'Creed II'

The newest chapter in the story of boxer Rocky Balboa and his protege Adonis Creed, “Creed II,” raises a big question: In what universe have I landed where I can make a serious argument for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Dolph Lundgren?

The super-sized Swede’s return to his most iconic role is just one of the grace notes in a sequel that builds on the world of Sylvester Stallone’s boxing hero beautifully, as it explores the bonds between parents and children in heart-tugging ways.

Michael B. Jordan returns as Adonis Creed Johnson, son of the late boxing champ Apollo Creed, who seems to be living on top of the world. At the movie’s outset, Adonis has won the WBC heavyweight crown, he’s happy with his musician girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and he’s got the love of both his adopted mother Mary Anne Creed (Phylicia Rashad) and his mentor, Rocky Balboa (played by Stallone).

Something is nagging at Adonis, as he has the feeling that he’s not really the champion. Then a glad-handing promoter (Russell Hornsby) shows up with an offer too good to pass up: A fight against a massive Russian boxer, Viktor Drago (Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu). The name Drago conjures a lot of significance in this story, because Viktor’s father, Ivan Drago (Lundgren’s character) is the boxer who killed Apollo Creed in the ring in “Rocky IV.”

Rocky, who held Apollo in his arms as he died, warns Adonis against taking the fight, warning that Ivan Drago “broke things in me that ain’t never been fixed.” Mary Anne tells him sternly, “Don’t pretend this is about your father.” And before the fight, Adonis and Bianca get surprising news: Bianca is pregnant.

While this plays out, a different story emerges in Ukraine. Viktor has trained as a boxer, coached by Ivan, for one reason: To seek revenge for what Ivan lost — his fame, his support of the Soviet government, even his wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen) — when Rocky defeated him back in 1985. 

It’s fascinating that Stallone’s Cold War allegory has become timely again, with Viktor as a stand-in for a strong, brutish Russia. But the screenplay, by first-timer Juel Taylor and Stallone (with story credit given to Sascha Penn and Cheo Hodari Coker), gives us so much more. Director Steven Caple Jr. (who made the 2016 indie “The Land”) gives us some bruising fight sequences, but he also focuses on the mental and emotional battles out of the ring.

Stallone’s lovably tough Rocky is as solid as ever, and Jordan and Thompson make a ferocious couple. But the surprise here is Lundgren, showing Ivan as a sports dad searching through his son for the glory that eluded him, and delivering a gruff, touching performance that becomes the movie’s soulful heart.

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‘Creed II’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 21, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sports action violence, language, and a scene of sensuality. Running time: 130 minutes.

'The Front Runner'

If one could point to the moment where American politics turned into the scandal machine and media feeding frenzy it is today, the new movie “The Front Runner” argues, it was when former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart told a Washington Post reporter, “Follow me around. Put a tail on me. I’m sure you’ll be bored.”

Director Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air,” “Juno,” “Tully”) tells the story of how Hart’s 1988 presidential bid, seemingly a sure thing for the Kennedy-esque Democrat, evaporated over the course of three weeks. The reason was a convergence of factors: A feckless candidate who thought his personal life was off-limits, a press corps realizing the rules setting those limits were changing rapidly, and a campaign staff struggling to keep up.

The screenplay — by Reitman, first-timer Jay Carson, and journalist Matt Bai (on whose book, “All the Truth Is Out,” the movie is based) — presents Hart, played by Hugh Jackman, as a serious policy wonk who vows to run a campaign like any other. He cringes at attempts by his staff to show the “up close and personal” side, of himself or his wife, Lee (Vera Farmiga).

Hart’s campaign manager, Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons), labors intensely to make Hart’s goal of a serious-minded campaign a reality. Reitman shows the rough-and-tumble of a fledgling campaign, where the phones barely work and eager volunteers eat pizza and get organized, with the layering and long takes of a Robert Altman movie.

Reitman applies a similar wide angle to the press. The movie takes us into the Washington Post’s meetings, where young reporter AJ Parker (Mamoudou Athie) struggles with what’s relevant and what’s gossip — while the old hand, Ben Bradlee (Alfred Molina), remembers the old days when JFK’s mistresses were not discussed in the news pages. Meanwhile, Miami Herald political reporter Tom Fiedler (Steve Zissis) isn’t sure what to do about a hot tip, involving a young woman and a boat called Monkey Business.

Reitman doesn’t suggest bad guys or good guys here — though he does depict the media as a slavering mob when the scandal over that woman, Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), explodes. Reitman gives us moments to empathize with Dixon trying to keep a lid on things, his aide Irene Kelly (Molly Ephraim) fearing for Rice’s scandal-tarred future, and reporters like Parker and Fiedler just trying to get the truth.

The movie gives much empathy to Lee Hart, who admits that she “has made accommodations” to her husband’s womanizing ways before this incident. Farmiga gives a tough, moving performance that gets under the public facade to show Lee refusing to play the victim to her husband’s bad judgment.

If there’s something missing in “The Front Runner,” it’s a full picture of Gary Hart himself. It’s hard to fault Jackman, who has the senator’s mannerisms and even his political mantras down pat. The fault probably lies with Hart himself, for leaving Reitman & Co. little public introspection or self-flagellation on which to build an inner life of a movie character.

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‘The Front Runner’

★★★

Opened November 7 in select cities; opening Wednesday, November 21, at theaters everywhere.  Rated R for language including some sexual references. Running time: 113 minutes.

'Robin Hood'

There have been some laughably bad movies based on the Robin Hood legends, and some outright strange ones — but it’s hard to think of one less necessary than director Otto Bathurst’s bombastic new rendition, “Robin Hood,” which strains to be cool and relevant but fails miserably.

Taron Egerton, so cool as Eggsy in the “Kingsman” movies, plays Robin of Loxley, a young nobleman with a good life in his family manor, giddily in love with Marian (Eve Hewson). Then Robin is drafted by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Mendelsohn) to fight in the Crusades — four years of hellish combat that is filmed like “The Hurt Locker” or “American Sniper,” but with bows and arrows instead of M-16s and AK-47s.

While in the Holy Land, Robin ends up fighting an Arab (Jamie Foxx), and later saving his life in the face of the torture-happy Guy of Gisbourne (Paul Anderson). When Gisbourne sends the rebellion Loxley back to England on a hospital boat, the Arab hides out in the hold, waiting for his chance at revenge against those who sent Gisbourne and his murderous compatriots.

Home in England, Robin learns his manor and fortune have been seized by the Sheriff of Nottingham, to pay for the war effort. The Sheriff has also declared Robin dead, and Marian — now running a soup kitchen for the unfortunate laborers in the nearby mines — has moved on and is romantically linked to Will Scarlet (Jamie Dornan), who champions the people’s cause to little avail in public meetings.

Robin and the Arab — whose name is hard for the English to pronounce, so he’s called John — both have reasons to seek vengeance on the Sheriff now. So they team up, and one training montage later, they’re looking to steal from the Sheriff’s coffers. They aim to use the money to position Robin as a glad-handing nobleman, currying favor with the Sheriff to gain his trust and learn his plans. 

The hardest part, for Robin and the audience, is not to burst out laughing when the Sheriff’s plot with a Machiavellian cardinal (F. Murray Abraham). But laughter is unavoidable when contemplating Mendelsohn’s scenery-devouring performance, which rivals Alan Rickman (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”) and possibly Pat Buttram (in the 1974 all-animal Disney version) for sheer hamminess.

Bathurst — making his movie debut after a load of TV work, notably “Peaky Blinders” — further jumbles the convoluted plot of Ben Chandler and David James Kelly’s script by tossing in as many loud and harried action sequences as possible. It’s all dimly lit movement and flickers of flame, all of it incoherent and draining.

The capper is an ending that induces slaps to the forehead, revealing all of this confusion to be an origin story for a franchise this “Robin Hood” may — and, if there’s a God, should — never gets to fulfill.

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‘Robin Hood’

★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 21, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for extended sequences of violence and action, and some suggestive references. Running time: 116 minutes.

'Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald'

“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is the first movie to bear a logo declaring it part of J.K. Rowling’s  “Wizarding World” — and, oddly, the first movie that’s not deserving to be in the company of Harry Potter’s adventures.

It’s 1927, just a year after the New York exploits of “magizoologist” Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) depicted in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” But before we get back to Newt, Rowling’s script deals with the arch-villain captured at the end of that last movie, Gellert Grindelwald (played by Johnny Depp — and, no, Rowling’s imagination hasn’t come up with a way to recast with a less problematic actor). Grindelwald is being transported from New York to Europe to stand trial, but he plots a daring escape and gets away.

Now back to Newt, who turns down a chance to lift the Ministry of Magic’s ban on his traveling abroad — because he doesn’t want to work as an auror (the magic world’s version of a police detective), because he’d have to work for his older brother, Theseus (Callum Turner). That job would also put Newt in proximity to his one-time crush, and Theseus’ fiancee, Leta Lestrange (Zoé Kravitz).

The magical ministries in the United States and Europe have traced Grindelwald to Paris, and they believe his aim is to recruit Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), the troubled and freakishly powerful young man who wreaked havoc on New York in the previous movie. Someone else wants Newt to find Credence first — and that someone is Newt’s old Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Albus Dumbledore (played by Jude Law).

It’s nearly an hour into the movie, directed by David Yates (who has now helmed four “Potter” and two “Fantastic Beasts” films), before fans get their promised visit back to Hogwarts. Before that, we have to delve into three potential romances: Newt’s continued pining for New York auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston); Tina’s ditzy sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), casting misplaced enchantments on no-maj baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler); and Credence, hiding out in a circus freak show, and falling for one of the performers, Nagini (Claudia Kim) — who transforms into a python familiar to “Potter” fans. 

Besides giving Voldemort’s assassin snake a tragic backstory, Rowling’s soap opera of a script is overloaded with extraneous characters and mishandled motivations. What’s worse, Rowling and Yates tell a lot more than they show, letting characters rattle off exposition by the yard — usually accompanied by elaborately staged but literal-minded flashbacks. 

When there is action, usually involving some odd creature Newt has tamed, it feels like a diversion from the story rather than part of it. And the less said about the final plot reveal, again spoken rather than shown, the better for everyone.

Because of the dense plotting and exposition, Redmayne’s Newt becomes a subsidiary character in his own movie. Instead, we get too much of Depp’s mumbling menace, as well as the flighty Queenie, easily the weakest character Rowling has written for this universe.

“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” isn’t the last we’ll see of Newt Scamander and his friends — at last report, Rowling was envisioning a five-movie arc — so there’s time and space for Rowling to right the ship. But make no mistake, there’s a sizable amount of damage done to the franchise’s reputation, and it’s all self-inflicted.

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‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald’

★★

Opens Friday, November 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some sequences of fantasy action. Running time: 135 minutes.

'Widows'

Part heist thriller, part political narrative and part marital drama, director Steve McQueen’s intense and probing “Widows” could be the best Sidney Lumet movie that Lumet never made.

Evoking threads of Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Prince of the City,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and others, McQueen and co-writer Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”) adapt Lynda La Plante’s 2002 miniseries into a richly detailed story of women forced to risk everything in a male-dominated Chicago.

Veronica Rawlings (played by Viola Davis) has what appears to be a good life: A luxury high-rise apartment, a wealth of possessions, and a seemingly loving marriage to Harry (Liam Neeson). What Veronica doesn’t know, or what she has chosen not to know, is how Harry makes his living: As a professional thief, leading a crew performing multi-million-dollar heists.

McQueen opens by juxtaposing Harry and his crew (Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Coburn Goss) in the heat of a post-heist police chase with domestic scenes with the crew’s wives: Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), silently suffering from domestic abuse; Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), with three kids and trying to keep a dress shop afloat; and Amanda (Carrie Coon), tending to a baby. They, and Veronica, soon learn that their men aren’t coming home, having been killed when a SWAT team assault led to the crew’s getaway van exploding.

Veronica soon learns something else, from crime lord-turned-politician Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry): Harry was stealing $2 million from Manning’s businesses, money that went up in flames in the explosion. Manning wants that money back, and gives Veronica one month to cobble together the money, or else — with Manning’s enforcer brother, Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya), monitoring her progress.

Veronica has only one way out, a key and an address left to her by Harry through their driver, Bash (Garret Dillahunt). That leads to a safe-deposit box with a notebook, with detailed plans for Harry’s next heist. The job is worth $5 million, but needs at least two other people. She contacts Linda and Alice to be her accomplices, and eventually they bring in a fourth, Belle (Cynthia Erivo).

Jamal wants the money to fund his campaign for alderman, in a district long ruled by an Irish-American family. Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall), is retiring, and his son Jack (Colin Farrell) thought his path to taking over his father’s seat was greased, until Manning’s ambitions surfaced. 

McQueen presents a Chicago where every interaction has an element of the transactional. A ward preacher, Rev. Wheeler (Jon Michael Hill), dangles his endorsement in front of Jack Mulligan and Jamal Manning as a prize on which they must bid. Alice, who signs herself up for an escort website to make some cash, meets a wealthy developer (Lukas Haas) who puts romance in terms of negotiation. Belle’s friend Breechelle (Adepero Oduye) runs her own hair salon through a program the Mulligans championed, but the cost is a monthly kickback to the family.

It’s in this world of power and trade-offs that Veronica and her team must navigate. Their secret weapon, as Veronica puts it, is “nobody thinks we have the balls to pull this off.”

McQueen illustrates the breadth of the city in masterful strokes. His best move is done in a single take, showing the income disparities in the ward Jack wants to represent, as he argues political strategy on a car ride from a lower-income development where he’s campaigning to the family’s gated mansion just barely within the ward’s boundaries. 

In a sharp ensemble with plenty of note-perfect performances, Davis is dominant, as she should be. Her Veronica exudes control, of her crew and her anger that selfish, careless men have put her in this predicament. Watching Davis’ eyes, as Veronica tries to calculate her way out, is as exciting as the heist and its shattering aftermath.

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‘Widows’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual content/nudity. Running time: 129 minutes.

'Boy Erased'

In “Boy Erased,” his second movie as director, the actor and screenwriter Joel Edgerton illuminates a heartbreaking and controversial subject — the forced “conversion” of gay men and women through prayer and dubious therapy — with sincerity and empathy.

One just wishes the depiction of this true-life story, told by a young man who lived it, came off as more than a sermon-simple lesson in accepting people as they are.

Adapting the memoir of Garrard Conley, Edgerton’s drama introduces us to Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges), the dutiful son of Nancy and Marshall (played by Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe). Marshall Eamons is a Baptist preacher and owner of a Ford dealership in their Arkansas town, and he dreams that Jared will one day follow in both roles.

As the movie begins, we see Nancy driving Jared to a facility that appears to have the trappings of a rehab clinic. In fact, it’s a Christian-based therapy center, where parents pay large sums of money to help their children who have been caught being gay. The lead therapist, Victor Sykes (played by Edgerton), tells his “patients” that there is no such thing as being gay, because it’s not in the Bible. Instead, these young people struggle with “same-sex attraction,” a choice they can un-choose through Jesus.

In flashbacks, Edgerton shows us Jared’s first inklings that he’s gay. There’s the harrowing incident in college in which he’s raped by an older student, Henry (Joe Alwyn). And there’s an encounter with Xavier (Theodore Pellerin), an artist with whom Jared shares a tender evening.

Edgerton also captures Conley’s harrowing descriptions of life inside the therapy center. A picture emerges of a slow-motion horror show, somewhere between quack science and cult teachings, with staffers devoid of qualifications. Edgerton’s performance is particularly good in these passages, trying to convince young patients to stay longer while also hiding his practices from their parents. The rock musician Flea gives a brief, menacing turn as an ex-Marine trying to instill stereotypical manliness through batting practice.

The movie never takes the easy route of demonizing Jared’s parents. Kidman encapsulates the southern belle, caught between maternal protection and obeying her faith’s patriarchy. And Crowe is particularly soulful as the father who wrestles with his status and his pride when confronted with a son who may not be a chip off the block.

It’s likely to become repetitive this fall — with “Mid90s” already out and the drug-addiction drama “Ben Is Back” coming soon — but wow Lucas Hedges is a talented young actor. He cuts through the predictable coming-out tropes and dysfunctional family material of Edgerton’s script, and crafts a sensitive, heartfelt portrayal of a young man weathering a storm of conflicting messages to discover who he really is. From start to finish in “Boy Erased,” Hedges’ performance is indelible.

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‘Boy Erased’

★★★

Opened November 2 in select cities; opening Friday, November 16, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Century 16 (South Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for sexual content including an assault, some language and brief drug use. Running time: 115 minutes.

'Ralph Breaks the Internet'

Where Disney’s 2012 comedy “Wreck-It Ralph” was a delightfully retro dive into video games, the sequel “Ralph Breaks the Internet” is giddily of its moment, a colorfully wacky satire of web culture that doesn’t care whether it’s still relevant in five years or five days.

The new movie returns to the world of the video arcade and the friendship between former bad-guy bruiser Wreck-It Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) and candy-coated racer Vanellope von Schweetz (voiced by Sarah Silverman). Ralph thinks life couldn’t get any better, though Vanellope is feeling a little bored winning her races all the time.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Overlord'

One imagines someone walking into J.J. Abrams’ production company and saying “It’s ‘Saving Private Ryan’ but as a horror movie” — and then walking out with a deal to make “Overlord,” an erratic but entertaining thriller that starts as a World War II action drama and ends up in a really weird place.

It’s early morning on June 6, 1944, hours before the D-Day invasion, and a platoon of Army Airborne paratroopers have one mission: Get to a church that’s occupied by the Germans and take out the radio tower erected there — or otherwise the Allied troops won’t have the air cover they need at Normandy.

The mission is less simple when the Germans start shooting airplanes out of the sky, and doing significant damage to the one carrying our platoon. By the time it’s all sorted out — in a sequence that  moves to a flaming plane to the French countryside in a way that’s both fluid and chaotic — the platoon is down to four men. 

The one we’ve been following to the ground is Pvt. Ed Boyce (played by Jovan Adepo), an African-American soldier who, we’re told, was too gentle in boot camp. Also surviving the drop are the jaded but war-savvy explosives expert Cpl. Ford (Wyatt Russell), tough-talking Pvt. Tibbet (John Magaro), and nerdy war photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker, from “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”). They get some help from Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), a young woman from the village.

Chloe helps the four American soldiers, because she needs help fending off the German garrison’s nasty commander, Wafner (Pilou Asbaek, from “Game of Thrones”). Chloe also informs them there’s something else going on in that Nazi-occupied church besides radio transmission.

Director Julius Avery moves the action at a dizzying pace. The first half-hour, as the troops land haphazardly in France, is a maelstrom of combat confusion, leaving the audience off-balance as to which characters are going to survive the opening moments and which ones aren’t. It feels a bit like a first-person shooter game, with better effects.

In the second half, screenwriters Billy Ray (“Captain Phillips”) and Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”) shift into full horror mode, delivering a kinetic story line that Avery augments with some impressive body-horror prosthetic and animated effects. It’s gross, but in a monster-movie kind of way that is more exhilarating than disturbing.

The talented ensemble cast mixes unknowns with kind-of-knowns so that no one has enough star power that the audience is sure he’s not going to meet a gruesome demise. There’s a certain freedom in that, because it means a filmmaker can keep the surprises going pretty much to the end.

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‘Overlord’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 9, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images, language and brief sexual content. Running time: 109 minutes.