'Once Upon a Deadpool'

The recycled, repurposed “Once Upon a Deadpool” answers the question geeks and movie-industry wags have been asking for months: What will it like when Disney gets its squeaky-clean mouse mitts on Fox’s hyper-violent Marvel franchises?

The answer: It won’t be pretty, but creative minds may pull something good out of it.

What director David Leitch and star/producer/prime mover Ryan Reynolds have done here is cut together an airline edit of this summer’s “Deadpool 2.” The F-bombs have been defused with bleeps or surreptitious overdubs. The blood-and-guts have been trimmed back. The bare backsides have been pixelated.

As before, the filmmakers are telling the story of how Deadpool (played by Reynolds) loses his lady love Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) to a gangster’s wayward bullet — and how, unable to die himself, he throws himself into trying to protect a teen mutant, Russell (Julian Dennison), from either getting killed by warrior-from-the-future Cable (Josh Brolin) or ending up a ruthless killer himself.

Some of the best gags — like the formation and rapid disintegration of Deadpool’s “forward-thinking, gender positive” X-Force — are truncated, because they originally relied on comical gore or profane reactions. A few DVD-worthy deleted scenes are restored to pad out the running time, but they mostly serve to show why they didn’t make the cut in the first place.

The gimmick tying it all together has Deadpool relating the plot, like a bedtime story, to Fred Savage in a duplicate of the bedroom set from “The Princess Bride.” Of course, Fred’s not a kid anymore, and he’s really ticked off at being put in this position — so his revenge is making snarky comments about Fox’s handling of Marvel material, the misogyny of killing off Vanessa to motivate Deadpool’s actions (a k a “fridging”), and the ubiquity of mid-credit and after-credit scenes. (There are four overall here, including a touching tribute to the late Stan Lee.)

The jokes with Savage induce a few laughs, but nothing compared to what’s lost in the sanitizing process. “Once Upon a Deadpool” dismisses what makes the Deadpool movies entertaining: The way they impishly revel in the extreme comic-book violence that Disney-owned Marvel movies are afraid to touch.

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‘Once Upon a Deadpool’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 12, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action violence, sexual content and language. Running time: 119 minutes.

'Roma'

Alfonso Cuarón’s luminous memory play “Roma” may be the purest example of what the snobs call “cinema” — applying a filmmaker’s skills to show life as it is, in black and white, with no musical score or other artificial tricks.

But because of how the production was financed — and how that has determined where viewers are likely to see it, in a theater or on a TV screen — a debate is raging among those same snobs about whether “Roma” should count as a movie at all.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Burning'

There is a lot of talk about fires in Lee Chang-dong’s South Korean noir thriller “Burning,” but the pyrotechnic effect that matter the most is the slow burn built by the director and his star, Yoo Ah-in, in this unsettling tale of sex, stalking and self-loathing.

Yoo plays Lee Jong-su, who writes some but spends most of his time tending to the rundown one-time dairy farm his family owns in a rural area in South Korea — close enough to the North Korean border that he can hear the loudspeaker blasting Kim Jong-un’s propaganda. He frequently drives into the city to get away from the farm, but he has no friends and little contact with others.

One day, Jong-su runs into Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-Seo), who used to go to school with him in their old hometown. Hae-mi is flighty and flirty, and it doesn’t take long before she’s talked Jong-su to watch her cat while the takes a trip to Africa. The deal is sealed, in Jong-su’s mind at least, when they have sex in her apartment.

After a couple weeks of feeding a never-seen cat, Jong-su gets a call from Hae-mi, with news that she’s returning home to Korea. At the airport, Jong-su is delighted to see her again, but less thrilled when he sees she’s not alone. She’s got a new friend, Ben (Steven Yeun, the Korean-born former star of “The Walking Dead”), who drives a Porsche and has what seems to be unlimited wealth.

This triangle — with Hae-mi representing an obliviously sensual but sometimes depressed third leg — gets more intense when Ben and Hae-mi drive out to visit Jong-su in his rural home. It hits a breaking point when Hae-mi mysteriously disappears, and Jong-su starts seeking clues into her whereabouts.

Treated as a standard thriller, the movie might have demanded a faster pace. But Lee is after bigger game, focusing in on Jong-su as his crush on Hae-mi evolves into obsession for her and barely disguised jealousy against the interloping Ben. The pacing may seem a bit ponderous, but there’s a purpose, a deliberation, behind every single move.

There are traces of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” among other classic references, in Jong-su’s slow descent into madness. With a gripping performance by Yoo, which goes from smoldering to raging with subtle mastery, Lee serves up a psychological thriller that’s deliciously dark and packs a wallop in the final reel.

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‘Burning’

★★★1/2

Opened November 9 in select cities; opens Friday, December 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for nudity, sexuality and some violence. Running time: 148 minutes. In Korean, with subtitles.

'Maria by Callas'

Perhaps no one more perfectly embodied the idea of a diva, a supremely talented but haughty star chasing down her mercurial muse, than Maria Callas — and director Tom Volf’s documentary “Maria by Callas” lets us hear her story, and most importantly that amazing voice, right from her own mouth.

In his first movie, Volf exclusively uses archival footage of Callas, in interviews and performance, and recitations of her letters and memoirs (read by the American opera singer Joyce DiDonato) to chronicle the soprano’s stellar career and personal heartbreaks.

Though she’s thought of as a European star, Callas was born in New York City in 1923, the daughter of Greek emigres. It was her mother who took her back to Greece, and forced her to study music, ultimately landing with her mentor and longtime friend Elvira de Hidalgo.

Her performing career began in Greece during World War II, but it wasn’t until after the war, in 1945, that she returned to America, where she had limited success. She was aided by another mentor, Tullio Serafin, who took her back to Italy, where her career blossomed. Sold out shows at La Scala in Milan became the norm, and she came back to America to debut with the Metropolitan Opera in 1956 — but a feud with the Met’s Rudolf Bing cut that relationship short.

Callas garnered a reputation for being difficult to work with. In Volf’s film, hearing about these incidents from Callas’ perspective, a different explanation emerges: Callas set high standards for her own performance, and would rather cancel than let anyone hear her when she wasn’t at her best.

“There are two people in me,” Callas told the British interviewer David Frost in 1970, in an interview that Volf uses as the movie’s narrative backbone. “I am Maria, but there is Callas that I have to live up to.”

That split is most apparent in the tabloid handling of her personal life, especially her romance with the Greek magnate Aristotle Onassis. That relationship led to heartbreak for Callas, when Onassis impetuously married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the American president, in 1968.

Volf covers those more tawdry parts of Callas’ life, but his heart is really in her performances. He blocks out long passages for a couple of Callas’ most famous arias — most notably the Habanera from Bizet’s “Carmen” — which she delivers with gusto. It’s in those moments of “Maria by Callas” when one realizes that she may have had a point, that great art sometimes requires sacrifice.

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‘Maria by Callas’

★★★

Opened November 2 in select cities; opens Friday, December 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for mild thematic elements, some smoking and brief language. Running time: 113 minutes. In English, and French and Italian with subtitles.

'The World Before Your Feet'

Like any long walk, the documentary “The World Before Your Feet” makes some interesting stops, has a lot of dead spots in between, and will leave you equally educated and exhausted.

The long walker in this case is Matt Green, who for six years (by the time the documentary finished filming in 2015) had followed his plan to walk every single street in the five boroughs of New York City. Recording his routes on his smartphone and taking pictures as he goes, Green documented his many encounters with average New Yorkers as he pursued his offbeat and solitary goal.

Along the way, director-editor-cinematographer Jeremy Workman (“Who Is Henry Jaglom?”) drops bits of Green’s biography. A former engineer, Green opted out of the rat race to start these walking tours, first crossing America and now surveying the Big Apple. He doesn’t own or rent an apartment, instead couch-surfing with friends or cat-sitting in exchange for temporary lodging. In one segment of Workman’s episodic narrative, we learn that he was engaged before his walking days but broke it off, and had a girlfriend who grew tired of his lack of interest in “normal” things like going to the movies.

What interests Green is the minutiae of city dwelling, whether it’s the different birds that live in the city or the way many barbershops put a “z” in their name. He has chronicled interesting gravestones in cemeteries, historical markers all over the place, and a vast and varied number of 9/11 memorials.

Workman depicts Green as someone who makes friends easily, and on his walks he ends up sharing a beer in a backyard barbecue in the summer and joining a snowy street football game in the winter. But Workman has difficulty answering the movie’s most basic question: Why does Green want to do this? Workman takes some stabs at getting to that essential truth, but Green’s elusive handling of the question — partly out of being a bit inscrutable, or because he doesn’t know the answer either — leaves the viewer wanting more from this confounding tour guide.

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‘The World Before Your Feet’

★★1/2

Opened November 21 in select cities; opens Friday, December 7, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG for mild language and images of the 9/11 attacks. Running time: 95 minutes.

'Mirai'

A four-year-old is the center of his or her universe, and the one at the center of the Japanese anime fable “Mirai” gets a fast and fantastical lesson in opening himself to the problems of others.

The 4-year-old in this scenario is Kun (voiced by Jaden Waldman in the English-language dub), who’s apprehensive about the arrival of his new baby sister. It doesn’t take long after Mom (voiced by Rebecca Hall) and Dad (voiced by John Cho) get home with the baby for Kun to realize that life isn’t the same any more. Dad, an architect, is going to work from home while taking care of the kids, while Mom goes to work in an office. But neither one of them seem to have enough time to play with Kun, not like they did before the arrival of the baby Mirai.

Repeatedly, Kun storms off into their house’s garden patio, angry over some slight or lack of attention. Each time, the garden transforms into someplace else, and Kun encounters someone extraordinary.

On one visit, Kun meets a young vagabond (voiced by Crispin Freeman) who turns out to be the personification of the family dog — who’s just as resentful of Kun because his arrival meant the parents wouldn’t play as much with him.

Other moments bring Kun up close to a teen-age Mirai (voiced by Victoria Grace), his mother as a little girl, and his great-grandfather as a dashing young man (voiced by Daniel Dae Kim). Each time, Kun fills in the information about his parents, his family’s past, and why Mirai’s name — meaning “future” — is so appropriate for her. 

Director Mamoru Hosoda (“The Boy and the Beast”) conjures up impressive images — some beautiful, some scary — for Kun’s fantasy world. When Kun throws a temper tantrum and calls Mom a witch, for a brief second she becomes an evil hag. When Kun discovers his dog in human form, he tries on the dog’s tail and instantly becomes half-dog himself. 

Through it all, Hosoda tells a rich and warm-hearted story about a middle-class family that is imperfect but loving. “Mirai” shows Hosoda sometimes reveling in the images of the past, but his inventive animation and storytelling show the Japanese animation tradition will carry on into the future.

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‘Mirai’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, November 30, at select theaters, including the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for thematic elements including some scary images. Running time: 98 minutes. Dubbed into English. 

'Border'

A lonely customs guard finds her soulmate, sort of, in “Border,” a bizarre and rather grim fairy tale from Sweden.

Tina (played by Eva Melander) is no princess. With her heavy brow line and stern look, she’s more ogre than fair maiden. But she has a special talent for smelling people’s fear, a gift that makes her well suited to her job as a guard at a customs station at a ship terminal. 

Tina can tell with just a sniff who’s trying to smuggle in excess alcohol, or who’s trying to smuggle a memory card loaded with child porn. When this second incident happens, Tina even helps a local police detective (Ann Petrén) track down the porn ring responsible for the images.

One day on the job, Tina sniffs out something different: A mysterious traveler, Vore (Eero Milonoff), with a knapsack filled with his tools to collect bugs. Vore also smiles at Tina, something few people do, and it unnerves her. When Vore keeps stopping at Tina’s station on subsequent trips, it unnerves her even more. When they see each other in Tina’s off-hours, Vore shows her how much they have in common — in a supernatural twist I won’t even bother divulging it here because you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

Director Ali Abbasi — who co-wrote with Isabella Eklöf and John Ajvide Lindqvist (on whose short story this is based) — performs the difficult trick of keeping our belief suspended even through this outlandish reveal. He’s aided greatly by Melander, who earns our sympathy even through some odd facial prosthetics.

The suspension doesn’t last all the way to the end, though, as Abbasi navigates some jarring tone shifts and a grating early plot thread that makes an unwelcome reappearance in the climax. Still, give “Border” credit for daring to be different, and daring to find timely questions about strangers within a monster-movie premise.

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‘Border’

★★★

Opened October 26 in select cities; opens Friday, November 30, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, a bloody violent image, and language. Running time: 110 minutes. In Swedish, with subtitles.

'Life and Nothing More'

In his second feature film, “Life and Nothing More,” writer-director Antonio Méndez Esparza delivers exactly what his title promises: An unvarnished cinema verité look at a family dealing with some hard knocks.

At first, the audience sees what the judge does: Another African-American teen on a downward slide. At 14, Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) is in court, as his exasperated mother Gina (Regina Williams) trying to convince a judge that he’s a good kid, and will fulfill the terms of his probation after being accused of breaking into cars in his home town of Tallahassee, Fla.

At home, Gina warns Andrew that he has to fulfill his probation obligations, so he doesn’t end up incarcerated like his father. Andrew has responsibilities, to care for the house and his 3-year-old sister Nesie (Ry’nesia Chambers), while Gina works at a truck stop. Andrew goes to school, and the anger-management classes that are part of his probation, but he’d rather hang out with friends.

At work, Gina fends off the advances of Robert (Robert Williams), a diner customer with romance on his mind. His charms slowly penetrate Gina’s defenses, and soon they are dating — a development that makes Andrew, seeing a new man in his mom’s life, even more sullen and withdrawn.

Esparza presents these life changes in straightforward scenes, unadorned by a musical score or other flourishes. With nonprofessional actors ad-libbing their dialogue, getting to the heart of their experiences and the inability to process them, the movie comes as close to Frederick Wiseman-level documentary as a narrative film can get.

Esparza aims to show Andrew as a man-in-training trying to find his own path, while also depicting him as another cog in a judicial machine that seems as likely to grind him into dust as help him toward the straight and narrow. The movie similarly shows Gina as a woman trying to be her true self, but finding herself blocked by poverty, bad luck and disappointing men.

“Life and Nothing More” doesn’t get preachy about the plight of poor African-American families, but it doesn’t have to. By showing the daily grind of this one family, Esparza lets his film speak for countless others.

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‘Life and Nothing More’

★★★1/2

Opened October 24 in select cities; opening Friday, November 30, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and suggestions of violence. Running time: 114 minutes.