'Monsters and Men'

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s probing drama “Monsters and Men” could easily get lost in a crowd of movies about police-initiated violence and the Black Lives Matter movement — between its Sundance Film Festival stablemate “Blindspotting” and the big studio entry “The Hate U Give.”

That would be a shame, because Green, as writer and director, takes on a police shooting from several different angles. Each is fascinating and powerful on their own, and together the results are shattering.

The movie begins with a white New York police officer shooting an unarmed black man who was selling loose cigarettes outside a Bed-Stuy bodega. (Eric Garner, who died in a police chokehold in Staten Island, was selling loosies before he was killed.) From that incident spin out three stories about men reacting to that death, having to make a choice, and dealing with the consequences.

First is Manny (Anthony Ramos, who plays Lady Gaga’s pal in “A Star Is Born”), a Latino who witnessed the shooting, and captured the moment on cellphone video. Manny is confronted with a choice: Make the video public, or keep quiet to avoid bringing heat on himself and his young family. 

Next up is Dennis (played by “BlacKkKlansman” star John David Washington), an NYPD officer who has experienced institutional racism himself. When we first see him, he’s in civilian clothes on his way to work, and he gets pulled over for “driving while black.” As the shooting case becomes a media spectacle, Dennis is eyed with suspicion both by his black friends and by white cops, even his partner (played by “Stranger Things” mom Cara Buono). Dennis must decide whether he can remain part of a system whose institutional racism always lies just below the surface. 

The third figure is Zee (Kelvin Harrison Jr., from “It Comes at Night”), a high-school baseball star who experiences a political awakening when he sees Manny’s video. For Zee, the question is whether he follows the advice of his father (Rob Morgan) to stay focused on school and sports, or fans the spark of activism and join those marching in protest.

Except for a cathartic, dynamically staged final scene, Green doesn’t push these issues too forcefully. He makes a tougher choice, to let the emotions and conundrums these characters face play out quietly, not so much with loud speeches than with contemplation and thought. It’s an effective tactic, and one that makes “Monsters and Men” a moving and thought-provoking drama. 

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‘Monsters and Men’

★★★1/2

Opened Sept. 28 in select cities, opens Friday, Oct. 5, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language. Running time: 95 minutes.

'Shine'

To paraphrase a lyric from “A Chorus Line,” the salsa-saturated melodrama “Shine” can be summed up as “dance: 10; plot: 3.”

The movie is set in New York’s Spanish Harlem, a place — as the heavy-handed opening narration by club owner and drummer Ramon (David Zayas) states — where “our souls are united by the same beat.” Ramon teaches his young sons, Junior and Ralphi, to dance salsa, in a studio downstairs from his nightclub. And he regularly turns down offers to sell his building to gentrification-minded developers.

As adults, Junior (Gilbert Saldivar) and Ralphi (Jorge Burgos) are the star dance duo in papa Ramon’s club. Ralphi also dances with Josie (Kimberli Flores), his boyhood crush. But their romance takes Ralphi away from the club at the worst time, when a fire destroys the club and kills Ramon. 

Flash-forward seven years, and the brothers are divided. Junior stayed in New York, running a clothing store for hip urban kids. Ralphi lives in London, working for the same real-estate conglomerate that wants to put a high-rise yuppie apartment building in Spanish Harlem. The project’s construction sites have been hit by a rogue arsonist.

Ralphi is sent home to New York to try to convince the Spanish Harlem locals to sell their homes and businesses. He tries to reconnect with the old neighborhood, but finds resistance from his brother and from Josie, who is keeping Ramon’s dance studio afloat. Ralphi, under pressure from his boss (Alysia Reiner) to bring results, finds himself torn between his job and his family ties.

This rehash of save-the-neighborhood cliches — devised by first-time director Anthony Nardolillo and co-writers Corey Deshon and Ahmadu Garba — is instantly forgettable, except for the ridiculous use of F-bombs. (Some producer was asleep at the switch, not reminding Nardolillo that less profanity means a tamer PG-13 rating and a bigger potential audience.) 

The script’s only use is as a clothesline, on which Nardolillo hangs a series of dynamic dance sequences. Flores really shines on the dance floor, in powerful solo numbers and sexy duets with Burgos. The salsa music and dancing have plenty of spice, which nearly make up for the bland story around them.

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‘Shine’

★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 5, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 97 minutes.

'Smallfoot'

The animated musical tale “Smallfoot” sneaks up on a viewer, presenting at first as a simple fish-out-of-water story but slowly revealing its true intentions as a clever morality play about the costs and benefits of telling the truth.

Up on a lonely mountain in the Himalayas, a village of Yeti live a blissful existence. They believe their mountain is an island floating in the clouds, supported by giant mammoth who must be fed ice every day — which is the villagers’ main employment. Every morning, the gong ringer, Dorgle (voiced by Danny DeVito), wakes the great glowing snail, which then crawls across the sky bringing the Yeti daylight. The Yeti’s leader, the Stone Keeper (voiced by Common), wears a robe of stones, each one imprinted with one of the village’s unbreakable laws, which are never to be questioned, so (almost) no one ever does.

Dorgle is ready to pass on his gong-ringing job — which involves catapulting himself to strike the gong with his head — to his son, Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum). While practicing, Migo gets distracted by the Stone Keeper’s pretty daughter Meechee (voiced by Zendaya), and is thrown to the edge of the mountain. There, he sees a giant silver bird (we’d call it an airplane) crashing nearby, and depositing a tiny creature, a Smallfoot, that the stones say doesn’t exist. The Smallfoot goes over the edge before Migo can show him to the rest of the village, so nobody believes him.

Well, almost nobody. Migo learns there’s a group of Yeti, disregarded as cranks by the rest of the village, who have formed the SES, the Smallfoot Evidentiary Society, to prove that the Smallfoot exist. Doing that, though, could endanger the carefully ordered way of life of the Yeti villagers — and the Stone Keeper will go to great lengths to keep that from happening.

Meanwhile, below the clouds, we meet Percy (voiced by James Corden), a nature-show host who is panicking that his ratings and social-media clicks are in the basement. He’s so desperate that he considers faking a Yeti sighting, but his unflinchingly honest assistant Brenda (voiced by Yara Shahidi) refuses to wear the Yeti costume and stilts Percy brought on the trip. When Percy meets Migo, the encounter rattles both of them, and leaves each with a moral dilemma about whether to tell the truth, no matter the consequences.

Director Karey Kirkpatrick (“Over the Hedge”) has a droll sense of humor — his writing credits include “Chicken Run” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — and it’s well deployed as Percy and Migo’s worlds ultimately collide. There are plenty of songs dotting the narrative, but the radio-friendly ones (like Zendaya’s early track, or Niall Horan’s folksy number over the closing credits) aren’t as interesting as Corden’s nervous rap to “Under Pressure” or Common’s intense number in which the Stone Keeper explains the harsh realities of Yeti life.

With inventive visual gags and an oddball voice cast (which includes Gina Rodriguez and LeBron James), “Smallfoot” turns out to be a free-wheeling comic delight. There’s also a well-delivered lesson about the importance of truth, but you don’t have to tell the kids that.

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‘Smallfoot’

★★★

Opens Friday, Sept. 28 at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action, rude humor and thematic elements. Running time: 96 minutes.

'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.