Wednesday, left (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz), presents her mother, Morticia (voiced by Charlize Theron), with an odd human artifact, in a scene from the animated “The Addams Family.” (Image courtesy MGM Pictures.)
Considering how often it’s been done — including a TV series in the 1960s and two movies in the early ′90s — making another version of “The Addams Family” shouldn’t be that hard.
Somehow, though, directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan miss the mark, with a rendition of Charles Addams’ macabre characters that’s the movie equivalent of safe-and-sane fireworks: harmless for the kiddies, but with no sizzle.
Read the full review at sltrib.com.
Young assassin Junior (played by a de-aged Will Smith) confronts his handler, Clay Verris (Clive Owen), in a scene from Ang Lee’s action thriller “Gemini Man.” (Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.)
Every superhero eventually faces his or her doppelgänger — even Will Smith, who confronts himself in the action-packed but narratively sketchy thriller “Gemini Man.”
Meeting one’s double is a great storytelling device, because it allows the main character to muse on the roads not taken, the what-ifs of one’s life — as well as letting the actor ham it up by playing variations on the character. Throw in the new technological wonders of de-aging, something such cool actors as Samuel Jackson (in “Captain Marvel”) and Robert De Niro (in “The Irishman”) have tried, and the lure is irresistible for a star like Smith.
Here, Smith plays Henry Brogan, an assassin who terminates the people the U.S. government tells him to terminate. (There’s always a euphemism, and the one here is so good I won’t spoil it.) But, at age 51 and with 72 kills to his credit, Henry tells his boss, Del (Ralph Brown), he’s going to retire to a fishing boat in Georgia.
What Henry doesn’t know at first is that the grad student now managing the marina is really a Defense Intelligence Agency minder, Dani Zakarewski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), assigned to run surveillance on Henry. The higher-ups suspect Harry’s motives for retiring, especially when he meets an old military buddy, Jack (Douglas Hodge), who knows a big secret and shares a bit of it with Henry.
Soon commandos are showing up trying to kill Henry, who drags Dani along to find someone to trust — namely, another military buddy, Baron (Benedict Wong), a hotshot pilot with a home in Cartagena, Colombia.
It’s there that Clay Verris (Clive Owen), a shady military contractor, unleashes the ultimate assassin to take down Henry. If you’ve seen any of the movie’s advertising, you know that this assassin is a 23-year-old clone of Henry, who has all of Henry’s fighting skills and instincts — but not, as yet, his demons.
Director Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) stages some hellacious action sequences. Take, as just one example, that first encounter in Cartagena, which builds gradually from a multi-leveled courtyard shootout to a high-speed motorcycle chase to a mano-a-mano battle where the younger Will Smith is pretty much throwing motorcycles at the older Will Smith. (Lee works a lot of mirrors and reflective surfaces into the scene, to drive home the theme of duality.)
Lee, continuing a habit that started with “Life of Pi” and continued with “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” has been fascinated with the technical side of filmmaking — like still using high frame rates (in this case, 120 frames as opposed to the normal 24) to heighten the crispness of the image.
But Lee seems, like fellow director Robert Zemeckis, to embrace the high-tech aspects of filmmaking while neglecting the narrative problems. And there are problems aplenty in this tag-teamed script — credited to Darren Lemke (“Goosebumps”), David Benioff (“Game of Thrones”) and Billy Ray (“Captain Phillips”) — in terms of character motivations and dumbed-down plot exposition, not to mention an idiotic late-inning twist. But as long as it looks spectacular, and Smith looks cool even when he’s literally beside himself, nothing else matters, does it?
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‘Gemini Man’
★★1/2
Opens Friday, October 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence and action throughout, and brief strong language. Running time: 117 minutes.
Astronaut Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman, right) befriends younger astronaut Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz), even though both are competing for the same spot on a space mission, in the drama “Lucy in the Sky.” (Photo by Hilary B. Gayle, courtesy of 20th Century Fox.)
You can’t blame Noah Hawley for trying, for wanting to cram every metaphor and visual device the innovative TV producer — the mind behind “Fargo” and “Legion” — can pack into his movie directing debut, “Lucy in the Sky.”
The problem is that from space, the problems down on earth, even for an astronaut wrestling with real life upon returning home, seem small and inconsequential — no matter how much polish Hawley and a talented cast apply to them.
Hawley introduces us to that astronaut, Lucy Cola (Natalie Portman), while on a spacewalk, with only a tether keeping her from floating away from the International Space Station into the limitless reaches of outer space. The feeling of being in space, on her 13-day mission, is unlike anything she has experienced in training at the Johnson Space Center with fellow mission specialist Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz), or going home to her sweet but dull husband, Drew (Dan Stevens).
Down on earth, we also get hints about the hard life Lucy lived to get where she is. Her nana (Ellen Burstyn), who raised Lucy and her never-seen older brother, is a tough old gal who drinks Crown Royal and smokes while using her oxygen machine. Lucy and Drew are also caring for Lucy’s teen niece, Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson), left behind again by Lucy’s irresponsible brother.
And we get a view of the danger on Lucy’s horizon: Hunky astronaut Mark Goodwin (Jon Hamm), who knows what it’s like to be in space — and offers Lucy an escape from the humdrum.
Hawley and screenwriters Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi took inspiration from real-life astronaut Lisa Nowak, whose 2006 cross-country drive to confront her lover’s astronaut girlfriend torpedoed her NASA career. This highly fictionalized version eschews the cheap tabloid details of Nowak’s story, presumably because Hawley wants to consider the weightier issues of love, obsession and the siren call of life in zero gravity.
Alas, Hawley doesn’t bring a lot of profound insight into the astronaut’s breakdown. He instead clutters the screen with visual tricks, like constantly shifting the screen’s aspect ratio — widescreen pans for Lucy’s space mission, a more boxy frame for the stifling claustrophobia of earth living, and other ratios just for the hell of it.’
Portman nearly overcomes those distractions to give a fearlessly unhinged performance as Lucy, who acts like she’s keeping it together even as it’s all falling apart. But we’ve seen Portman go crazy before, and better, in “Black Swan,” and “Lucy in the Sky” doesn’t do much to make us forget Portman’s Oscar-winning performance in that movie.
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‘Lucy in the Sky’
★★
Opened October 4 in select cities; opens Friday, October 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 124 minutes.
Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson, center) answers questions via radio to satisfy her captors, including the teen soldiers holding her in a South American country, in the drama “Monos.” (Photo courtesy of Neon.)
In its depiction of child soldiers growing up in a hurry, the Colombian drama “Monos” is as grim, stark and surprisingly moving as the high mountaintop where the action happens.
On a mountain in an unidentified South American country, these eight teens — five boys, three girls — perform exercises under the watchful eye of their commander, called The Messenger (Wilson Salazar), who visits occasionally to drill the individuality out of them. All that matters, they’re told, is loyalty to “The Organization,” which is engaged in a running battle with troops down the mountain.
Atop the mountain, this unit is given two assignments. The most recent one is to protect and care for Shakira, a milk cow recently conscripted by The Organization. The other is to keep their hostage, Sara Watson (Julianne Nicholson), an American engineer they call “Doctora,” alive and available to record ransom videos.
When The Messenger isn’t around, the kids have trouble maintaining their discipline. Romances, petty jealousies, drunkenness and boredom all take their toll, threatening the children’s sanity, and the lives of their hostage and the cow.
Director Alejandro Landes, working with writing partner Alexis Dos Santos, creates a spare, intense drama of foot soldiers struggling with the chains of conscription in a war they don’t understand. It’s a story that echoes with strains of “Lord of the Flies” — or perhaps the jungle oppression of “Apocalypse Now,” without Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz in charge.
Landes captures this unforgiving world with cinematographer Jasper Wolf’s beautiful images of the mountainscapes, so high up that the clouds lay below them. The score, by Mica Levi (“Jackie,” “Under the Skin”), pierces the high-altitude situation with intensity.
The wonder of “Monos” is the talented cast, almost all of them unknowns making their movie debut. (The exception is Moisés Arias, who a decade ago played Rico, comic foil to Miley Cyrus on “Hannah Montana,” and here plays Bigfoot, a pretender to leadership in the unit.) The young actors reflect both the brutality that they have endured and the vulnerability that still hasn’t been drilled out of them, and give “Monos” its depth.
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‘Monos’
★★★1/2
Opened September 13 in select cities; opens Friday, October 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence, language, some sexual content and drug use. Running time: 103 minutes; mostly in Spanish, with subtitles.
Retired farmer Hap Anderson (Barry Corbin, right) and his college-graduate granddaughter Ashley (Mackinlee Waddell) argue during their road trip, in the comedy-drama “Farmer of the Year.” (Photo courtesy Yellow House Films.)
One may forgive the independent comedy-drama “Farmer of the Year” its many faults — it apparently never met a cliche it didn’t like — because it’s just so gosh-darn charming, as if “Minnesota nice” were bottled and poured into a projector.
The character actor Barry Corbin — still familiar as the astronaut-turned-entrepreneur Maurice Minnifield on “Northern Exposure” — gets a rare chance to be a leading man, playing Minnesota farmer Hap Anderson. At 88, Hap is finally ready to semi-retire, selling his farm to his son Wayne (Robert Berdahl) and his hard-charging daughter-in-law Nancy (Michelle O’Neill). Hap offers to continue to work the farm, but Nancy is not-so-subtly pushing him toward retirement.
When Hap, living alone since his wife died, gets an invitation to the 65th anniversary reunion of his Army battalion from World War II, he makes a plan to get his RV out of mothballs and drive cross-country, with Hap’s younger brother Virgil (Terry Kiser, always and forever the cadaver from “Weekend at Bernie’s) as his traveling companion. When Virgil can’t make the trip, Hap enlists his granddaughter, Ashley (Mackinlee Waddell), a recent college graduate whose lack of employment is driving Nancy, her mother, up the wall.
The husband-and-wife directing team of Vince O’Connell (who’s also the editor) and Kathy Swanson (who wrote the screenplay) use the road trip as a chance to see such cheeseball attractions as the Mitchell Corn Palace in South Dakota. It’s also a way to peak into Hap’s emotional state, as he is confronted with his own mortality and the annoyances of old age.
Corbin and Waddell make a pleasing odd couple, the curmudgeon who blanches at dating apps up against the cellphone-addicted Millennial who trusts Google maps over talking to the locals. Their sweet-and-sour chemistry helps smooth over the bumps in Swanson’s episodic script, and makes “Farmer of the Year” a pleasant reminder that young and old still have a lot to learn from each other.
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‘Farmer of the Year’
★★★
Opens Friday, October 4, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language and mature themes. Running time: 103 minutes.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, who transforms into Gotham City’s iconic criminal, in “Joker.” (Photo by Niko Tavernise, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.)
There’s a lot to unpack in “Joker” — about the roots of psychopathy and the thrill of violence, topics director Todd Phillips is unprepared to handle in his oppressively gritty and emptily self-important take on Batman’s greatest nemesis.
Let’s start with the positive, which is Joaquin Phoenix’s no-holds-barred performance as Arthur Fleck, a forgotten man in Gotham City. Arthur feels ignored by his social worker (Sharon Washington), who prescribes the meds he takes ever since being released from Arkham State Hospital, and covers his pain by convulsive, involuntary laughter. He even has a laminated card to explain this condition to strangers.
Read the full review at sltrib.com.
Renée Zellweger plays Judy Garland, late in her tumultuous career, in the biographical drama “Judy.” (Photo by Daniel Hindley, courtesy of LD Entertainment and Roadside Attractions.)
In the biographical drama “Judy,” the legendary singer and actress Judy Garland gets the last word — something a hard life, and an overdose of barbiturates, denied her when she died on June 22, 1969, 12 days after her 47th birthday.
And Renée Zellweger, in the best performance of her career, gets a chance that Judy never got, to show what an older actress at the top of her game can do with a meaty role.
Zellweger plays Garland in the final year of her life. When the film begins, it’s near Christmas 1968, and Judy is performing a low-rent gig with her two younger children, Lorna and Joey Luft. When they arrive at Judy’s regular hotel, the manager tells her she’s in arrears and her suite has been rented to someone else. Her last refuge is the kids’ father, and Judy’s ex, Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) — who uses Judy’s current homelessness to demand full custody of the children.
Broke, and unemployable in the States because of her past unreliability, Judy takes the one gig available: A string of concerts in London. She’s unsteady at first, at least in the eyes of her minder, Rosalyn (Jessie Buckley) — but once she hits the stage, that amazing contralto voice kicks in, and all signs point to the comeback Judy has sought for years.
But not all the shows go according to plan. Alcohol, hecklers, and Judy’s crippling self-doubt — exacerbated by pills — leave her a shambles, causing the producer, Bernard Delfont (Michael Gambon), to consider pulling the plug. Further complicating Judy’s life is the arrival of a new boyfriend, nightclub owner Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), who romances Judy while also trying to use her name to secure a deal stateside.
Director Rupert Goold — primarily a stage director, though his 2015 movie debut “True Story” with James Franco and Jonah Hill was noteworthy — intercuts Judy’s late-‘60s troubles with flashbacks to the late 1930s, when a 16-year-old Judy (well played by 17-year-old newcomer Darci Shaw) learned the harsh truth about Hollywood. That truth was that she couldn’t do anything fun, like eat a hamburger or go on a date, without the permission of MGM’s dictatorial boss, Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery). It was Mayer’s concern with Judy’s weight that led to a lifetime of diet pills and sleeping pills.
Tom Edge’s script, adapting Peter Quilter’s play “End of the Rainbow,” indulges in the biopic cliches of momentary highs and depressing lows. It’s not as drearily literal as “Bohemian Rhapsody,” nor as fantastical as “Rocketman”; it most closely resembles “My Week With Marilyn,” which encapsulates its subject’s late-career period with a possibly career-saving job in England.
But even within those old tropes, there are moments of grace. There’s a sweet scene when Judy meets two devoted fans (Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira), an old gay couple, and ends cooking them eggs in their flat. And there’s a heartbreaking phone call Judy makes to Lorna (played devastatingly by Bella Ramsey, known to “Game of Thrones” fans as Lyanna Mormont).
Mostly, though, what carries “Judy” along is Zellweger’s performance. Yes, she gets all the physical moves — the darting doe eyes, the pursed lips, the nervous tics. And Zellweger even sings Judy’s songs, nailing the emotional beats without resorting to lip-synching the originals.
But there’s more to Zellweger’s performance than mere impersonation. Zellweger reveals Judy’s fragility that doomed her, but also the passion for performing, for being Judy Garland on a stage no matter the cost, that made her an icon. In digging into Judy’s persona, Zellweger makes “Judy” her own.
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‘Judy’
★★★
Opens Friday, September 27, at theaters nationwide, including Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, thematic content, some strong language, and smoking. Running time: 118 minutes.
Marchánt Davis stars as Moses al Shabaz, a Miami preacher who becomes the target of an FBI terrorism sting, in the satire “The Day Shall Come.” (Photo courtesy of IFC Films.)
It’s so hard to satirize government ineptitude and arrogance these days, when cable news and Twitter feeds are reporting the real thing on a minute-by-minute basis — but the dark comedy “The Day Shall Come” manages to find a few laughs in absurdities that haven’t yet come true.
In Miami, Moses al Shabaz (Marchánt Davis) leads a small congregation — three male followers, plus his wife Venus (Danielle Brooks) and their daughter Rosa (Calah Lane) — with promises of revolution against the “accidental dominance of the white race.” He aims to do this by farming in the city, and summoning the dinosaurs with an air horn. One of his strongest tenets is that he and his followers will not, under any circumstances, use guns.
Meanwhile, the Miami branch of the FBI is looking to nail some would-be terrorists, after the last sting operation yielded a guy too afraid to dial the cellphone to detonate the fake bomb an FBI informant sold him. The station chief, Andy (Denis O’Hare), needs a quick win — so he jumps at the suggestion of a junior agent, Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick), who has been watching Moses’ Facebook Live videos, in which Moses and his men stage fake drug deals to rip off trust-fund idiots.
So Kendra sets up two of the FBI’s Arab-looking informants, Reza (Kayvan Novak) and Nura (Pej Vahdat), to try to entice Moses with an offer of cash and AK-47s. Moses, needing cash to keep his landlord from evicting his fledgling movement, is willing to take the deal, which angers Venus. “You’re being played, Moses,” she says. He replies, “Maybe I’m playing them, while they’re playing me.”
Director Chris Morris and his writing partner Jesse Armstrong — both reprising their duties from the scathing 2010 jihadist satire “Four Lions” — ratchet up the stakes, and the weirdness, by throwing in some fake nukes, a white supremacist (Jim Gaffigan), and a backstabbing FBI agent (Adam David Thompson) trying to poach Kendra’s case.
Morris’ hand isn’t as steady as in “Four Lions,” and the satirical bite doesn’t have quite the pitbull-like grip. The callousness of the FBI, puffing up low-level criminals into so-called “terrorists” while letting its own informants get away with real crimes, is a rich target for satire, and Morris hits more than he misses.
In a cast with talents like Kendrick and O’Hare, the newcomer Marchánt Davis is a true discovery. Davis extracts the humor and the pain of this unbalanced holy man, to the point where the audience starts rooting for him to get away with whatever crime he’s not really doing.
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‘The Day Shall Come’
★★★
Opens Friday, September 27, at theaters nationwide, including Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 88 minutes.