'Hail Satan?'

The funny and fierce documentary “Hail Satan?” examines what happens when a satire of religion turns into a movement of its own.

Director Penny Lane, who made the animated documentary “Nuts!”, tells the story of The Satanic Temple, which began with a few guys in black Halloween-costume robes holding a press conference in 2013 in Tallahassee, Fla., supporting then-Gov. Rick Scott’s move for prayer in schools — because if the door’s open for Christians to pray, then it’s open for anybody.

Lane follows the growth of The Satanic Temple from a handful of media-savvy trolls to a movement numbering in the thousands across America and elsewhere in the world. There are growing pains, as the group tries to present a uniform message of opposition to Christian theocracy, as they go from profane protests at the grave of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps’ mother to launching a legal challenge to Ten Commandments monuments on state capitol grounds in Oklahoma and Arkansas. 

(They trot out one of my favorite bits of trivia, that most Ten Commandments monuments erected around America were done so in late ‘50s and early ‘60s as movie swag, a Paramount Pictures promotion of Cecil B. deMille’s “The Ten Commandments.”)

The movie delves into the history of claims that America is “a Christian nation” (it doesn’t go as far back as you think, only to the 1950s) and the scare tactics of “Satanic panic” cases of the 1980s. It also shows how The Satanic Temple’s co-founder and reluctant spokesman, Lucien Greaves, has reveled as a go-to guest to make Fox News hosts lose their minds.

Behind the absurdity of “Hail Satan?” is a serious conversation of how porous the wall between church and state is, and how the durability of the Constitution is only preserved by the most outsider voices.

(This review was first posted on Feb. 2, 2019, when the movie screened at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.)

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‘Hail Satan?’

★★★1/2

Opened April 17 in select cities; opens Friday, May 10, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and some disturbing images. Running time: 95 minutes.

'Tolkien'

There are moments of elf magic in “Tolkien,” when this stodgy biographical drama of the author J.R.R. Tolkien seems about to burst free of its genre limitations to become as soaring as Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” — until it seems to lose its nerve.

Screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford shift between two threads of Tolkien’s narrative. One is during World War I, when Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) is a young army officer battling illness as well as the Germans. The other begins in Tolkien’s childhood, when a young Ronald, as he’s called (and played by Harry Gilby), and his brother Hilary (Guillermo Bedward) deal with the death of their mother (Laura Donnelly). Their priest, Father Francis (Colm Meaney), sends them to live with a wealthy widow, Mrs. Faulker (Pam Ferris), who takes in orphans.

Young Tolkien is sent to a prestigious school, where he eventually finds three friends: Robert Gilson (played first by Alice Marber, then by Patrick Gibson), Christopher Wiseman (Ty Tennant, then Tom Glynn-Carney) and Geoffrey Smith (Adam Bregman, then Anthony Boyle). The four swear an oath to look out for each other, and support each other through their artistic pursuits.

The friendship carries them through their school days, college — Gilson and Wiseman at Cambridge, Tolkien and Smith at Oxford — and into World War I. But Tolkien’s college days are nearly cut short before they begin, as he’s distracted from his studies by another orphan in Mrs. Faulkner’s house. She is Edith Bratt, played as a girl by Mimi Keene but as a young woman by Lily Collins. Edith’s love of opera is what sparks Tolkien’s interest in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, one of the inspirations of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.”

Director Dome Karukoski’s 2017 biopic “Tom of Finland” covered many of the same tropes of biographical drama as “Tolkien” does, particularly in showing a life event in terms of the symbolism of what the person later created. In “Tom of Finland,” it was when Tom watched a biker and essentially created gay leather fetishism. In “Tolkien,” it’s in how Ronald’s friends inspired the fellowship that propelled his epic adventure, or in how the horrors of The Somme informed Tolkien’s examination of war.

Hoult and Collins match up well as the self-doubting writer and the woman who challenged him to dig deeper. If “Tolkien” were more about their relationship, and less trying to make Tolkien’s life look too much like his creations, the movie might have been truly precious rather than just a story with a familiar ring to it.

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‘Tolkien’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 10, at area theaters nationwide. Rated PG-13 for some sequences of war violence. Running time: 112 minutes.

'Ash Is Purest White'

Love and determination are a dynamic combination, and no more so than in Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke’s slow-burn gangster drama “Ash Is Purest White.”

Spanning from 2001 to 2018, Jia’s story starts with two people in love. One is Qiao (played by Jia’s wife, Zhao Tao), who works in a dance club and oversees the high-stakes mah jongg games in the back room. Her boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan), is at one of those tables. He’s a mid-level gangster in their small but growing city, Datong.

Qiao and Bin live on the line between devotion and violence. One night, while dancing in the club (to Village People’s “YMCA”), a handgun falls from Bin’s shirt and hits the floor. He quickly hides it again, before anyone sees it. Owning a handgun is a major crime in China, though every good gangster has one.

Sometime later, while Qiao and Bin are riding in a fancy car through downtown, some street toughs on motorbikes force them to pull over. The boys beat Bin severely, and would likely kill him if Qiao doesn’t pull out Bin’s pistol and shoots it into the air, which forces the kids back. The police arrive soon, and Qiao tells them the gun is hers. Qiao ends up getting five years in prison for that moment, more than Bin got for fighting.

What the rest of “Ash Is Purest White” covers is what happens when Qiao gets out of prison and tries to reunite with Bin. It’s in these moments where Jia turns the movie’s full attention to Qiao, who will pull every con-artist trick she can to make some cash and get closer to Bin.

The result is a fiery, yet carefully restrained, performance by Zhao, who gives Qiao a dark, intense drive that serves her well as she maintains her “jiangha,” or street gangster, ferocity through nearly two decades of setbacks. She’s like the dormant volcano that inspires the movie’s title, calm on the surface but ready to blow with righteous, purifying fire if pressured.

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‘Ash Is Purest White’

★★★

Opened March 15 in select cities; opens Friday, May 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and violence. Running time: 136 minutes; in Chinese with subtitles.

'Red Joan'

There are few words that can strike dread in a movie lover’s heart faster than these: “Inspired by a true story.”

When these words show up at the beginning of a movie, it’s a sure sign that some producer read something in the paper and thought it would make a good movie, but things went astray after that. Somewhere in the development process, the filmmakers came not to trust in what made the original story interesting. By the end, the movie is so embellished with movie clichés that it resembles the true story less than it does every other movie that’s come before.

The case study this time is “Red Joan,” which takes a kernel of an idea — a London grandmother is arrested for spying for the KGB in her younger days — and turns it into a saccharine Cold War romance, intercut with an acting legend slumming in the framing story.

The movie begins with Joan Stanley (played by Judi Dench), quietly living in London in 2000. Then the doorbell rings, and it’s Scotland Yard, MI5 and MI6, arresting her and accusing her of violating the Official Secrets Act.

The interrogation scenes, as Joan’s barrister son Nick (Ben Miles) learns of his mum’s espionage, become a framing story that takes us into Joan’s past. It starts in 1938 in Cambridge, when young Joan (played by Sophie Cookson) is an eager student in the sciences, and a fledgling socialist in love with a Russian-Jewish emigre, Leo Galich (Tom Hughes).

When World War II begins, Leo ends up in Canada, and Joan lands a job working with her professor, Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore), at a research lab that is trying to develop the atomic bomb for Britain. Joan finds herself torn by her feelings for both Leo and Max. She’s also torn by her ideology: She believes the Allies should fulfill their promise of sharing tech secrets with the Russians, and as Hitler is defeated and Stalin looms as a threat, she believes giving the Russians the bomb will keep both sides from using it.

Director Trevor Nunn — whose 1996 movie version of “Twelfth Night” remains an unrivaled gem — and screenwriter Lindsay Shapero reduce what could have been an intriguing character study of misplaced idealism into a sappy, and slow-moving, historical romantic drama.

“Red Joan” also makes Joan Stanley a distressingly passive character, and neither Cookson nor Dench can do much to make her more than a doormat succumbing to romantic and political forces.

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‘Red Joan’

★★

Opened April 19 in select cities; opens Friday, May 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan). Rated R for brief sexuality/nudity. Running time: 101 minutes.

'Long Shot'

The only thing uninteresting about “Long Shot” is its title, which doesn’t begin to hint at the frisky romantic comedy and political commentary bubbling within.

Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen star as people with matching political ideologies but clashing personalities. Theron plays Charlotte Field, the cool and composed Secretary of State. Rogen plays Fred Flarsky, a crusading journalist for a progressive Brooklyn alt-weekly.

Charlotte can work a cocktail party, engage in small talk with diplomats, and smile as she deflects flirtatious comments from James Steward (Alexander Skarsgård), the suave Canadian prime minister. Fred’s risky undercover jobs, like trying to infiltrate a neo-Nazi enclave, don’t explain his goofy demeanor and unending supply of ugly windbreakers.

What could these two people possibly have in common? Well, when Charlotte was 16, she babysat the 12-year-old Fred, and Fred has never forgotten her.

When Fred quits his job, after learning the paper has been bought by a right-wing media tycoon, Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis, who not for a second makes you think of Rupert Murdoch), Fred’s college friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) takes him to a fund-raiser. That’s where Fred meets Charlotte for the first time in years. The encounter is brief, as Charlotte is hustled away by her top aide, Maggie Millikin (June Diane Raphael, stealing every scene), but it leaves an impression.

Charlotte is aiming to run for president, and sees an opening when her boss, President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk), a dimwit who played a president on TV and still watches himself in reruns, decides to leave the White House so he can get into movies. Charlotte’s plan is to push through a global environmental treaty, to use as a springboard to a presidential campaign. Her consultants say her image weakness is her humor, so she hires Fred to punch up her speeches. 

As Charlotte and Fred spend more time together, bouncing around the world, a spark develops. But can romance flourish when Charlotte’s ambition is pulling her toward the presidency — and, as Maggie points out, Fred doesn’t come off as White House material?

Screenwriters Dan Sterling (who wrote Rogen’s “The Interview”) and Liz Hannah (“The Post”) blend the romantic with the political with some sizzling results. The best running gag features the anchors of a cluelessly misogynistic morning show on Wembley’s network that, again, isn’t supposed to make anyone think of “Fox & Friends.”

Director Jonathan Levine, who worked with Rogen on the cancer comedy “50/50” and the Christmas farce “The Night Before,” relies heavily on the chemistry between Theron and Rogen. Despite the surface mismatch, that chemistry is a happily explosive meeting of minds, hearts and raunchy sensibilities — and a rare instance where both sides are equally in command. It’s that equality, the give and take between the poised Theron and the frumpy Rogen, that makes “Long Shot” pay off.

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‘Long Shot’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, May 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content, language throughout and some drug use. Running time: 125 minutes.

'The Brink'

I can think of few people I’d be less interested in spending 90 minutes with than Steve Bannon, the slovenly pseudo-intellectual who ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and tried to make a laundry list of hateful impulses — xenophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia — look like a coherent political ideology.

Documentarian Alison Klayman spent weeks with the guy to film “The Brink,” a terrifyingly eye-opening look behind the curtain of Bannon’s attempt at globalizing and weaponizing his white-nationalist crap. If she could do it, it falls upon us to do our civic duty and find out what she learned.

Klayman — whose first movie, 2012’s “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” profiled the dissident Chinese artist — is often a one-woman crew here, acting as cinematographer and sound recordist. She insinuates herself into Bannon’s entourage after he’s left the White House to begin his next big project: A global campaign to coalesce far-right movements around Europe under a catch-all “nationalism” banner. 

At different points, Klayman shows Bannon meeting with members of far-right groups from France, Hungary, Sweden and the United Kingdom — that last one in the person of Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK Independent Party and one of the louder voices in favor of Brexit. (The comedian John Oliver once called Farage a “three-time cover model for ‘Punchable Face’ magazine,” and there’s nothing here that suggests Oliver is wrong.)

At the same time, Bannon is vetting congressional candidates who he can back to carry the hate-spewing “nationalism” message into the 2018 midterms. His first candidate is former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore, whose alleged predilection for very young women proves to be a campaign hindrance.

Klayman lets Bannon hang himself with his own hypocrisy and arrogance. He claims an intellectual superiority in his campaign, but comes up with arguments that boil down to little more than “hey, we won last time.” He claims he’s advocating populism, but does so while flying private jets to European capitals and staying in swank hotels. (That changes, tellingly and hilariously, in the movie’s later scenes.) He waves the flag of patriotism, but takes millions from a shady Chinese billionaire to fund his escapades.

Still, “The Brink” reminds us not to sleep on Steve Bannon. He may be down after the Democrats took the House in 2018, his fake populism replaced by the genuine article in the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But only a fool would count him out, or let one’s guard down when he’s at work.

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‘The Brink’

★★★1/2

Opened March 29 in select cities; opening Friday, May 3, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 91 minutes.

'Ask Dr. Ruth'

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the travel-sized sex therapist and media superstar, has always been more than a German-accented punchline — and Ryan White’s documentary, “Ask Dr. Ruth,” show not only how much of a pioneer Westheimer has been in expanding America’s discussions of sex, but also a person who has seen more tragedy and triumph than most.

White starts with the media caricature of Dr. Ruth, the much-satirized staple of ‘80s and ‘90s talk shows, happily talking about penises and vaginas without blushing. The montage of her appearances with Arsenio Hall, David Letterman and others sets the table for the very real, very warm, and very short (4’7’’) person behind the persona.

Westheimer, who turned 90 last June, still lives in the Washington Heights apartment she shared with her third husband, engineer Fred Westheimer, from just after they married in 1961 to when he died in 1997. She is regularly visited by her two children, Miriam and Joel, and her four grandchildren; there’s a great moment where one granddaughter, Leora, tries to convince grandma that, despite her dislike of the word, is a feminist.

As White digs deeper into Westheimer’s life, he introduces us to Karola Ruth Siegel, a little Jewish girl living a happy life in Frankfurt, Germany. That changes when she’s 10, in 1938, when her parents put little Karola on the kindertransport with other Jewish children, to escape the growing Nazi oppression. She lands at an orphanage in Switzerland, where (as White shows through tender animation sequences) she and the other Jewish children became servants for the Swiss kids.

After World War II, Karola Siegel immigrated to British-controlled Palestine, where she used her middle name, Ruth, because Karola was considered too German. She lived on a kibbutz, and trained with the Israeli underground army as a sniper. Yes, Dr. Ruth is more badass than you ever knew, and at 90, she shows she can still field-strip a rifle, though she hates the whole idea of guns.

Her first marriage took her to Paris, and her second one to America, where she studied psychology and sexuality, and started her first practice as a sex therapist. Then came a surprisingly successful radio show, which made Dr. Ruth the nation’s expert on sex just as the AIDS crisis was beginning. Then came TV, books, and the rest.

White pivots from Westheimer today, still active and writing books, with the looks into her past. Westheimer travels to Frankfurt, Switzerland and Israel to show the camera crew the stops along her life journey. (A trip to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and library, is particularly moving.) 

“Ask Dr. Ruth” shows Ruth Westheimer has a few faults — she’s skittishly agnostic about showing favor in electoral politics, for example — but overall presents a portrait of a feisty, fun-loving woman who survived the worst in life and came out perpetually chipper and life-affirming.

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‘Ask Dr. Ruth’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, May 3, in select theaters, including the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and descriptions of sexuality. Running time: 100 minutes.

'UglyDolls'

The movie “UglyDolls” prompts the same question one would ask when looking at any of the plush-toy characters in the store: What the heck is this thing?

On the one hand, it’s an 87-minute infomercial for a toy line. On the other hand, it’s a cookie-cutter plot about being your own true self, mixed with a little “Toy Story”-lite lesson about how a toy’s best destiny is to be loved by a child. On the third hand — surely, one of these UglyDolls has to have three hands, amirite? — it’s a vehicle to throw together a voice cast with such chart-toppers as Kelly Clarkson, Blake Shelton, Janelle Monae, Pitbull, Nick Jonas, Bebe Rexha, Charli XCX and Lizzo for a forgettable song score.

The story starts in Uglyville, where all the UglyDolls live happy lives singing that “it doesn’t get better than this.” The cheeriest of the UglyDolls is Moxy (voiced by Clarkson), who is convinced that today will be the day she finally achieves the apex of toy life: To be paired with a child in “the Big World.” Uglyville’s mayor, Ox (voiced by Shelton), tries to tell Moxy that “the Big World” is a myth, but Moxy is undeterred.

One day, Moxy leads a group of Uglies — cynical Wage (voiced by Wanda Sykes), worrywart Lucky Bat (voiced by Wang Leehom), lovable lug Babo (voiced by Gabriel Iglesias) and too-cool Ugly Dog (voiced by Pitbull) — through the portal that sends new UglyDolls to Uglyville each day. That’s how they end up at the Institute of Perfection, where all the “pretty dolls” get their training before going to meet their child.

The “pretty dolls” freak out at the sight of the UglyDolls, but their leader, the super-perfect Lou (voiced by Jonas), gives them the chance to prove themselves. But, as the story goes on, we learn Lou may not be as perfect, or as nice, as he seems.

Not all the “pretty dolls” are turned off by the UglyDolls, though. Mandy (voiced by Monae) makes fast friends with Moxy, bonding over the fact that Mandy has what the disapproving Lou has what would be seen as an “ugly” trait: Mandy wears glasses.

The script, by rookie Alison Peck (and a story credit, weirdly enough, to “Spy Kids” and “Alita: Battle Angel” director Robert Rodriguez), meanders all over the place, and the humor veers wildly from kid-friendly slapstick to over-their-heads references. Director Kelly Asbury (whose last film was “Smurfs: The Lost Village”) keeps things moving with some colorful visuals, particularly in the many musical numbers.

Of course, with a voice cast like this, there would be musical numbers. Composer Christopher Lennertz (“Sausage Party,” “Supernatural”) and lyricist Glenn Slater (who triumphed last year with “A Place Called Slaughter Race” in “Ralph Breaks the Internet”) serve up a full score of bubblegum pop and empowerment ballads. None of them are particularly memorable, except maybe for Monae’s makeover song, “All Dolled Up” and Jonas’ villain song, “The Ugly Truth.”

The jumbled storytelling, frenetic animation, monotonous songs and overtalented voice cast make “UglyDolls” one of the most head-scratching animated movies in a long time. It’s not really good, but its badness is strangely fascinating.

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‘UglyDolls’

★★

Opens Friday, May 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic elements and brief action. Running time: 87 minutes.