'A Simple Favor'

Comedies and thrillers, if you think about it, are polar opposites as movie genres. Thrillers require tight control so the tension can build second by second, while comedies need to be loose so the laughs can flow.

The fact that director Paul Feig, a comedy guy, manages to do both at once in the light-fingered but dark-hearted “A Simple Favor” is kind of a big deal. 

Stephanie Smothers (played by Anna Kendrick) is a single suburban mom and a vlogger imparting zucchini chocolate-chip cookie recipes and instructions for friendship bracelets. One day when picking up her son Miles (Joshua Satine), the boy wants to have a playdate with his schoolmate Nicky (Ian Ho) — which is how Stephanie meets Nicky’s mom, Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), a stylish PR executive for a New York fashion label. 

Emily says sure, and while the kids play upstairs, Emily and Stephanie become fast friends, sharing intimate conversation over martinis. The party only stops when Emily’s husband Sean Townsend (played by “Crazy Rich Asians” hunk-of-the-moment Henry Golding) shows up and starts making out with Emily.

After a few more playdates, Emily calls Stephanie to ask for a favor: To take Nicky after school while she deals with a work emergency. An afternoon turns into an evening, then another day, and soon Stephanie is concerned that something has happened to her new best friend.

That’s where the synopsis stops, because part of the fun is how Feig and screenwriter Jessica Sharzer (adapting Darcey Bell’s mystery novel) tease out the suspense behind every plot twist. Suffice it to say that when Stephanie starts playing Nancy Drew, she discovers everybody has something to hide — even herself.

Feig deploys Kendrick and Lively perfectly, first as a strong comedy duo and eventually as sexy and smart figures on their own. No male director working handles women characters as intelligently as Feig — examples include “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and even his “Ghostbusters” reboot. Here he gives Kendrick room to run her perky persona into some dark places, and discovers in Lively a funny side she hasn’t shown in her movies (but she has in tweets teasing hubby Ryan Reynolds).

In the end, “A Simple Favor” is like one of Emily’s martinis: A strong kick that makes you giggle, ice-cold delivery, and a twist that gives it plenty of bite.

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‘A Simple Favor’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, Sept. 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nude images, drug use and violence. 117 minutes.

'The Predator'

In almost every way, “The Predator” is a testosterone soup of an action movie — big and bloody, militaristic and macho, with more alpha males than a wolf convention.

Thankfully, Olivia Munn comes through and kicks as much butt onscreen as she apparently did behind the scenes, when she protested after learning director Shane Black hired a buddy — a registered sex offender — to act in a scene with her.

The movie is a sequel, I guess, of the 1987 jungle sci-fi spectacle starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and of the 1990 follow-up “Predator 2,” and, heck, maybe even of the 2010 reboot “Predators” — but definitely not the two “Alien Vs. Predator” mash-ups. A filmmaker has to draw the line somewhere.

An Army commando leader, Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), is on a mission somewhere in Mexico to rescue hostages from a drug cartel. Before the drop happens, something literally falls from the sky: A spacecraft, and an occupant who is pretty efficient at killing. McKenna grabs a couple of items from the crashed ship, and arranges to mail them back home in the States.

The recipient who can make best use of this alien tech is McKenna’s son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay, from “Room” and “Wonder”), a socially-awkward fourth-grader who is an autistic savant — because the “Rain Man” cliche never gets old. He instantly figures out the alien tech, which turns out to be quite explosive during trick-or-treating.

Meanwhile, Munn’s character, Dr. Casey Brackett, an expert in alien biology, is asked to confer at a top-secret government research site. That’s where a ruthless boss, Traeger (Sterling K. Brown), and a team of scientists are keeping a captured Predator under heavy sedation — at least until something triggers the creature, and then the lab is being repainted with scientist blood and guts.

McKenna finds himself on a military prison bus with a group of hotheads and misfits — a line-up consisting of Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”), Alfie Allen (“Game of Thrones”), Augusto Aguilera, Thomas Jane and Keegan-Michael Key. When the Predator gets loose, these guys spring into action, aided by Casey’s expertise, to rescue Rory and figure out what the hell’s going on.

Good luck with that last part. I’m not sure Black and co-writer Fred Dekker know what’s going on from moment to moment. Nor do I think they care, as long as the blood spurts regularly, the action stays fierce, and the tough-guy one-liners fall thick and fast. After all, this is the franchise that gave us Jesse Ventura saying “I ain’t got time to bleed,” so there’s a tradition to uphold.

Yes, Black peppers the script with references for the diehard fans, including a well-placed “Get to the chopper!” And, as Black did in “Iron Man 3” and “The Nice Guys,” the cute kid makes major contributions to defeating the baddies.

In a movie this overloaded with dudes, of course Munn is the stand-out. She proves herself a true action hero, battling with fists and brains, and getting her share of witticisms to deliver. Even when Black contrives the equivalent of a shower scene, Munn manages to get through it with some level of dignity. How about we give her a franchise and see what she can do with it?

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‘The Predator’

★★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, and crude sexual references. Running time: 107 minutes.

'The Wife'

Glenn Close has been nominated for an Academy Award six times, and there’s a fair-sized contingent of critics and prognosticators who think she could get a seventh nod for “The Wife.”

It would be doubly appropriate, since Close plays a character whose talent is unappreciated — and because, if she’s nominated, it will be for a performance that’s far superior to everything going on around her.

In this adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel, Close plays Joan Castleman, the dutiful and doting wife of acclaimed author Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce). As the story begins in 1992, Joe and Joan get some momentous news: Joe has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. They celebrate at their Connecticut home, with their children David (Max Irons) and Susannah (Alix Wilton Regan), and a room full of well-wishers.

On the plane to Stockholm, Joe and Joan are chatted up by Nathaniel Bone (Christian Slater), a journalist who has researched Joe’s career in detail. Nathaniel is a bit miffed that Joe regularly turns down pleas to write the great man’s biography, but the journalist is undaunted, and aims to use this trip to Sweden to prove himself to the Castlemans.

Everything is not well in the Castleman family, though. David, himself a writer, strains to squeeze a drop of appreciation from his father. Joan notices Joe flirting with a pretty photographer (Karin Franz Körlof), which dredges up memories of Joe’s past affairs. And Nathaniel tells Joan he thinks he’s uncovered a secret about Joe that, if true, could rock the literary world.

Joan used to be a writer, we learn in flashbacks, when a young Joan (Annie Starke, Close’s real-life daughter) was a student at Smith College. Joe (played as a young man by Harry Lloyd) was her professor, and married to his first wife. Joe is impressed with Joan’s writing ability, and Joan is taken with his attention, and — well, they’re married 40 years later, so it’s clear where things are going.

Alas, even if you haven’t read Woiltzer’s book, it’s clear where the entire story (adapted by “Olive Kitteridge” screenwriter Jane Anderson) is going. There is a clockwork predictability to each revelation, each twist, each argument, as director Björn Runge lays them out.

What’s more surprising, though, is how thoroughly lived-in Close’s performance is. In stillness or in full rage, every one of Joan’s disappointments, resentments and thwarted ambitions play out across her delicately expressive face. It’s a quietly devastating performance that itself may be in for a few awards.

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‘The Wife’

★★★

Opened August 17 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 14, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake Cty) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 100 minutes.

'American Chaos'

The biggest cliche in American journalism today is when an editor sends a reporter into the red states to “listen to Trump voters.” These moments of hayseed tourism always turn out the same: Reporter points to some crazy thing Donald Trump has done lately and asks “Do you still like him now?,” and the voters say “yep,” and the cycle continues.

James D. Stern, the Hollywood movie producer whose credits range from “Looper” to “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” at least gets credit for traveling to Trump country and talking to the natives back in 2016, before it was trendy. The documentary “American Chaos” captures in plain terms what Stern (who directed the film) learned from them.

Stern introduces himself as growing up a Kennedy Democrat, and that one of his happiest moments was watching Barack Obama’s inauguration. He’s got some connection to Obama, as well: Stern’s brother, Todd, was one of Obama’s envoys who helped negotiate the Paris climate treaty.

Watching Donald Trump descend that escalator and announce his candidacy, Stern had the same reaction most of the experts did: This guy’s a joke. But Stern, at least as he depicts himself here, latched on early to the idea that Trump might actually win, because of the supporters Stern met in Florida, West Virginia and Arizona, and at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

It’s not what these people say about Trump. Invariably, what they say is the same canned nonsense they heard on right-wing media, from Breitbart to Limbaugh to Fox News. It’s all “Hillary committed treason” and “she’s going to take our guns” and the usual rhetoric. They don’t say it with malice, but with the repetitious air of kids reciting their multiplication tables or anything else they’ve had drilled into their head.

The real stories Stern gets are about the people themselves. The Cuban immigrant who worked to become mayor of a Miami suburb. The West Virginia residents who hope against hope that the coal mines will open again. The Arizona rancher who watches a drug-cartel drone fly over the border fence, looking for the easiest route through.

All these folks, like millions of others, heard and believed Trump’s promises that he alone could fix things, that he had the common people’s interests at heart, that he could make America great again. They aren’t deplorable (Stern cringes at the political stupidity Hillary Clinton displayed with that word), and Stern’s mournful but hopeful film shows us how their problems and their lives will still be there, waiting for an answer, after the White House’s current occupant is gone.

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‘American Chaos’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, Sept. 14, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language including sexual references. Running time: 90 minutes.

'Mandy'

I’d like to say that the brooding and bloody “Mandy” is what it would look like if David Lynch made a Gaspar Noe movie, but that makes director Panos Cosmatos’ slow-motion train wreck seem more appealing than it is.

The plot is straightforward, once Cosmatos (who co-wrote with Aaron Stewart-Ahn) gets to it. Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) is a grizzled logger who leaves work and goes home to a remote cabin. That’s where his lover Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), sporting an enigmatic scar on her cheek and an endless supply of heavy-metal T-shirts, draws fantasy artwork. They have no one but each other, and life is good.

One day while walking down a road, Mandy sees a van drive past. In the van are the members of a cult, and their messianic leader, Sand Jeremiah (Linus Roache). Jeremiah decides he wants Mandy for himself — so he and his fanatic followers kidnap her, and leave Red tied up with barbed wire.

Without getting too much more into the details, things go south from there, and Red ultimately goes on a bloody rampage through Sand’s disciples.

I compared Cosmatos’ work here to Lynch and Noe, but alas not the good parts of either director’s work. “Mandy” has the slow pretension of Lynch’s more inscrutable movies, but none of his off-kilter humor or subdued eroticism. And while the movie is steeped in Noe’s brand of nihilism, Cosmatos doesn’t seem to understand the dark forces he’s conjuring with in his blood-drenched images.

Cage gets to have it both ways, playing the quiet hero in the early going before turning on his trademark full-tilt crazy. His best moments are when Riseborough, once again the chameleon with soul, draws out Red’s tender heart. Too bad that heart gets sacrificed to Cosmatos’ over-the-top madness.

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‘Mandy’

★★

Open Friday, Sept. 14, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for bloody violence, language and drug use. Running time: 121 minutes.

'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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.