'The Children Act'

There are a lot of big questions posed in “The Children Act,” but this astringently stark adaptation of the novel by Ian McEwan (“Atonement,” “On Chesil Beach”) ultimately asks one: Who gets to decide the answers for all the others?

Judge Fiona Maye, played with simmering intensity by Emma Thompson, is a family-court magistrate in London. She deals with high-profile, life-or-death cases every day — like the one where she must rule whether to let doctors separate conjoined twins, which would kill one of them, against the wishes of the babies’ parents.

While Fiona handles such cases calmly and with detachment, and avoiding the media firestorms that each case brings, her personal life isn’t so rosy. Her husband of 21 years, Jack (Stanley Tucci), one day declares that he wants to have an affair — to make up for the fact that he and Fiona haven’t had sex in nearly a year. Fiona’s reaction is clear: “You do this, we’re done. Simple as that.”

As she tries to deal with her crumbling marriage, another big case lands in her docket. Adam Henry (played by “Dunkirk” star Fiona Whitehead) is three months’ shy of his 18th birthday, and suffering from leukemia. The doctors have the drugs to treat his illness, but they recommend he take a blood transfusion to lessen the side effects. But Adam and his parents (Ben Chaplin and Eileen Walsh) are Jehovah’s Witnesses, who believe that blood is sacred and that transfusions are against God’s will.

Fiona hears the arguments from the hospital and the Henrys, and even takes the unusual step of visiting Adam in hospital to understand his passionate defense of his religious beliefs. Then she makes her ruling — a decision with life-altering consequences for everyone concerned.

Director Richard Eyre (“Notes on a Scandal”) and McEwan, adapting his own novel into a screenplay, capture the story’s many stage-ready moments — both the courtroom scenes and Fiona and Jack’s marital disintegration would play well on the West End or Broadway — with a brutal quiet, so we hear every silent frustration in the characters’ voices. Those silences are important because, this being McEwan, it’s what characters don’t say to each other that hits as powerfully as what they do.

Thompson gives a stellar performance, as she labors to separate her personal warmth and her flinty professional manor separate but finds one bleeding into the other in emotionally devastating ways. She sharpens her performance on her two foils, Tucci and Whitehead, who bring out her wounded pride and her mournful motherly instincts, respectively.

Eyre and McEwan sometimes move so subtly, so calmly, that it’s not until the movie’s end that the full emotional impact of “The Children Act” is felt. When it hits, though, it packs a hard punch.

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‘The Children Act’

★★★1/2

Opened Sept. 14 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 28 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for a sexual reference. Running time: 105 minutes.

'Pick of the Litter'

It doesn’t take more to make people see the documentary “Pick of the Litter” than to say one word: Puppies!

But the cute baby Labradors we meet at the beginning aren’t just on display for our amusement. They are here to work, doing one of the hardest and most noble jobs a pooch could have: Acting as a guide dog for a blind person.

Directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy follow the two-year process it takes to train a guide dog, and they start with an impressive statistic: Of the 800 pups born into Guide Dogs for the Blind’s breeding program every year, only 300 make it all the way through the program to work and live with blind and vision-impaired people.

The movie follows one litter of five pups through the process. The pups are given names, all starting with the same letter of the alphabet. In this case, it’s “P,” and the staff brainstorm the names Potomac, Patriot, Phil, Primrose and Poppet. The pups spend about two months at GDB’s facility in San Rafael, Calif., going through basic moves to get accustomed to walking on different surfaces without hesitating.

From 2 months to 16 months, the dogs go to live with volunteer families, who help train the dogs how to handle being around people calmly. If a dog is too high-strung or energetic, he or she may be moved to a different foster family, sometimes more than once. Every three months, the dogs are tested for their temperament, and some may wash out of the program — the polite term is “career changed” — then and there.

The third step is back at GDB’s facility, with a rigorous 10-week training program to get them to master obedience and their abilities to sense and avoid dangers — including busy sidewalks and oncoming cars. At the start of this phase, some of the female dogs learn their fate isn’t to be a guide but to be mama to the next generation of pups.

Nachman and Hardy capture the personalities of the five dogs, but more fascinating are the vignettes of the humans who train them. The most fascinating is Adam, an Iraq War veteran who’s still adjusting to civilian life, and hopes concentrating on the dogs’ welfare will help him overcome his own post-traumatic stress.

“Pick of the Litter” has built-in suspense, as we wait breathlessly at every turn to see which dogs make the cut and which ones don’t. You may find yourself rooting for each of the five, hoping they’ll get matched with kind people waiting for a guide dog and the independence such an animal provides.

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‘Pick of the Litter’

★★★

Opened August 31 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 28 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG for mild thematic elements. Running time: 81 minutes.

'Blaze'

Biopics of musicians usually fall into one of two patterns: They either chronicle how incidents from that person’s life transformed into songs, or they show what a trainwreck of a life that person lived.

Sometimes you get both at once, as in the case of “Blaze,” in which director Ethan Hawke introduces us to the irascible singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, whose life was the saddest country song he ever wrote.

Hawke knows his way around a musical biopic, having starred in one of the better ones, 2015’s “Born to Be Blue,” in which he played a semi-fictionalized version of the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. With “Blaze,” Hawke enlists Foley’s lady love, Sybil Rosen, as a co-screenwriter to adapt Rosen’s memoir, and the results are more intimate and less gossipy than most biopics.

Sure, they hit the standard career mileposts, as Foley — sensitively played by musician and first-time actor Ben Dickey — meets Sybil, played by Alia Shawkat, in a Georgia artists’ community in 1975. Blaze hits the road to perform, with Sybil the supportive girlfriend, until they ultimately reach Austin, Texas.

Success seems always just around the corner for Blaze, as he attracts a circle of musician friends including Townes Van Zandt (played by Charlie Sexton). But as he gets tantalizingly close to a recording contract, waved in front of him by three record-company cowboys (played by Hawke pals Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn and Sam Rockwell), Blaze sabotages himself with his boozing and his habit of getting into bar fights with his audience.

Hawke captures Blaze and Sybil’s romance in gauzy golden tones, a love affair crystallized in a Terrence Malick magic-hour loop. But Blaze’s obstinate personality, his unwillingness to change to suit anyone else — his friends, the record company or Sybil — ultimately becomes his undoing, and Hawke depicts those moments with gritty realism.

Dickey is a real find, and he brings a musician’s soulfulness to this lived-in portrayal. He’s beautifully matched by Shawkat, who’s best known as a comic actor (think of her in “Arrested Development” or “Search Party”) but proves her versatility as Blaze’s supportive but no-bull lover. Their collaboration, like Hawke’s with Rosen, makes “Blaze” a biography that’s more than the sum of its well-worn parts.

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‘Blaze’

★★★

Opened August 17 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 28 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content and drug use. Running time: 129 minutes.

'Little Women'

It’s a blessed relief to see “Little Women” out of its corsets, freed from the strictures of 19th-century costumes and settings, and moving around in the modern world just in time for the book’s sesquicentennial — a big-sounding word that Louisa May Alcott’s impulsive heroine Jo would enjoy using in a sentence.

Director Clare Niederpruem, who co-wrote with Kristi Shimek, makes the brave choice to take Alcott’s 150-year-old classic and update it to the 21st century. The details are changed, such as when Marmee (Lea Thompson) is heard on the phone dealing with creditors while her husband, Mr. March (Bart Johnson), is serving as an Army medic in Afghanistan. But the relationships between the four March sisters remain the emotional core.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Fahrenheit 11/9'

When Michael Moore is angry, the result is smartly satirical political commentary. When he’s scared, as he is with his latest op-ed documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9,” his satire takes on an insistent edge — cutting right to the heart of our nation’s dire predicament.

The title is a riff on Moore’s 2004 classic “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a dissection of American panic in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The transposed numbers represent Nov. 9, 2016, the date the world woke up to learn that Donald Trump had narrowly won the Electoral College and the presidency over the popular-vote winner, Hillary Clinton.

And who is to blame for Trump’s campaign in the first place? Moore rehashes a popular theory that it was singer Gwen Stefani, because NBC was paying her more to be a judge on “The Voice” than they paid Trump to host “The Apprentice.” So Trump, Moore argues, devised his publicity stunt of a campaign, riding the escalator down into the Trump Tower lobby. The plan was perfect, until Trump opened his mouth and denigrated Mexicans as rapists and murderers, leading to NBC cutting ties with him.

Running for president, it turned out, was more lucrative, and the rallies he held nationwide stoked his ego more than being on TV ever did. Moore blames others for promulgating Trump: A weak field of Republican candidates, the Democratic establishment who propped up Hillary Clinton and thwarted a people’s campaign by Bernie Sanders (let it go, Michael), and a media that saw Trump as a ratings goldmine — and was loaded with men (Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, John Heilemann, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes) whose sexual harassment and abuse histories surfaced after Trump’s Access Hollywood tape.

After the rehash of Trump’s election, Moore — like his liberal fan base has for the last two years —vacillates between hope and despair.

The hope comes from progressive, grassroots movements Moore profiles. They include teachers going on wildcat strikes in West Virginia, Democratic primary winners like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the kids from Parkland, Fla., battling the National Rifle Association and pro-gun politicians after 17 people were gunned down in their high school last Valentine’s Day. (Trigger warning: Moore uses seldom-seen footage taken by students on their cellphones inside Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School during the shooting.)

The despair comes from political scientists and scholars who see in Trump’s behavior the earmarks of despotism. Moore isn’t the first commentator to compare Trump to Adolf Hitler, but Moore does it with style, juxtaposing Trump’s speeches to footage of Hitler in rallies — and following up with a moving interview with 99-year-old Ben Ferencz, the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials.

And despair hits the red zone when Moore returns to his hometown of Flint, Mich., and details that city’s ongoing water crisis — which he labels, not without provocation, an “ethnic cleansing” committed against the majority-black population of Flint by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and his penny-pinching minions. (As a stunt, Moore sprays a tanker of Flint water over the gates of Michigan’s governor’s mansion.)

For all the talk of doom, and even fear of nuclear war, Moore always leans to the hopeful side. He still has confidence that the American people will pull the country from the brink, and “Fahrenheit 11/9” is his rallying cry for them to take action at the ballot box this November.

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‘Fahrenheit 11/9’

★★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at theaters nationwide. Rated R for language and some disturbing material/images. Running time: 129 minutes.

'Life Itself'

One almost has to admire how perfectly awful “Life Itself” is. It’s a two-hour torpedo of shameless manipulation and distrustful screenwriting, as if writer-director Dan Fogelman decided to cram all the tear-jerking pathos and storytelling contrivances of a season of his hit TV series “This Is Us” into one sitting.

Fogelman starts with some deliberately hackneyed scripting, with an overbearing Samuel L. Jackson cameo as an unreliable narrator fishing around for a hero — and ending with a therapist (Annette Bening) getting hit by a bus on a New York street.

Psych! The scene is a false alarm. The screenplay-within-a-screenplay is the product of Will (Oscar Isaac), one of the Bening character’s patients. Will is recounting his beautiful romance to Abby (Olivia Wilde), from their free-spirited college days (where Abby’s thesis was about the unreliable narrator) through marriage and the impending birth of their first child. After telling this story, with Will and the therapist walking through flashbacks like Scrooge on Christmas Eve, there’s a tragedy, and nothing is the same after.

Then there’s another tragedy. And another. And another. Each one seems to be meant to illustrate the fragility of life, and the need to make every moment count, and similar Hallmark-worthy sentiments. What they really illustrate is Fogelman’s penchant for disaster porn, and how readily he will jerk the rug out from under any character with whom we might begin to identify.

Thus is a cast of talented actors — a list that includes Olivia Cooke (“Ready Player One”), Mandy Patinkin, Jean Smart, Antonio Banderas and Laia Costa — squandered in a sprawling narrative that spans two continents and, ostensibly, 50-plus years without ever seemingly leaving 2017 and always returning to that single tragic moment. All this while making a pretentious number of Bob Dylan references.

The reasons why “Life Itself” fail so completely all tie to that tragedy, as well. Fogelman has set us up not to trust anything the movie tells us, so we never let our guard down among these characters. And since Fogelman’s convoluted script is more concerned about graphing out the characters’ tenuous connections than their honest emotions, he never leaves room to make us care about them.

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‘Life Itself’

★

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for language including sexual references, some violent images and brief drug use. Running time: 118 minutes.

'The House With a Clock in Its Walls'

J.K. Rowling has spoiled us for any other story involving magic — stories like “The House With a Clock in Its Walls,” haunted-house tale for kids that gets by on silliness and the odd screen pairing of Jack Black and Cate Blanchett.

Lewis Barnevelt (Owen Vaccaro, last seen in the “Daddy’s Home” movies) is a nerdy fourth-grader in 1955, recently relocated to a small town in Michigan after his parents’ death in a car crash. He is moving to live with his uncle, Jonathan (played by Black), in a creepy old house designed in early Addams Family. Jonathan soon reveals that he is a warlock, training himself in the art of magic. His next-door neighbor, Mrs. Florence Zimmerman (that’s Blanchett), is a witch, even more skilled in magic, and the two share a friendship disguised in traded insults.

Every night, Lewis observes, Jonathan sneaks around the house, seeking something making deep and terrifying noises through the house. Eventually, Jonathan reveals that he is searching for a clock hidden in the house’s walls by its former occupant, a powerful but evil warlock, Isaac Izard (played in flashbacks by Kyle MacLachlan). Isaac died, and presumably killed his witch wife Selina (“Hamilton’s” Renée Elise Goldsberry), while concocting a plan that could destroy the world — and it’s up to Jonathan and Florence, with some help from Lewis, to find it and stop it.

Lewis, though, is troubled. He has vivid dreams about his late mother (Lorenza Izzo). And he so wants to suck up to the school tough guy, Tarby (Sunny Suljic), that he breaks Jonathan’s only house rule, and removes a book of dark magic from a locked cabinet.

Director Eli Roth — and, yes, seeing the guy who made “Hostel” and the “Death Wish” remake helming a PG-rated movie is the weirdest thing since John Waters concocted “Hairspray” — creates a colorful array of gross-out magical effects, from the puking pumpkins guarding Jonathan’s house to the topiary griffin that farts dead leaves. He and screenwriter Eric Kripke (adapting John Bellairs’ 1973 novel) also have fun devising the sharp-elbowed banter between Jonathan and Florence.

Alas, the story itself is thin, and drawing it out to movie length allows for a lot of visual-effects padding. You’d think with all the clocks in this movie, placed by Jonathan to drown out the ticking of the one in the title, that somebody would make the movie go just a little faster.

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‘The House With a Clock in Its Walls’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, Sept. 21, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements including sorcery, some action, scary images, rude humor and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

'Lizzie'

One of America’s most enduring horror legends is the story of Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 in Fall River, Mass., was accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an axe.

In “Lizzie,” director Craig William Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass examine this notorious crime, picturing it as a case of female empowerment, revenge and sexual awakening.

Chloë Sevigny plays Lizzie, a spinster at 32 who lives under the thumb of her father, Andrew (Jamey Sheridan), a hard and sometimes cruel man who punishes his daughter for the slightest diversion from his rules. One of those rules is to treat with respect his second wife, Abby (Fiona Shaw), whom Lizzie despises.

Andrew hires a new housemaid, an Irish lass named Bridget (Kristen Stewart), and the dynamic in the Borden household subtly changes. Lizzie knows that Bridget, like servant girls before her, will become a target for her father’s lecherous and abusive habits. Lizzie and Bridget grow closer, and the sexual tension between Sevigny and Stewart grows as the relationship does.

Macneill moves slowly, with deliberation and careful calibration, as he ratchets up the suspense toward the moment everyone who can rhyme “axe” and “whacks” is waiting for. The viewer may not notice this creeping dread building, until the moviegoer notices fingernails have embedded themselves in the armrest.

It helps that Sevigny and Stewart are two terrific actors, and their takes on these characters — two lonely, longing women held back by their sex and their class — is quietly compelling. They bring “Lizzie” to that expected, bloody moment, but it’s what they do after that will have the audience gasping in surprise.

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‘Lizzie’

★★★

Opened Sept. 14 in select cities; opens Friday, Sept. 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence and grisly images, nudity, a scene of sexuality and some language. Running time: 105 minutes.