'Apollo 11'

As a NASA nerd who was not quite 5 years old when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, the documentary “Apollo 11” made me feel cheated — not by the movie, but by history.

Watching this breathtaking movie, loaded with never-before-seen footage of that incredible mission, I wanted to know why this stuff has been hidden for most of my life.

Director Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13,” SFF ’13) assembles a crew of space historians, NASA buffs and technicians to condense in 93 minutes what it must have felt like — in Mission Control, to civilians watching in awe on the ground, and most importantly to Armstrong, Aldrin and the mission’s commander, Michael Collins — to prepare, launch and navigate the complex maneuvers needed to get to the moon and back alive.

The pristine images, taken from long buried government storage, take us from the launch pad to splashdown. Graphics explain concisely each delicate maneuver, none more precarious than the final landing on the moon — which Armstrong had to perform manually to avoid a crater the size of a football field.

The technical challenges must have been enormous — not the least of which because, Miller told the movie’s first Sundance audience, NASA didn’t have a single bit of footage with synchronized sound. Poring through hundreds of hours of video and audio footage, Miller gives the audience the full visual and aural feeling of a moon landing.

The audio mix is especially important, and Miller has help making it pristine. The two key players are sound designer Eric Milano, who places every ping and whoosh precisely in context, and composer Matt Morton, whose haunting synthesizer score — performed on a 1968 model Moog, which would be authentic to the time of the mission — makes us feel like we’re in outer space. 

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‘Apollo 11’

★★★★

Opening Friday, March 1, at IMAX theaters nationwide (including the Megaplex Jordan Commons in Sandy and the Megaplex Geneva in Vineyard, Utah); opening wider on March 8. Rated G. Running time: 93 minutes.

(This review was originally posted on Jan. 25, 2019, after the movie premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.)

'Greta'

You would have to go back a few decades — maybe to Glenn Close in 1987’s “Fatal Attraction” — to find a grande dame actress completely committing to a psychotic character like Isabelle Huppert does in the horror-thriller “Greta.”

It’s a shame, then, to find that director Neil Jordan, a long way removed from “The Crying Game,” ultimately lets down Huppert and the audience with a brainless story.

The story starts with recent New York transplant Frances McCullen (Chloë Grace Moretz) riding the subway one day, and seeing an abandoned purse on a seat. Being a kind person — i.e., someone not from New York, the story strongly hints — she takes the bag home and finds a woman’s ID card inside. Against the advice of her roommate, Erica Penn (Maika Monroe), Frances goes to the address on the ID to return the bag to Greta Hideg, Huppert’s character.

At first, Greta seems to be a nice lady, a former pianist in a cottage-like house tucked away in a courtyard away from New York’s traffic and noise. Greta offers Frances some tea, and later Frances even accompanies Greta to the animal shelter to find a rescue dog to help Greta fend off her loneliness. But Erica warns Frances not to turn Greta into a surrogate for her recently deceased mom.

After a short bit, there’s a twist revelation that prompts Frances to end the relationship with Greta. However, Greta refuses to be dismissed so easily. It’s in these middle passages, when neither Frances nor the audience is sure what Greta’s game is, that Huppert shines, riding that fine line between wounded soul and creepy stalker.

Alas, Jordan, polishing a script by Ray Wright (“Case 39,” “The Crazies”), can’t stay in the either-or zone for long — and when the movie does tip over the side, things take a turn for the ludicrous. The twists get increasingly ridiculous, and only work because Moretz’s character has been written to be an idiot and a doormat. (Jordan regular Stephen Rea, playing a private detective, doesn’t fare too well in the brains department, either.) Then there’s the silly and somewhat sadistic ending, which relies on a twist Jordan telegraphs well ahead of the big reveal.

Through it all, though, Huppert is having a grand old time, as Greta’s maternal charm curdles into something darker and more disturbing. If only “Greta” was willing to be as boldly insane as its title character.

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‘Greta’

★★

Opens Friday, March 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some violence and disturbing images. Running time: 98 minutes.

'A Tuba to Cuba'

Part travelogue, part history lesson and part concert film, the documentary “A Tuba to Cuba” is a fun, music-filled look at one of America’s greatest treasures — New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band — on a journey of discovery in Cuba.

For Ben Jaffe, the tuba player and current leader of the band, a trip to Cuba would fulfill a lifelong dream of his father, Allan Jaffe, Preservation Hall’s founder. Allan and Sandra Jaffe moved to New Orleans from Philadelphia in 1961, and not long after became managers of the hall, which was an art gallery and occasional performance space. 

Allan Jaffe started a band, with himself on tuba, that became one of the first integrated music groups in the Jim Crow South. But in a city where music emanates from every street corner, saloon door and church window, the Jaffes found their band was a bridge over New Orleans’ racial divide.

Ben Jaffe was a teen when his father died in 1987, and after college he took over the family band in 1993, playing double bass and tuba, which became the band’s trademark. Ben says in this documentary’s narration that his father always wanted to go to Cuba, feeling that a missing part of New Orleans’ musical history was there.

Finally, with the Obama administration easing travel restrictions to the Communist Caribbean nation, the band made its first trip to Cuba in December 2015. Directors T.G. Herrington and Danny Clinch (a concert-film specialist) followed the seven-member band first in Havana, then to Santiago de Cuba and Cienfuegos. At each stop, they encounter musicians who keep alive Cuba’s traditions.

In many places in Cuba, the New Orleans bandmates discover, those traditions were born in Africa and landed in the Caribbean thanks to the slave trade. The rhythms of Afro-Cuban music and of New Orleans jazz are similar, as are the origin stories of racial division, poverty and the uniting power of music.

At every turn, the Preservation Hall crew meets up with Cuban musicians, and it doesn’t take long for a jam session to start. One of the strongest moments is when the band first arrives in Santiago, and finds itself horning in on (literally) a conga group in the street, who welcome the Americans as they form a Cuban version of a New Orleans second line.

Not everything plays smoothly in “A Tuba to Cuba.” Ben Jaffe’s narration can be clunky and repetitive, and there are moments and montages that carry a whiff of an infomercial. But when the music is playing, breaking through language and cultural barriers like they were crepe paper, this movie swings joyously and exuberantly..

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‘A Tuba to Cuba’

★★★

Opened February 15 in select cities; opens Friday, March 1, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG for mild thematic elements. Running time; 84 minutes; in English, and Spanish with subtitles.

'Never Look Away'

The German drama “Never Look Away,” one of the five Academy Award nominees in the Foreign-Language Film category, is and is not a biopic — which is what makes it endlessly fascinating as it bends fiction toward fact and biography toward narrative.

Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (“The Lives of Others”) loosely bases his story on the life of German painter Gerhard Richter. It starts where Richter did, outside of Dresden before World War II, with its main character, Kurt Barnert, as a five-year-old boy. Little Kurt goes into the city with his favorite aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), to see an exhibit of “degenerate art” — the label the Nazis give to modern art, like Picasso and Kandinsky and Mondrian. Aunt Elisabeth confides in the young Kurt that she actually likes the modern stuff, and admonishes him to “never look away” from beauty.

The first of many traumas in Kurt’s life comes when Elisabeth, who suffers from schizophrenia, is taken away by men in white coats and put in an asylum in Dresden. The film shows us what Kurt never knows, that Elisabeth is condemned by a Nazi-affiliated gynecologist, Prof. Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), to the gas chambers.

As Kurt grows up, he sees the firebombing of Dresden, the end of the war, and his father’s humiliation that he can’t find work because of his reluctant membership in the Nazi party. Meanwhile, Prof. Seeband is imprisoned by the occupying Russians, but he is spared from a harsh punishment when he deals with the difficult birth of the son of the commanding Russian officer (Evgeniy Sidikhin), who then puts Seeband under his protection.

As a young adult, Kurt (now played by Tom Schilling) moves to Dresden to study painting, training in the “socialist realism” that was the only allowable style in Communist-controlled East Germany. While in art school, Kurt meets and falls in love with a fashion student (Paula Beer). Kurt winces when he hears her name, Elisabeth, and asks if she has a nickname. Her father, she says, called her Ellie, which is the name Kurt calls her from then on.

Again, something Kurt doesn’t know becomes crucial information: Ellie’s father is Prof. Seeband, who has been restored to prominence in Dresden’s medical community. However, his views about genetic purity — especially when it involves his daughter fooling around with a scruffy artist — are as nasty as before.

The story continues through Kurt and Ellie’s romance, their eventual defection to West Berlin just months before the Berlin Wall goes up, and Kurt’s struggle in the West to find his personal artistic style — aided by an eccentric art professor (Oliver Masucci). There’s a lot of story to unpack, and the movie’s three-hour running time seldom feels wasted.

Donnersmarck creates a vivid portrait of the artist’s life, from oppression in the Communist bloc to the challenging burden of freedom in West Germany. From the broad satirical comedy of Kurt’s first post-defection visit to a Dusseldorf art school to the frank and frequent sex scenes between Kurt and Ellie, the movie is varied and rich in its many looks — overseen by the legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.

The touchstones of Kurt’s life are similar to those the real Richter encountered that it raises the question of how blurry the line is between fact and fiction. Richter has condemned the movie, telling The New Yorker that Donnersmarckhad “managed to abuse and grossly distort my biography.” The same might be said about what Orson Welles did to a thinly fictionalized William Randolph Hearst in “Citizen Kane.”

The most fascinating part of “Never Look Away” is how Donnersmarck suggests the roots of Richter, er, Kurt’s art without making direct correlation the way most biopics do. (Take any song cue from “Bohemian Rhapsody” as an example.) The result for Donnersmarck is a full-bodied examination of the artist’s process, and how everything in life is eventually fodder for the artist’s work.

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‘Never Look Away’

★★★1/2

Opened November 30 in select cities; opens Friday, Feb. 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for graphic nudity, sexuality and brief violent images. Running time: 189 minutes; in German with subtitles.

'Fighting With My Family'

One might read the premise of “Fighting With My Family” and dismiss it as a warm, fuzzy family story wrapped up in the artificiality of professional wrestling and the spectacle of the WWE.

OK, it’s all that, but it’s also a lot more. Writer-director Stephen Merchant, the co-creator of “The Office,” has crafted a smart, funny, sharp and emotionally charged story about family ties, the business of sports entertainment, and an underdog tale of pushing through self-doubt. It’s a winner, in more ways than one.

The family in question is the Bevis family of Norwich, England, which runs a scruffy pro wrestling franchise that sets up in bars and other dives across England. Everyone wrestles in this family: Dad (Nick Frost), Mum (Lena Headey), big brother Zak (Jack Lowden) and little sister Saraya-Jade (Florence Pugh) — whose wrestling name is Britani Knight. When the family sends an audition tape to the WWE, they get a call from talent scout and coach Hutch Morgan (Vince Vaughn), who invites Zak and Saraya-Jade to try out when the WWE is in London.

Morgan tells the auditioning wrestlers that the WWE isn’t just looking for athleticism, but for that “spark.” Pro wrestling is “soap opera in spandex,” and the ability to please a crowd is as important as the strength to throw another wrestler to the ground. (Talking about the importance of pleasing the crowd in a crowd-pleaser movie is meta-storytelling at its finest.)

Saraya-Jade, who takes the name Paige (from Rose McGowan’s character in “Charmed”) because WWE already has a Britani, turns out to have that “spark,” in Morgan’s view. She’s the only one Morgan picks to go to Florida to train in WWE’s NXT development program — which is a blow to Zak’s ego, and his lifelong dream of joining the WWE.

The rest of the movie follows Saraya-Jade’s, er, Paige’s struggle to make it through the NXT, discover her identity as a wrestler, and follow the advice of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who appears as himself because who else could play him) to be authentic: “Don’t be the next me, be the first you.” Pugh, who burst on the scene in the intense “Lady Macbeth,” proves herself a star here, handling the comic and serious moments beautifully.

Merchant paces “Fighting With My Family” incredibly well, shifting deftly from dreary Norwich to sunny Florida, and finding the humor and heart of the Bevis family’s unique form of tough love. 

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‘Fighting With My Family’

★★★1/2

Opened February 14 in select cities; opens Friday, February 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual material, language throughout, some violence and drug content. Running time: 108 minutes.

(This review was originally posted on Jan. 29, 2019, when the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.)

'How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World'

There’s nothing specifically wrong with “How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World,” the third and apparently final installment in the animated franchise — it’s a serviceable and audience-friendly bit of computer-animated storytelling, but whose craft and artistry are emotionally inert.

Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) is now the leader of Berk, the Viking/dragon community where he fills the role of his late father, the chieftain Stoick (voiced by Gerard Butler in flashbacks). Hiccup and his pals, including his lady love Astrid (voiced by America Ferrara), ride their dragons to raid barges to free imprisoned dragons and bring them home to the increasingly crowded Berk.

Hiccup, partnered with his faithful “night fury” dragon Toothless, worries that Berk is not only more crowded but also a growing target for dragon hunters. He decides the solution is to find what his father dreamed of locating, a hidden world beyond the horizon where dragons can live in safety.

While Hiccup tries to locate this hidden world, the dragon-hunting forces are regrouping behind a ruthless hunter named Grimmel (voiced by F. Murray Abraham). Grimmel has hunted and killed every other “night fury,” and aims to make Toothless his final trophy — and he has a captive white dragon, a “light fury,” to lure Toothless away from Hiccup and his Berk friends.

Director-writer Dean DeBlois, now responsible for three movies based on Cressida Cowell’s book series, formulates some solid set pieces — particularly the cleverly staged fight scenes and some charming bits where Toothless clumsily courts this potential girlfriend. 

But for all of that, and some gorgeously colorful moments inside the hidden world, the third “How to Train Your Dragon” film just lies there, creating an emotional dead zone. Maybe it’s just as well these training sessions are over.

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‘How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World”

★★1/2

Opens Friday, Feb. 22, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG for adventure action and some mild rude humor. Running time: 104 minutes.

'Arctic'

The snowbound drama “Arctic” is a grim and unadorned tale of survival, and a full dose of the acting mastery of Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen.

Mikkelsen’s career has taken him from superstardom in Denmark to success in Hollywood, as the title character in the TV series “Hannibal” and villain roles in “Casino Royale” and “Doctor Strange.” He’s great at tightly wound menace, unpacking surprising emotion just below the placid surface.

In “Arctic,” Mikkelsen plays Overgård, the only survivor of an expeditionary plane that crashed somewhere in the snowy north. It’s not specified at the outset how long Overgård has been here, but it’s apparently been a while, judging from the giant SOS sign he has dug in the snow near the wreckage.

In that time, Overgård has developed a daily routine. He digs snow to make sure the SOS is still readable. He checks the fishing lines that he has lowered through holes in the ice, and stores the fish he catches in ice for later. He walks to a nearby ridge and cranks up a portable radio, in hopes of getting a signal from a passing aircraft.

One day, the radio gets a ping from a helicopter. But when the craft gets close to Overgård in the blizzard winds, the copter itself crashes. Overgård finds the pilot has been killed, but the other passenger (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) — apparently the pilot’s wife — is alive, though seriously injured.

Now Overgård has to make a choice: Stay in the comparative shelter of the plane, or risk freezing — and, oh yeah, a polar bear — to take the woman over the snow to find help.

Director Joe Penna, writing with Ryan Morrison (who’s also the film’s editor), present a stripped-down, no frills thriller. The action is dependent on Overgård’s decisions and actions, as he bundles the woman up on a sled and pushes on through the bleak conditions.

As “All Is Lost” did with Robert Redford, “Arctic” rises or falls on the strength of its star. In that regard, Mikkelsen does not disappoint, His spare dialogue and economical movement capture the desperation Overgård is facing and the determination he has to plow through the obstacles ahead. It’s a tour de force of a performance from one of the best actors working in movies today.

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‘Arctic’

★★★

Opened February 1 in select cities; opens Friday, Feb. 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated PG-13 for language and some bloody images. Running time: 98 minutes.

(Note: Director Joe Penna will be in attendance at the Broadway Centre Cinemas for a Q&A after the 7 p.m. screening on Friday, Feb. 22, 2019.)

'Alita: Battle Angel'

What happens when a famously seat-of-the-pants director goes to work for a notoriously detail-oriented filmmaker? Unsurprisingly, in the case of “Alita: Battle Angel,” a big mess, though an exhilarating one.

Robert Rodriguez, he of “Sin City” and “Spy Kids,” is the director in question. “Titanic” and “Avatar” auteur James Cameron is his boss — and co-screenwriter, along with Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis (“Terminator Genisys”) — in adapting Yukito Kishiro’s cult-fave manga “Gunnm.” Together, they conjure up exciting action sequences in a meticulous steampunk landscape, centered on a performance-capture CGI character that’s the closest Hollywood has come to the edge of the “uncanny valley.”

It’s the year 2563, some 300 years after a great war that left humanity divided into two worlds: The city in the sky Zalem, and the grungy, bustling areas on the surface, like Iron City, where Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) repairs workers’ cyborg parts and scrounges for supplies in the mounds where Zalem dumps its refuse.

Ido’s latest salvage item is the head and shoulders of a female cyborg that contains a fully intact brain of a human female, a teen-ager. Ido cleans up the cyborg parts, and provides a new body — the origins of which form the basis of Ido’s backstory, and his connection to a shrewd rival doctor, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly). Ido gives his new creation the name Alita, and raises her like his own daughter, though they both have to solve one mystery: Akita’s identity and memory of her life in Zalem.

Alita looks like a normal teen girl, except for her enormous eyes, which take in her surroundings with a measure of curiosity and innocence. The eyes are evocative of Japanese anime style, but also have the haunted look of a Margaret Keane painting — and that mix of emotions is how Rosa Salazar, who deftly provides the voice and body performance to Alita, plays the character.

Alita discovers a lot about her self and her new world, through Ido and Hugo (Keean Johnson), who befriends Alita on the street, teaching her about the taste of chocolate and the popularity of motorball — a combination of roller derby and Rock’em Sock’em Robots that is the only chance anyone in Iron City has of getting up to Zalem.

Alita also learns there are nasty bounty hunters, called hunter warriors, who capture wayward cyborgs at the demand of The Factory, which provides raw materials for Zalem. Alita is surprised to learn that Ido is a hunter warrior, using the bounties to pay for repairs of his Iron City clients. Alita finds that she has fighting skills, which spring into action when a brute cyborg, Grewishka, is sent to kill her — under the orders of Nova, the unseen leader of Zalem, working through Vector (Mahershala Ali), the gangster who controls Iron City’s motorball arena.

Rodriguez and his team cram a lot of world-building into two hours, and if that means a bare framework of a plot, then so be it. It’s the rust-speckled wonders of Iron City that Rodriguez and Cameron are most interested in, along with the spunky CGI warrior in the middle of it all. Maybe if there are future “Alita” adventures — and the movie’s ending sets up franchise possibilities — we’ll get a complex story to fully inhabit this fascinating world.

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‘Aiita: Battle Angel’

★★★

Opens Thursday, February 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language.  Running time: 122 minutes.