'Juliet, Naked'

If there’s anyone who has turned fan obsession into a wellspring of observant comedy, it’s novelist Nick Hornby, whose has seen successful adaptations of his books “High Fidelity” (with John Cusack as a morose record-store owner) and “Fever Pitch” (twice, once with Colin Firth as a luckless Arsenal supporter, the other with Jimmy Fallon as a constantly disappointed Red Sox fan). 

With “Juliet, Naked,” in which director Jesse Peretz (“Our Idiot Brother”) tackles a Hornby novel, fan obsession, self-reinvention and romances old and new combine for a charmingly off-kilter comedy.

Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) has two loves in his life: His longtime girlfriend Annie (Rose Byrne), and the musical genius of Tucker Crowe. Duncan maintains a fan website dedicated to Crowe, a reclusive singer-songwriter who recorded one album in the ‘90s, “Juliet,” and then disappeared from view. On the website, Duncan trades theories with other fans about the hidden meanings in each of the album’s songs, and rumors about the musician’s whereabouts.

As she approaches 40, Annie realizes that Duncan, with whom she has lived for 15 years, is more in love with Tucker Crowe’s mystique than he is with her. Who could blame him, Annie tells her lovelorn lesbian sister Ros (Lily Brazier), bemoaning the fact that she’s done little with her life other than maintain the tatty local museum she inherited from her late father. 

One day, a CD arrives in the mail, labeled “Juliet, Naked.” Annie finds it before Duncan arrives home, and impulsively listens to it. The disc turns out to be a never-released solo acoustic demo, recorded by Crowe. Annie’s not impressed, so when Duncan listens to it and declares it a masterpiece, Annie counters by posting a pseudonymous, and negative, review on Duncan’s website.

Then something unexpected happens: Annie gets an email from the long-missing Tucker Crowe (played by Ethan Hawke), agreeing with her. Soon Annie and Tucker are trading emails, which get quite personal. That’s when Peretz — in a script written by his sister Evgenie, and by married screenwriters Jim Taylor (“Sideways”) and Tamara Jenkins (“Slums of Beverly Hills”) — gives us the details of Tucker’s not-so-mysterious and somewhat sad life.

When Peretz introduces Tucker into the mix, it throws a much-needed wrench into what was a gently melancholy story of a stagnant romance. While Tucker is forced to reconcile his hard-living past with his ramshackle present, as he’s confronted by his long-estranged daughter Lizzie (Ayoola Smart), it shakes up Annie, helping her realizing Duncan and her sleepy little town aren’t the only options in her life.

O’Dowd is hilarious as the arrogant academic who has inflated Tucker’s one artistic product into the second coming of Bob Dylan. Hawke is excellent at a role that’s becoming his signature, the jaded middle-aged ex-hipster.

Byrne, easily one of the most talented comic actors of our age (see “Bridesmaids” and “Spy” for examples), shines here. She makes every moment of Annie’s emotional awakening, as she enjoys  Tucker’s attention and the thrill of keeping it from the one person who would freak out over that information, both funny and fully rooted in truth. It’s a thoroughly delightful performance, one that gives “Juliet, Naked” a jolt of comic energy.

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‘Juliet, Naked’

★★★

Opened August 24 in select cities; opens Friday, August 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Century 16 (South Salt Lake), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for language. Running time: 105 minutes.

'The Bookshop'

There is a certain kind of British drama that seems inescapable: A power struggle, where hostility is wrapped in gentility, all of it set comfortably in the nostalgic glow of the post-war era, between Churchill and The Beatles.

Even a non-English director, like Spain’s Isabel Coizet (“Learning to Drive”), finds she’s not immune to  the charms of such a narrative — and the result is the quiet gracefulness found in “The Bookshop.”

Based on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, this story starts in a seaside village in East Anglia in 1959. Florence Green (played by Emily Mortimer), a widower who lost her husband in World War II, has arrived in this town with a dream: To buy a rundown but quaint house in the middle of the village and open a bookshop there. Florence is a lover of books, and thinks any town would be improved with more of them around. Who would object to that?

The village’s grande dame, Mrs. Violet Gamart (played by Patricia Clarkson), that’s who. Mrs. Gamart has harbored her own dream, of turning the rat-infested old house into a community art center. No one else in the village dares challenge Mrs. Gamart, nor do they ask aloud why she and her husband, Gen. Gamart (Reg Wilson), the richest family in the area, haven’t built such a center already.

Soon, the lines are drawn for a polite but forceful battle of wills. Mrs. Gamart draws upon her circle of influence, which includes local BBC radio personality Milo North (James Lance), an obsequious bachelor who sniffs around Florence’s shop. Florence has Christine (Honor Kneafsey), a schoolgirl who works part-time at the shop, and the reclusive Edmund Brundish (Bill Nighy), a voracious reader who quickly becomes Florence’s biggest customer and champion.

When Florence decides to stock a new novel in her shop — Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial “Lolita” — the etiquette is inadequate to hold back the vitriol from Mrs. Gamart and her forces.

Mortimer, so often cast as the English wallflower, gets to blossom here, as Florence maintains her poise in the face of the town’s opposition. Nighy is delightful, as always, playing the awkward but passionate Edmund. But it’s Clarkson who steals the movie, as Mrs. Gamart orchestrates her plot without raising her voice above a ladylike whisper.

Coixet, who wrote and directed, structures the narrative much like a novel. It may be a bit slow-going at first, as one starts sorting out the characters (aided by narration read by Julie Christie). But things pick up speed soon enough, toward a wicked twist of an ending, and “The Bookshop” becomes the movie equivalent of a page-turner.

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‘The Bookshop’

★★★

Opened August 24 in select theaters; opens Friday, August 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some thematic elements, language and brief smoking. Running time: 113 minutes.

'The Little Stranger'

Atmosphere will carry a movie a long way, especially a haunted-house suspense thriller, but it’s still not enough to overcome the creaky plot mechanics in “The Little Stranger.”

That’s too bad, because this adaptation of Sarah Waters’ 2009 Gothic novel is the work of director Lenny Abrahamson, his first since helming Brie Larson to her Oscar for “Room.” Here, the space is bigger, but the menace isn’t.

In an English village in 1947, Dr. Faraday (played by Domhnall Gleeson) is the studious young town doctor. He is called up to Hundreds Hall, the once-opulent mansion outside of town, when a young maid, Betty (Liv Hill), becomes terrified of something mysterious she’s seen there. Dr. Faraday chalks it up to nerves and loneliness, since there are so few people for Betty to talk to in the house.

There are three, in fact, members of the Ayres family. There’s the matriarch, Angela (Charlotte Rampling), and her two children, Caroline (Ruth Wilson) and Roddy (Will Poulter). Roddy is a World War II veteran who was horrifically wounded in combat. He hides his fire-scarred face from everyone, and Angela and Charlotte have become virtual hermits in sympathy.

Dr. Faraday (we never learn his first name, which is in itself suspicious) has memories of Hundreds Hall. As a lad, his mother worked as a servant there, and he fell in love with the place on the one time he was allowed to visit. He recalled seeing a cute little girl, Angela’s oldest child Susan, who died at age 8.

Dr. Faraday starts making regular visits to Hundreds Hall. First, he’s there to treat Roddy, using a new experimental electronic apparatus to stimulate his withered leg muscles. But soon the good doctor is coming around to see Caroline, as a tentative romance begins — though that may be more to Dr. Faraday’s liking than it is to hers.

Abrahamson and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon (“The Danish Girl”) calibrate the movie’s tone, the sense of creeping dread that permeates this old house, with precision. What gets muddled are the motivations for the story’s characters, as the loneliness of the Ayres’ siblings and the social-climbing ambitions of Dr. Faraday smack into the more straightforward supernatural elements.

The performances by all four leads are strong, particularly Gleeson’s portrayal of the tightly coiled doctor who morphs ever-so-gradually from bemused observer to the story’s prime mover. One just wishes all this work wasn’t in service to a story that’s so dour and disappointing.

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‘The Little Stranger’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 31, at some theaters across America; in the Salt Lake City area at: Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Century 16 (South Salt Lake), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Cinemark 24 at Jordan Landing (West Jordan), and Megaplex 20 at The District (South Jordan). Rated R for some disturbing bloody images. Running time: 111 minutes.

'Papillon'

I have dim memories of the classic 1973 drama “Papillon,” the true crime story of Henri Charrière, the Parisian safecracker sentenced to the French penal colony in French Guiana, who attempted escape and endured solitary confinement and exile to the dreaded Devil’s Island.

I remember Steve McQueen, rugged and indefatigable as Charrière, nicknamed Papillon for the butterfly tattoo on his chest. I remember Dustin Hoffman, with his darting eyes sizing up all the angles as Louis Dega, a forger who becomes Papillon’s only friend in prison. I didn’t remember, and only realized through surfing around the Internet Movie Database, that “Papillon” was the last produced script the great screenwriter Dalton Trumbo worked on before his death in 1976 — and its themes of freedom and escape must have resonated for someone who survived the blacklist.

Watching a new version of “Papillon,” adapted from Charrière’s memoirs and from the 1973 script (credited to Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr.) by Danish director Michael Noer and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (who wrote Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners”), I found it to be a solidly constructed telling of the story. Even so, it didn’t dislodge those decades-old memories of McQueen and Hoffman.

Charlie Hunnam has a fair amount of the McQueen swagger, playing Henri as a roguish thief who puckishly cheats his mobster boss (Christopher Fairbank) to make a nest-egg for himself and his girlfriend, Nanette (Eve Hewson). The boss gets wind of Henri’s deceit and takes his revenge by framing him for murder, for which Henri is sentenced to life in French Guiana.

Even on the transport ship, Henri is looking for his chance to escape. He soon sizes up that it would benefit him to befriend Louis Dega (Rami Malek), a bespectacled forger who comes from a wealthy family. Louis is an easy target for the brutes on the boat, and Louis realizes it, too — which is why he offers to bankroll any escape attempt Henri makes, using the money he keeps in a capsule he hides in his rectum.

Escape won’t be easy, the penal colony’s warden (Yorick van Wageningen) tells the inmates. There’s the jungle on one side, the shark-infested sea on the other, and harsh penalties for anyone who gets caught: Two years in solitary for the first offense, five years’ solitary and a life sentence on Devil’s Island for the second. And if a prisoner kills a guard in the attempt, the guillotine awaits.

Noer and Guzikowski divide the movie between Henri’s daring escape attempts and the harsh retribution the warden doles out when he’s caught. The escape scenes have a frenetic, improvised energy. Henri’s long stretches in silence, as the warden tries to break his spirit and his mind, are harrowing but repetitive.

Hunnam, hopefully done with blockbusters (“Pacific Rim” and “King Arthur”), is settling into the character-actor phase of his leading-man career nicely. But the real power, in terms of acting, is generated by Malik, whose friendship gives Hunnam’s Henri the purpose he needs to continue fighting, sacrificing and attempting to escape.

I’m not saying this new rendition of “Papillon” is better than the McQueen/Hoffman original, and I’m not saying it’s worse. It’s a potent, well-executed version of Charrière’s amazing story. It does make me want to seek out the ’73 version, to see how well it holds up after all these years.

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‘Papillon’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence including bloody images, language, nudity and some sexual material. Running time: 133 minutes.

'Puzzle'

With notable roles in “Trainspotting,” “Gosford Park,” “Nanny McPhee,” “No Country For Old Men” and “Brave” — as the voice of Merida, the feisty Scottish princess — it’s rather strange that Kelly Macdonald isn’t better known and respected as one of the strongest actors working.

“Puzzle,” a slight but thoughtful drama, gives Macdonald a more prominent role than she usually gets, and she makes the most of it.

Macdonald plays Agnes, a Connecticut homemaker who does everything for her husband, Louie (David Denham), and their two teen sons, Gabe (Austin Abrams) and Ziggy (Bubba Weiler). She’s so subservient, we see in the opening moments, that she does all the work arranging, cooking for and cleaning up after her own birthday party.

On this birthday, someone gives her an odd present for a 40ish woman: A jigsaw puzzle. The next morning, instead of her usual list of chores, she stops and assembles the puzzle, and realizes she’s actually really good at it. She recognizes the patterns quickly, knows intuitively what fits with what, and sees the whole picture long before it’s done.

Soon she decides she wants more. She takes the train into New York, and finds a puzzle shop. There, she learns that someone is looking for a jigsaw-savvy partner for competitive puzzle solving. On an impulse, she texts the number, and soon meets its owner, Robert (played by the great Indian actor Irrfan Khan), an inventor who uses puzzles to shut out the depressing drone of the daily news.

Without telling Louie, the good Catholic Agnes starts making regular trips into the city to practice with Robert for an upcoming national tournament. But the cascade effect of Agnes lying to her husband collides with the joy and excitement she feels — possibly for the first time in her life — when she puts together a jigsaw puzzle.

Director Marc Turteltaub captures Agnes’ dour, drab existence, and how it gradually brightens as her puzzle skills, and Robert’s encouragement, propel her toward standing up for herself in ways she never could before. The schematics of this change — as assisted by writers Oren Moverman (“Love & Mercy”) and Polly Mann, remaking Natalia Smirnoff’s 2009 Argentine film of the same name — are a bit predictable and plodding, but the payoff rather muted because of it.

Macdonald is a joy to watch, as she modulates Agnes’ emotional awakening with pinpoint precision. She finds the specific gravity of this character, so dedicated to her husband’s and her sons’ wellbeing that it takes time for her to accept the idea that there’s something she can do solely for her own pleasure. It’s a performance so good that all Turteltaub has to do is not get in the way.

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‘Puzzle’

★★★

Opened July 27 in select cities; opens Friday, August 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language. Running time: 103 minutes.

'The Happytime Murders'

There’s a kernel of a good idea rattling around “The Happytime Murders,” a foul-mouthed and underwritten mash-up of “Avenue Q” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” that seems to have only one purpose: To reclaim puppetry from the precincts of the family-friendly.

Director Brian Henson, son of Muppets founder Jim Henson and himself director of “A Muppet Christmas Carol” and “Muppet Treasure Island,” isn’t exactly breaking new ground with this notion. After all, his father created raunchy Muppet sketches for the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” way back in 1975. 

But here, in a story set in a Los Angeles where puppets are an oppressed minority, they’re decidedly not playing it safe. Scenes of puppet-centric porn, puppet prostitutes serving up a little “rotten cotton,” puppets snorting sugar like it’s cocaine, and a puppet ejaculating silly string are par for the course — but there’s more shock value than genuine laughs. (It doesn’t help that most of the scenes mentioned were in the movie’s red-band trailer.)

The setting is a modern Los Angeles where puppets live alongside humans — though they are an oppressed minority, frequently maligned and teased for being short and made of felt and foam. Our hero is Phil Philips (performed by Bill Barretta), a private eye who was the first puppet on the LAPD — until, as the inevitable newspaper-clipping backstory montage tells us, he was drummed out of the force, in a hostage situation gone wrong involving his partner. That partner, Det. Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy), now hates Phil’s fluffy guts, and vice versa.

So, equally inevitably, they get assigned by Connie’s boss, Lt. Banning (“The Office’s” Leslie David Baker), to work together to solve a series of crimes. Someone is killing puppets across Los Angeles — all stars of a beloved ‘80s TV series, “The HappyTime Gang,” the first regular puppet-filled show on network TV. And each time one of them (including Phil’s brother, Larry) has died, Phil was in the vicinity.

Can Connie and Phil get over their animosity to solve the case? Can Connie prove Phil’s innocence to an obnoxious FBI agent (Joel McHale)? Can Phil also sort out the blackmail case of the seductive puppet Sandra? And can Phil overcome his heartbreak for the only human member of the HappyTime Gang, Jenny (Elizabeth Banks), and keep her from being the next one killed?

After watching “The Happytime Murders,” the answer to all of the above is “Who cares?” Henson focuses on the puppetry, and bringing the puppet and human worlds together on a technical level, that he fails to notice how weak Todd Berger’s script is. The script feels like an early first draft, one where nobody came through later to write any real jokes.

The most genuine laughs come from scenes that feel ad-libbed by McCarthy, especially when she’s paired with her old “Bridesmaids” co-star Maya Rudolph, who plays Phil’s forever-loyal secretary. Their moments have a breezy humor of which the rest of “The Happytime Murders” should have been stuffed full.

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‘The Happytime Murders’

★1/2

Opens Friday, August 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong crude and sexual content and language throughout, and some drug material. Running time: 91 minutes.

'Far From the Tree'

In the thoughtful but somewhat disjointed documentary “Far From the Tree,” director Rachel Dretzin explores the bond between parents and children — and whether that bond is strengthened or stretched thin when the children are markedly different from their parents.

Dretzin begins this documentary with her source material, the 2012 book by Andrew Solomon. Solomon spent 10 years interviewing families of all stripes, after dealing with his own difference from his parents: He is gay, and his discovery of this fact of his life was not immediately welcomed by his patrician parents. 

This set Solomon, now 54, on a quest to understand other children who were different than their parents — a quest that Dretzin takes up in the film.

Dretzin introduces us to Jason, a 41-year-old with Down syndrome, living semi-independently with two roommates who are also adults with Down syndrome. Then there’s Jack, 13, who has severe autism and can communicate via a keyboard he taps. Or there’s Loini, 22, a little person who is thrilled with her first visit to the Little People of America’s convention, where she gets to meet others with dwarfism and, for the first time, realize she’s not alone.

The LPA convention yields two of the most fascinating subjects in Dretzin’s film: Leah and Joe, a fun and feisty couple who talk most passionately (and eloquently, since Joe is a philosophy professor) about why they’re happy being the size they are — and are eager to bring their own child into the world.

The one story that feels the most jarring involves Trevor, who as a 16-year-old in Louisiana ambushed an 8-year-old boy on a forest trail and slit his throat. Trevor’s parents talk about the anguished questions they asked after their son’s crime, and the battery of psych tests that only revealed the vague answer that “our son is broken.”

That story feels out of place with the rest because Trevor isn’t interviewed, since he’s serving a life sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He’s the only child whose viewpoint is kept from us.

Dretzin gathers these stories with care and sensitivity, intercutting them with Solomon’s journey toward accepting himself as gay and, ultimately, being accepted by his father. 

Together, the stories in “Far From the Tree” illustrate Solomon’s conclusion from his book research, that life is actually the opposite of Leo Tolstoy’s observation that “happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Solomon found that unhappy families tend to be the same, and what’s remarkable — and what the movie demonstrates — is “all the different ways people find to be happy.”

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‘Far From the Tree’

★★★

Opened July 20 in select cities; opens Friday, August 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for descriptions of violence and sexual material. Running time; 93 minutes.

'The Miseducation of Cameron Post'

When Desiree Akhavan’s teen gay drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, it took a few festival attendees by surprise.

This sensitively rendered drama, adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s groundbreaking novel about a teen lesbian sent off to a “pray away the gay” Christian camp, didn’t have the grab-you-by-the-lapels forcefulness of some of the Sundance entries. Its charms were quieter, but no less emotionally intense.

Chloë Grace Moretz, a child star all grown up into a confident and mature actor, plays Cameron Post, who is sent to God’s Promise in 1993 Montana after she’s caught making out with the prom queen, Coley (Quinn Shepherd).

Cameron is welcomed to the camp by Reverend Rick (John R. Gallagher), a pastor who says he is an “ex-gay,” having battled same-sex attraction (he never dares call it homosexuality) and, he claims, defeated it. Leading the therapy sessions is Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), who believes homosexuality — er, same-sex attraction — is a sin, and that owning up to that is the only road to being “cured.”

In scenes that veer from wry comedy to deeply felt drama, Cameron befriends two other campers — Jane (Sasha Lane), who lived in a commune, and Adam (Forrest Goodluck), a Native American boy with a politically ambitious father — who teach her the tricks of faking answers to Reverend Rick and Dr. Marsh. They also have a spot in the forest where Jane grows pot.

Akhavan and co-screenwriter Cecilia Frugiuele (who produced Akhavan’s semi-biographical debut feature, “Appropriate Behavior”) run Cameron through a series of vignettes, both funny and harrowing. The scenes build steadily, as Cameron goes from questioning her own sexuality to questioning the right of others — especially Rick and Dr. Marsh — of telling her what “normal” is.

Moretz, who has been growing up in front of us in “Kick Ass” and “The Equalizer” among others, turns “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” into her valedictory. She takes this fragile, confused girl and transforms her into a determined young woman, fighting for her self-identity. It’s a performance as graceful and surprising as the film that carries it.

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‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’

★★★1/2

Opened August 3 in select cities; opens Friday, August 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexual content and language. Running time: 91 minutes.