'The Public'

As a filmmaker, Emilio Estevez is the sincerest kid in the pumpkin patch, with never a hint of hypocrisy or cynicism — and he wears his heart proudly on his sleeve in “The Public,” an earnest comedy-drama about people looking out for their fellow humans.

Estevez stars in this movie, which he wrote and directed, inspired by a 2007 essay by Chip Ward, a now-retired Salt Lake City librarian who wrote plainly and eloquently about how public libraries have become de facto shelters for the homeless. That germ of an idea infuses itself in the story of a librarian who is embroiled in a standoff between homeless patrons and the police.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Pet Semetary'

I know there are those who consider Stephen King’s 1983 novel “Pet Sematary” to be so chilling that it’s the embodiment of horror-story perfection.

As a non-reader of King’s books (I’ve read just one; nothing personal, just not my cup of tea), I won’t try to speak for that group. As a movie watcher, and a viewer of my fair share of horror films, I will say that the latest adaptation of King’s creepiest misspelling delivers more dread than scares.

The Creed family — husband Louis (Jason Clarke), wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz), 8-year-old daughter Ellie (Jeté Lawrence), and toddler son Gage (played by twins Hugo and Lucas Lavoie) — have left the fast pace of Boston for a quieter life in Ludlow, Maine. The family buys a big rustic farmhouse with a massive wooded backyard, which includes an old cemetery for the locals’ pets. Louis takes a job running the campus clinic at the University of Maine, which is far less demanding than his old job on an emergency-room graveyard shift.

It doesn’t take long, though, for the Creed family to start feeling something is off about their new rural life. Louis has bad dreams about Victor (Obssa Ahmed), the college student who dies gruesomely in his clinic after a car accident. Rachel is also troubled by bad dreams, haunted by her late sister Zelda (Alyssa Brooke Levine), who died years ago after years being crippled and contorted by spinal meningitis.

Then Ellie’s cat, Church, dies along the road by the Creeds’ house — a road where tanker trucks drive past at frighteningly fast speeds. It’s the Creeds’ neighbor, Jud (John Lithgow), who shows Louis a way to ease Ellie’s heartbreak. Beyond the pet cemetery (or “sematary,” as a ramshackle sign reads), there’s a place where Jud tells Louis to bury Church. Louis does, and the next day, Church is back. But he’s different, nastier and scarier.

Jud acknowledges to Louis that it was a mistake to show him where to bring Church back to life. “Sometimes, dead is better,” Jud declares, though without the Pepperidge Farm inflection that Fred Gwynne brought to the role in Mary Lambert’s 1989 version.

The directing team of Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer aren’t great at jump scares, as the first few attempts put the viewer off when they try again later. And the script by Jeff Buhler has a habit of telegraphing its punches. But, boy, do the directors know how to set a disturbingly creepy mood, whether in the Creeds’ suddenly spooky new home or the dank landscape beyond the pet cemetery.

Clarke (“The Aftermath”) is soulfully sympathetic as the rational man trying to keep his world from unraveling. Young Lawrence has serious chops, particularly in the movie’s nastier back half. And Lithgow, who can chew scenery with the best of them, nicely underplays the role of the avuncular old man who knows the town’s darkest secrets.

But the performance I keep coming back to in “Pet Sematary” is that of Seimetz. The indie darling’s character is the movie’s heart, mixing motherly love with survivor’s guilt in an explosive combination. One moment, involving a very creepy hug, prompts a cascade of emotions to play out on Seimetz’ face in about two seconds, which is a scarier special effect than any amount of fake blood can produce.

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‘Pet Sematary’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for horror violence, bloody images, and some language. Running time: 101 minutes.

'The Best of Enemies'

Is America ready, more than a century after “The Birth of a Nation,” for a movie where the audience’s buttons are pushed to have sympathy for a Klansman? That’s the conundrum “The Best of Enemies,” a tedious based-on-a-true story drama about racial tensions and committee meetings.

Set in Durham, N.C., in 1971, the movie first introduces us to two antagonists. One is Ann Atwater (palmed by Taraji P. Henson), a community organizer and civil-rights activist who’s always ready for an argument. The other is C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), a gas station owner and leader of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. (His title is Exalted Cyclops, which raises the unanswered question of why people took the Klan seriously with such ridiculous titles.)

Ann and C.P. frequently are on opposing sides of fights in the city council. But when a fire guts the elementary school Durham’s black students attend, Ann lobbies unsuccessful to integrate the white-only elementary school — until the NAACP sues to integrate the schools.

As a stopgap, the judge dodges a decision by bringing in a negotiator from Raleigh, Bill Riddick (played by British actor Babou Ceesay). Riddick, who is black, proposes a charrette, a group arbitration process to reach a compromise. Riddick proposes Ann and C.P. be the co-chairs of this process, and — after some grousing that each would never work with the other — they agree to lead the charrette.

Anybody want to guess what happens next? That the two slowly learn from each other and reach a middle ground? And that townsfolk on both sides, but especially in the white community, react badly to that detente?

Robin Bissell, a movie producer making his debut as writer and director, manages the nearly impossible trick of depicting empowered black characters doing verbal battle with racist white characters — and still creating a white savior scenario when Rockwell’s Ellis gets to deliver the big Oscar-clip moment in the finale. Would that Bissell give Henson, whose performance as Ann is more lived in and authentic than Rockwell’s retread of his “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” performance, such a meaty speech?

“The Best of Enemies” feels for all the world like the producers of “Green Book” decided for an encore and looked for the most relatable story about a Klan member. Aside from Henson’s performance, the only thing to look forward to about this movie is what reaction Spike Lee will have to it.

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’The Best of Enemies’

★1/2

Opens Friday, April 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, racial epithets, some violence and a suggestive reference. Running time: 133 minutes. 

'Storm Boy'

A moving folk tale crosses a generation or two in “Storm Boy,” a charming family drama from Australia.

Director Shawn Seet and screenwriter Justin Monjo tell two stories in parallel, one modern, the other in the 1950s and hewing to Colin Thiele’s novella (which is a classic in Australia, but not so well known in the States). The ‘50s story tells of Michael (Finn Little), a boy living with his father, Tom (“Suicide Squad’s” Jai Courtney), on an isolated spit of land on the Australian coast. Tom, a fisherman, has brought Michael here to live apart from the locals, and has earned him the nickname “Hideaway Tom.”

One day, Michael hears the shotgun blasts of hunters and goes to investigate. He finds a nesting ground, along with several pelicans shot and left for dead. He also finds a nest of three scrawny pelican chicks whose mother has been killed.

Michael, aided by a native, Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamieson), picks up the chicks and decides to raise them himself. After some work, and a lot of ground up fish guts, Michael has three full-grown pelicans in the house: Mr. Proud, Mr. Ponder, and the runt of the group, Mr. Percival. When the three are grown, Tom tells Michael he has a difficult task: To release them back into the wild.

The framing story for this one features Geoffrey Rush (“The King’s Speech,” “Shine”) as an aged Michael, recounting the story to his granddaughter, Maddy (Morgana Davies). Maddy is arguing with her father, Malcolm (Erik Thomson), over the father’s decision to have the family business — on whose board Michael is an emeritus member — lease farm land out for mining, a decision the environmentally minded Maddy strenuously opposes.

Seet and Monjo neatly tie together the two stories, through Rush’s avuncular narration and through a common theme of parents and children in conflict. The result is a narrative that is at once rustically nostalgic and refreshingly modern, nicely pitched at younger viewers without talking down to them.

Seet is also blessed with gorgeous Australian scenery to shoot, and a cast that underplays the melodrama well. There’s also a cameo by the great native Australian actor David Gulpilil, who played Fingerbone Bill in the 1976 version, and plays that character’s father here.

“Storm Boy” is also an answer to parents who complain that there are never enough family-friendly movies, or that the ones that exist are all part of the Disney oligarchy. This one is a small delight, for all ages, so don’t let it get away. 

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‘Storm Boy’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 5, at theaters nationwide, including the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated PG for some thematic elements, mild peril and brief language. Running time: 99 minutes.

'The Hummingbird Project'

One would think that a story about digging fiber-optic cable lines, Wall Street micro-transactions and the Amish would not make a compelling drama. One would be right, but you have to give writer-director Kim Nguyen’s “The Hummingbird Project” points for the effort.

One might also think those oddly specific elements could only come in a story based on real life, but this time one would be wrong. This is all from Nguyen’s furtive imagination.

Vincent Zaleski, played by Jesse Eisenberg, has a dream of making a whole lot of money in not much time. Sixteen milliseconds, to be precise — the time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings once. It’s also the time he hopes to send a computer signal from one financial data system to another, from Kansas to New Jersey. Sending such a signal in 16 milliseconds, faster than the competition can do it, would mean making millions on the rapid-fire computer-aided stock transactions on the New York Stock Exchange.

What Vincent needs is a fiber-optic cable between Kansas and New Jersey, which doesn’t exist. But he’s got an investor, Bryan Taylor (Frank Schorpion), who will bankroll such a project. He’s also got his cousin, Anton (Alexander Skarsgård), a balding computer wizard, who can develop the software and massage the hardware to cut the delivery time to that crucial 16 seconds.

With Anton running the technical side and Vincent riding his contractor (Michael Mando) to keep the digging crews moving, the project faces many obstacles — from digging through granite in the federally protected Appalachians to convincing recalcitrant Amish to allow the line to pass under their land. But the biggest impediment is Eva Torres (Salma Hayek), their hard-charging ex-boss, who will resort to all kinds of dirty tricks to stop the Zaleskis and get a faster signal for herself.

Nguyen works to make this offbeat plot relatable by humanizing the Zaleskis, giving Vincent an ailment and Anton a worried wife (Sarah Goldberg) and kids. He’s also blessed with Hayek in full dragon-lady mode, at which she excels.

But no matter how hard Nguyen and the cast tries in “The Hummingbird Project,” there’s little a filmmaker can do to make computer screens and digging cable worth watching for two hours. As the Zaleskis eventually learn, sometimes you have to know when you’re licked.

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‘The Hummingbird Project’

★★1/2

Opened March 15 in select cities; opens Friday, April 5, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language throughout. Running time: 111 minutes.

'Mapplethorpe'

Documentarian Ondi Timoner’s first stab at a narrative feature, “Mapplethorpe,” suffers the same biographical-fiction pitfalls that doomed “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a by-the-numbers chronological depiction of a famous life, sapped of much of the passion and controversy that made that life interesting.

Well, at least this one didn’t gloss over the gay sex.

Timoner chronicles the rise of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, from the late 1960s to his death from AIDS in 1989, at the age of 42. It starts with Mapplethorpe (played by former “Doctor Who” star Matt Smith) dropping out of ROTC at the Pratt Institute — his father’s idea of an education — to live as a starving artist in Manhattan, rooming with fellow artist and girlfriend Patti Smith (Marianne Rendón). Mapplethorpe dabbles in painting and collage, cutting up stolen beefcake magazines for the sexually frank images.

Eventually, Mapplethorpe and Smith (well before her rock-star days) talk their way into an apartment in the Hotel Chelsea, haven for artists of all stripes. One of their new neighbors, Sandy Daley (Tina Benko), suggests that Mapplethorpe shoot his own photos, and hands him his first camera, a Polaroid. 

Soon his Polaroid images attract the attention of a wealthy art collector, Sam Wagstaff (John Benjamin Hickey). Wagstaff also is attracted to Mapplethorpe, and they begin an affair. When Smith catches them in bed, she breaks up with Mapplethorpe and moves out.

Flash forward a couple years, and Mapplethorpe is starting to gain attention in the New York art scene, with Wagstaff as his sugar daddy. Some of Mapplethorpe’s images — like his pictures of flowers and celebrities — are catnip for most galleries. Only the most daring are wiling to display his confrontational and frankly sexual pictures, like his portraits of patrons of New York’s leather bars.

The scenes penned by Timoner and co-writer Mikko Alanne (who worked on “The 33”), adapting a Bruce Goodrich script, feel like the most basic biopic material. Mapplethorpe rises to the top, falls into a spiral of drugs and rampant sex, rejects his family (namely, his kid brother Edward, a photographer, played by Brandon Sklenar), and becomes a bigger jerk than he was before. None of this feels revelatory, or much of a challenge for Smith to portray.

Timoner’s approach embraces the genius of Mapplethorpe’s art — the best parts of the movie are when she just shows his images — while downplaying the controversy they generated. In fact, that controversy may be the most cinematic thing about Mapplethorpe’s work, but the biggest scandal, when his touring retrospective was canceled at D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery and brought an obscenity charge against a gallery director in Cincinnati, happened after his death and is therefore mentioned only in end-of-movie title cards.

The movie was supported by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and its interests in preserving its namesake’s legacy may be in opposition to what a movie audience would find worth watching. So we get a deeply flawed biographical drama in “Mapplethorpe,” a dry retelling of the artist’s life with much of the passion kept at bay.

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‘Mapplethorpe’

★1/2

Opened March 1 in select cities; opens Friday, April 5, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably NC-17 for graphic nudity and sexuality, also drug use and language. Running time: 102 minutes.

'The Mustang'

As beautiful as the horses it features, and as uncompromising as the broken men it depicts, “The Mustang” is a modern tale that celebrates and then deconstructs the old ideas of the West.

In the state penitentiary in Nevada, an island of barbed wire and walls in the middle fo the desert, Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a man alone. Recently released from isolation, he tells the prison psychologist (Connie Britton) “I’m not good around people.” So she recommends he be assigned to outdoor duty, shoveling manure in the horse yards adjoining the prison.

In those horse pens is the prison’s one source of pride: A wild horse rehabilitation program, which takes mustangs captured by the Bureau of Land Management for population control and tries to train them to be auctioned as police horses and other equine jobs. Inmates who obey the rules and can handle the horses, and handle the program’s grizzled old boss, Myles (Bruce Dern), are allowed into the program.

Roman notices one horse, locked in a barn and trying to kick its way out. Myles tells Roman the horse is too wild, and only a fool would try to tame it. But Roman gives it a try, initially with disastrous results. But Roman tries again, seeing in this horse, whom he names Marquis, a kindred spirit, a creature enraged by captivity but with the potential to grow beyond it.

French actor Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, making her feature debut as writer and director, provides other obstacles to Roman’s already rocky road to redemption. There’s Marsha (“Blockers’ “ Gideon Adlon), Roman’s pregnant teen daughter, who hasn’t seen her father free since she was a little girl. And his cellmate, Dan (Josh Stewart), a gang leader with connections beyond the prison walls, threatens harm to Marsha if Roman doesn’t smuggle horse tranquilizer from Myles’ supply cabinet into the prison — something he has seen the program’s most talented trainer, Henry (Jason Mitchell), do a few times.

Schoenaerts is a Belgian actor who has been impressive in European films (a boxer in “Rust and Bone,” a steroid junkie in “Bullhead”) and Hollywood (as Jennifer Lawrence’s spy boss in “Red Sparrow,” and Jane Fonda’s son in “Our Souls at Night”), and here he’s powerfully good. He shows Roman, at first, as a rock, hard and silent, but his time in the training ring with his horse first causes him to unleash his anger and ultimately his fear — as he starts to confront the actions that put him in prison and the pain they caused himself and his daughter.

Clermont-Tonnerre sets this story in the harsh, unforgiving landscape of Nevada, on the desert plains framed by distant mountains, a locale John Ford would have picked if he had seen it. It becomes a spare, elegiac backdrop for Roman to let his macho facade crumble and allow a new self to emerge.

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‘The Mustang’

★★★1/2

Opened March 15 in select cities; opens Friday, March 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Century 16 (South Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Running time: 96 minutes.

'Hotel Mumbai'

Terrorism dramas have become the new disaster movies, apparently, and the based-on-a-true-story thriller “Hotel Mumbai” employs the disaster-movie formula to depict the terrifying events that befell Mumbai, India, in late November 2008.

The story begins with 10 men landing on the beach at Mumbai in a raft, with backpacks and a mission. They are members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic terrorist group from Pakistan, and their goal is to kill people and sow chaos at multiple locations around Mumbai.

When the terrorists strike a hospital, a train station, a cafe and other sites, the panicked people of Mumbai rush to the most secure location available: The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, an opulent destination for elite Indians and foreign high-rollers. The lobby security tries to let in people fleeing from the attacks, but in the process allow in some of the terrorists.

Then the shooting starts, and guests and staff are slaughtered in the lobby.

By the time the terrorists have attacked, rookie Australian director Anthony Maras (who shares screenwriting credit with John Collee, who co-wrote “Master and Commander”) has already introduced us to the main characters through whose eyes we will be seeing the carnage and heroism to come.

Among the locals are Arjun (Dev Patel), a poor Sikh who needs his waitstaff job to feed his wife and young daughter, and Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher), the detail-obsessed chef who commands the hotel staff. The foreigners include an American businessman (Armie Hammer) and his Indian wife (played by Iranian-born Nazanin Boniadi), along with their baby son and the boy’s nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey). There’s also a shady Russian businessman (Jason Isaacs) whose past life in the military provides useful expertise as the attacks continue.

The most disturbing part of the movie is the audio of the terrorists’ mastermind pumping them full of jihadist talking points over the phone. It’s disturbing because it turns out to be the most true-to-life element, as Maras based them on actual intercepted audio uncovered in the investigation after the attacks. 

Some of the encounters between staff and guests inside the hotel play more closely to the disaster-movie formula — though it’s a sign of the movie’s international origins that the top-billed performers aren’t necessarily the ones who get out alive in the end.

Maras captures the panic, frustration and thwarted hopes of those inside the hotel, growing more desperate as the hours tick by and the Mumbai cops are ill-equipped to handle a terror attack. There are enough thrills, and moments of human kindness, throughout “Hotel Mumbai” to make the trip worth it.

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‘Hotel Mumbai’

★★★

Opened March 22 in select cities; opens Friday, March 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for disturbing violence throughout, bloody images, and language. Running time: 123 minutes.