'The Cakemaker'

Tender and sensual, “The Cakemaker” mines powerful emotions from an unusual love triangle involving a sensitive German baker, a widowed Israeli cafe owner, and the man who loved them both.

Israeli writer-director Ofir Raul Graizer, making a strong feature debut, begins the story in a Berlin bakery, where Thomas (Tim Kalkhof) every morning makes sweet treats for his customers. One of those customers is Oren (Roy Miller), a businessman visiting from Jerusalem. Oren tries one slice of Thomas’ Black Forest cake and is hooked. 

Soon, Oren is in Thomas’ apartment, and a romance ensues, rekindled once a month when Oren flies in for work from Israel. Oren tells Thomas he’s married with a son back in Jerusalem, and that she will never learn of this affair.

After a year, Oren’s visits suddenly stop. Thomas visits the Berlin branch of Oren’s company and learns that Oren was killed in a car accident in Jerusalem. Thomas is devastated by the news, but decides on a risky course: To go to Jerusalem, and try to meet Anat (Sarah Adler), Oren’s wife.

Thomas finds Anat running her cafe, sweating over the details of a rabbi’s inspection to have her kitchen certified kosher. Thomas, in English because he doesn’t speak Hebrew, asks Anat if she needs any kitchen help. One day, as she’s juggling the cafe with taking care of her son, Itai (Tomer Ben Yehuda), she gives him a job washing dishes, over the objections of Oren’s brother Motti (Zohar Strauss). 

Soon, though, the baking urge is too great, and he starts making cookies and cakes. His pastries are delicious, but Anat warns they may not be kosher, and his baking them in the cafe could risk her certification —and with it, her business. 

The one fault in Graizer’s story, and it’s a big one, is that we know what Thomas knows about Anat and her deceased husband — and we know it’s inevitable Anat will eventually find out, because all the clues are there. Heck, Oren’s mother Hanna (Sandra Sade) meets Thomas for all of five minutes and she intuitively knows he’s got a connection to her late son.  

Delaying the inevitable reveal, Graizer provides space for his characters, notably the shy Thomas and the harried Anat, to show themselves to each other — two people with the same Oren-shaped hole in their hearts. Kalkhof, a relative newcomer with quiet charm, and Adler, who impressed as the grieving mother in “Foxtrot,” have an unhurried chemistry that makes their intertwined grief palpable and gives “The Cakemaker” a sweet finish.

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‘The Cakemaker’

★★★

Opened June 29, 2018, in select U.S. cities; opens Friday, August 10, in Salt Lake City, at the Tower Theatre. Not rated, but probably R for sexuality and some language. In Hebrew and German, with subtitles. Running time: 105 minutes.

'Christopher Robin'

From “Mary Poppins” to “Freaky Friday” to “The Santa Clause,” Disney’s movie library is filled with stories of work-distracted parents learning that family is more important than career — but it’s jarring to see that idea applied to Winnie the Pooh’s human friend in the live-action tale “Christopher Robin.”

It’s jarring in part because of Disney’s interpretation of A.A. Milne’s stories and Ernest Shepard’s drawings that usually put Christopher Robin on the sidelines, gently tut-tutting the “silly old bear” after one of his misadventures. Here, he’s front-and-center, a harried adult played by Ewan McGregor.

Read the full review on sltrib.com.

'The Spy Who Dumped Me'

There’s a void at the core of the action-comedy “The Spy Who Dumped Me” that a joke-heavy script and the always-hilarious Kate McKinnon busting her butt in the sidekick role can’t quite overcome. Maybe it’s me, but I think what’s lacking is the “me” of the title.

The “me” is Audrey, an organic-foods store clerk in L.A., played by Mila Kunis. Audrey is such a bland drip of a character that even if you put a comedic spark plug in the role, like Melissa McCarthy or Kristen Wiig, you wouldn’t get much for the effort. Giving the role to Kunis, the least funny performer in “Ted” and two “Bad Moms” movies, is a portent of doom.

Audrey just recently got a break-up text from Drew (Justin Theroux), so she’s in the dumps on her birthday. Audrey’s live-wire best pal Morgan (that’s McKinnon) suggests they ceremonially burn all of Drew’s stuff, and Audrey does the courtesy of texting Drew to tell him. What Audrey doesn’t know is that Drew is at that moment in Lithuania, killing and trying to avoid being killed by some nasty customers. Still, Drew calls back to apologize, and to beg Audrey not to burn his stuff until he can talk to her.

The next day, Audrey is put into a mysterious van, where two intelligence operatives — Sebastian (“Outlander” star Sam Heughan), who’s with Britain’s MI-6, and Duffer (Hasan Minhaj, from “The Daily Show”), who’s in the CIA — to ask what she knows about Drew. Not long after, Drew shows up in Audrey’s apartment, follows by a lot of bullets and a naked Ukrainian assassin (Dustin Demri-Burns). Drew gets shot, but not before telling Audrey to take an item to Vienna immediately.

Within minutes, for reasons that only make sense in a comedy like this, Audrey and Morgan are on their way to Vienna. But the drop is interrupted by Sebastian and more gunplay.  (Have I mentioned this is an incredibly bloody movie for a comedy?) The chase continues through Prague, Paris and Amsterdam, with Audrey and Morgan unsure who to trust — though they figure out quickly that Nadedja (Ivanna Sakhno), a gymnast-turned-supermodel who’s also a ruthless assassin, is definitely on the “don’t trust” list.

Director Susanna Fogel (creator of the ABC Family series “Chasing Life”), who co-wrote the script with prolific TV writer David Iserson, stuffs her movie with plenty of solid gags, like the left-field lines about Edward Snowden and Nadedja’s thwarted Olympic dreams. She’s also particular in her supporting casting, like hiring Jane Curtin and Paul Reiser, and choosing Gillian Anderson as Sebastian’s no-nonsense boss.

But for all of the funny bits, many of them pulled off with childlike delight by McKinnon, “The Spy Who Dumped Me” is dragged down by Kunis’ humorless vibe. She’s a comedic black hole, sucking the funny out of too many moments of a movie that could have been an enjoyable late-summer surprise.

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‘The Spy Who Dumped Me’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, language throughout, some crude sexual material and graphic nudity. Running time: 116 minutes.

'The Darkest Minds'

Remember when dystopian young-adult action franchises — like “The Hunger Games,” “Divergent” and “The Maze Runner” — were supposed to make us forget about our real-world problems? No such luck with the hit-or-miss “The Darkest Minds,” which starts with scenes of children separated from their families and held in detention camps.

The set-up for this uncomfortable scenario is that, in the very near future that too closely resembles “Children of Men,” a mysterious disease strikes all of America’s children. Most die, but a small percentage survive with heightened abilities. The government starts to color-code children by their new powers: Green for super-smart kids, gold for ones who can manipulate electricity and blue for those with telekinetic powers are deemed safe. The reds and oranges are considered a threat, and are killed immediately.

Ruby Daly (played as a 10-year-old by Lidya Jewett) is an Orange. She soon figures out what that means: She can, like The Shadow, cloud men’s minds and make them do her will. She also can, with a touch, walk around in another person’s memories. She survives her first exam by making the doctor (Wallace Langham) classify her as a Green.

Fast-forward six years, and Ruby — now played by Amandla Stenberg, who made a splash as innocent Rue in the first “Hunger Games” movie — is about to be discovered as an Orange. A kind-appearing doctor, Kate (Mandy Moore), helps her escape the camp, under the nose of the nasty Capt. McManus (Wade Williams), whom Ruby hits with a “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for”-level mind trick.

Kate tells Ruby about a support network, The Children’s League, that is rescuing children and training them to fight the oppressive regime of President Clay (Bradley Whitford) that is imprisoning all the children. But Ruby’s not sure to trust Kate, especially when she runs into a trio of rogue kids — Liam (Harris Dickinson), a Blue and a natural leader; Charles, aka Chubs (Skylan Brooks), a brainy Green; and Zu (Miya Cech), a mute Gold. Liam used to train with the League, and convinces Ruby they’re bad news.

So Ruby joins up with Ruby, Chubs and Zu, and hits the road. Their goal is East River, a rumored safe haven organized by a mysterious figure known only as the Slip Kid. To get there, though, they must avoid the government forces and the Tracers, bounty hunters like the scarily tough Lady Jane (“Game of Thrones’” Gwendoline Christie).

There are plenty of twists on the road to East River, but they — like the attraction between Ruby and Liam — feel all-too-predictable in Chad Hodge’s script (adapted from Alexandra Bracken’s novel). Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, making her live-action debut after helming the second and third “Kung Fu Panda” movies, has a solid sense of action pacing, but her real strength is fostering a strong chemistry among her teen actors.

“The Darkest Minds” is the first installment in what Bracken wrote as a trilogy, but I have a sneaking suspicion we won’t see the second and third movies come to fruition. There’s not quite enough oomph to sustain this story into more chapters. Besides, it’s hard to get excited about end-of-the-world scenarios when we see them playing out on the news.

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‘The Darkest Minds’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence including disturbing images, and thematic elements. Running time: 105 minutes.

'Mission: Impossible - Fallout'

There’s an important question at the heart of “Mission: Impossible - Fallout”: When, exactly, did Tom Cruise become the American Jackie Chan?

Chan made his reputation in Hong Kong, and later in Hollywood, for doing his own death-defying stunts. Once, he nearly did die, filming “The Armour of God,” when he jumped to a tree branch, which broke and sent him falling 40 feet onto his head.

With the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — this one’s the sixth since the series started in 1996 — Cruise keeps raising the bar for outlandish stunts that are captured in a way that shows he’s the one doing them. Even in an age of computer-generated effects, where anything can be fudged or faked, Cruise’s dedication to keep it real is admirable, if a little bit insane.

But it’s all to the good, if it means white-knuckle entertainment like this latest installment, possibly the best of the lot, and certainly the one that captures the team dynamic and smart pacing of the original TV series.

The mission Cruise’s Ethan Hunt accepts at the start of “Fallout” is a continuation of the one that ended the last movie, “Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation.” That movie’s baddie, anarchist mastermind Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), is in custody, thanks to Ethan — and being bounced from country to country for interrogation. But his followers, who call themselves The Apostles, are working around the world, and have gotten hold of three spherical canisters of plutonium, with which they aim to carry out Lane’s master plan to build nuclear weapons.

Early on, Ethan gets his hands on the plutonium, but loses it — because he opted to save the life of his IMF teammate, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames). His boss, The Secretary, Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), wants to give Ethan and his team another chance to retrieve the plutonium. But the CIA director, Erica Sloan (Angela Bassett), will only approve if Ethan takes along her top assassin, August Walker (Henry Cavill), a mustachioed brute with a reputation for killing first and asking questions later.

Ethan, Luther and tech genius Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) are pursuing the never-seen controller of the Apostles, known only as John Lark, first in Paris and later in London. The Paris sequence is dominated by a hellacious vehicle chase through the streets of Paris, which reunites Ethan with Isla Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the seductive MI-6 agent from “Rogue Nation,” who wants Lane for her own reasons.

Throughout it all, Ethan is plagued by demons. At night he dreams of his ex-wife, Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan), dying because Ethan couldn’t protect her. And Walker is becoming convinced that years of being disavowed by his government has made Ethan snap, and that Ethan is the mysterious John Lark, in league with Lane.

Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who directed “Rogue Nation” and Cruise’s first “Jack Reacher” movie, keeps the movie humming at peak performance. The plot delivers plenty of twists and turns, which come at the viewer at a rapid pace. The movie clocks in at just under 2-1/2 hours, but never feels stretched.

Of course, the fun of a “MIssion: Impossible” movie is the action sequences, and McQuarrie sets up some doozies, Cruise throws himself into the stunt work, trading punches with Cavill, jumping between rooftops, performing his own high-altitude skydiving, and learning to fly a helicopter for a hell-for-leather aerial chase scene. (Cruise broke his ankle during one of the rooftop jumps, and the shot's still in the film.)

The realism of Cruise’s stunt work — that gasp when you realize he’s doing these things himself — is what makes “Mission: Impossible - Fallout” so invigorating. It’s great to see a performer of Cruise’s stature risk life and limb for our enjoyment, and he seems to get a kick out of doing it.

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‘Mission: Impossible - Fallout’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 27 in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense action sequences, violence and brief strong language. Running time: 147 minutes.

'Eighth Grade'

Meet Kayla. She’s smart and funny and nice, but is also insecure about all of the above — thanks to the daily bombardment of peer pressure and social-media expectations. In short, she’s the most realistic 13-year-old you have seen on a movie screen in ages — and writer-director Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” captures her awkward failures and quiet triumphs beautifully.

Played by Elsie Fisher — whose previous claim to fame was voicing Agnes, the youngest foster child of Gru in “Despicable Me” and “Despicable Me 2” — Kayla spends a lot of time in her bedroom, recording confidence-boosting videos on her largely ignored YouTube channel. The videos show a level of self-esteem she doesn’t have. She has few friends at her middle school, where she has been voted “most quiet” in the final week of school.

So Kayla is thrilled that she’s been invited to a pool party by a popular girl, Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), not knowing the invitation was given reluctantly, at the insistence of Kennedy’s mom. At the party, Kayla fights off an anxiety attack long enough to go for a swim, where she meets Kennedy’s nerdy cousin Gabe (Jake Ryan). She also learns that Aiden (Luke Prael), the boy on whom she has had a crush, has recently dumped his girlfriend — because she wouldn’t send him nude photos.

Meanwhile, Kayla takes part in a shadow program with a high-school senior, Olivia (Emily Robinson). She even hangs out with Olivia and her friends at the mall — though the fun is interrupted when Kayla spots her dad (Josh Hamilton) spying on her.

Burnham, a stand-up comedian with his own YouTube following, makes a masterful debut as a filmmaker. He captures the slings and arrows of adolescence, the high drama felt by not-quite-adults who still think everything is a matter of life and death, with an astonishing amount of empathy. He finds great humor in Kayla’s social stumbles, but also makes us feel the discomfort at her just-barely burgeoning sexuality. (Fair warning: The movie’s R rating is for “language and some sexual material,” but it’s all talk.)

Throughout the film, Burnham employs Fisher not only as a performer but as his technical advisor on living as an adolescent girl. There’s a feeling of true collaboration between actor and filmmaker, working together to talk about the complexities of growing up in a fresh, honest and funny way. The result is a movie that will make viewers laugh and wince, and a star-making performance that will win the audience’s heart.

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‘Eighth Grade’

★★★1/2

Opened July 13 in select cities; opens Friday, July 27, in more cities, including at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Century 16 (South Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some sexual material. 93 minutes.

‘Teen Titans Go! To the Movies’

There are two audiences who will be laughing uncontrollably throughout “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies”: The kids who enjoy the antics of “Teen Titans Go!” on Cartoon Network, and the comic-book obsessed adults who will get the movie’s deep-cut satire of DC Comics superhero lore.

For the uninitiated, a fast primer: The Teen Titans are five young DC superhero characters — Batman’s sidekick Robin the Boy Wonder, half-mechanical Cyborg, alien girl Starfire, animal-shapeshifting Beast Boy, and daughter of demons Raven — who have teamed up to fight bad guys. The team had their own serious-minded animated show on Cartoon Network from 2003 to 2006, then was repurposed into a sillier, kid-friendly, Nickelodeon-style animated series, also on Cartoon Network, starting in 2013. Diehard fans still pine for the old show, which is just one of the many things series creators and writers Aaron Horvath (who co-directed with Peter Rida Michail) and Michael Jelenic joke about in this movie.

The biggest, juiciest target is the whole idea of the superhero movie, of which Robin (voiced by Scott Melville) desperately wants to be a part. But only real superheroes get movies, so when Superman (voiced by Nicolas Cage), Wonder Woman (voiced by Halsey) and Green Lantern (voiced by Lil Yachty) tell the Titans they’re more jokesters than heroes, it’s a blow to their ambitions.

Robin is especially determined to convince movie director Jade Wilson (voiced by Kristen Bell) to make a movie about the Teen Titans. Real heroes, they learn, have an archnemesis — and they think they’ve found one in Slade (voiced by Will Arnett), a masked supervillain who steals a rare crystal as part of a world-domination plot. But it’s hard for the Titans to take Slade seriously as a supervillain, because they think he looks an awful lot like Deadpool. (“Look into the camera and say something inappropriate,” Cyborg, voiced by Khary Payton, tells Slade at their first encounter.)

Along the way, Horvath, Michail and Jelenic poke fun at all aspects of superhero movies: The barrage of trailers, the critical drubbing of the “Green Lantern” movie, the repetition of origin stories, the onslaught of special effects, even the celebrity cameos. They also aren’t afraid to name-drop across corporate brands, mocking the Marvel Cinematic Universe as much as DC’s.

Smartly, the filmmakers stick to the happily anarchic spirit of the “Teen Titans Go!” TV series, and keep the original voice cast — besides Menville and Payton, there’s Greg Cipes as Beast Boy, Hynden Walch as Starfire and the legendary Tara Strong as Raven. The TV-level animation is augmented with clever segments that use stop-motion felt animation and other styles.

Most importantly, “Teen Titans Go! to the Movies” sticks a pin in the super-inflated pomposity of comic-book movies and the people who get so worked up over them. It’s a reminder that these movies are supposed to be fun — and this one certainly is.

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‘Teen Titans Go! to the Movies’

★★★1/2

Opens nationwide Friday, July 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action and rude humor. Running time: 84 minutes, plus a 5-minute short, “The Late Batsby,” from the “DC Super Hero Girls” series.

'Blindspotting'

There’s plenty of lightning in “Blindspotting,” in the dramatically charged story of race and class in an ever-dynamic Oakland, Calif., unfolds — and then there’s the thunder, when the twin talents of actors and writers Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs are unleashed in full verbal fury.

Diggs and Casal play Collin and Miles, best friends since childhood on the mean streets of Oakland, currently working dead-end jobs for a moving company. Collin is on parole, with only three days left to serve, and he’s especially careful not to get himself in any situations that might send him back to prison.

Unfortunately, one of those situations is being around Miles, a hothead who sometimes likes to brandish a gun and pick fights with the upwardly mobile who are gentrifying the neighborhood. “You have to get rid of Miles,” warns Collin’s still caring ex-girlfriend, Val (Janina Gavankar). “He’s either going to put you back in jail or he’s going to get you killed.”

Adding to the conflict in Collin’s mind: One night, as he’s finishing a run in the moving truck, he witnesses a white police officer (Ethan Embry) shoot a fleeing suspect, a black man, in the back, killing him. The incident makes him miss curfew, jeopardizing the end of his probation, and presents him with a dilemma: Stay silent about what he saw, or speak out and risk the wrath of the police.

Director Carlos López Estrada, making a sure-footed feature debut, surfs that fine line Collin and Miles are navigating between the Oakland they knew and the one growing up around them. It’s a place where their old pal Dex (Jon Chaffin) is selling Miles a handgun from his tricked-out car one moment, and the next taking a fare as an Uber driver. López Estrada also veers between heightened realism and stylized fantasy, from the police shooting on the streets to a dream-sequence courtroom hearing where Collin is assailed by his demons.

Casal and Diggs, both as performers and writers, are the guiding lights of “Blindspotting.” Their sharp observations of their hometown, where low-wage strivers and wealthy young professionals bump against each other, are razor-sharp. So are their word skills, which get their fullest exposure in Diggs’ searing final soliloquy, which even leaves his Tony-winning work in “Hamilton” in the dust.

“Blindspotting” is a document of our times, of people uncomfortably close to economic devastation and racial subjugation. It’s as fresh and alive as any big city, a movie you don’t just watch but breathe in.

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‘Blindspotting’

★★★1/2

Opened July 20 in select cities, opens widely on Friday, including the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), on July 27. Rated R for language throughout, some brutal violence, sexual references and drug use. Running time: 95 minutes.