'Unbroken: Path to Redemption'

When the true-life prisoner-of-war drama “Unbroken” came out in 2014, I wrote that director Angelina Jolie missed an opportunity by focusing entirely on the physical abuse Louis Zamperini suffered at the hands of the Japanese during World War II.

More interesting, I wrote, was the story Jolie relegated to title cards before the end credits: How Zamperini, a former Olympic distance runner, battled post-traumatic stress, became a born-again Christian and returned to Japan to forgive his captors.

The sequel “Unbroken: Path to Redemption,” a hamfisted Christian-themed melodrama, is proof that critics should be careful what they wish for.

The war is over when the movie begins, and Zamperini (played this time by “Chicago P.D.’s” Samuel Hunt) is returning to his family in Torrance, Calif. But he can’t shake the memories of his plane being shot down, of surviving 47 days alone in a raft in the Pacific, and of being beaten in the prison camp. The face of one Japanese guard, Watanabe (David Sakurai), nicknamed “The Bird,” haunts him.

On a promotional tour for war bonds, his colonel (Bob Gunton) notices Zamperini is drinking too much. The colonel sends Zamperini to Florida for three weeks R&R, and to meet a psychiatrist (Gary Cole) who specializes in PTSD (or “battle fatigue,” as they called it then). Zamperini doesn’t hold much stock in the shrink, but he does find something better: Cynthia Applewhite (Merritt Patterson), a beach beauty who soon becomes Mrs. Zamperini and moves with him back in Torrance.

Even with Cynthia by his side, and soon a baby daughter, Zamperini can’t shake his demons, his failures or the bottle. But, when all seems hopeless, Cynthia notices the tent going up in town, the one for Billy Graham’s revival tour. (Evangelist and actor Will Graham portrays his grandfather in the film, channeling his compassionate preaching style.)

Director Harold Cronk (whose “God Bless the Broken Road” hit theaters only a week ago) and screenwriters Richard Friedenberg and Ken Hixon adapt the middle sections of Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of Zamperini into an unremarkable story. Zamperini’s salvation is a given, the road he took to get there familiar and well-worn, without much introspection about what happened inside him that allowed him to accept Jesus’ love. 

Without that internal struggle, “Unbroken: Path to Redemption” is little more than a living billboard for Billy Graham (to whom the film is dedicated). One suspects he, and Zamperini (who died in 2014), would have wanted a movie with a little more meat.

——

‘Unbroken: Path to Redemption

★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 14, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic content and related disturbing images. Running time: 98 minutes.

'Peppermint'

In the violent and depressingly obvious revenge drama “Peppermint,” Jennifer Garner takes the role usually assigned to Liam Neeson — the steely, dead-eyed human weapon — without getting to show the interesting part of how she got that way.

Director Pierre Morel, who put Neeson in that role in “Taken,” begins with Garner in a bloody fight in the front seats of a car, ending with her shooting some guy’s brains out. She limps back to her lair, a van on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where she performs self-surgery on a knife wound on her thigh with vodka, a surgical stapler and some duct tape.

The movie then gives us the backstory, five years earlier, when Garner’s character, Riley North, was a working mom helping her 10-year-old daughter Carly (Called Fleming) sell Firefly cookies. She and her husband, Chris (Jeff Hephner), take Carly to the Christmas carnival for her birthday — which is where three gangsters machine-gun Chris and Carly to death, and nearly kill Riley.

Aided by two LAPD detectives, Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and Beltran (John Ortiz), Riley testifies against the three gangsters, hitmen for a powerful Mexican drug boss, Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba). Even with her testimony, the three are let loose because of a rigged legal system, a corrupt judge (Jeff Harlan) and apathetic prosecutors.

The script, by Chad St. John (who worked on “London Has Fallen”), flashes forward five years, which turns out to be the movie’s tragic flaw. In those five years, as we’re told by an exposition-dispensing FBI agent (Annie Ilonzeh), Riley was traveling the world, learning combat skills and MMA moves, and disappearing before any law enforcement agency could find her. (I always love when screenwriters drop the word “Interpol” as a catch-all for cool international crimefighting.)

This is the tragic flaw because that journey, as Riley hones her body and mind to become a vengeance-seeking killing machine, is way more interesting than the story we get. What we get is a repetitive series of scenes of Riley unleashing herself on Garcia’s army of bullet magnets, interrupted by the occasional conversation between Carmichael and Beltran, still on the case five years later.

There is exactly one surprise element in the long, bloody slog through gangster bodies. That’s when the veteran Beltran warns the younger Carmichael that Garcia has a dirty LAPD cop on the payroll, and we’re expected to spend the bulk of the movie figuring out who it is. Since we only get to know two cops, Beltran and Carmichael (OK, there’s a third, played by Cliff “Method Man” Smith, but he’s introduced so late it doesn’t count), and it’s a coin flip to guess which one’s corrupt. And since St. John and Morel don’t invest in character development, nobody cares about the answer.

Garner gamely fulfills her duties as ruthless warrior, with a few side trips as Skid Row’s menacing guardian angel. (There’s a scene where she threatens a drunk dad at gunpoint to be nicer to his son, and a churlish part of me wondered if that’s what Ben Affleck’s intervention looked like.) But there’s no fire in her performance, only a grim determination to see it to the conclusion. It’s admirable that Garner wants to expand beyond the bubbly romantic-comedy and supportive mom roles that have been her bread-and-butter, but it would have been nice if she had taken a knife to the script and demanded something better.

——

‘Peppermint’

★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 7, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence and language throughout. Running time: 102 minutes.

'We the Animals'

Director Jeremiah Zagar’s fluid dreamscape of a movie, “We the Animals,” captures the joys and pains of growing up better than anything since Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” — as it preserves the moment when a boy realizes he’s different than his parents and siblings.

When we first meet Jonah (Evan Rosado), Manny (Isaiah Kristian) and Joel (Josiah Gabriel), they seem like a single entity, playing shirtless in the summer woods near their home in upstate New York. (The era is undefined, though Justin Torres’ semi-autobiographical novel on which the movie is based was set in the 1980s.) The boys — ranging in age from 9 to 11 — do nearly everything together, from crossing railroad trestles to getting under a quilt with a flashlight for the “body heat” game.

The boys also watch their parents, a Puerto Rican dad (Raúl Castillo) and a white mom (Sheila Vand) from Brooklyn, whose relationship is stormy. Ma and Paps — who married as teens when Ma got pregnant with Manny — both work crappy night jobs, and sleep through the mornings. When they’re both awake, they often argue and shout. Sometimes Paps hits Ma, and then disappears for days at a time, leaving Ma a crying heap on the couch, leaving the boys to fend for themselves.

The story, sensitively adapted from Torres’ book by Zagar and Daniel Kitrosser, is seen through Jonah’s eyes, and through them we gradually see how Jonah is different than his brothers. He’s the youngest, and he can’t swim like his brothers can, which becomes the source of one of Ma and Paps’ biggest fights. 

When Manny and Joel are asleep, Jonah crawls under his bed and draws in his journal. The drawings reflect the boys’ summertime play, but also the domestic violence he witnesses. When the boys meet a teen living with his grandfather on the neighboring farm, and the teen shows them his VHS porn collection, Jonah starts incorporating sexual figures in his drawings.

Eventually, all these elements of Jonah’s life must come together at a point of conflict, a centralized conflict. But the destination is less important than the journey in “We the Animals.” The movie relishes those little moments and shifting moods in Jonah’s day-to-day existence, as the violence he sees from his parents passing down to his older brothers.

Zagar made his 2014 Sundance Film Festival debut with the media-analysis documentary “Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart.” So it’s a happy surprise that a documentarian tells Jonah’s story with such beautifully dreamlike, impressionistic images. He also draws strong performances from his adult leads — Vand is the movie’s one recognizable face, from her role in “Argo” or the title role in the vampire romance “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” — as they depict a marriage in free fall.

But “We the Animals” is dominated by the boys, Kristian, Gabriel and especially Rosado, a movie first-timer who brings a wide-eyed innocence and depth of feeling to Jonah’s search for identity. When he begins to find it, in the movie’s shattering conclusion, it’s Rosado’s expressive eyes that tell us that nothing will be the same again.

——

‘We the Animals’

★★★1/2

Opened August 17 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some underage drug and alcohol use. Running time: 93 minutes.

'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.