'Free Solo'

Most of us lack that psychological quirk that compels us to do crazily dangerous things just because they are there to be done — which is why documentaries like “Free Solo” are so fascinating, because they give us a glimpse of that particular form of obsession, and the amazing things those few people achieve because of it.

Married filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi captured a group of such people in their last movie, the acclaimed “Meru,” in which a team of mountain climbers (including Chin) braved one of the most dangerous ascents in the Himalayas. Chin isn’t risking his life quite so much this time, but the subject he and Vasarhelyi profile definitely is.

At 33, Alex Honnold has climbed more big walls than most people can imagine. His specialty is the free-solo ascent, going up a rock wall with no ropes or other safety equipment. He relies on his fingers, his feet, and the bag of chalk on his belt to keep his hands dry as he seeks the slightest depression that he can use as a handhold or foothold.

A decade ago, Honnold first made a name for himself by free-soloing up the Moonlight Buttress at Utah’s Zion National Park. His favorite place, though, is Yosemite National Park in California, which presents some of the most challenging rock faces, including the Half Dome and the granddaddy of them all, El Capitan.

As the movie begins, no one has free-solo climbed then nearly 3,000-foot-high granite wall of El Capitan. Honnold aims to be the first. He parks his van, which is both his training vehicle and his home, and starts examining his possible route. He climbs it with ropes, so he can study every nook and cranny, and figure out which ones he can use to climb without ropes later. He consults with other climbers, like Tommy Caldwell and Peter Croft, about the pros and cons of each step.

Over the course of nearly two years, Chin and Vasarhelyi follow the ups and downs of Honnold’s preparations. In that time, two major distractions emerge. One is the film crew itself, which raises the pressure that Honnold might push himself when he’s not ready to go. The other is his new girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, whose presence shows Honnold for the first time what he might miss if he dies while climbing.

As with “Meru,” Chin and Vasarhelyi attain astonishing footage of Honnold that illustrate the dangers and sheer size of the rock wall. What’s more, they get into the such close-up detail, particularly of the six trickiest spots along his route up El Capitan, that we understand the dangers more intimately when Honnold encounters them for real.

The result is a documentary with the pacing and stakes of a thriller, a literal cliffhanger. It’s also a fascinating look into Honnold’s mind, and the million calculations that fuel his drive to turn risk into a manageable commodity.

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‘Free Solo’

★★★1/2

Opened Sept. 28 in select cities; opens Friday, Oct. 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex Geneva (Lehi). Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 100 minutes.

'Tea With the Dames'

The documentary “Tea With the Dames” — in which we get to hang vicariously with four of the English theater’s greatest living actresses as they share good gossip and reflect on their lives — is pure catnip for movie lovers, drama geeks and anybody who loves a good yarn.

The four old friends are, in alphabetical order, Dame Eileen Atkins, 84; Dame Judi Dench, 83; Dame Joan Plowright, 88; and Dame Maggie Smith, 83. According to the introduction, they often get together from time to time out in the country to chat about this and that, having grown up together as young thespians and grown old together working together occasionally in plays, movies and television.

Most recently, Dench and Smith co-starred in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011) and its 2015 sequel, while Smith and Atkins worked together in Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” (2001), and Dench, Smith and Plowright all appeared in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Tea With Mussolini” (1999). But their paths have been crossing for decades.

When they get together, they often reminisce about their days in the National Theatre, often working with — and suffering the criticism of — Plowright’s husband, the legendary Sir Laurence Olivier. Smith tells some of the funniest and cattiest stories, like when she describes playing Desdemona opposite Olivier’s blackface Othello, and how Olivier, in character, once struck her hard across the face. “I like say that was the only time I saw stars at the National Theatre,” Smith says in a perfect deadpan.

Smith isn’t the only one who can drop a tart remark. At one point, a production assistant shows Dench and Atkins some footage of Dench’s boarding-school theatrical appearances, and Atkins takes one look at the teen-age Dench and remarks “Did you have tits even then?”

The foursome compare notes on everything from playing the lead in “Antony and Cleopatra” to balancing work with motherhood (all but Atkins have had children) to working alongside their actor husbands. (Plowright was married to Olivier; Smith to the stage actor Robert Stephens; Dench to the late Richard Williams, and they co-starred on a sitcom “A Fine Romance”; and Atkins was married briefly to “Game of Thrones” actor Julian Glover.)

Dench and Smith reflect on the oddness of appearing in major movie franchises — James Bond and Harry Potter, respectively — while Plowright tells how her American agent once told her he’d find “some cameo that Judi hasn’t gotten her hands on yet.” And on it goes like this, as the women gently poke at each other and laugh the way only true old friends can.

Director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill,” “My Cousin Rachel”) augments the conversation with a wealth of archival photos and video, which are eye-opening and sometimes downright odd. (The weirdest is seeing Dench, at 34 in 1968, as a green-skinned fairy queen Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”) The added material doesn’t detract from the lively conversations, as these four acting legends are caught in the act of just being themselves. 

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‘Tea With the Dames’

★★★1/2

Opened Sept. 21 in select cities; opens Friday, Oct. 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 84 minutes.

'The Old Man & the Gun'

Many movie buffs would argue that Robert Redford’s best years as an actor were from 1969 to 1976, when he was at the height of his movie stardom, with a string of heavyweight films that included “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid,” “Downhill Racer,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Candidate,” “The Way We Were,” “The Sting,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “All the President’s Men.”

That’s one hell of a run, but I’d argue the string he’s on now — starting with his one-man 2013 drama “All Is Lost,” and including “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “A Walk in the Woods,” “Truth,” “Pete’s Dragon,” the Netflix films “The Discovery” and “Our Souls at Night,” and his latest and possibly last one, the heist comedy “The Old Man & the Gun” — is just as good.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'First Man'

Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” is everything a good biographical drama should be, and absolutely nothing that one would expect.

In capturing its subject, astronaut Neil Armstrong, the movie respects the emotional reserve Armstrong built around himself. What’s more, it extends that reserve to what one might think would be an easy thing to exploit for tears and cheers: Mankind’s landing on the moon. 

The fact that Chazelle chose this project to follow up his romantic, open-hearted “La La Land” shows some guts — and shows he can work in many more moods than anyone realizes.

For a story about one of humanity’s greatest triumphs, “First Man” is mainly a chronicle of the failures and tragedies along the path. As Armstrong, played with coiled intensity by Ryan Gosling, says after one such failure, “We fail down here so we don’t fail up there.”

The script, adapted from James R. Hansen’s authorized biography by Josh Singer (who co-wrote “The Post” and “Spotlight”), begins in 1961 in the air, as Armstrong works as a test pilot on supersonic aircraft that skirt the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. He’s a good pilot, the powers that be say, but he’s distracted by the health problems of his 3-year-old daughter Karen, who has cancer. Karen’s death is a tragedy for Neil, his wife Janet (Claire Foy), and their other children that colors the rest of their lives.

Seeking a fresh start, Neil enrolls in NASA’s astronaut training program. NASA’s mission, after being beaten by the Soviets at every step of the space race, is to put a man on the moon and bring him back to Earth. We follow the process of the test runs, in the Gemini and early Apollo flights. Sometimes, astronauts were nearly killed — and in one tragic instance, astronauts were killed.

Chazelle also puts the spotlight on Janet, the dutiful wife who works to maintain a brave face in front of the cameras, but privately rails that NASA’s “boys” aren’t as in control of things as they pretend to be. Together, she and Gosling’s Neil are a yin-and-yang of personalities, bringing out the best in each other through adversity.

The movie smartly depicts the hustle-and-bustle of NASA’s astronaut corps, with a solid ensemble that includes Jason Clarke, Patrick Fugit, Christopher Abbott, Lukas Haas, Shea Whigham and Corey Stoll (who plays Armstrong’s abrasive foil and eventual Apollo 11 colleague Buzz Aldrin). Kyle Chandler provides a fatherly oversight as Deke Slayton, the director of NASA’s astronauts.

Chazelle opts to show the space missions not with Kubrickian sterility but with all their rough-and-tumble edge, every shake and shimmy conveyed through wobbly visuals and a sound design that will jiggle the audience’s collective backsides. In many scenes, Linus Sandgren’s handheld camera puts the viewer in Armstrong’s place, feeling every jostle and wobble as it happens. The finale, the depiction of the Apollo 11 moon landing, was filmed using IMAX cameras for maximum detail — and it’s difficult to tell how much of the rocket’s assent is documentary footage of the era and how much is modern visual effects.

It’s probably impossible to re-enact Armstrong’s feat without generating some feeling of pride and accomplishment in the heart of every human who sees it. Chazelle doesn’t deny us that glory, but what he does that’s so remarkable in “First Man” is that he give it a personal meaning — of an astronaut who pushed down his sadness, of a wife who kept her family together through it all, and of a nation that needed a hero.

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‘First Man’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, Oct. 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some thematic content involving peril, and brief strong language. Running time: 138 minutes.

'The Sisters Brothers'

It’s hard to get a handle on what kind of Western “The Sisters Brothers” is trying to be — a revisionist take on frontier violence, an outsider’s metaphor for American brutality, or just an old-school shoot-‘em-up — and that’s part of its charm.

French director Jacques Audiard, who has made such incisive dramas as “A Prophet,” “Dheepan” and “Rust and Bone,” goes to Oregon, circa 1851, for his first English-language feature. There, he introduces brothers Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), brothers and paid assassins in the employ of The Commodore (Rutger Hauer). Charlie, though younger, is the lead man of the team, and also more comfortable with the killing life. Eli is more reticent about taking life, and puts his priority into protecting Charlie when he’s drunk and unruly.

The Commodore’s assignment to the Sisters Brothers is to rendezvous with a detective, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has been put on the trail of a chemist, Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). The chemist, the brothers are told, stole something from the Commodore, who dearly wants it back. Morris is under orders to befriend Warm, and detain him until the Sisterses meet them. What Charlie hasn’t told Eli is that he has orders to extract from Warm, to the point of torture, his formula for a process to make gold extraction easier.

Audiard, who co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain (adapting Patrick Dewitt’s novel), spends most of the movie on the trail with Charlie and Eli, as they talk and sometimes bicker about their lethal profession. Eli would rather get out of killing and go open a store somewher, but Charlie enjoys the thrill of pursuing and dispatching people — and, besides, the Commodore would never let them give up the life.

Only when the brothers meet Morris, an intellectual taken to flowery prose, and Warm, whose belief in a utopian future is almost evangelical, do they see the possibilities of life away from the endless bloody trail. The fact that the story would entertain such a departure from the familiar Western scenario is remarkable, and transports, if only briefly, the movie to dizzying heights.

The movie is blessed with a tight ensemble, with all four main men adding subtle shades to the mix. Phoenix and Reilly are believable as irascible brothers, and their differences — Charlie’s mean streak vs. Eli’s gentleness — are set in relief by Gyllenhaal’s gentlemanly Morris and Ahmed’s idealist Warm.

The conclusion is as unexpected as what came before, but in a different way. In a movie so punctuated with gunfire and violence, the ending is oddly muted. The payoff is big, just not in the way a Western usually ends.

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‘The Sisters Brothers’

★★★1/2

Opened Sept. 21 in select cities; opens Friday, Oct. 12, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content. Running time: 121 minutes.

'Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween'

As I sat about to watch “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween,” I thought about all the questions I had after 2015’s “Goosebumps.” Questions like: What happened in the first “Goosebumps” movie? Did I even watch it? Why can’t I remember it?

Turns out, I did see it, and kind of liked it — and I wish I had those fond memories to console me through the force-fed hijinks and special-effects overload of this charmless sequel.

You’ll recall, as I barely did, that the first movie involved some high-school kids who encounter the reclusive writer R.L. Stine (Jack Black), creator of the “Goosebumps” book series. He has the original manuscripts all locked away, because when they’re opened, the monsters within leap off the page and into the real world.

In the sequel, there’s a new town, new kids and a new scary old house. Middle-school buddies Sonny (Jeremy Ray Taylor, from “It”) and Sam (Caleel Harris) rummage around the scary old house, and happen upon a treasure chest with a mysterious book inside. Before they can investigate, the book is stolen by bullies — but not before the evil ventriloquist dummy Slappy is released to wreak havoc.

It’s up to Sonny’s college-bound sister Sarah — played by Madison Iseman, who, ironically enough, turned into Jack Black in the “Jumanji” reboot — to help Sonny and Sam keep Slappy in line. That’s not so easy when they figure out that Slappy, following the plot of R.L. Stine’s first book, has a plan to make Halloween come alive, and that part of the plan involves Sarah and Sonny’s mom (Wendi McLendon-Covey, from “The Goldbergs”).

Director Ari Sandel (“The Duff”) can’t do much with Rob Lieber’s undernourished script, even when he adds a couple of comedy ringers in the form of Ken Jeong as a decoration-obsessed neighbor and Chris Parnell as an awkward pharmacy clerk. All the humor and charm that anyone tries to muster gets sucked into the whirlwind of animated monsters thrown at the screen.

Lastly, “Goosebumps 2” deploys a strategic cameo — you may have seen it in the ads — for what could have been a clever finishing gag. Unfortunately, the filmmakers undercut the set-up, so the joke falls flat. It’s unlikely the gag would have redeemed this sequel, but it would have helped.

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‘Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween’

★1/2

Opens Friday, Oct. 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for scary creature action and images, some thematic elements, rude humor and language. Running time: 90 minutes.

'Jane and Emma'

The drama “Jane and Emma” takes an intimate and intense approach to a historic event — the 1844 slaying of Joseph Smith, founder and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — through the eyes of two women close to the scene.

One of the women is Emma Smith (played by Emily Goss), the first wife of the prophet, who watches over Joseph’s body in the family’s hotel in Nauvoo, Ill., pistol at the ready, in case an angry mob comes to cart him away. She dreads the public viewing his followers will demand and seeks just a moment to mourn in private.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'A Star Is Born'

No, the contours of the new “A Star Is Born,” starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, don’t veer too far from the 1937 original with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. Or the 1954 version with Judy Garland and James Mason. Or the 1976 version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.

It doesn’t take long in Cooper’s soulful directorial debut to realize how little that matters. After all, most movie adaptations of “Romeo & Juliet” tell the same story, and what’s important is the care given to the characters within it.

In Cooper’s version (he shares writing credit with Eric Roth and Will Fetters), those characters are Jackson Maine, an alcoholic country-rock singer, and Ally, a hotel waiter who moonlights as a singer at a drag bar. It’s when Maine, out of booze and looking for a drink, enters that bar and hears Ally singing a sultry take on “La Vie en Rose,” that a connection sparks.

Jackson and Ally spend the night together, driving around in Jackson’s town car and talking about music and songwriting. He gets her to sing a song she wrote. She talks about how she’s uncomfortable singing her own songs onstage, and that talent experts have told her she’ll never be famous because her nose is too big. In the early morning, he takes her home, where she lives with her dad, Lorenzo (Andrew Dice Clay), who runs a chauffeur service and talks about his days as a crooner.

The next day, Jackson invites Ally, and tagalong pal Ramon (Anthony Ramos), to take a private plane to his next gig in Phoenix. In the wings during Jackson’s performance, Ally is shocked when he starts playing the song she wrote, and urging her to sing with him. She does, and it becomes a viral sensation.

What Ally doesn’t see at first is the tension in Jackson’s rock-star life, much of it fueled by alcohol. There are his arguments with his road manager, and older brother, Bobby (Sam Elliott). And there is Jackson’s tinnitus, a condition he refuses to treat, making his hearing only get worse. In spite of the warning signs, Ally falls in love with Jackson. But as she becomes a fast-rising star and Jackson declines into alcoholism and drug dependency, will their live survive?

Cooper shows, both as director and in his hangdog performance, that he’s not just the pretty face of “The Hangover.”His Jackson Maine looks and feels like a washed-up music legend, from his guitar riffs to his choice of friends — namely, a sage old cohort in Memphis played by Dave Chappelle. Cooper also synthesizes the alcoholism tropes of the past “A Star Is Born” iterations and a thousand other movies and gives them a bone-deep authenticity. 

But, unlike Jackson, Cooper knows when to turn the spotlight over to his leading lady. Given the theatricality of her musical persona, it’s no surprise that Lady Gaga makes an impression in the film. What is surprising, and revelatory, is how the woman born Stefani Germanotta channels both the Gaga glamour and the earthy, real human being behind it. The glory of this version of “A Star Is Born” is in how this movie star is born through the deconstruction of the pop star playing her.

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‘A Star Is Born’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, Oct. 5, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, some sexuality/nudity and substance abuse. Running time: 136 minutes.