'Capernaum'

In our recent discussions of seeking out more diversity among movie directors, there’s a name that needs to be included in the conversation as one of the best women directors working today: Nadine Labaki, the Lebanese actor and filmmaker behind the searing “Capernaum.”

“Capernaum” is Labaki’s third film and is a stunning departure from her female-centered “Caramel” and “Where Do We Go Now?”. The new film — which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last May, and is nominated for the Academy Award in the Foreign-Language Film category — is a gritty, uncompromising look at life on the mean streets of Beirut through the eyes of a child hardened by his experiences.

Labaki introduces her main character, 12-year-old Zain (played by Zain Al Raffea) in a courtroom. He’s been accused of a violent crime, but he’s also suing his mother, Souad (Kawthar Al Haddad), and father, Selim (Fadi Kamel Youssef), for the crime of giving him life in the first place. His explanation to the judges form the flashbacks through which Labaki (who has a minor role as Zain’s lawyer) tells the boy’s harrowing story.

Zain is one of the older kids in Souad and Selim’s tiny, filthy apartment, and he’s forced to skip school to work for the family — mostly making deliveries for a local grocer. Zain assigns one job to himself: To protect his beloved little sister, Sahar, and never letting their parents know that Sahar is having her first period. That, Zain knows, will be a sign to marry Sahar off to the leering grocer.

When the parents do send Sahar away, Zain runs away, eventually landing at a beachside amusement park. He meets Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), an Ethiopian immigrant who mops floors there, and is hiding her baby boy Yonas from her employers and the authorities. Rahil aims to raise money to buy a fake ID from Aspro (Alaa Chouchnieh), a shady dealer in a souk. Zain agrees to babysit Yonas while Rahil works, in exchange for lodging in Rahil’s shanty shack.

But when Rahil unexpectedly doesn’t come home one day, Zain finds he must scramble to keep Yonas from starving — while also keeping hidden from Rahil’s landlady and from Aspro, who knows there’s big money in trafficking a baby to adoption dealers.

“Capernaum” isn’t unrelentingly depressing, as Labaki squeezes out small moments of joy through the hardship in Zain’s hard-knock life. It is a serious-minded movie, though, and Labaki has plenty to say about how society treats our smallest and poorest members.

Thanks to the nonprofessional actors in the cast, particularly its 12-year-old lead, and a breakneck pacing, “Capernaum” sweeps the audience up in the plight of young Zain, whose resolve and even hopefulness stay steady in the face of every bad thing life throws at him.

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‘Capernaum’

★★★1/2

Opened Friday, December 14, in select cities; opens Friday, February 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for language and some drug material. Running time: 126 minutes; in Arabic with subtitles.

'Isn't It Romantic'

Rebel Wilson gets to have her cake and eat it, too, in “Isn’t It Romantic,” a formula romantic comedy that also is a parody of formulaic romantic comedies.

Wilson, the Australian comic relief of the “Pitch Perfect” series, stars here as Natalie, who grew up watching romantic comedies and having her happily-ever-after dreams shattered by her disapproving mum (Jennifer Saunders, in a too-brief cameo). Cut to today, and Natalie lives in a crappy apartment in a rundown New York neighborhood, and is an architect and resident doormat in a shabby architectural firm, which at the moment is trying to woo a handsome client, Blake (Liam Hemsworth). 

Natalie tells her romance-obsessed assistant Whitney (Betty Gilpin) that romantic comedies are rubbish, and decries that they’re filled with such cliches as the mincing gay best friend and the bitchy female office competition. Meanwhile, Natalie spectacularly fails to notice that her office best friend Josh (Adam Devine) is mooning over her.

One evening, Natalie makes eye contact with a hot guy on the subway — who, it turns out, is only trying to steal her purse. Natalie fights ferociously, but ends up whacking her head into a pillar. When she wakes up in the hospital, she slowly realizes everything is different: New York smells like lavender rather than poop, and hot guys are falling all over themselves to impress her.

“I’m in a [bleep]ing romantic comedy!” she finally yells out. “And it’s [bleep]ing PG-13!”

Sure enough, Natalie is being swooned over by Blake, but when they seem to consummate their relationship, things immediately cut to the next day and “good morning, beautiful!” Meanwhile, Tiffany has turned into an angry rival, Natalie’s neighbor Donny (Brandon Scott Jones) has become a flaming font of “Queer Eye” inspiration and Josh has found a new love, the impossibly beautiful “yoga ambassador” Isabella (played by the impossibly beautiful Priyanka Chopra).

The script — written by Erin Cardillo, with a strong rewrite by rom-com veterans Dana Fox (“What Happens in Vegas”) and Katie Silberman (“Set It Up”) — borrows heavily from “Pretty Woman” and “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” with references to “When Harry Met Sally…” and “Jerry Maguire,” among others, thrown in for good measure. The cliches run thick and fast, but they work because (as the cliche goes) all cliches have a kernel of truth in them.

Director Todd Strauss-Schulson (“A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas”) plays up Wilson’s outsized personality and her willingness to sacrifice dignity for a good joke. He also deploys Wilson’s rapport with Devine, established in the “Pitch Perfect” films, to good effect. And, when all else fails, he can spring up with a charmingly ridiculous musical number, such as when Natalie tries her hand at karaoke and lands in a Whitney Houston-inspired dance routine.

“Isn’t It Romantic” works with ruthless efficiency, getting Wilson and the cast through the story quickly, living out the same romantic-comedy tropes it mocks, and never dwelling on any humorous scenario too long. There’s no Judd Apatow-style piling on of ad-libbed jokes, and the movie clocks in at a rapid 84 minutes — exactly what this funny bur derivative material deserves.

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‘Isn’t It Romantic’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, February 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for language, some sexual material and a brief drug reference. Running time: 84 minutes.

'Happy Death Day 2U'

It’s always a nice surprise when a horror-thriller like “Happy Death Day 2U” comes along and cleverly upends the low expectations one would normally have for a low-budget slasher — and a sequel, to boot.

If you remember the first “Happy Death Day” — and seeing the first one is a must to make any sense out of this one — you’ll recall that it put sorority sister Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) in a lethal “Groundhog Day” situation. She wakes up one Monday, hung over, in the dorm room of a stranger, nice-guy Carter Davis (Israel Broussard), and goes through the day leading up to a surprise birthday party, which she never gets to because a killer in a baby-face Halloween mask kills her first. Then she wakes up again in Carter’s dorm room and the cycle repeats itself until she can figure out who’s killing her over and over again.

The sequel begins exactly where the first movie left off, on Tuesday, but seen through Carter’s nerdy roommate Ryan Phan (Phi Vu), as he goes through a normal day that ends with his violent murder — and he goes through it all again. Since one of the first people he tells this to is Tree, she’s immediately accepting of his otherwise outlandish story, and jumps in to help him solve his problem.

The source of Ryan’s time loop — and, it turns out, Tree’s — is the project Ryan and his science partners, Samar and Dre (Suraj Sharma and Sarah Yarkin), are building in the quantum mechanics lab. When they fire it up, over the objections of Dean Bronson (Steve Zissis), it lets loose a cosmic blast that sends Tree to the last place she wants to go: Monday again.

Sure enough, she wakes up in Carter’s dorm room, seemingly reliving the day from hell in which she was repeatedly murdered in the first movie. But she quickly notices some changes — like how her roommate Lori (Ruby Modine) is different, and the sorority’s queen bee Danielle (Rachel Matthews) is, like, nice. Ryan explains that this loop is in a different dimension, and they have to use the quantum reactor lab project to fix things to end the loop. 

Along the way, it would be nice if Tree could also prevent people from getting gruesomely murdered by the baby-mask killer. There’s also another difference in this dimension that makes Tree seriously consider whether she’d rather stay instead of going back to her old life.

Writer-director Christopher Landon, woh directed the first “Happy Death Day” and a few of the “Paranormal Activity” sequels, references early on the inspiration for this sequel: “Back to the Future Part II.” It’s a fair comparison, because Landon takes the structure of the first “Happy Death Day” and tweaks it in some creative ways to bring a fresh perspective — and a new mystery — to the familiar scenario of the first movie.

As with the first movie, “Happy Death Day 2U” is held together — even in its more slapstick moments — by Rothe. Her comic skills and scream-queen charm keep us invested as Tree must once again endure the live-die-repeat cycle to get to a satisfying conclusion.

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‘Happy Death Day 2U’

★★★

Opens Wednesday, February 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for for violence, language, sexual material and thematic elements. Running time: 100 minutes.

'Cold War'

Love, music and politics are an explosive mix in “Cold War,” a heartbreakingly beautiful drama from the rightly acclaimed Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, whose movie “Ida” won the Academy Award for Foreign-Language film four years ago.

The story of “Cold War” starts in the rubble of World War II, when Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a music director, first encounters Zula (Joanna Kulig), a singer whose voice is as remarkable as her beauty. The two fall in love hard, to the point of obsession.

As musicians in a Poland that is now under the influence of Stalin’s Russia, Wiktor and Zula are forced to perform for the Communist government’s propaganda machine. They talk about someday escaping to the West — but when the chance comes to make a break for freedom in France, something happens that changes their lives forever.

Pawilkowski, co-writing with Janusz Glowacki and Piotr Borkowski, loosely based the story on his own parents. He keeps the story at an intimate level, channeling global events through the eyes of this love-bound couple, and how politics is filtered through their passions.

The movie has the allure of film noir, with foggy streets and smoky gin joints rendered in piercing black-and-white images by cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who received an Academy Award nomination for his work. (The movie is also nominated in the Foreign-Language Film category, and Pawlikowski scored a surprise directing nod, the first time a director has been nominated for a film didn’t get a Best Picture nomination since the Oscars expanded the Best Picture category past five nominees.)

Because of Pawilkowski’s tight focus on this self-destructive couple, the movie becomes a showcase for Kulig and Kot, and their performances have an intensity seldom found in movies. It may be a “Cold War,” but the actors’ chemistry burns through the screen.

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‘Cold War’

★★★1/2

Opened December 21 in select cities; opens Friday, February 1, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Century Cinemas 16 (South Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexual content, nudity and language. Running time: 87 minutes; in Polish (and other languages) with subtitles.

'Destroyer'

Nicole Kidman delivers another searing, persona-busting performance in the crime drama “Destroyer,” but her work is a step above the garden-variety story it services.

When we first see Kidman’s Erin Bell, she’s in bad shape. Battered, possibly hung over or maybe still drunk, the L.A. County Sheriff’s detective shuffles unsteadily to a crime scene being processed. A homicide victim, shot multiple times, lies in the road, a few dye-stained $100 bills near the body. Bell tells the detectives working the case that she knows who did it, but they don’t believe her.

In the next scene, Bell goes to her desk at the sheriff’s office, and there’s a piece of mail waiting. Inside the envelope is a dye-stained $100 bill. She instantly knows the message behind this cryptic delivery: Silas is back.

Bell slips out, avoiding her partner (Shamier Anderson), for some off-the-books detective work, as she starts asking old criminal acquaintances where Silas is. They never know, but they know somebody who does — which leads Bell through a rogue’s gallery that includes a sleazy lawyer (Bradley Whitford) and Silas’ crazed girlfriend (Tatiana Maslany).

At each step, director Karyn Kusama (“The Invitation”) flashes back to Bell’s past. As a young L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy, Bell was recruited to go undercover with Chris (Sebastian Stan), an FBI informant, to infiltrate a gang of bank robbers led by the charismatic, manipulative and deadly dangerous Silas (Toby Kebbell).

Meanwhile in the present, Bell also is dealing with a family crisis: Her estranged teen daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), who had been living with Bell’s ex (Scoot McNairy), is taking up with a sleazy older guy (Beau Knapp).

The script, by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, teases out its information like bait on a fishhook, reeling us in with every revelation. It’s only in the aftermath that one realizes there’s not a lot of there there, that the story is a barebones string of encounters without much to flesh them out.

Kusama and Kidman collaborate to make the most of what the script provides. Kusama digs into the dingy atmosphere that Bell’s criminal contacts inhabit. And Kidman, nearly recognizable as the world-weary detective, puts in a masterful performance of regret, revenge and redemption.

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‘Destroyer’

★★1/2

Opened December 25 in select cities; opens Friday, February 1, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, violence, some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 121 minutes.

'The Kid Who Would Be King'

The action adventure “The Kid Who Would Be King” seems to be following the pattern established 12 months ago by “Paddington 2,” by serving up an unassuming British family movie that’s more charming and smart than anyone expects.

Director-writer Joe Cornish, helming his first movie since the 2011 aliens-in-the-projects thriller “Attack the Block,” re-imagines the Arthurian legends for modern times. This, the movie points out, is a time when people are leaderless and pitted against each other — fill in your particular Brexit or Trumpian complaint here — and therefore exactly the right time for heroes like King Arthur.

The kid in question is Alex (played by Louis Ashbourne Serkis, son of “Lord of the Rings” star Andy Serkis), a 12-year-old living in a council estate with his mum (Denise Gough). Alex regularly defends his best pal Bedders (Dean Chaumoo) from their school’s bullies, Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Dorris). If these character names feel familiar, you’re very clever and stop reading ahead.

One night, the bullies chase Alex into a demolition site, where Alex finds a sword poking out of a concrete pillar. Alex realizes that the sword is Excalibur, and that he is the chosen heir to King Arthur’s mantle. 

The re-emergence of Excalibur also awakens two ancient beings. One is Merlin, who we see as a gangly teen (played by Angus Imrie, son of British comedienne Celia Imrie) — though he transforms into an owl, or into his older form, who looks a lot like Sir Patrick Stewart. The other is Arthur’s long-imprisoned sorceress half-sister Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson), who recognizes that the political turmoil above ground make the perfect conditions for her global conquest.

The ensuing adventure sets Alex, Bedders and Merlin — and, after some convincing, Lance and Kaye — on a quest to stop Morgana before she surfaces. Cornish also makes space for some serious stuff, like Alex learning the truth about his wayward father.

Cornish deftly mixes exciting action sequences, some scary CGI creatures, and a sense of humor that the kids will enjoy and is dry enough to amuse their parents whose knowledge of Arthurian legend begins and ends with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Cornish is also blessed with a strong group of young actors who are earnest heroes without being cloying or ridiculous, making “The Kid Who Would Be King” a tale worth telling again.

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‘The Kid Who Would Be King’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for fantasy action violence, scary images, thematic elements including some bullying, and language. Running time: 118 minutes.

'Stan & Ollie'

The biographical comedy-drama “Stan & Ollie” is indeed a fine mess, a string of sentimental cliches that are enlivened by stars Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly and their abundant fondness for the real-life duo they play, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

The silent and early-sound comedy duo is shown here at the end of their run, on a 1953 music-hall tour of the United Kingdom that they hope will revive their flagging careers. Laurel (played by Coogan) is polishing the gags in a “Robin Hood” script, while Hardy (played by Reilly) is succumbing to his usual vices: Food, matrimony, and the ponies.

The tour has the duo re-creating their classic skits for smaller-than-promised audiences, until they take the advice of their promoter Bernard (Rufus Jones) and perform some publicity stunts. When their wives — Hardy’s Lucille (Shirley Henderson), a worrywart ex-script girl, and Laurel’s Ida (Nina Arianda), who was a big star back in St. Petersburg — arrive on the scene, the tensions and some old resentments between the comics.

Those resentments are spelled out in flashbacks to the 1930s, when Laurel tried to fight their cheapskate producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston) to renegotiate a salary and creative control comparable to Charlie Chaplin. 

Director Jon S. Baird (“Filth”), working off a script by Jeff Pope (who co-wrote “Philomena” with Coogan), hints at how Laurel and Hardy’s era is fading out, like showing the advancing age of their fan base. The central story line is a snooze, though, largely premised on Laurel keeping from Hardy the truth about their prospective comeback movie.

What enlivens “Stan & Ollie” is the way Baird and his stars stage small moments that serve as built-in homages to Laurel and Hardy’s classic sight gags — for example, at one train station, they lug a heavy trunk up a flight of stairs, only to see it slide back down.

And it helps that Coogan and Reilly work extra hard to squeeze laughs out of those gags, and at distilling Stan and Ollie’s essence in their performances. Make-up and prosthetics help, especially with Reilly’s fat suit for Hardy, but the actors also manage to display that comfortable shorthand long-standing partners develop and maintain in spite of old grudges or the ravages of time.

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‘Stan & Ollie’

★★★

Opened December 25 in select cities; opens Friday, January 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG for some language and for smoking. Running time: 97 minutes.

'Glass'

In his latest thriller, “Glass,” writer-director M. Night Shyamalan strip-mines the good parts from his best movie, “Unbreakable,” and the creepiest parts of his last movie, “Split,” with an ending that has more hard-to-swallow twists than a bag of stale pretzels.

And I wish I could have seen them.

Because of a family emergency — everybody’s fine, thanks for asking — I was summoned away from the screening of “Glass” with about 20 minutes left to go. I saw a couple of Shyamalan’s trademark plot twists before having to exit the theater, but I had a feeling that there were more that I missed. 

I asked a colleague to fill me in and, sure enough, Shyamalan pulled the rug out from under everything that had gone before, in his perpetual quest to show he’s ever so clever, more clever than those snooty critics or dumb audiences.

Shyamalan begins by reintroducing David Dunn (Bruce Willis), the protagonist of his 2000 thriller “Unbreakable.” Dunn runs a security-equipment store with his son Joseph, again played by Spencer Treat Clark, now all grown up. (Robin Wright, who played David’s wife Audrey in the first film, is killed off as unceremoniously as Wright’s TV husband on “House of Cards.”) On the side they combat crime, with David patrolling the streets and Joseph as “the guy in the chair” monitoring police scanners and internet mentions of his dad’s anonymous vigilantism.

David is on the hunt for Beast, the serial killer introduced in “Split,” 24 personalities inside one body (played by James McAvoy), who was once someone named Kevin. Kevin, who terrorized high-school girls in the first movie, is up to it again here, until David decides to intervene.

Then Dr. Ellie Sample (Sarah Paulson) steps in. Dr. Sample is a psychiatrist whose specialty is people with a specific delusion of grandeur: They believe they have superpowers. Dr. Sample takes David and Beast into custody, with the help of many guards and a set of flashing lights that reset Kevin’s personality. (A title card before the movie begins warns anyone who has photosensitivity issues, like epilepsy, that the lights might affect them adversely.)

Dr. Sample places David and Kevin in a heavily fortified mental institution, where they meet the third supposedly super-endowed person: Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), the criminal mastermind who orchestrated David’s origin story in “Unbreakable.” Dr. Sample is out to prove to these three patients that they don’t have abilities beyond that of the average person — and that she can cure them of their superhero complexes.

OK, that’s about as far as I can go without getting into deep spoiler territory. It’s enough to say that Shyamalan takes an eternity getting the story to this point, as he drones on about comic books — a theme that began in “Unbreakable.” It’s also important to note two more characters who play a hand in events: Glass’ mother (Charlayne Woodward), who visits her sedated son occasionally, and Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy), the vengeance-seeking lone survivor of Kevin’s wrath in “Split.” 

What I saw, before I had to duck out, was a director trying to make an action movie without showing us the action. He does this numerous times, capturing a fight scene out-of-focus in the background or outside the area where something else is happening. It’s almost as if he’s a little embarrassed that he has to cater to his audience’s base need for cathartic violence. (He’s not too embarrassed to feature himself in a cameo that references his cameo in “Unbreakable.”)

Will I see the final 20 minutes of “Glass” someday? Probably. Like a White House banquet table laden with fast-food items, Shyamalan’s ending sounds like something that mere words can’t describe — but a travesty one has to see for oneself.

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‘Glass’

★★

Opens Friday, January 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language Running time: 129 minutes.