Review: 'It Was Just an Accident' shows director Jafar Panahi telling a moving story of revenge and doubt, while slyly skewering the Iranian regime

Sometimes the best art comes from struggling against the forces of oppression arrayed against the artist — and few filmmakers have faced as much oppression as the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and his new film, the suspenseful and absurdist “It Was Just an Accident,” is among the best films this year. (The jury at Cannes believed so when they awarded it the Palme D’Or.)

Panahi has been directing movies since 1995, with his debut “The White Balloon,” a tender and heartbreaking story about a little boy wanting nothing more than a goldfish for the new year. In the decade that followed, Panahi made small, sometimes delicate movies, usually with non-professional actors and often trying to skirt the rules of the strict Iranian authorities. 

When you have time for a movie marathon, find “The Mirror” (1997), “The Circle” (2000) and particularly “Offside” (2006) — which depicted women trying to sneak into a soccer match, and which Panahi filmed partly in secret at an actual World Cup qualifying match.

After that, though, the Iranian regime cracked down. They arrested and jailed Panahi in 2010, and he was sentenced to six years imprisonment (he served a year and a half, then moved to house arrest) and a 20-year ban on making movies. He’s still managed to make six movies since, all of them illegally, sometimes having digital footage smuggled out of Iran. (Previously, my favorite of Panahi’s post-arrest movies was “Taxi,” in which the director played himself as a cab driver in Tehran — with his camera mounted on the dashboard.)

“It Was Just an Accident” starts with Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi), a man driving his pregnant wife and young daughter on a dark road. When Rashid accidentally runs over a stray dog in the road, he has to take the car to a mechanic. It’s in the garage where we learn that Rashid isn’t the main character, though he is the catalyst for all that follows.

In the garage, the mechanic’s colleague, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), hears the squeak of an artificial leg when Rashid walks. He has a chilling realization that Rashid is actually Eghbal, the man who tortured Vahid during his time as a political prisoner. After the car is repaired, Rashid/Eghbal drives his family home, and Vahid follows to see where his one-time tormenter lives.

Vahid isn’t certain that Rashid is Eghbal — he’s going by sound, because Vahid was blindfolded when he was imprisoned — and wants corroboration before killing him. So Vahid kidnaps the man, locks him in a foot locker in his van, and goes in search of others who were also tortured by Eghbal. 

Soon Vahid has filled his van with people who may or may not remember the man who made them suffer. First is Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a wedding photographer who’s taking portraits of a couple. Soon the couple has joined the party, because the bride, Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), is also a survivor of Eghbal’s cruelty. Lastly is another survivor, Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a hothead who doesn’t want to wait to confirm whether Rashid is really Eghbal.

The way Panahi blends suspense with dark humor is a skill we haven’t seen displayed so skillfully since perhaps the best days of Alfred Hitchcock. Like that old master, Panahi almost intuitively understands how to use humor as a release valve for the unbearable tension he’s building in every scene. Shrewdly, Panahi’s humor doesn’t undercut the suspense but emphasizes it.

The tension builds to a shattering conclusion, where Vahid gets to unload all of the pain, guilt and anger he’s felt for years — all directed at his alleged persecutor. Every word of Vahid’s angry monologue was written by Panahi, and it doesn’t take much to believe that he was channeling something deeply personal.

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‘It Was Just an Accident’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, violence, strong language, and smoking. Running time: 105 minutes; in Persian, with subtitles.

Review: "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" gives Rose Byrne a role that she rips into, but doesn't provide enough support for her brilliant performance

Rose Byrne gives the performance of her career in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a dark yet weirdly manic drama that never matches what Byrne is giving.

Byrne’s character, Linda, has a lot going on. Her child, who is never named and almost never seen above the neck (she’s played by Delaney Quinn), suffers from some unexplained illness that requires Linda to feed her through a tube inserted in her belly. Linda’s husband is away on an extended business trip, and only a disembodied voice on the phone. (I didn’t look up who the actor was ahead of time, and I recommend you do the same.) 

And, one night, a massive water leak from the apartment upstairs rips a hole in Linda’s bedroom ceiling, and she and her child have to vacate for a motel, feeding tube and medical equipment in tow.

Through this, Linda tries to maintain her child’s medical appointments, and is admonished by the child’s doctor (played by the film’s writer-director, Mary Bronstein) that the child’s weight isn’t enough to allow the next surgical procedure. Linda tries to unburden herself to her therapist (played by Conan O’Brien), who has the office down the hall from Linda’s own practice — where her patients include a young mother (Danielle Macdonald), who seems to be in a worse state than her.

The only person Linda finds she can talk to is James (played by A$AP Rocky), who lives in the hotel and knows how to get weed. Soon the question becomes whether Linda will get a chance to pull herself together, or will she do down the psychic spiral that the hole in her apartment ceiling has come to represent for her.

Bronstein gives Byrne the space she needs to embrace Linda’s pain and anger from the no-win situation she’s been dealt by constantly having to subsume her needs for her daughter, her patients, or whoever is demanding her time in the moment. Unfortunately, it’s a performance trapped in a bell jar, with nowhere to go and no progress to be made. Byrne is magnificent, but that’s in part because she has to build the moments that the script never fully fleshes out for her. 

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‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 31, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and bloody images. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere' forcefully reveals the troubled soul that spurs The Boss's boundless talent

If writer-director Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” was your standard-issue musician biographical drama, it would still be a remarkable movie, mostly for the way its star, Jeremy Allen White, channels the blue-collar persona of rock star Bruce Springsteen — and delivers a strong impression of The Boss’ singing voice.

However, just as Springsteen’s fiercely loyal manager, Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong), remarks that the songs Bruce is creating in this part of his life are reaching into some dark spaces, Cooper’s movie also explores an aspect of the singer-songwriter’s life that a lesser movie may overlooked: Springsteen’s ongoing battle with depression, and how it fueled his music and added obstacles to his personal life.

The story starts in 1981, at the end of Springsteen’s successful “The River” tour. After months of performing “Hungry Heart” and “Born to Run” to thousands of fans, Springsteen needs a break from the world. He rents out a hose in New Jersey, near his hometown of Freehold, and starts working on some new songs.

Being home stirs up some tough memories, of an 8-year-old Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.) becoming an inadvertent buffer between his abusive father (Stephen Graham) and his long-suffering mother (Gaby Hoffmann). But home also gives him a chance at a new romance, when he meets Faye (Odessa Young), a single mom who was a couple years behind Bruce in high school. But the songs, and the darkness, intervene.

The songs take two paths, and at one point Springsteen makes a note that they could become a double album. Some of the songs are deeply introspective, mini-narratives of people living on the edge of American society. Others are clearly stadium-worthy rock anthems — though one of the ones we hear early, “Born in the U.S.A.,” has lyrics that prove it’s not the patriotic belter its title would suggest. 

(A fun fact mentioned in Cooper’s script, adapted by Warren Zanes’ biography of The Boss, is that the title of “Born in the U.S.A” came from a screenplay Paul Schrader wanted Springsteen to read, both to inspire a song for the soundtrack and perhaps for him to make his acting debut.)

Springsteen recorded his songs on a portable TEAC mini-studio recorder, which created a stripped down four-track cassette tape. Springsteen started out saying he only wanted to make a demo tape, and that the songs would ultimately be recorded in the studio by him and his E Street Band. As he dug in — on songs like “Highway Patrolman,” “Mansion on the Hill” and the ultimate title track, “Nebraska” — he realized that the songs sounded best on the stripped-down demo.

(A personal aside here: I am a Springsteen fan, but I was late to the party, not really getting into his music until the “Born in the U.S.A.” album in 1984. However, my first Springsteen album was 1982’s “Nebraska” — which I bought when my sister signed up for the Columbia House mail-order record club, not knowing she would have to pay full price for records after the eight-for-a-penny introductory deal.)

Strong’s best scenes as Landau showing him talking with his wife (Grace Gummer) about his consternation with Springsteen. And later holding firm against his record label, when Springsteen demanded “Nebraska” to be released without any singles for radio play, without press interviews, and without Springsteen’s face on the cover. 

White’s performance starts with impersonation — he nails the onstage Springsteen in all his sweat-soaked glory — and works his way from there. White captures a man wrestling with his past, his guilt over not protecting his mom and not being what Faye needs of him, the burning flame of an artist’s creativity, and the gnawing feeling that neither talent nor fame can cut through the depression that gripped Springsteen since boyhood.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” succeeds not only as an examination of Springsteen’s songwriting genius, but also as one of the most honest depictions of depression on film. It gets past the cliche of the man who suffers for his art, by showing us that Springsteen’s art was how he channeled his suffering and found refuge from it.

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‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some sexuality, strong language, and smoking. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Frankenstein' shows director Guillermo Del Toro at his best, capturing the horror and beauty of Mary Shelley's classic.

We’ve had so many adaptations of Mary Shelley’s classically gothic horror story “Frankenstein” — starting with James Whale’s atmospheric 1931 version — that one wonders what Guillermo Del Toro might do with it. 

Then you remember that Del Toro has been telling us, over and over again, why he would be the perfect director now to tell this story of scientific hubris and human frailty — because it contains many of the ideas he’s been playing with for decades, in “Cronos,” “MimIc,” two “Hellboy” movies, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Crimson Peak” and “The Shape of Water.”

Del Toro, who directed and wrote the screenplay, frames the story in the Arctic in 1857, on a ship stuck in the ice near the North Pole. The crew soon sees that there’s someone else out there — a haggard, haunted man running for his life. That’s Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, who tells the ship’s captain (Lars Mikkelsen, Mads’ brother) the story of how he got here.

“Victor’s Tale,” as the title card puts it, begins with young Victor (played by Christian Convery) learning medicine and anatomy from his brutal father (Charles Dance). Young Victor is much closer to his mother (Mia Goth), but when she giving birth to Victor’s brother William, Victor becomes more resentful of his father — who, despite his brilliance as a doctor, couldn’t save his wife.

As a young adult, Victor’s experiments with reanimating dead bodies earns him the condemnation of the medical establishment. He does have one admirer, though — the eccentric and rich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), who has conducted similar research in bring the dead back to life, and offers to bankroll Victor’s efforts.

Victor and Harlander scour graveyards and impending hangings to find the right parts they needs to complete Victor’s experiments. Ultimately, he builds his creature (Jacob Elordi) and brings it to life. However, Victor is ill-prepared for what comes next — and reverts to cruel parenting skills he inherited from his father.

In contrast, Harlander’s cousin, Elizabeth (also played by Goth) arrives at the castle, meets the monster and shows it compassion. That makes things worse, and soon Victor’s lab is destroyed and the creature is loose.

Del Toro paces this first 90 minutes with deliberation, building up the period details and unsettling details of Victor’s experiments. This section may feel like it’s dragging a bit, though that may be in comparison to what happens next — when Del Toro forcefully reminds us that for every creator there’s a creation, who has his own tale to tell. When that transition happens, the movie’s energy skyrockets, its purpose of reclaiming Mary Shelley’s story from decades of schlock coming into sharp focus.

I won’t say much about part 2, called “The Creature’s Tale,” other than it sets Victor’s cruelty and the creature’s humanity on a collision course. Oh, and there’s a character, played by David Bradley (Filch from the “Harry Potter” films), whose absence would have prompted riots from film buffs worldwide. 

Isaac is compelling as Victor, a brooding and arrogant symbol of humanity’s inability to leave well enough alone, in science and in life. And Goth — so good in the “X”/“Pearl”/“MaXXXine” trilogy — shows us a fragility and tragic goodness that we haven’t seen from her before.

But just as Shelley’s story is about the creature and its creator, this movie comes down to how two creators — Del Toro and Elordi — imbue this creature with life. The make-up designs capture a being that’s evolving in front of our eyes, subtly growing and changing as his indestructible body heals. Elordi works from within to find, or at least search for, the creature’s soul. It’s one of the most brilliant actor-director collaborations in ages, and makes this “Frankenstein” more than the sum of its parts.

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‘Frankenstein’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 24, in theaters; starts streaming Nov. 7 on Netflix. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Regretting You' is a mishmash of soap opera cliches about love, grief and mother-daughter turmoil — but Mckenna Grace is good in her first grownup role.

The movies based on the books of Colleen Hoover — the domestic violence drama “It Ends With Us” and now the teen- and grownup-centered romance “Regretting You” — have their value as time-savers, because people can sit through two hours of turgid melodrama instead of taking more time reading it. The number of people who can fake their way through their book clubs will go up exponentially. 

“Regretting You” starts with one bunch of teens: Morgan (Allison Williams) is at a beach party after graduating from high school, with her boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), Scott’s best pal Jonah (Dave Franco) and Jonah’s girlfriend, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) — who’s also Morgan’s younger sister. Morgan isn’t having fun or alcohol, because, as she confides in Jonah, she’s pregnant with Scott’s child.

The movie then cuts forward 17 years — rescuing viewers from the discomfort of watching those four actors playing high-schoolers, either through wide eyes or CGI de-aging. Morgan and Chris live in Chris’s childhood home, where they care for their 16-year-old daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace). Jenny is now with Jonah, who returned after a long absence, and they now have a baby boy.

Clara’s relationship with Morgan is strained in the typical teen-daughter ways. At the start of the story, the sticking point is Clara’s interest in the cutest boy in school, Miller (played by Mason Thames, from “How to Train Your Dragon” and the “Black Phone” movies) — seen by Morgan as a bad boy, entirely because his dad was the town drug dealer and is now in prison. In truth, Miller’s a budding film student who takes care of his cranky grandpa (played by Clancy Brown). 

Then tragedy strikes, when Morgan gets a call that Chris has been in a car accident. At the hospital, she learns Chris has died. Then Jonah also runs in, having been told that Jenny also was in a car crash. Quickly, they realize that they both died in the same car crash — and, more slowly, Morgan and Jonah piece together that Chris and Jenny were having an affair. Morgan forbids Jonah from telling Clara this last part, and keeping that secret further divides mother and daughter.

There are more melodramatic plot twists scattered through screenwriter Susan McMartin’s adaptation, mostly to delay resolutions that any sentient creature could figure out long before the closing credits. (One of those complications — regarding Jonah’s long-buried feelings for Morgan — prompt another flashback with Williams and Franco looking artificially younger.) 

Director Josh Boone had more to work with in adapting John Green’s equally weepy “The Fault in Our Stars,” and does what he can giving his actors, particularly Williams and Franco, something to do with their moony-eyed characters. If there’s a positive in all this soap opera, it’s the idea that the female characters, Morgan and Clara, ultimately get to chart their romantic and sexual destinies, which is a nice change.

The one redeeming thing about “Regretting You” is Mckenna Grace, who at 19 is blossoming into grown-up roles after showing talent as a child actor. (Most notably, Grace was the best part of the last two “Ghostbusters” movies, playing Egon’s nerdy granddaughter Phoebe.) Grace’s portrayal of the emotional complications of being a teenager are the one element of this syrupy movie that rings true.   

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‘Regretting You’

★★

Opens Friday, October 24, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, teen drug and alcohol use, and brief strong language. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: In 'After the Hunt,' director Luca Guadagnino provokes thought and emotion with this quietly slashing takedown of academic pretention.

Director Luca Guadagnino finds new ways to be confrontational in his new movie, the college-set drama “After the Hunt,” a bitter drama about the things privilege can and can’t get a person on a modern college campus.

At the center of the story is Alma, a professor at Yale who’s one of the stars among the school’s faculty. She’s expecting news any day now of whether she will get tenure, and her main competition is Hank (Andrew Garfield), a charismatic professor and one of Alma’s closest friends. Alma is also grooming her star student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) — who, it’s noted early on, is Black, has rich parents, and is dating a nonbinary law student, Alex (played by the talented trans actor Lîo Mehiel).

Alma’s well-ordered life — which includes her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a friendship with a psychiatrist, Kim (Chloë Sevigny) — is rocked when Maggie shows up on her doorstep one day and says something shocking: She accuses Hank of sexually assaulting her.

It’s one thing if Alma could assess this accusation in a vacuum, choosing whether she should believe Hank or Maggie. But in first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett’s sharp script, nothing is so simple. Hank has a history, we learn — and some of that history involves Alma. And Maggie’s accusation quickly becomes embroiled in the politics of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter in the hothouse environment of campus protests.

The script is predicated on something called Sayre’s Law, named for a late academic who once wrote that “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” (The quote is sometimes misattributed to Henry Kissinger.) The players, particularly Alma and Maggie, must play out their roles in this intense story, which tries to tackle political correctness, the semantics of victimhood, the demands of pampered rich kids and perpetually angry protesters.

It’s clear from the opening credits that Guadagnino wants to provoke an argument. The credits are shown in a particular typeface — Windsor Light Condensed. It’s the same typeface Woody Allen has used on his films since 1975. Evoking the now-canceled Allen in a theater of cinephiles is a choice, even a provocation. What’s not clear is what, exactly, Guadagnino wants to provoke from his audience.

The audience can and will ponder that question throughout “After the Hunt.” If we need a break from weightier thoughts, we can stop to admire the strong central performances by Roberts as the flinty academe who resents anyone upsetting her well-ordered world. But the most acting praise here goes to Edebiri, who gives a purposefully enigmatic performance — the audience isn’t sure what the truth is, or whether anyone else here ever will.

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‘After the Hunt’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 139 minutes.

Review: In 'Good Fortune,' director-star Aziz Ansari wavers from funny to overly serious, but Keanu Reeves' portrayal of a hapless angel is heavenly

Good intentions alone cannot save “Good Fortune,” a comedy-drama directed, written by and starring Aziz Ansari that tries too hard to be funny and meaningful at the same time.

Ansari plays Arj, an unemployed documentary editor who struggles to make it in the gig economy in Los Angeles. He works in a big-box hardware store, where he befriends Elena (Keke Palmer), a coworker who is trying to unionize the store’s employees.

Arj lives in his car, which is also his workspace for his other job, as a driver and body-for-hire for a delivery app. We see him waiting for cinnamon rolls at a trendy bakery, only to learn the bakery has sold out for the day — and the person who ordered his services cancels payment, even though Arj spent much of his day in line. What’s more, the bakery saved some rolls for one of its rich investors, a venture capitalist named Jeff (Seth Rogen). 

On one call, Arj ends up cleaning out Jeff’s garage — and does such a good job that he convinces Jeff to hire him as his assistant. The job puts enough money in Arj’s pocket to let him get a cheap motel. But when Arj tries to impress Elena with dinner at a fancy restaurant, one recommended by Jeff, Arj uses Jeff’s company credit card, and Jeff fires him over it.

We, the audience, aren’t the only ones watching Arj’s miserable life. So is Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), an angel who sees Arj as a lost soul — and Gabriel wants to save him. However, as his boss angel, Martha (Sandra Oh), reminds him, Gabriel isn’t that high up in the angelic organizational chart. Gabriel’s assignment is to nudge people who are texting while driving, so they don’t get in accidents.

Gabriel, on his own volition, decides to show Arj that his life isn’t so bad – by have Arj live Jeff’s life, so he can learn being rich isn’t all that great, either. Arj, however, rather likes being a rich guy in a big house and every comfort available to him. The pleas from Jeff, who’s now living Arj’s paycheck-to-paycheck existence, aren’t enough to compel Arj to go back.

Watching “Good Fortune” put me in mind of “Sullivan’s Travels,” Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy masterpiece about a Hollywood filmmaker (Joel McCrea) who decides to give up making light-hearted popcorn movies to create a serious movie about the plight of the common folk. The filmmaker learns, through his misadventures, that the common folk want to see a movie that’s fun and diverting, to make them forget about their plight for a couple of hours.

It turns out the comparison isn’t all in my head. A day after I saw “Good Fortune,” I saw Ansari was a guest programmer for TCM, showing films that he said he connected with while making his movie — and the first one up was “Sullivan’s Travels.”

Where Ansari goes off the track with “Good Fortune” is that he’s trying to make both movies — a light comedy and a serious movie about how the working class gets screwed over — and it never gels convincingly on either front. The jokes are muted by Ansari’s sober tone, and the message is undercut by the manic edge. 

Some of the problem is that Ansari is unsubtle as a performer — though he’s Daniel Day-Lewis next to Rogen, whose tech bro arrogance here feels only a degree or two off from his other roles, notably his work as the conniving Hollywood executive on Apple’s “The Studio.”

The upside to “Good Fortune” is Reeves, whose deadpan portrayal as a hapless — he uses the term “dumb dumb” — angel, discovering the joys of milkshakes and psychedelics, earns whatever laughter this movie generates. Now if Reeves could find a guardian angel who could nudge him into better projects.

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‘Good Fortune’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Truth & Treason' is a thoughtful, and unusually timely, story of a German teen showing resistance to the Nazis.

Not many people know the story of Helmuth Hübener, a German teen who worked in the shadows to resist the Nazi regime during World War II — and many of those who have told it are, like Hübener, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

One member of the faith, Matt Whitaker, directed and co-wrote “Truth & Treason,” a surprisingly tough-minded movie that tells Hübener’s story with a measured tone and strong central performances.

Hübener, played by young British actor Ewan Horrocks, is a teen hanging out with his pals, Karl (Ferdinand McKay) and Rudi (Daf Thomas), riding their bikes around Hamburg and avoiding hanging out with their Hitler Youth classmates — not necessarily because of their classmates’ fascist beliefs, but because those classmates are simply jerks. When Hübener gets a job as a gofer at City Hall, it’s not out of ambition but because his stern stepfather (Sean Mahon) made him do it.

At City Hall, Hübener gains access to a basement room filled with banned books. On the sly, he starts reading some of them, and quickly comes to learn that the propaganda spouted by Hitler and his followers is all a bunch of lies. Hübener is further driven — “radicalized” is the term some today might use — when he gets an illegal shortwave radio and listens to the BBC, and when his friend Salomon (Nye Occomore), a converted Latter-day Saint but still seen by the regime as Jewish, suddenly disappears.

Hübener starts small, typing small pamphlets denouncing Hitler and sticking them in mailboxes around Hamburg. Over time, he enlists Karl and Rudi, and the pamphlets spread around the city — ultimately drawing the attention of a Nazi official (Rupert Evans) determined to crush this paper rebellion.

Whitaker, who co-wrote the 2003 World War II drama “Saints and Soldiers,” has been fascinated with Hübener’s story for decades. He even directed a documentary about Hübener in 2002, in which he interviewed the real Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, Hübener’s friend. That dedication is evident in the intense and evenhanded approach he brings to the story.

For example, the movie doesn’t show Latter-day Saints as always doing good; notably, Hübener’s bishop (Daniel Betts), in the early going, is shown as overly pliant to German law, even putting a sign on the meetinghouse door barring Jews from entering. On the other hand, Whitaker spares a moment to consider the Nazi investigator as a family man, kind to his children, not a cardboard villain — and that approach pays off, particularly in Evans’ startling performance.

Whitaker closes out “Truth & Treason” with a quote from Alexei Navalny, the recently martyred Russian resistance leader, that says “sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is to simply speak the truth.” It’s clear Whitaker has more on his mind than a totalitarian regime that’s been gone for 80 years. The question is whether the movie’s target audience will make the connection to current events. 

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‘Truth & Treason’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 17, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images, thematic elements, and smoking. Running time: 122 minutes.