a teen child, will recoil with horror and recognition through “The Plague,” a psychological drama that centers on the harms of isolation and peer pressure.

The setting is 2003, at a summer camp for boys learning water polo. The boys learn the basics of what’s often a rough-and-tumble sport, but nothing in the water is as nasty as what the group dynamic of these boys does to a kid who doesn’t fit in.

Ben (Everett Blunck) isn’t that kid, at least not yet. But he’s closer in temperament to the outcast kid in the camp, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), than to the boys who tease and torment a kid who quotes “The Lord of the Rings” in the sauna when only Ben is around.

The gang of boys, with the constantly smirking Jake (Kayo Martin) as their ringleader, maintain a rumor that Eli has “the plague.” According to Jake’s telling, the plague starts with a skin rash and descends into more terrible symptoms — and any boy who touches Eli has to wash himself off immediately or risk contracting the plague himself. 

The boys react to Eli’s presence by scattering like cockroaches in the cafeteria, for fear of being touched. Ben, desperate to be part of the group, joins in this behavior — though he has second thoughts when he actually talks to Eli in the locker room. As Ben starts to befriend Eli, or at least not treat him like a pariah, Jake see a chance to make Ben the next target of the gang’s cruelty.

Writer-director Charlie Polinger, making his feature debut, conjures up a 21st-century variation on “Lord of the Flies,” a situation where boys are given free rein to be who they want to be — and who that is turns out to be horrible little pricks. There’s only one adult in the room here, a coach played by Joel Edgerton, but he’s largely ineffectual when he’s present, which isn’t a lot. 

The lads are mostly on their own in “The Plague,” which pumps up the psychological tension without giving us enough details to get past the “kids can be cruel” stereotypes. The camp, we discover early, is a bad place for sensitive boys like Eli, and an even more dangerous place for a kid like Ben, who’s one small push from falling off the fence between prey and predator. But the audience’s investment in where Ben lands is muted by Polinger’s inability to show us more clearly what’s at stake.

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‘The Plague’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 2, in theaters. Rated R for language, sexual material, self-harm/bloody images, and some alcohol and drug use - all involving children. Running time: 98 minutes.