Review: 'Fjord' is a harrowing drama about a Christian family at odds with Norwegian law, with great performances but mixed messages

I can’t think of a movie that was so good and yet aggravated me as much as “Fjord,” Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s Palme D’Or-winning drama that pits two opposite forces — liberal Norwegians and conservative Christians — and gives the audience reasons to dislike both of them.

The family details we get early here is that Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu — played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve — have moved from his home country of Romania to her birthplace, a small town in Norway. (As it happens, those are the birth countries of the two actors.)

Mihai and Lisbet have five children, including a year-old baby, and have raised them in an evangelical Christian faith. Even so, Mihai and Lisbet befriend their next-door neighbor, Mats Halberg (Markus Scarth Tønseth), the liberal headmaster at the town’s school, and his wife, Mia (Lisa Carlehed). The Gheorghius’ oldest daughter, Elia (Vanessa Ceban), quickly becomes close with the Halbergs’ rebellious daughter, Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen).

When a gym teacher notices bruises on Elia’s back and neck, it sets in motion what becomes a nightmare scenario for Mihai and Lisbet. Several teachers call in Child Protective Services, who act quickly to remove the children — even the baby, who Lisbet is still breastfeeding — from the Gheorghius’ house and to live with foster parents.

Mihai is convinced the CPS caseworker, Gunda (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), and her liaison at the school, Frida (Lisa Loven Kongsli), are prejudiced against hardcore Christians. Though even their church’s Norwegian members warn Mihai not to fight the CPS, whose power to trample on families’ civil rights is unquestioned in Norwegian law and society. Even the couple’s first lawyer (Anne E. Kokkinn) quits after one meeting, because she refuses to listen to Mihai’s side of things. 

Their neighbor, Mia, who’s a lawyer, starts to realize that the case isn’t so simple — because of a language barrier with the younger children, and Frida and Gunda’s biases — and offers to help the Gheorghius in civil court to get their children back. By then, Mihai is fed up and finds another way to fight the system.

What keeps us engaged with the Gheorghiu parents are the actors playing them. Stan, best known for his work in the Marvel universe, gives a breathtaking performance as the religiously rigid Mihai, and Reinsve counters heartbreakingly as Lisbet, who’s caught between the people she grew up with and her love for her husband and her children. (Stan and Reinsve have shown great chemistry before, in the 2024 dark comedy “A Different Man.”)

Mungiu’s “plague on both your houses” attitude about the two sides here — the Gheorghius’ strict Christianity and the Norwegians’ equally dogmatic governmental protectiveness — ends up being more infuriating than illuminating. Presenting both sides fairly isn’t the same as showing each as being wrong.

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‘Fjord’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters. Rated R for language, full nudity and self-injury. Running time: 146 minutes; in English and Norwegian and Romanian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Everest: The Other Side' beautifully shows us the work behind climbing Mt. Everest, but leaves open the question of "why?"

I don’t know if mortals are supposed to understand why there are some people who pursue extreme physical challenges. The closest we have to understanding such people is the husband-and-wife documentary team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, and even for them the figures chronicled in “Everest: The Other Side” are on the edge.

The couple won an Oscar for their documentary portrait of rock climber Alex Honnold in “Free Solo,” and that familiarity with the climbing world comes into play with this look at Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, who shared a dream to ascend Mount Everest the hard way — up the steep, snow-covered north face of the world’s highest mountain.

Morrison tells us that some 13,000 people have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest in history, almost all of them from the classic southern route from Nepal. Only five people, we’re told, have done it from the other side — mostly because of the steep terrain,  but also because the Chinese government owns the north face, and gives out permits sparingly.

Morrison and Nelson met while on Everest, and as partners raised Nelson’s two boys and went out on climbing expeditions. They shared a dream to climb the north face and ski down it, something no one has ever done. (There was a 1975 documentary, “The Man Who Skied Down Everest,” about Japanese climber and skier Yuichiro Miura, who went down the south face on skis in 1970. He just turned 94.)

The new movie shows Morrison and Nelson training for that climb when in 2022 Nelson was caught in an avalanche and killed on Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest mountain, in the Himalayas. After a grieving period, Morrison decides he’s going to complete the climb he wanted to do with Nelson — and he asks Chin to be his climbing partner. 

Before Chin says yes, the movie gives us perhaps the most real moment ever: A conversation between Chin and Vasarhelyi, where she asks her husband how many of their friends are now dead. 

Still, Chin joins Morrison on this climb, and that’s what the rest of the movie shows.

The filmmakers take pains to show the thousand little details that go into an Everest climb, any one of which could go wrong on an expedition team. The two most important things, the movie shows us, are a good team of Nepalese guides who set up the ropes and camps that get people up the mountain, and the spotters who radio in details of the land they’re hitting next — and the weather that’s also on its way.

And with a crew like this, there’s a third group: The ones filming it all, and capturing spectacular views of the climb. Chin and Vasarhelyi have an uncanny talent for finding or creating those moments, and to not get int he way too much when putting them together.

“Everest: The Other Side” never satisfactorily answers the question of why these climbers do it — when asked, they either hem and haw or fall back on Sir Edmund Hillary’s famous “because it’s there.” But if the movie can’t uncover the why, it excels at depicting the how, and that may be enough.

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‘Everest: The Other Side’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic material and brief strong language. Running time: 110 minutes; in English and Sharpa with subtitles.

Review: 'The Only Living Pickpocket in New York' gives John Turturro the showcase he's long deserved, and he steals every moment

Like most movie fans, I’m the sort who sees John Turturro in a tiny role in a lackluster movie and wishes somebody, anybody, would give this boundlessly talented actor a meaty role and just let him cook. Writer-director Noah Segan’s “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is the showcase for Turturro’s subtle talents that we’ve been waiting for.

Turturro plays Harry, who is the pickpocket of the title. Harry’s an old-school thief, smoothly lifting wallets and jewelry from people on the subway or the street, then bringing his purloined goods to his friend Ben (Steve Buscemi), a fence who runs a pawn shop. Ben has a niece, Eve (Victoria Moroles), who knows the new computer-driven crime, but Harry prefers to keep it low-tech and human. And after a day of picking pockets, he goes to the senior center to pick up his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), who’s in a vegetative state.

One night, Harry sees an arrogant young man, Dylan (Will Price), driving a classic 1969 hot rod he doesn’t deserve. Dylan seems like a perfect mark, so Harry gets into his car and takes a gym bag. Inside, he later finds, are a wallet with a large stack of $100 bills, an imposing-looking handgun, and a memory card that Harry has no idea what to do with. But Harry quickly figures out that Dylan is the last person he should have hit: A member of a certain kind of New York family, the kind that doesn’t like to be robbed.

Dylan and his young thugs soon find Harry and threaten him and Rosie if he doesn’t bring back one item: The memory card. Thus begins Harry’s journey through four of the five boroughs, both to find the missing card but also to tie up some loose ends, since he knows there’s no coming back from this one.

Among those loose ends are Warren (Giancarlo Esposito, for those seeking a “Do the Right Thing” reunion), a detective who’s wanted to put away Harry for decades, and a character played by Tatiana Maslany that I will not describe further. 

Segan neatly blends a thriller’s pacing with a slightly laconic love letter to New York City’s urban beauty and idiosyncrasies. Mostly, though, Segan gives Turturro a chance to show the gritty side, the romantic side and the heroic side we always knew he had. It’s the best platform Turturro has had to show off his acting skills since, perhaps, “Quiz Show.” 

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‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 88 minutes.

Review: 'Gentle Monster' is a drama in which star Léa Seydoux does everything right while so much around her goes wrong

The French actress Léa Seydoux gives a compelling performance in “Gentle Monster,” writer-director Maria Kreutzer’s cross-European drama that manages to get so much wrong about the disturbing subject matter in the story around her.

(Consider this your one warning: I can’t discuss this movie adequately without revealing an early plot point on which the entire movie pivots. It would be considered a spoiler only to the Netflix marketing department, who are working diligently to keep this plot point hidden.)

Seydoux plays Lucy Weiss, a French pianist and experimental musician, who sells out concert halls with her avant-garde interpretations of pop songs. Her mother, Eloise (the great Catherine Deneuve), is also a famous pianist, we’re told, but Lucy’s work is categorized as a rejection of her mother’s classical style. This doesn’t turn out to be important in the story, but it’s an interesting distraction from what’s coming.

Lucy lives in a country house outside Munich, with her husband, Philip (Laurence Rupp), a German documentary filmmaker, and their son, Johnny (Malo Blanchet), who’s about 10. One day, Lucy wakes up to the sound of Munich police serving a search warrant on Philip, taking all of his computers and other devices — on suspicion of trafficking in child sexual assault material. (The Munich cops still use the phrase “child porn,” which advocates have urged writers to avoid, because the word “porn” implies consent and children cannot give consent at their age.)

The rest of the movie largely shows Lucy trying to sort out in her mind whether her husband, the father of their child, is capable of such horrible actions. She has to listen to his excuses — he was doing research for a documentary, or he was dealing in such images for the money — and determine what’s a lie, while willing herself to ask the most unthinkable question: Did Philip ever take or distribute images of Johnny?

Meanwhile, Kreutzer invests much of the film’s running time with the lead police detective, Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), Her scenes involve a complicated home life, centered on her aging father (Sylvester Groth) and the live-in nurse (Patrycja Ziółkowska) who threatens to quit because Dad won’t keep his hands to himself.

Seydoux, known on both sides of the Atlantic for such films as “Blue Is the Warmest Color” and “No Time to Die,” gives a stunning performance, channeling the confusion, grief and rage of a woman learning that the man she raised a son with isn’t at all who she thought he was. Seydoux also brings out the best from Deneuve, that French institution, who at one point here gives one of the best double-takes I’ve ever seen. 

But Kreutzer, whose best-known movie to date was the Vicky Krieps-starring period piece “Corsage,” overloads this modern story with extraneous distractions from Lucy’s main path. Between the muddled message of contrasting Lucy’s life to Elsa’s and the self-congratulatory atmosphere that comes in a movie tackling a disturbing subject like this one, “Gentle Monster” is as heavy-handed as a TV weepie and about as unpleasant. 

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‘Gentle Monster’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters. Rated R for sexuality, graphic nudity and some language. Running time: 114 minutes; in English, French and German, with subtitles. 

Review: 'Wildwood' is a stop-motion epic, creating an epic fantasy world that's massive and intimate at the same time

Through five movies, from “Coraline” to “Missing Link,” animation fans have grown to expect a unique kind of craftsmanship from Laika, the Oregon-based stop-motion studio that produces handcrafted movies in a computer-driven world.

With the studio’s sixth and easily most ambitious movie, “Wildwood,” director Travis Knight (“Kubo and the Two Strings”) and his Laika team have outdone themselves by creating a fantasy on a level of “The Chronicles of Narnia” and using their little plastic-and-fabric figurines to create something both epic and intimate.

Our heroine, Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, formerly of “Andi Mack”), is a 12-year-old girl living in Portland, Oregon, with her baby brother, Mac (voiced by the director’s son Arthur), and their granola-ish parents (voiced by Maya Erskine and Jake Johnson). When the parents assign Prue to babysit Mac, they give one command: Don’t leave the house. Prue, like most kids, disobeys and sticks Mac in a wagon behind her bicycle and heads into town, where she runs into her very nerdy classmate, Curtis (voiced by Jacob Tremblay).

Prue takes Mac to a playground, and is surprised when dozens of crows descend on the jungle gym. (Yes, comparisons to Hitchcock’s “The Birds” are inevitable, and the set-up remains as terrifying as ever.) Suddenly, the crows take Mac airborne, and Prue must pursue them to the bridge at the edge of town, which leads to what has been called “the Impassable Wilderness.” At first, it lives up to its name, but Prue and tagalong Curtis are allowed inside.

What they find is an army of coyotes, dressed in Napoleonic military uniforms. The coyotes serve the Dowager Princess, Alexandra (voiced by Carey Mulligan), who has designs on reshaping the forest to something dark and foreboding, for reasons that will present themselves in due course.

Prue’s journey to find Mac leads her through a bureaucratic rabbit warren, and eventually to The General (voiced by Angela Bassett), a giant hawk who commands the kingdom’s birds (except the crows). Prue also finds Wildwood’s wisest woman, Iphigenia (voiced by Tantoo Cardinal), who helps her understand the magic-fueled circumstances that led to her and Mac’s birth. 

Meanwhile, Curtis is taken down a different path. First drafted into Alexandra’s coyote army, Curtis eventually falls in with her rivals, the Bandits, and their swashbuckling leader, Breandan (voiced by Mahershala Ali). 

The voice cast is extraordinary. Besides the names I’ve already mentioned, there’s Awkwafina, Charlie Day, Tom Waits, Jemaine Clement, Len Cariou, Blythe Danner and Rob Delaney. That’s an impressive roster for any animated movie, and Knight deploys them expertly.

Screenwriter Chris Butler — who directed “Missing Link” and co-directed “ParaNorman” — has expertly adapted “Wildwood” from the children’s book series written by Colin Meloy (frontman for The Decembrists) and illustrated by Meloy’s wife, Carson Ellis. Meloy and Ellis are Portlanders, too, and the sense of place they and the Laika team bring out is note-perfect.

The most remarkable thing about “Wildwood” is its massive sweep. The grand finale is a battle sequence that would put “Braveheart” to shame, with hundreds of animated animals taking up arms and sacrificing their lives. (The PG-13 rating is to be taken seriously for that reason.) The stop-motion animation, augmented with some computer work, is intense, overwhelming and intimate in ways that even live-action films have difficulty achieving.

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‘Wildwood’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong fantasy violence/bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'A Talent For Murder' brings Helen Mirren as a crafty novelist together with Alden Ehrenreich as a devious underling for clever gamesmanship

The key thing to know about “A Talent for Murder” is that Helen Mirren plays the famed author Patricia Highsmith, but it’s not a biopic — but instead a completely invented thriller in which the writer of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” matches wits with a Ripley-like figure in a conflict over her life and legacy.

Set in 1995, the movie finds Highsmith alone in her home in Switzerland, smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch and dismissive of humanity in general — and, in particular, of Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), who has come from her New York publisher eager to get her to sign a contract to write a sixth book in her “Ripley” series.

Highsmith has no interest in revisiting her social-climbing sociopath, no matter how fat a contract she’s offered. Ridgeway appeals to her vanity, telling her he knows more about Highsmith’s books than anyone other than herself — and that he could give her a premise for another Ripley book, something interesting enough that she would want to finish it.

What Ridgeway suggests is that Ripley meets a beautiful American heiress, and devises how to marry her and klll off the relatives standing between her and her inheritance. The heiress bears the same name, Clementine Balfour, and likeness as the young woman (Olivia Cooke) Ridgeway met on the train to Switzerland. 

This resemblance between Ridgeway’s story and Ripley’s allows director Anton Corbijn (“The American”) and screenwriter Joanna Murray-Smith (adapting her play “Switzerland”) to blur the lines between parallel narratives — and to show how Ripley’s influence, and Highsmith’s needling, could change how Ridgeway goes about wooing the “real” Clementine.

The twin connections between Ehrenreich and Cooke make for some steamy scenes, but the real explosive chemistry is between Mirren’s Highsmith and Ehrenreich — as both Ridgeway and Ripley. The movie makes us consider how much control Highsmith has over her elusive Ripley, until you realize this is Highsmith and this is Mirren, and control is something neither woman is likely to give up. 

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‘A Talent for Murder’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 23, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, some violence and language. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'You Can See Everything' brilliantly upends what we think about Elizabeth Holmes, true-crime narratives and even documentaries themselves

No matter how much you know, or think you know, about Elizabeth Holmes — now serving time in a Texas minimum-security prison for fraud in connection with her Theranos blood-testing device — the perception-bending documentary “You Will See Everything” will upend your ideas about her, the true-crime genre and the very nature of documentary storytelling.

The quick way to describe it is that the title is true, but also inadequate to what directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim deliver.

Fielder, known for his comedy work on “Nathan For You” and his investigatory docu-series “The Rehearsal,” was invited, we’re told initially, to bring a movie crew to capture Holmes’ life in 2023, in the month before she must report to the Bryan Federal Prison Camp in Texas, where she’s now serving more than 11 years for defrauding investors (though not defrauding patients, which Holmes says is an important distinction).

Fielder takes an on-camera role in the documentary, interviewing Holmes and her partner, tech entrepreneur and hotel heir Billy Evans, in a rental house on the Pacific coast near San Diego. They are there with their son, William, not yet two years old during filming, and their two-month-old baby daughter — named Invicta, according to People magazine, but referred to here as Ivy. At some point, Fielder takes up Holmes’ and Evans’ offer to sleep in the guest house, which allows near-total access. Or at least the appearance of it.

During the weeks in the rental, Fielder talks to Holmes and Evans about Theranos, and their stated hopes of trying to rebuild the company and prove that their one-drop blood-testing technology can actually work. Are they serious? Or is Holmes continuing the con that put her in prison? Fielder doesn’t know, and every time he tries to probe a bit deeper, something interrupts the conversation — usually it’s Evans telling the crew that Holmes has to be somewhere, or help get the kids to bed. 

What Fielder does get out of Holmes complicates the narrative that’s been built up around her by news reports, true-crime podcasts and Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-winning portrayal of her in the 2022 Hulu miniseries “The Dropout.” By the time Holmes goes to prison, about halfway through this nearly three-hour movie, Fielder has more questions than answers.

The second half of the film shows Fielder and Oppenheim, the unseen but equally important collaborator, as they try to find those answers. 

There is no force on earth that would make me spoil what happens next. I will say this much: What Fielder and Oppenheimer do is brilliant, creating some of the purest cinema I’ve ever seen.

The questions raised in “You Can See Everything” go beyond Elizabeth Holmes and a particular criminal case. Fielder and Oppenheim get us thinking about our fascination with narratives, and how we process the story when facts don’t readily fit those narratives. It’s a movie that could, if you allow it, change the way you see everything.

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‘You Can See Everything’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some graphic nudity. Running time: 174 minutes.

Review: 'Sense and Sensibility' finds Jane Austen being adapted in an earthy, naturalistic telling of the Dashwood sisters' romances

In reviewing director Georgia Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility,” one must first address the genteel elephant in the room: The Ang Lee-directed, Emma Thompson-written 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s first novel.

The Lee/Thompson version was a sublime adaptation, with a stately look in which every set and costume looked perfect — a lovely backdrop for Austen’s precise language and understated emotions. Nothing will dislodge that movie from my heart, but I find myself making some room for this earthy, sensual take on Austen’s tale of financial and romantic troubles.

The new film’s rugged spine remains the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones in the Thompson role) and Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles, filling the part that introduced the world to Kate Winslet). Their father have left Mrs. Dashwood (Catríona Balfe) and her three daughters — younger Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) rounds out the family — reliant on others’ goodwill for continued lodging. That goodwill falls short when Fanny (Stacy Martin), the greedy wife of their the girls’ uncle John (Tom Brooke), sets her sights on their house. 

The Dashwood women move to a more affordable cottage in Devonshire. (It’s fascinating to see how much real estate plays into Austen’s work.) Fanny’s brother, Edward Ferrars (George Mackay), is a regular visitor, and he and Elinor seem to get along well — though Fanny warns that their mother expects Edward to marry a woman with more money. Meanwhile, Marianne, whose ideas of romance are less practical than Elinor’s, finds herself drawing the attention of the much older Col. Brandon (Herbert Nordrum), but is soon smitten by the dashing John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), until he’s sent to London by his family. 

Oakley (whose previous film was the 2022 lesbian drama “Blue Jean”), working off an elegantly spare script by first-timer Diana Reid, emphasizes the Dashwoods’ closeness to the natural world around them. Oakley gives us a sense that the girls, Marianne particularly, would be as happy living in the woods around Devonshire as they would inside their cottage. 

This “Sense and Sensibility” draws its main strength from the sisterly bonds among Elinor, Marianne and Margaret — particularly in the way Elinor sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of helping the headstrong Marianne when her heart is repeatedly broken. The relationship allows Edgar-Jones (“Twisters,” “I Heard the Crawdads Sing”) to display her understated charm, but mainly gives Creed-Miles enough room to give an expressive performance I believe viewers will fall in love with.

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‘Sense and Sensibility’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some thematic elements, partial nudity and brief violence. Running time: 131 minutes.