'Loopers: The Caddie's Long Walk'

There’s more to being a caddie than “show up, keep up, and shut up,” according to the many golfers, caddied and writers interviewed in “Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk,” a documentary that surely will be better appreciated by players of the game than those who don’t.

Director Jason Baffa finds some fascinating people to interview. He starts with the old men who guide guests around the links courses of Ireland and Scotland. He moves on to the caddy squad who know the secrets of Georgia’s Augusta National, and who for years were the only caddies allowed at The Masters.

There are lots of great individual stories. There’s the bond Tom Watson shared with Bruce Edwards, who was Watson’s caddie for decades and one of the first pro caddies who dedicated themselves to one player. There’s Greg Puga, who learned the game in east Los Angeles, worked as a caddie to get practice time, and worked his way to playing The Masters.

Baffa, who is also the film’s cinematographer, and writer/editor Carl Cramer paint a portrait of the caddie as the ultimate assistant: A technician, confidante, parental figure and psychologist, all in one. The movie repeats this mantra throughout the movie, either through the interview subjects or the narration — delivered with laconic humor by Bill Murray, an avid golfer and former caddie himself. (Thankfully, the “Caddyshack” references are kept to a minimum.)

Baffa captures some gorgeous footage of some legendary golf courses, from St. Andrews in Scotland to Pebble Beach in California. It’s one more way “Loopers” will appeal to those who love chasing that dimpled little ball around, but may leave the rest of us in the rough.

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“Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk”

★★1/2

Opening Friday, June 3, in select theaters, including Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated PG for some suggestive/rude humor, mild thematic elements, and smoking images. Running time: 81 minutes.

'Dark Phoenix'

Slowly, in fits and starts, Fox’s “X-Men” became the franchise nobody wanted — and the latest, and possibly last, chapter in the saga, “Dark Phoenix,” is the sad, misshapen end product.

It’s 1992, and this group of mutants seem scarcely to have aged since their debut in the rebooted “X-Men: First Class” (2011), which was set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The bald, mind-reading Prof. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) still runs his school for mutants, while also getting on the government’s good side by sending his adult mutants out on life-saving missions.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'Rocketman'

The musical “Rocketman” is a fun, emotionally affecting, spiritual biography of the life and career of Elton John — a movie that exploits every cliche in the genre, and earns the audience’s love anyway.

The love comes in part because screenwriter Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”) plays on the audience’s sympathy early, by showing the sad childhood experienced by the young Reginald Dwight (played as a youth by Matthew Illesley and Kit Connor). His father Stanley (Steven Mackintosh) is aloof and cold, while his mum Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard) is self-centered and dismissive of Reggie’s burgeoning musical talent. Only his nan, Ivy (Gemma Jones), sees the potential in her grandson’s piano playing.

Rock and roll becomes Reggie’s salvation. First Reggie (played as an adult by “Kingsman” star Taron Egerton) plays local pub gigs (shown through a lively song-and-dance number to “Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting)”), then backs up a touring American soul revue. That gets Reggie — who picks the stage name Elton John — the attention of a junior record-company executive (Charlie Rowe), who pairs him with a budding poet, Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell).

It was at this point where “Rocketman” charmed me into liking it. Director Dexter Fletcher (who directed Egerton in “Eddie the Eagle”) sweetly underplays the first meeting of one of pop music’s most successful songwriting teams, showing two shy guys at a diner, bonding over a shared love of Marty Robbins’ “Streets of Laredo.” Later we see Elton at the piano with some of Bernie’s new lyrics, and watching that spontaneous moment of the creation of “Your Song” brings a tear to the eye.

A moment like that makes one think about “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the Queen biopic that was wall-to-wall scenes of how a random incident would inspire a classic song. Fletcher famously took over “Bohemian Rhapsody” when produces fired the still-credited director, Bryan Singer, over bad on-set behavior. “Rocketman” feels, in part, like Fletcher’s effort to prove what he could do with a musical biography from scratch. (One area where “Rocketman” excels over “Bohemian Rhapsody” is that there’s actually something close to a male-on-male sex scene, between Elton and his longtime manager and lover, John Reid, played by Richard Madden.)

Fletcher presents many of John’s best songs as opportunities for span stretches of his career, or to illuminate Elton’s fragile emotional state. The most touching is when a drug-addicted Elton attempts suicide via an overdose and a jump into his pool — which cues a rendition of the movie’s title track, with Egerton singing through a dance interpretation of an emergency-room visit.

The scenes of Elton’s rags-to-riches rise and his suffering of many addictions are the sort of predictable moves that “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” parodied so perfectly that no filmmaker should ever use them again. (The opening shot, of a devil-costumed pre-show Elton walking into a rehab support group, is the epitome of the “Dewey Cox has to think about his whole life before he plays” framing-device scene.)

And while Egerton aims for a physical approximation of Elton John in his performance, he’s not as obsessive about it as Rami Malek was with replicating Freddie Mercury’s every move. And, unlike Malek, Egerton is actually singing the songs. (Egerton and John, who appeared in the second “Kingsman” movie, sing a duet to a new song over the closing credits.) The result is a rich, emotionally direct performance that captures John’s heart as well as his music.

Another thing that helps “Rocketman” transcend the cliches is that, let’s face it, the music is great. Elton John has been so ubiquitous for so long, from his ‘70s glory days through “The Lion King” soundtrack and “Will & Grace” cameos, that it’s easy to forget how much songs like “Your Song,” “Daniel” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” have been a part of our lives. It would be easy to say “The Bitch Is Back,” as the first song on the soundtrack repeats, but really he never left.

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’Rocketman’

★★★

Opened Friday, May 31, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, some drug use and sexual content. Running time: 121 minutes.

'Non-Fiction'

There’s a delicious irony in seeing Olivier Assayas’ thoroughly French comedy “Non-Fiction” in America — because audiences, in watching a movie where characters talk about the death of literature, will have to read more than a book’s worth of dialogue in the subtitles.

It begins with two men having lunch. Alain (Guillaume Canet) is a book editor at a prestigious publishing house, who keeps up on all the trends in his fast-changing industry. Leonard (Vincent Macaigne) was one of Alain’s hottest authors once, but Alain is less impressed with his current manuscript — a roman à clef focusing on the disheveled Leonard’s romantic life.

What Alain doesn’t realize is that the character Xenia in Leonard’s new book, the woman with whom Leonard’s central character has a torrid affair, is based on Alain’s wife, Selena (Juliette Binoche), an actress on a popular cop show. (The English title of the cop show is “Collusion,” which I think is Assayas’ sly wink at American politics.)

Alain’s not exactly innocent here. He’s having his own fling with Laure (Christa Théret), a new hire at the publishing house, who is assigned to figure out how to upgrade the imprint for the digital world.

The only main character not having an affair is Leonard’s wife, Valérie (Nora Hamzawi). She’s an campaign aide to a socialist politician (Nicolas Bauchaud), and she’s as idealistic about her boss’ politics as she is about marriage, in spite of evidence to the contrary in both cases.

These stories play out mostly in smart banter among friends, where they talk about whether digital books will bring the end of libraries or whether a writer has the right to appropriate the lives of the people around him for fictionalization.

It’s not the first time Assayas has deconstructed art in full view — his 1996 movie-in-a-movie “Irma Vep” springs to mind — but this one is all in the talking. The dialogue has a dry wit, and there are even inside jokes. (For example, Leonard’s description of a moment from his and Selena’s affair name-drops the director Michael Haneke, with whom Binoche has worked.)

Binoche is great, as always, carefree in her love life and quite zen about the limitations of being an older actress. The surprise discovery is Hamzawi, an engaging actress who seems to relish when Valérie matter-of-factly cuts through Leonard’s self-absorbed bullcrap.

The rich veins of conversation in “Non-Fiction” are a delight, as if the audience is invited to a dinner party with some smart, funny and thoughtful intellects. Even reading what they say is a pleasure.

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‘Non-Fiction’

★★★1/2

Opened May 3 in select cities; opens Friday, May 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language and sexuality/nudity. Running time: 107 minutes; in French with subtitles.

'Booksmart'

If I had teen daughters, I would hope they were as smart, funny and loyal as Amy and Molly, the over-achieving best friends in the raucous and righteous comedy “Booksmart.” I would also hope that, as a parent, I would never learn what they were doing on the night before their high school graduation.

Molly (played by Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (played by Kaitlyn Dever) are the straight-A, straight-arrow kids at Crockett High School in Los Angeles. Both have plans for college: Molly is going to Yale as part of her drive to be a Supreme Court justice, while Amy is going to Columbia, after a summer in Botswana helping local women learn how to make tampons. (Don’t laugh. There was an Oscar-winning documentary about the subject just this year, “Period. End of Sentence.” Look it up.)

On the last day of school, while everyone else is turning homework assignments into confetti, these two still have pressing concerns. They then realize that their classmates are heading to prestigious colleges, even though they partied all through high school. Molly, the more forceful of the two, convinces Amy that they must cram a year’s worth of high school parties into one night — this night, Friday, before Saturday’s graduation ceremony.

The big party, they learn, is an unsupervised blowout at the home of the aunt of Nick (Mason Gooding), a jock and their class’ vice president — and, therefore, a thorn in Molly’s side all year. The girls vow to find this party, in part so Amy, who is a lesbian, can finally connect with her crush, the skateboarding Ryan (Victoria Ruesga).

In the bitingly funny script — credited to four women writers: Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins and Katie Silberman — there’s more than one party happening, and Amy and Molly end up dealing with missed connections, oddball classmates, a hallucinogenic trip that takes the girls into stop-motion animation, one weird pizza guy (Mike O’Brien), and their principal (Jason Sudeikis) popping up unexpectedly. It’s a crazy night, but nothing so crazy that our super-smart girls can’t handle it.

First-time director Olivia Wilde has made a movie far superior to some of the crap in which she has acted (e.g., “Life Itself,” “Love the Coopers” and “The Lazarus Effect” ). Wilde can set up a joke better than most directors, while also capturing the rhythms of high-school life and understanding the yearning souls of these smart, sweet, nerdy girls.

Wilde is blessed with abundantly talented actors in Dever (“The Front Runner,” “Beautiful Boy”) and Feldstein (“Lady Bird,” “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising”), who embody these driven characters and have a BFF chemistry that’s explosive. There also are strategically placed grown-ups — including Jessica Williams, Will Forte and Lisa Kudrow — and a strong supporting cast of young talent that includes Molly Gordon, Diana Silvers, Austin Crute, Noah Galvin, Skyler Gisondo, and especially Billie Lourd (Carrie Fisher’s daughter), who steals scenes as the seemingly magical classmate Gigi.

“Booksmart” is more than its hilariously raunchy moments. It’s also a warm, wise valentine to high school, and the tighter-than-sisters friendship that made the ordeal worth enduring. Like the wish list presented to the Wizard of Oz, these girls have brains, hearts and courage — and they had them all along. 

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‘Booksmart’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, May 24, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content and language throughout, drug use and drinking - all involving teens. Running time: 102 minutes. 

'The Biggest Little Farm'

The next time I’m in southern California, I’d love to take a tour of Apricot Lane Farms, a traditional farm north of Los Angeles that subscribes to a sustainable model in which the farm exists in harmony with the natural life in and around it.

Until then, the next best thing is the documentary “The Biggest Little Farm,” which details how this 130-acre patch of land when from barren to bountiful.

It started when the film’s director, nature filmmaker John Chester, and his wife Molly, a private chef, decided essentially to go “Green Acres” — leaving Santa Monica city life for their dream farm. Their idea was to grow a lot of different crops, rather than the monoculture of many industrial farms, and do so in a way where the farm could co-exist with nature.

The Chesters started doing their research, and soon found a mentor, Alan York, who stressed the importance of building up the soil. The land the Chesters found for their farm had hard, rocky soil that was devoid of life and nutrients. York preaches the gospel of biodiversity to guide the Chesters as they build a composting center, buy livestock to provide life-giving poop, and design a farm that includes a massive vegetable garden and an orchard with 75 kinds of stone-fruit trees.

The movie chronicles the first seven years of the farm’s development, and they aren’t easy years. Problems big and small make the Chesters’ dream feel like a fool’s errand at first, but York’s encouragement drives them to keep going. 

After a while, they discover that nature frequently arranges for two problems to occur at the same time and solve each other. At one point, when a drought makes their pond stagnant with duck poop at the same time the orchard is overrun with snails, the Chesters move the ducks over to the orchard — where they proceed to eat the snails, and provide poop to fertilize the fruit trees.

There are triumphs like this throughout “The Biggest Little Farm,” as well as tragedies, from the threat of California wildfires to York’s cancer diagnosis. Through it all, there is the farm, which begins to thrive by attracting wildlife that helps achieve that balance that York espoused.

There is a hint of the infomercial in Chester’s film, a sales pitch not just for Apricot Lane’s farmers market stall but the biodiversity that is the farm’s reason for existence. That’s OK, though, because it’s a worthy cause and a path to humanity’s survival on this broken planet, captured in a film that’s as beautiful as it is vital.

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‘The Biggest Little Farm’

★★★

Opened May 10 in select cities; opens Friday, May 24, at the Broadway Centre Theatre (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for mild thematic elements. Running time: 91 minutes.

'The White Crow'

In “The White Crow,” actor-and-director Ralph Fiennes takes on the task of re-creating the blazing dance talent of Rudolf Nureyev — and produces a movie as temperamental, and sometimes as enigmatic, as its subject.

Nureyev, Fiennes and screenwriter David Hare (“The Hours,” “The Reader”) suggest, was a man constantly in motion. He was even born, in 1938, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, a rail line that fascinated him all his life. Growing up in a small village in the Soviet Union, he knew he was destined to go places — and as a headstrong young dance student in Leningrad (played by Ukrainian dancer and first-time movie actor Oleg Ivenko), he thinks those places will be London and Paris, as a ballet superstar.

His technique doesn’t match his talent and energy, and after rejecting one teacher as too rigid, he finds a more suitable mentor in the former dancer Alexander Pushkin (played by Fiennes). Pushkin subtly guides the young Nureyev, urging him to think not just about the moves but the story, not just how he dances but why.

Nureyev’s training sessions are intercut with his successes with the Kirov Ballet, which sometimes ventured out of the Soviet Union. In Paris, Nureyev bends and sometimes flouts the rules about curfew and fraternizing with Western artists, and even starts a friendship and possible romance with Clara Saint (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a socialite who has connections to the French minister of culture. The Kirov’s manager and government minder, Strizhevsky (Aleksey Morozov), warns Nureyev that the headstrong dancer’s actions may get him in trouble with Khrushchev’s regime.

Clara and Strizhevsky are supporting players in the movie’s thrilling climax, on June 16, 1961, when Nureyev defected to the West at the Paris airport. (This isn’t a spoiler; it’s hinted at in the movie’s first scenes.) Hare’s script also delves into Nureyev’s sex life, including relationships with male dancers, and an affair with Pushkin’s wife, Xenia (Chulpan Khamatova). 

Fiennes opted to have most of his actors perform the bulk of their dialogue in Russian, which adds to the tension of Nureyev’s alienation and Cold War sacrifices. Ivenko gives a rugged performance as the mercurial Nureyev, whose emotions are never so direct as when he’s expressing them through his dancing. It’s a performance that soars even when this grim Cold War story sometimes drags.

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‘The White Crow’

★★★

Opened April 26 in select cities; opens Friday, May 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for some sexuality, graphic nudity, and language. Running time: 127 minutes; in English and Russian with subtitles.

'Photograph'

The Indian culture-clash drama “Photograph” has a plot out of an old screwball comedy, but is handled so seriously and so gently that it practically evaporates as you watch it.

Rafi (played by the prolific Indian actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a photographer who hustles to get tourists to pay to have their picture taken at a Mumbai landmark. He lives in a tin-roofed apartment with several other street vendors, and sends most of his money to his grandmother, Dadi (Farrukh Jaffar). What Dadi really wants from Rafi is news that he’s found a fiancée, so one day he sends a photo of a girl he encountered at his job, in hopes of getting grandma off his back.

The girl is Miloni (Sanya Malhotra), a shy accounting student from an upper-middle class family. Miloni dreams of being an actress, but she studies to make her parents happy. What would really make them happy is if she would marry a rich young Indian man, preferably one emigrating to America.

Rafi’s photo ruse only works for a short time. Soon, Dadi announces she’s coming to Mumbai, and she wants to meet Rafi’s new girlfriend, whom he has given the name Noorie. Rafi finds Miloni again — Mumbai is a big city, but it’s also a small world — and asks her to help continue the masquerade to make Dadi happy. Miloni, who’s all about putting other people’s happiness ahead of her own, agrees, and the screwball comedy ensues.

Writer-director Ritesh Batra navigated these cross-cultural crossed wires before, most successfully in his 2013 film “The Lunchbox,” in which a lonely housewife’s meals for her husband (played by Siddiqui) get mistakenly sent to a sensitive widower. Here, the cultural differences between the rural-born poor Rafi and the prosperous Miloni are more pronounced but less interesting, and the movie suffers for it.

There’s also little chemistry between Rafi and Miloni, in part because Batra makes Miloni so timid that there’s scarcely any room for Malhotra to blossom. “Photograph” is, in the end, pretty to look at, but distressingly two-dimensional.

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‘Photograph’

★★1/2

Opened May 17 in select cities; opens Friday, May 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some thematic material. Running time: 110 minutes; mostly in Hindi, with subtitles.