'Fahrenheit 11/9'

When Michael Moore is angry, the result is smartly satirical political commentary. When he’s scared, as he is with his latest op-ed documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9,” his satire takes on an insistent edge — cutting right to the heart of our nation’s dire predicament.

The title is a riff on Moore’s 2004 classic “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a dissection of American panic in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The transposed numbers represent Nov. 9, 2016, the date the world woke up to learn that Donald Trump had narrowly won the Electoral College and the presidency over the popular-vote winner, Hillary Clinton.

And who is to blame for Trump’s campaign in the first place? Moore rehashes a popular theory that it was singer Gwen Stefani, because NBC was paying her more to be a judge on “The Voice” than they paid Trump to host “The Apprentice.” So Trump, Moore argues, devised his publicity stunt of a campaign, riding the escalator down into the Trump Tower lobby. The plan was perfect, until Trump opened his mouth and denigrated Mexicans as rapists and murderers, leading to NBC cutting ties with him.

Running for president, it turned out, was more lucrative, and the rallies he held nationwide stoked his ego more than being on TV ever did. Moore blames others for promulgating Trump: A weak field of Republican candidates, the Democratic establishment who propped up Hillary Clinton and thwarted a people’s campaign by Bernie Sanders (let it go, Michael), and a media that saw Trump as a ratings goldmine — and was loaded with men (Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, John Heilemann, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes) whose sexual harassment and abuse histories surfaced after Trump’s Access Hollywood tape.

After the rehash of Trump’s election, Moore — like his liberal fan base has for the last two years —vacillates between hope and despair.

The hope comes from progressive, grassroots movements Moore profiles. They include teachers going on wildcat strikes in West Virginia, Democratic primary winners like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the kids from Parkland, Fla., battling the National Rifle Association and pro-gun politicians after 17 people were gunned down in their high school last Valentine’s Day. (Trigger warning: Moore uses seldom-seen footage taken by students on their cellphones inside Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School during the shooting.)

The despair comes from political scientists and scholars who see in Trump’s behavior the earmarks of despotism. Moore isn’t the first commentator to compare Trump to Adolf Hitler, but Moore does it with style, juxtaposing Trump’s speeches to footage of Hitler in rallies — and following up with a moving interview with 99-year-old Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials.

And despair hits the red zone when Moore returns to his hometown of Flint, Mich., and details that city’s ongoing water crisis — which he labels, not without provocation, an “ethnic cleansing” committed against the majority-black population of Flint by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and his penny-pinching minions. (As a stunt, Moore sprays a tanker of Flint water over the gates of Michigan’s governor’s mansion.)

For all the talk of doom, and even fear of nuclear war, Moore always leans to the hopeful side. He still has confidence that the American people will pull the country from the brink, and “Fahrenheit 11/9” is his rallying cry for them to take action at the ballot box this November.

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‘Fahrenheit 11/9’

★★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at theaters nationwide. Rated R for language and some disturbing material/images. Running time: 129 minutes.

'Life Itself'

One almost has to admire how perfectly awful “Life Itself” is. It’s a two-hour torpedo of shameless manipulation and distrustful screenwriting, as if writer-director Dan Fogelman decided to cram all the tear-jerking pathos and storytelling contrivances of a season of his hit TV series “This Is Us” into one sitting.

Fogelman starts with some deliberately hackneyed scripting, with an overbearing Samuel L. Jackson cameo as an unreliable narrator fishing around for a hero — and ending with a therapist (Annette Bening) getting hit by a bus on a New York street.

Psych! The scene is a false alarm. The screenplay-within-a-screenplay is the product of Will (Oscar Isaac), one of the Bening character’s patients. Will is recounting his beautiful romance to Abby (Olivia Wilde), from their free-spirited college days (where Abby’s thesis was about the unreliable narrator) through marriage and the impending birth of their first child. After telling this story, with Will and the therapist walking through flashbacks like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, there’s a tragedy, and nothing is the same after.

Then there’s another tragedy. And another. And another. Each one seems to be meant to illustrate the fragility of life, and the need to make every moment count, and similar Hallmark-worthy sentiments. What they really illustrate is Fogelman’s penchant for disaster porn, and how readily he will jerk the rug out from under any character with whom we might begin to identify.

Thus is a cast of talented actors — a list that includes Olivia Cooke (“Ready Player One”), Mandy Patinkin, Jean Smart, Antonio Banderas and Laia Costa — squandered in a sprawling narrative that spans two continents and, ostensibly, 50-plus years without ever seemingly leaving 2017 and always returning to that single tragic moment. All this while making a pretentious number of Bob Dylan references.

The reasons why “Life Itself” fail so completely all tie to that tragedy, as well. Fogelman has set us up not to trust anything the movie tells us, so we never let our guard down among these characters. And since Fogelman’s convoluted script is more concerned about graphing out the characters’ tenuous connections than their honest emotions, he never leaves room to make us care about them.

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‘Life Itself’

★

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for language including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use. Running time: 118 minutes.

'The House With a Clock in Its Walls'

J.K. Rowling has spoiled us for any other story involving magic — stories like “The House With a Clock in Its Walls,” haunted-house tale for kids that gets by on silliness and the odd screen pairing of Jack Black and Cate Blanchett.

Lewis Barnevelt (Owen Vaccaro, last seen in the “Daddy’s Home” movies) is a nerdy fourth-grader in 1955, recently relocated to a small town in Michigan after his parents’ death in a car crash. He is moving to live with his uncle, Jonathan (played by Black), in a creepy old house designed in early Addams Family. Jonathan soon reveals that he is a warlock, training himself in the art of magic. His next-door neighbor, Mrs. Florence Zimmerman (that’s Blanchett), is a witch, even more skilled in magic, and the two share a friendship disguised in traded insults.

Every night, Lewis observes, Jonathan sneaks around the house, seeking something making deep and terrifying noises through the house. Eventually, Jonathan reveals that he is searching for a clock hidden in the house’s walls by its former occupant, a powerful but evil warlock, Isaac Izard (played in flashbacks by Kyle MacLachlan). Isaac died, and presumably killed his witch wife Selina (“Hamilton’s” Renée Elise Goldsberry), while concocting a plan that could destroy the world — and it’s up to Jonathan and Florence, with some help from Lewis, to find it and stop it.

Lewis, though, is troubled. He has vivid dreams about his late mother (Lorenza Izzo). And he so wants to suck up to the school tough guy, Tarby (Sunny Suljic), that he breaks Jonathan’s only house rule, and removes a book of dark magic from a locked cabinet.

Director Eli Roth — and, yes, seeing the guy who made “Hostel” and the “Death Wish” remake helming a PG-rated movie is the weirdest thing since John Waters concocted “Hairspray” — creates a colorful array of gross-out magical effects, from the puking pumpkins guarding Jonathan’s house to the topiary griffin that farts dead leaves. He and screenwriter Eric Kripke (adapting John Bellairs’ 1973 novel) also have fun devising the sharp-elbowed banter between Jonathan and Florence.

Alas, the story itself is thin, and drawing it out to movie length allows for a lot of visual-effects padding. You’d think with all the clocks in this movie, placed by Jonathan to drown out the ticking of the one in the title, that somebody would make the movie go just a little faster.

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‘The House With a Clock in Its Walls’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements including sorcery, some action, scary images, rude humor and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

'Lizzie'

One of America’s most enduring horror legends is the story of Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 in Fall River, Mass., was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe.

In “Lizzie,” director Craig William Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass examine this notorious crime, picturing it as a case of female empowerment, revenge and sexual awakening.

Chloë Sevigny plays Lizzie, a spinster at 32 who lives under the thumb of her father, Andrew (Jamey Sheridan), a hard and sometimes cruel man who punishes his daughter for the slightest diversion from his rules. One of those rules is to treat with respect his second wife, Abby (Fiona Shaw), whom Lizzie despises.

Andrew hires a new housemaid, an Irish lass named Bridget (Kristen Stewart), and the dynamic in the Borden household subtly changes. Lizzie knows that Bridget, like servant girls before her, will become a target for her father’s lecherous and abusive habits. Lizzie and Bridget grow closer, and the sexual tension between Sevigny and Stewart grows as the relationship does.

Macneill moves slowly, with deliberation and careful calibration, as he ratchets up the suspense toward the moment everyone who can rhyme “axe” and “whacks” is waiting for. The viewer may not notice this creeping dread building, until the moviegoer notices fingernails have embedded themselves in the armrest.

It helps that Sevigny and Stewart are two terrific actors, and their takes on these characters — two lonely, longing women held back by their sex and their class — is quietly compelling. They bring “Lizzie” to that expected, bloody moment, but it’s what they do after that will have the audience gasping in surprise.

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‘Lizzie’

★★★

Opened Sept. 14 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence and grisly images, nudity, a scene of sexuality and some language. Running time: 105 minutes.

'I Think We're Alone Now'

Reed Morano’s end-of-the-world drama “I Think We’re Alone Now” is one of those independent movies that starts so well, with an enticing set-up and beautiful execution, that you know in your heart of hearts that the good times won’t last to the end. And, alas, you’d be right.

As with most apocalypses in the movies, the details of why everybody’s dead are unmentioned and unimportant. All we are told, and all we need to know, is that everybody in this small town is dead — except for Del (Peter Dinklage), who lived on his own before the apocalypse anyway. 

Del lives in the town library, surrounded by books and rationing his computer battery use. He has methodically gone through every house in town, removing the dead, burying them in a field, cleaning the houses and salvaging canned food and other items. He also has amassed a sizable collection of family snapshots.

One day, while heading to another house, Del sees something on the street that shouldn’t be there: An unfamiliar car, recently crashed into a tree. In the driver’s seat is a young woman, still alive. This is Grace (Elle Fanning), and her presence disrupts Del’s carefully constructed solitude.

For a while, Mike Makowsky’s script bubbles along with the day-to-day mechanics of Grace adjusting to, and sometimes altering, Del’s meticulous routine. As captured by director and cinematographer Reed Morano — who won an Emmy last year for directing “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and has shot such indies as “Frozen River” and “The Skeleton Twins” — those moments are constantly gorgeous and evocative. And Dinklage reminds us that he is one of our most soulful actors, wearing Del’s pain like armor.

It’s too good to last. The finale devolves into a garden-variety conspiracy plot, and introduces two characters (played by Paul Giammati and Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a level of menace the movie could have done without. “I Think We’re Alone Now” is still three-quarters of a good movie, and worth the view if one adjusts one’s expectations down a few notches.

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‘I Think We’re Alone Now’

★★★

Opened Sept. 14 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language. Running time: 93 minutes.

'A Happening of Monumental Proportions'

Let me be clear: Judy Greer is a goddamn national treasure, and I will fight anybody who says otherwise.

She’s an oft-overlooked actor, whether she’s playing the cool ex-wife (in “Ant-Man”) or the cool mom (in “Jurassic World”) or the crazy secretary (in “Arrested Development”), or a hundred other roles. Judging from the cast she’s assembled for her directorial debut, the middle-school comedy “A Happening of Monumental Proportions,” she’s also supremely nice, because how else would so many talented people get together for such a labored and humor-deprived script?

The movie chronicles one day in a Los Angeles middle school, on one of the most important days (as the title implies) on the calendar: Career Day. It starts on a morbid note for the principal (Allison Janney), who finds a groundskeeper dead on the school grounds. After learning the paramedics won’t handle someone who’s already dead, she enlists her vice-principal, Ned (Rob Riggle), to lug the body to the teachers’ lounge so the kids — and the parents visiting for Career Day — don’t see it.

Elsewhere at school, nerdy new student Darius (Marcus Eckert) develops an instant crush on a classmate, Patricia (Storm Reid, from “A Wrinkle in Time”). Darius finds himself getting advice from the shop teacher (John Cho) and the music teacher, Chrisian (Anders Holm), the latter of whom is living in his car and dealing with his failures.

Meanwhile, Patricia’s dad, Daniel (played by Common) is unprepared for Career Day, because he is having a very bad day at his job at a publishing firm. The husband of his assistant, Nadine (Jennifer Garner), has learned that Daniel’s having an affair with her — and wants to arrange a time to meet and kick his ass. Also, a new corporate hatchet man, Arthur (Bradley Whitford), is intent on finding out who committed a bit of petty vandalism to the office coffee machine, and Daniel is his prime suspect.

Greer bounces amiably from subplot to subplot, and there are a few nice moments, most of them involving little Darius getting worldly wisdom from his teachers. But neither Greer nor the cast — which includes Katie Holmes, Kumail Nanjiani, and an uncredited actor whose appearance toward the end truly surprises — can overcome the limply written dialogue in first-timer Gary Lundy’s screenplay.

Still, Greer moves things along briskly, and gets us in and out in 81 minutes. She’s so nice, even she doesn’t want audiences to suffer too long through her underwhelming movie.

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‘A Happening of Monumental Proportions’

★1/2

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at select theaters nationwide, including the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for sexual content and language. Running time: 81 minutes.

'Let the Corpses Tan'

If you like your gangster movies to be bat-guano crazy, the sun-baked and blood-drenched French/Belgian entry “Let the Corpses Tan” might be right up your alley. If you prefer something a little more coherent, this movie can’t help you.

Let me see if I can summarize the story, because it kind of goes all over the place. There’s a remote villa on the ocean, with stone ruins of an ancient village, that’s the retreat of Luce (Elina Löwensohn), an artist whose prime medium is shooting paintballs at canvases.

For an out-of-the-way place, though, this villa gets more traffic than Times Square. First off, Max (Marc Barbé) has been holed up there, trying to loosen his writer’s block. A mob lawyer (Michelangelo Marchese) has been prepping the place for the arrival of Rhino (Stéphane Ferrara) and his crew, who are carrying more than 500 pounds in stolen gold bars. Along the way, Rhino and crew pick up Melanie (Dorylia Calmel), Max’s wife, their son (Bamba Forzani Ndiaye), and their nanny, Pia (Marine Sainsily), because the crooks fear they may have seen something. And a pair of motorcycle cops (Hervé Sogne and former porn star Dominique Troyes) arrive, hot on Rhino’s trail.

This is all just foreplay. The writer-director team of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani art-direct this story to within an inch of their lives, inspired by ‘70s “spaghetti Westerns” for a look of glistening bodies sweating in the hot sun — and often getting shot at by the crooks. The gunplay is so fierce and frequent that it’s easy to get confused about who’s shooting who and why.

The one standout among the hot and bothered cast is Löwensohn, who plays Luce with the same jaded sensuality Marlene Dietrich had in her later days. It’s a far cry from Löwensohn’s early days, when the Romanian actor played a vampire in Michael Almereyda’s “Nadja,” had a brief but memorable turn in “Schindler’s List,” and was Jerry’s gymnast girlfriend on an episode of “Seinfeld.”

“Let the Corpses Tan” is gorgeous to look at, from the kinetic gun battles to the stylized depictions of a gold-painted nude model invading Max’s dreams. It may not make a lick of sense, but it’s got eye candy for days.

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‘Let the Corpses Tan’

★★1/2

Opened August 31 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 21, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for bloody violence, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 90 minutes. In French, with subtitles.

'Lore'

The woodsy suspense thriller “Lore” isn’t a great movie, but it might become a significant one — because it gives hints that its creators, the writing-directing team of Christian Larsen and Brock Manwill, may be going places.

In this debut, they go into Idaho’s Cache National Forest, an area just north of the Utah border seldom used for filmmaking. It’s a beautiful, if rough-hewn territory, the sort of place one might expect a hiker to get lost and never found.

That’s exactly what has happened to Eric (Derek Grange), a 17-year-old boy who has been dealing with the breakup of his parents, Ann (Lyndsey Lantz) and Rich (Max Lesser). When the story begins, Ann is begging the sheriff (Eric Roberts, in a strategic cameo) to continue the so-far fruitless search efforts on the mountainside.

The other side of the mountain is on tribal land and outside the sheriff’s jurisdiction, as well as the subject of mystery and superstition. With the sheriff unable to help, Ann and Rich seek out John (Sean Wei Mah), an Indian guide and tracker, and apparently the only person willing to venture near the mountain’s summit. John reluctantly agrees to take them up, but warns that something up there doesn’t like to be disturbed.

The three hike up the mountain, and soon they start hearing noises and seeing lurking figures in the woods. It’s not exactly “The Blair Witch Project” in terms of chills, but Larsen and Manwill conjure up some satisfactory moments of dread and terror. 

It doesn’t all hold together for 90 minutes, and the tension dissipates a little too soon before the final credits. But these first-time filmmakers have talent, and “Lore” provides enough suspense to make moviegoers wonder what Larsen and Manwill might do next. 

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‘Lore’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violent images. Running time: 90 minutes.