'Custody'

Domestic violence isn’t just an American problem, and the French drama “Custody” is a nerve-wracking and engrossing story of one family terrorized by an abusive ex-husband.

When writer-director Xavier Legrand introduces the audience to Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Miriam (Léa Drucker), his rage seems to be tempered, but her fear isn’t. The two are sitting, with their lawyers, before a family-court judge (Saadia Bentaïeb), presenting arguments over custody of their 11-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria, an amazing newcomer).

In short strokes, in the analytical calm of a court hearing, we get glimpses of the awful details. We learn Miriam has moved with Julien and the couple’s now-18-year-old daughter Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux), to be closer to Miriam’s parents and away from Antoine. However, Antoine tells the judge that Miriam’s accusations are unproven, and that he wants split custody once he moves to Miriam’s new town to be closer to his kids. Joséphine, being 18, decides for herself she wants no contact with her father, so all the pressure is now put on little Julien.

The judge, without sufficient proof of Antoine’s abuse, awards him shared custody of Julien, every other weekend before Antoine moves closer to the family. And poor Julien, sick to his stomach at the thought of staying with his father, must go anyway.

In his first feature, director-writer Xavier Legrand deftly combines the heartbreak of a domestic drama with the nail-biting tension of a horror movie. In interviews, Legrand has said his inspirations included “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “The Shining,” and one can see influences in both films, particularly in how  everyone else tenses up waiting for the tightly coiled Antoine to explode.

Legrand has had practice with this topic, and indeed these same characters, in his Oscar-nominated 2013 short film “Just Before Losing Everything.” That short starred Ménochet, Drucker and Auneveux in the same roles (another young actor played young Julien), in an intense scene where Miriam is taking the children far away from Antoine, using a supermarket as a rendezvous point. One hopes the short will be packaged with “Custody” on its DVD release, because it’s a perfect prologue that encapsulate’s Miriam’s fear of the man she once married.

Given more running time, Legrand expands the circle of support, showing Miriam’s steely relations and Antoine’s well-meaning but exasperated parents. There’s a subplot, involving Joséphine and her boyfriend (Mathieu Saikaly), that doesn’t pan out, But when the story is focused on Miriam and Antoine, with Julien in the middle, “Custody” is intensely riveting.

——

‘Custody’

★★★

Opened June 29 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City. Not rated, but probably R for violence, children in peril, sexual content and language. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 94 minutes.

'God Bless the Broken Road'

The Christian-themed drama “God Bless the Broken Road” wears its earnest heart on its sleeve, and isn’t afraid to show it. Whatever its other faults in storytelling short-cuts, it must be said that it’s the most sincere pumpkin patch for miles around.

That’s a bit of a surprise, since it’s directed by Harold Cronk, who has built a little movie empire of hectoring, in-your-face Christianity with his “God’s Not Dead” films. Those films usually pit a devout Christian against paper-tiger atheist villains in an adversarial setting, with lots of shouting, until the atheist breaks down sobbing at the error of his ways.

In “God Bless the Broken Road” — the title comes from a Rascal Flatts song — the elements of Christianity are present, but not oppressively so. This is more about the characters’ faith, and the obstacles placed in their way through life.

Amber Hill, played by Lindsay Pulsipher (best known for her work in “True Blood”), has more obstacles than most. She’s a single mom, scraping by barely as she raises her daughter, Bree (Makenzie Moss), in a small Kentucky town. The town is near an Army base, a painful reminder to Amber that her husband, Sgt. Darren Hill (Liam Matthews), was killed in Afghanistan a couple years before. 

Amber is stubborn, refusing help from her husband’s former soldiers or from his mother, Patti (Kim Delaney, formerly of “NYPD Blue”). She also has stopped attending the local church, where she used to be choir director. (Robin Givens and singer Jordin Sparks play two of the members of the choir.)  

Amber works extra shifts as a diner waitress, but that’s not enough to cover the mortgage, and she’s in danger of losing the house, the only thing her husband left her, to the bank. Amber’s efforts to dig out of this financial hole only put her deeper, and it’s all to the good that Cronk and his co-writer, Jennifer Dornbush, explore how difficult and expensive it is to be poor in America.

Brightening Amber’s life, and complicating it, is the arrival of Lightning McQueen, er, Cody Jackson (Andrew W. Walker), a self-centered stock-car racer who’s been sent to this small town for sage mentoring from local mechanic and racing guru Joe Carter (Gary Grubbs). Joe’s garage is near the diner, so it’s not long before Cody is asking Amber out to dinner, and helping the kids in town, including Bree, build and race their own go-karts.

Cronk pours on the melodrama in some passages, like when Mike Nelson (Arthur Cartwright), a soldier in Sgt. Hill’s unit, recounts the day Hill died. (In light of the movie’s wartime themes, the producers have promised to give 5 percent of the proceeds to the Disabled American Veterans.) Cronk also sets the requisite inspirational moments in the local church, with Hall of Fame running back LaDainian Tomlinson as the pastor. 

“God Bless the Broken Road” has its quiet epiphanies but no big hand-of-God miracles, which sound great in a Sunday sermon but in a movie come off as lazy screenwriting. Thankfully, the drama centers on Amber, played with tenderness and spunk by Pulsipher, and the more true-to-life spiritual crisis of someone alienated from and drawn back to her faith.

——

‘God Bless the Broken Road’

★★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 7, in theaters nationwide. Rated PG for thematic elements and some combat action. Running time: 111 minutes.

'Kin'

With so many movies pre-hyping themselves to the point of absurdity (reviews of trailers? really?), it’s a welcome surprise that a solid, tension-filled action movie can come out of nowhere the way that “Kin” does.

Elijah (played by Myles Truitt) is a 14-year-old kid living in a rundown part of Detroit. He’s an outsider, getting into fights at school and spending most of his down time scavenging for scrap metal in abandoned buildings — a practice his gruff adopted father, Harold (Dennis Quaid), strongly condemns, considering it the same as stealing.

Harold knows about stealing. It’s one of the things that put his adult son, Jimmy (Jack Reynor), in prison for six years. Jimmy is just out of the slammer, and the reunion is a tense one. It gets even more tense when Jimmy tells his dad that he needs $60,000 immediately, to repay a nasty crime boss, Taylor (James Franco), for debts he ran up in prison.

When Jack tries to rob his way out of his plight, it ends in gunplay and blood, and with Jack making a panicked decision: That he and Elijah should make an impromptu road trip to Lake Tahoe. Elijah packs a couple bags, and brings along something he salvaged — a mysterious energy weapon of unknown, possibly alien, origin.

Somewhere around Colorado, the brothers pick up a friend, Millie (Zoë Kravitz), a stripper in need of a change of scenery. As they travel, though, Taylor is on their trail, seeking revenge against Jack. But there are two other figures searching for them: Two black-armored trackers — looking like the guys in Daft Punk — trying to retrieve Elijah’s new weapon.

The brother team of Jonathan and Josh Baker makes a sure-footed feature debut with this mash-up of urban drama, road-trip action and science-fiction intrigue, which they adapted from their own short film, “Bag Man.” The Bakers hit the action beats precisely, cleverly deploy and subvert genre stereotypes, leave room for the character development in Daniel Casey’s screenplay, and make the most of a tight effects budget.

The Bakers assemble a solid cast with Reynor, Quaid, Franco, Kravitz, a brief turn by Carrie Coon as a no-nonsense Fed, and a smart, soulful performance by Truitt, a newcomer with a promising future. It all culminates in a slam-bang ending that genuinely surprises, and makes “Kin” a fun buried treasure to finish the summer.

——

‘Kin’

★★★

Opening Friday, August 31, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for gun violence and intense action, suggestive material, language, thematic elements and drinking. Running time: 102 minutes.

'Skate Kitchen'

Representation matters. It’s important for audiences who aren’t white males (like me) to see people like themselves on the screen — whether it’s “Moonlight” or “BlacKkKlansman” or “Crazy Rich Asians.” It’s also important for my demographic to see such stories, but for the opposite reason: So we need to see how people who aren’t us live, think and feel.

I have practically nothing in common with the New York teen girls who inhabit the energetic and heartfelt drama “Skate Kitchen.” But that doesn’t matter. What matters is how director Crystal Mozelle, much as she did in her acclaimed documentary “The Wolfpack,” draws us into their world, and lets them define themselves on their terms.

Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) is a solitary 18-year-old living on Long Island with her overworked, Spanish-speaking mom (Elizabeth Rodriguez). Camille is most happy when she’s riding her skateboard, trying new jumps and other tricks. After a bloody crash — she gets “credit carded,” meaning the edge of the board hits her hard in the groin — Camille must promise her mom she won’t skate any more. It’s a lie, of course, and soon she’s skating behind her mom’s back.

When she’s not skating herself, Camille is following Manhattan skateboarding girls on Instagram. One of them, a loudmouthed butch girl named Kurt (Nina Moran), posts a meet-up, Camille takes the train into the city and finds them. She makes fast friends with Kurt, camera-wielding Ruby (Kabrina Adams), street artist Indigo (Ajani Russell), and the rest. Camille soon is best friends with Janay (Dede Lovelace), and even sleeps over when she gets tired of dealing with her mom’s nagging and abuse.

Much of “Skate Kitchen” consists of watching Camille and her new friends hanging out. Sometimes they’re skating, and cinematographer Shabier Kirchner and editor Nico Leunen capture the freedom of the girls’ movements and the exhilaration when they go fast, jump far or wipe out. Sometimes, though, they’re talking about this or that, and we get insights into the secret world of teen girls — and this fierce ensemble of newcomers, led by Vinberg, makes it feel as real and as raw as a documentary.

About the only time “Skate Kitchen” falters is when Mozelle, who wrote the screenplay with Jen Silverman and Aslihan Unaldi, is forced by convention to provide some kind of dramatic tension. She finds it in a simple love triangle, when Camille starts hanging out with Devon (Jaden Smith), a budding photographer who used to date Janay, who’s still not over it.

Smith, son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, is the only familiar face in the cast, and he’s more mannered and Hollywood-y compared to the newcomers around him. That, along with the pedestrian story choice and simplistic message that accompanies it (what’s the girl version of “bros before ho’s”? “Sisters before misters”?), are minor stumbles. “Skate Kitchen” is at its best when its fascinating young women aren’t necessarily going anywhere, but are enjoying the moment when the wheels roll on the pavement and the air hits their faces.

——

‘Skate Kitchen’

★★★1/2

Opened August 10 in select cities; opens Friday, August 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for drug use and language throughout, strong sexual content, and some nudity – all involving teens. Running time: 102 minutes.

'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.

——

‘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.

——

‘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.

——

‘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.

——

‘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.