'Leave No Trace'

In the three feature films she has made in the last 14 years, director Debra Granik has excelled at creating tight, character-driven dramas about individuals at the edge of society and the end of their ropes.

She did it with her 2004 debut, “Down to the Bone,” about a suburban mom trying to maintain her life amid a wicked cocaine addiction. She did it again with “Winter’s Bone” (2010), about a Kentucky teen trying to keep her family together while hunting down her drug-dealer father. And now she does it, in beautifully rendered strokes, in the father-daughter drama “Leave No Trace.”

Adapting Salt Lake City-born author Peter Rock’s “My Abandonment,” “Leave No Trace” begins with Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie), his 13-year-old daughter, camping in the woods. It soon becomes clear that this isn’t some weekend adventure, but the way they live all the time — picking mushrooms, tending the campfire, and practicing being unseen to the human eye. It also becomes clear that their forest shelter is actually in a park, not too far from civilization in Oregon.

One day, park rangers and police find Will and Tom, and their forest idyll is over. Will is arrested, and both are treated to the county’s hospitality — until a kindly counselor (Dana Millican) sets them up with living quarters on a Christmas tree farm, with Will finding work for the farm’s owner (Jeff Kober). Tom tries to adapt to this new life, of 4H meetings and regular school hours, even though Will’s teaching has put her several grades above her age group. But Will wants to hit the road, outrunning demons about which Granik and writing partner Anne Rosellini need only drop hints.

Granik and her regular cinematographer, Michael McDonough, let the tranquil, but sometimes menacing, woods of Oregon infuse the film. The locations, starting in the wild but coming back to pre-fab suburbia, become a fever chart of Will’s melancholy — he’s at peace outdoors, restless in artificial light — and a battleground for Tom’s rapidly growing independence.

Foster (“Hell or High Water”) seems incapable of giving a bad performance — bad choices, maybe, like “Warcraft,” but never a bad performance. Here, he subtly conveys Will’s internal mental imbalance and his fierce determination to make right by his daughter.

But Granik’s other strength is in finding new talent — “Down to the Bone” was the first starring role for Vera Farmiga, and “Winter’s Bone” gave the world its first good look at Jennifer Lawrence — and she’s got a winner in McKenzie. The New Zealand native shows a vulnerability and a coltish spunk that grows as Tom emerges from her father’s shadow. McKenzie will be a name people remember, as  “Leave No Trace” will leave an indelible mark on audience’s memories.

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★★★1/2 (out of four)

‘Leave No Trace’

Opened June 29 in select markets, opens Friday, July 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City and the Megaplex Thanksgiving Point in Lehi. Rated PG for thematic material throughout. Running time: 109 minutes.

'Boundaries'

Shana Feste’s “Boundaries” found my last cinematic nerve and jumped up and down on it mercilessly.

It’s a shrill comedy about a dysfunctional family, made of characters one would cross the street to avoid if one encountered them in real life. Feste calls upon the oldest of tropes, the road movie, and deploys it in the most predictable laugh-cry-laugh-cry cycles possible. And she squanders two of the best actors we have, Vera Farmiga and the legendary Christopher Plummer.

Farmiga plays Laura, a trainwreck of a woman whose character is summed up in the literal metaphor that plays over the opening credits: She takes in stray dogs and cats, who have overrun her Seattle house and her life. She’s so messed up, she says right out, that she lies to her therapist about how messed up she is.

Aside from the many pets, Laura lives with her 14-year-old son Henry (Lewis MacDougall, from “A Monster Calls”). Henry quietly mocks his mom’s string of short-term boyfriends by drawing their portraits — always nude, based on his perception of their souls, and invariably, the guys’ “souls” have small penises. When Henry applies his art techniques to his teachers, he gets himself expelled from school.

The guy who causes Laura the most grief, though, is her father, Jack, played by Plummer. Jack, at 85, has a history as a con man, liar and petty criminal, and his unreliability is at the heart of Laura’s abandonment issues. When Jack is thrown out of another nursing home for illegal activities, namely growing marijuana in the tool shed, Laura is pressed into driving the old man from Seattle to Los Angeles, so he can live with Laura’s sister JoJo (Kristen Schaal).

Thus begins a road trip down the Pacific coast in Jack’s beat-up Rolls Royce — in this movie, even the car has to be eccentric — with Henry and several dogs in the back seat. What Laura doesn’t know is that Jack has stashed in the trunk about $200,000 worth of marijuana, which he plans to deliver to “customers” in Oregon and California along the way. Jack enlists Henry to be his “business partner,” and moviegoers can set their watches to the moment when this secret blows up in everyone’s faces.

If anything I have described above sounds the least bit pleasant or entertaining, I have failed as a critic and wordsmith. Feste (whose “Country Strong” is an underappreciated gem) saddles her cast — which briefly includes Christopher Lloyd, Bobby Cannavale and Peter Fonda — with more quirks than anyone should have to bear, and dialogue so riddled with cliches that it feels like a computer wrote it.

Worst of all, “Boundaries” gives Farmiga and Plummer, actors so talented and with screen personas that exude charm and intelligence, roles so grating that the viewer will want to slap them. They deserve so much better than what they get here, and so do audiences.

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‘Boundaries’

zero stars (out of four)

Opened June 22 in select cities; opens July 6 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City. Rated R for drug material, language, some sexual references and nude sketches. Running time: 104 minutes.

'Whitney'

There is the Whitney Houston we know from music videos, the model-thin singer with the soulful voice and the bright smile.

There is the Whitney Houston we know from tabloid headlines and reality television, battling addiction and spiraling out of control.

And there is the Whitney Houston of history, who charted more No. 1 singles than any woman ever, while blazing a trail for African-American artists to follow.

Director Kevin Macdonald ambitiously tries to capture all of these Whitney Houstons in his documentary, “Whitney,” and if he’s unsuccessful, he can lay blame at the people who didn’t want to talk about her.

Macdonald starts with the jarring juxtaposition between Houston’s sunny early hits, and the Reagan-era optimism they represent, and the unrest of the late ‘60s, which Houston witnessed first-hand as a little girl growing up in Newark, N.J. Houston’s refuge from the streets was music, singing in the church choir and driven by her mother, Cissy Houston, a longtime back-up singer to everyone from Aretha Franklin (Whitney’s godmother) to Elvis Presley. Whitney could also boast that her cousin was the singer Dionne Warwick.

Whitney’s musical career was pushed by Cissy’s ambition, and aided by her father, John Houston Jr., a Newark city administrator and political fixer. She soon signed with Arista Records, guided by the legendary Clive Davis, and her ‘80s stardom was nearly instantaneous. What the public didn’t see, according to Whitney’s brothers, was her hard-partying habits and her reliance on her best friend, Robyn Crawford.

The movie walks right up to the line of suggesting a more-than-platonic relationship between Whitney and Robyn, but backs away just as quickly. Crawford isn’t interviewed in the film, so we don’t hear her side of the story.

Silence is Macdonald’s enemy repeatedly through the documentary. Cissy Houston appears toward the beginning of the film, but talks only about Whitney’s church singing. Pop star Bobby Brown, Whitney’s husband for 14 tumultuous years, refused to discuss Whitney’s drug abuse even when Macdonald asks him point-blank. Their daughter, Bobbi Kristina, died in 2015, taking what she witnessed with her.

Macdonald — who won an Academy Award for his 1999 documentary “One Day in September,” and guided Forest Whitaker to an Oscar in “The Last King of Scotland” — has some success getting past the tabloid struggles to pinpoint the impact Whitney Houston had on the culture. 

For many, her best years were 1991 and 1992, when she wowed the nation with her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV, and made her movie debut opposite Kevin Costner in “The Bodyguard” — a movie that produced the mega-hit “I Will Always Love You.” The movie was particularly important to African-American audiences, as it pivots on an interracial love affair between Houston’s pop singer and Costner’s title character. (Houston only acted in three more movies: “Waiting to Exhale” and “The Preacher’s Wife” in the ‘90s, and a thwarted comeback role in “Sparkle” in 2012, the year she died.)

These high points in Houston’s career also reveal why “Whitney,” as a documentary, doesn’t have the same gut-punch impact that, for example, Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning 2015 film “Amy” does. “Amy” showed how Amy Winehouse mined her personal life, including her troubles with men and heroin, through her raw, confessional lyrics. Houston didn’t write her own music (the two songs that defined her in the ‘90s were penned by Francis Scott Key and Dolly Parton), and music was how she hid her problems from the world and herself.

Macdonald does provide some depth to our knowledge of Whitney Houston’s life — including a bombshell revelation about a childhood trauma — and tries to put her life and music into a broader context. Alas, “Whitney” leaves viewers with as many questions as answers, which may be exactly how the image-conscious Whitney Houston would have wanted it.

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★★1/2 (out of four)

‘Whitney’

Opens Friday, July 6, at theaters nationwide. Rated R for language and drug content. Running time: 120 minutes.

'Ant-Man and the Wasp'

The movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe contain multitudes, and can cover any genre: war movie (“Captain America: The First Avenger”), political thriller (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”), planet-hopping science fiction (the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies), fantasy (“Thor: The Dark World”) and even action comedy (“Thor: Ragnarok”).

What the newest entry in the franchise, “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” does is even more daring: It’s a mix of buddy comedy and romantic comedy, showcasing three strong women characters in a series known for boys playing with their toys.

Read the rest of the review at sltrib.com.

'Sicario: Day of the Soldado'

Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan revisits the murky world of Mexican drug cartels and American off-the-books lawmen in “Sicario: Day of the Soldado,” an exercise in movie machismo that can’t hold up to the original.

Sheridan serves up a scenario that feels like it was adapted from a Trump rally speech: A link between the Mexican cartels, immigrants crossing the border, and extremist Muslim suicide bombers. After we see one suicide bomber cornered by U.S. Border Patrol agents while attempting to cross into the States, the movie shows four more bombers hitting a Kansas City grocery store — bringing terrorism to the heartland.

Enter Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), the grizzled CIA fixer from the first movie. He gets an off-the-books assignment is to set the cartels at each other’s throats, without the U.S. government’s fingerprints being seen. The Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) and Graver’s CIA boss (Catherine Keener) give him carte blanche to gather equipment and a crew — which includes his old partner Alejandro, the vengeance-seeking assassin, again played by Benicio Del Toro.

“You want to start a war with a king, kidnap a prince,” Graver says — or a princess. He launches a plan to abduct Isabel Reyes (Isabela Moner, from the last “Transformers” movie), the 16-year-old daughter of one of the cartel bosses.

Like other recent plans involving the U.S./Mexico border, this one isn’t thought through too well — and when it goes south, Graver and Alejandro are left with an impossible ethical dilemma. And, if there’s anything we learned from the first “Sicario,” it’s that these guys lost their moral compasses a long time ago.

That’s the essential problem with this sequel: It’s missing the moral high ground that Emily Blunt’s FBI agent character brought to the first movie. It’s also missing the melancholy dread director Denis Villeneuve unearthed in every tense moment. Here, Italian director Stefano Sollima, who overcompensates with a lethal dose of macho posing from Del Toro, Brolin and Elijah Rodriguez, who plays Miguel, a Mexican-American kid who gets drawn into the cartel’s business plan.

Sheridan — recently relocated to Utah to make the New West melodrama “Yellowstone” for the Paramount Network — seems to be caught in the sequel trap of trying to outdo the predecessor, but losing the handle on what made it special. The sense of place that Sheridan invests in his best scripts (like “Hell or High Water” or “Wind River”) is absent, replaced by anonymous U.S. military warehouses and a vaguely stereotyped Mexico.

There are a few intriguing moments, mostly between Del Toro and Moner. But they are lost in a stew of blood, testosterone, repellent politics and sketchy plotting that leave “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” far behind its more thought-provoking predecessor.

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★★ (out of four)

'Sicario: Day of the Soldado'

Opens in theaters everywhere June 29, 2018. Rated R for strong violence, bloody images and language. 122 minutes.