'Amazing Grace'

The documentary “Amazing Grace” is an imperfect but vital artifact of one of music’s most luminous moments: Aretha Franklin’s two-night gospel performance in January 1972 that was captured for her landmark album of the same name.

Franklin was one of music’s biggest stars at this point, and wanted to return to her roots. She chose the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles as the location, led by Rev. James Cleveland, with the Southern California Community Choir (conducted by — no kidding — Alexander Hamilton). Warner Bros. Records hired Sydney Pollack, whose “Jeremiah Johnson” would be released later that year, to capture the moment on film.

The movie is a very unadorned chronicle of Franklin’s performance. After brief introductions from Cleveland, who reminds the assembled that this is a religious service and not a nightclub show, Franklin takes the stage in modest dress — a sparkling white gown on night one, a green-and-white printed caftan-like dress on the second night — and sings modern and classic songs for the glory of Jesus.

The spirit is strong in this film. Franklin engages in the call-and-response with Hamilton’s choir, and with Cleveland, who serves as opening act and hype man. On the second night, Franklin’s preacher father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, gets up to the pulpit for a heartfelt sermon that demonstrates how close the apple fell from the tree. Franklin’s mentor, the singer Clara Ward, is in attendance. So is Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts — and Pollack annoyingly makes sure we get multiple shots of Jagger’s presence.

Alas, it’s not the only slip-up Pollack makes. The biggest is that he never used clapperboards, so the footage couldn’t be synched up to the audio, making all of the hard-won footage useless for decades. Producer Alan Elliott eventually got the footage from Pollack, just before his death in 2008, and was able to use digital technology to synchronize the audio to the visual. (Pollack’s name was kept off the film, at his family’s request.) 

Even after Elliott’s efforts, the film was delayed from release for years, because of legal challenges by Franklin, even to the point of preventing the movie’s premiere at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival. Only after Frankllin’s death in 2018 did her estate make a deal with Elliott — who is credited as having “realized and produced” the film — for its release.

“Amazing Grace” serves as a testament to the power of Aretha Franklin’s talent, the strength of her faith, and the love of the community who supported her. 

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‘Amazing Grace’

★★★

Opened April 5 in select cities; opens Friday, April 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated G. Running time: 89 minutes.

'High Life'

One would suspect going into outer space with French filmmaker Claire Denis, the woman behind “Beau Travail” and last year’s “Let the Sun Shine In,” would be trippy — but, boy, that’s understating the mind-bending experience of “High Life.”

The first thing Denis shows us is a toddler talking animatedly to an unseen male voice. The voice belongs to Monte (Robert Pattinson), and he’s not in the room. He’s outside, on a space walk, making repairs to what we now know is a spacecraft. Monte comes inside, through the airlock, and tends to the now-crying child, Willow.

Monte and Willow — played as a baby by Scarlett Lindsey, and as a preteen by Jessie Ross — are the only people alive onboard the rather poorly maintained vessel. Monte maintains the water recirculating system, tends to the crops in the greenhouse, and files a daily report with the ship’s computer, which guarantees another day of life support.

Denis and her co-writers, Jean-Pol Fargeau and Goeff Cox, eventually show us how Monte and Willow got to this point. Without giving away too much, we learn that Monte was doing life in prison, one of several who signed on for this dangerous deep-space mission. (André Benjamin and Mia Goth are among Monte’s fellow inmates-turned-space travelers.) Overseeing the mission is Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who is conducting medical experiments without the crew’s knowledge, and who may be crazier than anyone else on board.

The lengths — or, if this isn’t your jam, the depths — that Denis and Binoche take Dibs’ madness are fascinating, and often rather disturbing. Denis seems to be taking the old themes about how the isolation space travel will drive people crazy, and turning on their head. In Denis’ view, what happens to someone in space depends on what they bring with them.

The devolution of Dibs’ treatment of the inmates — and the explanation for Willow’s existence — gets rough and a bit predictable outside of Dibs’ strange behavior. What’s far more interesting in “High Life” is Pattinson’s quietly intense portrayal of Monte, wading through the insanity around him to find an island of peace and redemption as Willow’s guardian.

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‘High Life’

★★★

Opened April 5 in select cities; opens Friday, April 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for disturbing sexual and violent content including sexual assault, graphic nudity, and for language. Running time: 113 minutes.

'The Curse of La Llorona'

The horror movie “The Curse of La Llorona” has more jump scares than a faulty trampoline, efficiently getting to the audience’s lizard-brain instincts to scream when prompted.

This isn’t your so-called “elevated” horror, like Jordan Peele’s movies. This movie, a far spinoff of “The Conjuring” franchise, is bargain-basement shocks.

Set in 1973, the story centers on Anna Tate-Garcia (played by “Green Book’s” Linda Cardellini), a caseworker for Los Angeles’ child protective services department. Anna’s most troubling case at the moment is Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez), whom Anna finds locking her two sons in a closet. Patricia tells Anna she’s protecting from some sinister presence.

The police don’t believe Patricia, and arrest her for child endangerment. Anna escorts her boys, Carlos (Oliver Alexander) and Tomas (Aiden Lewandowski), to a Catholic-run group home for the night — promising the boys that she’ll make sure they’re safe. Of course, Anna can’t keep that promise, and the boys are found that night, drowned in the Los Angeles river.

Some background on Anna: She’s the widow of a cop, recently killed in the line of duty. She’s now alone with their two kids, Chris (Roman Christou), and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen).

On the night Patricia’s children die, Anna goes to the scene, with Chris and Samantha in the car. Chris wanders off for a moment and hears someone crying. It turns out to be the same spirit — a woman in a white dress — that haunted Carlos and Tomas. And now they’re after Chris and Samantha.

Anna learns about the woman, La Llorona, a Mexican ghost story, from kindly Father Perez (Tony Amendola) — who, the movie reminds us, had a pivotal role in “Annabelle,” the spinoff of “The Conjuring.” Father Perez can’t help Anna, but knows someone who can: Rafael Olvera (Raymond Cruz, from “Breaking Bad”), an ex-priest and shaman.

Rookie director Michael Chaves knows the mechanics of horror pretty well, and finds plenty of creepy ways to have La Llorona (played by Marisol Ramirez) surprise people effectively. Alas, screenwriters Mikky Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis — who wrote the unscary medical romance “Five Feet Apart” — can’t make the story add up to more than the sum of its shocks.

Presumably, as the sixth installment of “The Conjuring” universe, this won’t be the last of it. (In fact, a trailer for “Annabelle Comes Home” preceded the screening I attended, and Chaves is on board to direct “The Conjuring 3.”) I’m hoping, based on what we see here, that Cruz’ Rafael gets spun off into his own supernatural adventures, lifting hard-to-pronounce curses around Los Angeles.

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‘The Curse of La Llorona’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 19, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and terror. Running time: 93 minutes.

'Penguins'

The latest Disney-made documentary, “Penguins,” stretches the viewer’s tolerance for anthropomorphizing cute wild animals further than anything in the 10 years of DisneyNature’s history.

If you’re the 8-year-old who is the movie’s target audience, seeing it in a theater or (more likely) streaming in a classroom next year, that’s all to the good — anything to further the cause of knowledge.

If you’re the parent accompanying that 8-year-old, you may find the sweet handling a little much.

Nature filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson, collaborators on the upcoming Netflix series “Our Planet,” have the DisneyNature routine down pat: Follow a year in the life of an animal, relate that animal’s experiences to human ones, and let the cuteness carry the day.

In this case, they follow an Adélie penguin, a two-foot-tall, 15-pound flightless bird in a tuxedo — to whom they give the name Steve. Steve is about five years old, and making his first migration as an adult, so the pressure is on for him to do this procreation thing right.

Male Adélie penguins must walk across the ice shelf of Antarctica to the rocky land where their ancestors spawned. They must make rock nests suitable for hatching eggs, then issue a mating call that will attract a female penguin. Once that’s accomplished, the male and female take turns sitting on their eggs and walking to water to feed on fish, which will be regurgitated to feed the chicks.

Steve crosses paths with other Antarctic creatures. They include the larger emperor penguins, predatory skua birds, smelly sea elephants, and treacherous harbor seals — who come as close as anything to threaten both the Adélie penguins’ lives and the movie’s G rating.

Narrator Ed Helms and writer David Fowler wisely don’t attempt to emulate the grand champion of penguin-related narration: the voice of God, Morgan Freeman, in 2005’s “March of the Penguins.” Helms’ approach is more down-to-earth, focusing on such mundane things as the sea elephants’ pungent odor and how feeding penguin chicks largely involves barfing at them.

Pair that level of humor with some ridiculous soundtrack needle drops (e.g., REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” when Steve meets his mate, Adeline), and you have a perfectly packaged nature documentary for human chicks to digest. Adults may regurgitate their popcorn a bit at the cheesiness, but that’s what adults have to do for their kids.

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‘Penguins’

★★★

Opening Wednesday, April 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated G. Running time: 76 minutes.

'Mary Magdalene'

Director Garth Davis labors, in the biblical drama “Mary Magdalene,” to undo what Pope Gregory I started a millennium and a half ago: To win back the good name of Jesus’ most wrongly besmirched apostle.

It was Gregory, back in 591, who first referred to the woman from the coastal Galilee town of Magdala as a prostitute — because patriarchy. Most depictions since have run with that, suggesting that Mary Magdalene was a slatternly woman whose sins were washed clean by following Jesus. (Even the seemingly progressive “Jesus Christ Superstar” played with this trope, giving Mary the solo “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”)

Davis, who directed Dev Patel in “Lion,” and screenwriters Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett reclaim Mary’s good name from the beginning. They show Mary (played by Rooney Mara) as a thoughtful young woman in Magdala, calming talking a young woman through a difficult childbirth, and sitting in the temple for Shabbat praying as intently as the men.

This Mary is a seeker, not satisfied with the lot women have been dealt in Judea in 33 CE. She declines a marriage proposal by a widow in the village, angering her brother Daniel (Denis Ménochet) and worrying her father (Tchéky Karyo). When a traveling rabbi and his band of acolytes come through town, she becomes intrigued by his message and decides to join them.

Mary becomes a close confident of this rabbi, played by Joaquin Phoenix. She’s touched by his talk of the kingdom of God, and how it will be attained through peace and kindness, not force and anger as Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Judas (Tahar Rahim) and the other followers expect will come.

It’s not until the group reaches Jerusalem that anyone mentions this rabbi’s name: Jesus of Nazareth.

There are few who don’t know what happens next, and Davis stages those familiar icons — the moneychangers, the breaking of bread, Judas’ kiss, the arrest at Gesthemane, the walk to Calvary, the crucifixion, the empty tomb — with spartan simplicity and elegance in the rocky terrain of southern Italy (which doubles for the Holy Land). If there’s a twist, it’s what happens when Mary tells Peter and the apostles what she knows, and how they react to it.

Phoenix makes a rugged Jesus, weathered and worn by the path he knows he must walk. His scenes with Mara are beautiful, showing an understanding between rabbi and student that often needs no words.

In the movie’s slower passages — and there are a few of those — it’s Mara’s performance that carries “Mary Magdalene” through. She gives a quietly forceful performance of Mary as Jesus’ first and best apostle (an honor the Vatican finally gave her in 2016), and gives believers something to think about on the week before Easter Sunday.

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‘Mary Magdalene’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 12, in theaters nationwide, including Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville). Rated R for some bloody and disturbing images. Running time: 120 minutes.

'Transit'

A classic life-during-wartime drama with a modern sensibility, German writer-director Christian Petzold’s “Transit” is both timeless and completely made for our current, uneasy times.

France is on the verge of being occupied by Germany, and people are scrambling. Georg (Franz Rogowski), a radio and TV technician, is offered a job for quick money: Deliver a couple of letters to Weidel, a writer in Paris. One letter is a visa to Mexico for Weidel and his wife, Marie. The other is from Marie, begging to be reunited.

When Georg finds Weidel’s hotel room, he learns that Weidel is dead, and left behind his typewriter and some incendiary manuscripts. Georg takes possession of Weidel’s typewriter and papers, and tries to figure out his next move. In the meantime, he’s pressed to accompany a wounded dissident, smuggled on a train from Paris to Marseille. Georg makes it to Marseille, but the dissident dies en route.

Once in Marseille, Georg befriends a deaf refugee, Melissa (Maryam Zaree), and her son, Driss (Lilien Batman) — but Georg’s plans to use Weidel’s papers to get out of France upsets the abandonment-phobic Driss. While Georg is going to different consulates to secure his passage to Mexico, someone else is doing the same: Marie (Paula Beer), who is keeping time with her lover, Richard (Godehard Geise), a doctor leaving for Uruguay to set up a hospital.

The love triangle — between Georg and Marie and Richard — is propped up by the strong performances, particularly by Rogowski and Beer (so good in “Frantz” and “Never Look Away”) as characters who must improvise to stay alive.

Petzold’s script, adapted from German author Anna Seghers’ novel, sets us firmly in World War II-era intrigue and romance, and one might expect to see 1939-era cars and Nazi insignia. Instead, the settings are current — shot in Marseille in the spring and summer of 2017. This change makes these displaced people’s plights more immediate, calling to mind today’s refugee struggles in Europe and our own immigrant dilemmas.

If there’s a nostalgic twist, it’s Petzold’s use of an unknown narrator (only identified in the final reel) who brings a literary flourish to the tragic story. The juxtaposition of the past and the present keeps us constantly off balance, and make “Transit” a ride to remember.

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‘Transit’

★★★1/2

Opened March 1 in select cities; opens Friday, April 12, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for disturbing images, some violence and sensuality. Running time: 102 minutes; in German and French, with subtitles.

'Diane'

The woman in the title of writer-director Kent Jones’ “Diane” is discovering the options in her life disappearing — which is a nice irony for a movie that introduces a not-so-young director and a veteran performer trying new things in their careers.

Mary Kay Place, a longtime second banana (“The Big Chill,” “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and so on) taking her first lead in a movie at 71, plays Diane, who spends her New England days helping others. She’s serving dinner at the homeless shelter, or she’s checking in on her ailing aunt Ina (Phyllis Somerville), or she’s at the hospital visiting her cousin Donna (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s suffering from cervical cancer.

The other person Diane labors to help is her 30-something son Brian (Jake Lacy), a drug addict who won’t accept Diane’s help.

All of this helping others, and driving around twisty New England roads to get from one errand to another, is wearing on Diane, physically and emotionally. But it’s also allowing her to avoid thinking back to her troubled past. Donna, in a moment of anger, reminds her of one such moment: When Diane left young Brian with Donna while running off with Donna’s boyfriend.

Jones is a fixture in New York’s movie scene, a former critic who became programming director for the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. He’s also directed documentaries about film history (2015’s “Hitchcock/Truffaut” is particularly good), and works as an archivist for Martin Scorsese (who’s one of this film’s producers). This is Jones’ first narrative film, but he has the moves of a master, shifting tone with subtle moves, and venturing into dreamscapes that expose Diane’s desperation when she starts to lose the people she has been helping for years.

Jones gathers a wealth of delightful senior actors around Place, including Estelle Parsons and Andrea Martin. But “Diane” is Place’s movie, and she pours everything into it, creating a wistful, humorous and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of thwarted dreams and fading realities. 

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‘Diane’

★★★1/2

Opened March 29 in select cities; opens Friday, April 12, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and drug use. Running time: 96 minutes

'The Wind'

There are demons in the frontier in “The Wind,” an ominous and well-crafted low-budget horror thriller with a sneakily feminist bent.

In a cabin in the Old West in the late 1800s, young frontier woman Lizzy Macklin (Caitlin Gerard) is having a bad time. Her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman) and their neighbor Gideon Harper (Dylan McTee) have left Lizzy alone while they ride to town for supplies — but not before burying Gideon’s wife Emma (Julia Goldani Telles), who had a large section of her head blown off by a shotgun. Also in the casket is Emma’s stillborn baby, whom Lizzy tried unsuccessfully to deliver by Caesarean.

Director Emma Tammi and screenwriter Teresa Sutherland toggle between Lizzy’s lonely ordeal in the Macklin cabin and flashbacks to how Lizzy and Isaac lived happily until the arrival of the Harpers, when bad things started to happen. Lizzy and Emma become convinced that demons, like the ones listed in a pamphlet given to them by a traveling preacher (Miles Anderson), are haunting the prairie — but the menfolk won’t listen to their concerns.

Tammi stages moments of terror that are effectively chilling, small moments that deploy the tiny budget to maximum chills. The most startling effect in “The Wind” is Gerard, who appeared in “Insidious: The Last Key” and “American Crime,” and shows here that she can carry a movie with her stillness, her steely resolve, and her fiery eyes.

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‘The Wind’

★★★

Opened April 5 in select cities; opens Friday, April 12, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violence/disturbing images, and some sexuality. Running time: 88 minutes.