'Official Secrets'

As based-on-a-true-story movies go, “Official Secrets” feels more real than most, a credit to the British penchant against hyperbole and the understated performances of its cast — particularly its star, Keira Knightley.

Knightley plays Katherine Gun, who in early 2003 — on the eve of the invasion of Iraq — was a signals analyst for GCHQ, the British government’s intelligence-gathering agency. In short, as a character notes later, she’s a spy, charged with gathering, processing and analyzing data for Her Majesty’s government.

One morning, everyone in Katherine’s office receives a memo from GCHQ’s American counterpart, the National Security Administration. It’s a general call for intel that can be used toward — or, more accurately, against — countries sitting on the United Nations Security Council. The intent is clear: The Bush administration is looking for dirt that can be used to blackmail countries into approving a UN resolution supporting an invasion of Iraq.

Katherine has been discussing the run-up to war with her husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri), a Kurdish Iraqi who emigrated to the UK from Turkey, and how Tony Blair and his cabinet were lying their way into a war. When the memo arrives, Katherine feels compelled to do something, so she makes a copy, which she mails to an anti-war activist friend (MyAnna Buring).

The memo makes its way, eventually, to Martin Bright (played by Matt Smith), a reporter at The Observer, which has already declared an editorial position in favor of going to war. He and the paper’s DC correspondent (Rhys Ifans) try to nail down the veracity of the memo, and when they do, the paper publishes their story. But the American media thinks it’s a fake — for reasons both of politics and, as one editor (“Game of Thrones’” Conleth Hill) bellows, someone being “colossally stupid” — and the march to war continues.

Within GCHQ, an investigation into the leak begins, and Katherine, sickened that her coworkers may suffer under suspicion, confesses. Thus begins her ordeal for violating the Official Secrets Act, as the government holds charges over her head, spies on her, and threatens Yasar’s immigration status. When she goes to a civil-rights law firm, the lead barrister, Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), suggests a novel defense — but Katherine is warned that saying anything, even to her lawyer, about the memo would also violate the Official Secrets Act.

Director Gavin Hood has explored similar issues before, in “Rendition” (2007) and “Eye in the Sky” (2015), and here — as co-screenwriter with married scribes Gregory and Sara Bernstein — he sets an unfussy, just-the-facts tone, a police procedural of the security state. (Spoiler: The American government comes off looking quite badly, not that Blair is let off the hook.) The story has an offbeat structure, following the memo’s journey before settling on Katherine’s legal problems.

The strong ensemble cast also includes Matthew Goode as Bright’s fellow journalist, Indira Varma and John Heffernan as Emmerson’s colleagues, and such old-school British actors as Kenneth Cranham and Clive Francis in small roles.

But Knightley holds our attention throughout “Official Secrets,” capturing Katherine’s optimism that she can stop the war, her anger that she was naive for thinking she could, and her resolution to reveal the truth no matter the cost. It’s a sharp reminder of what lies a government will tell to get what it wants, and how some individuals find the strength to speak the truth.

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‘Official Secrets’

★★★1/2

Opened August 30 in select cities; opens Friday, September 13, in more theaters nationwide. Rated R for language. Running time: 112 minutes.

'Freaks'

The dark “Freaks” is a welcome surprise, a blend of paranoid thriller and superhero excitement, all delivered with sharp writing and directing rather than expensive special effects,

In a Los Angeles feeling the reverberations of a terror not immediately explained to audiences, 7-year-old Chloe (Lexy Kolker) lives an isolated life with her father (Emile Hirsch) in a house where the doors are tightly locked and the windows covered in newspaper and duct tape. “The bad guys” are outside, Dad explains to Chloe, and they can’t let them in or they’ll take Chloe away — just like they did her mother (Amanda Crew). Dad drills Chloe in assuming another child’s identity, though why she’s doing this isn’t immediately clear, either.

Chloe seems to have a rich imagination, conjuring up a protective older sister, Harper (Ava Telek), and sometimes seeing an imprisoned woman who just might be Chloe’s missing and presumed-dead mother.

And what to make of the old man (played by Bruce Dern) who parks his ice-cream truck near Chloe’s window. Is he just a creepy old man? Or is there something going on that he, or Chloe’s dad, isn’t telling?

Actually, there’s plenty not visible at first in this highly imaginative and compelling script, written by the film’s directors, Adam Stein and Zack Lipovsky. (The pair also collaborated on the live-action “Kim Possible” TV movie for Disney Channel earlier this year.) They capture fear of the unknown, through the allegory of super-powered people, more succinctly and effectively than most of the “X-Men” franchise ever could. And they do it with an economy of scale in the effects, which work as well as any blockbuster’s expensive CGI, and a surplus of emotional weight.

Hirsch is compelling as the fear-driven father trying to protect his girl from monsters real and imagined, and Dern, who at 83 still can find new ways to surprise us. But young Kolker — whose biggest role to date was a recurring appearance as a future-seeing girl on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” — gives the performance that audiences will remember best, as she finds the balance between childhood innocence and steely resolve when the twisty plot unfolds all of its delicious secrets. 

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‘Freaks’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 13, in select theaters, including Megaplex at The District. Rated R for violence and some language. Running time: 105 minutes.

'Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles'

When a musical becomes part of the Broadway canon, and its tunes part of the Great American Songbook, there’s a tendency to assume they were always there and the work came inscribed on stone tablets from Mount Sinai.

That’s one reason by Max Lewkowicz’s expansive documentary “Fiddler: A Miracles of Miracles” is so revelatory. It’s one thing to show how “Fiddler on the Roof” has become the universally loved musical that it is — performed from Broadway to Bangkok and back — but to get the story about how close the show came to never happening at all.

It started when lyricist Sheldon Harnick brought a book to composer Jerry Bock: A collection of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, about life for Russian Jews in the early 20th century, just before the pogroms that scattered them to Europe and America. The stories are dark, depressing, and don’t really have a narrative through-line.

What’s more, notes author Fran Liebowitz, Aleichem created “nostalgia for a world that never happened.” While other immigrants came to America for economic reasons, Jews came over “because we were being killed.”

Joseph Stein, who wrote the musical’s book, found the connective thread to Aleichem’s tales: A milkman, Tevya, raising five daughters and trying to maintain Jewish tradition as modern life is being pushed onto his village.

But while Tevya is the lead role, lamenting his poverty in “If I Were a Rich Man,” it’s the daughters who drive the action — from the moment the eldest, Tzeitel, declares she wants to defy the tradition of an arranged marriage (described in “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”) to marry the man she loves, the tailor Motel Tamzoil. Her sisters follow suit, with Hodl falling for the student radical Perchik, and young Chava wishing to marry a Russian soldier.

The production got rolling, with Zero Mostel as the boisterous, and difficult to manage, star. Jerome Robbins (“West Side Story”) was hired to direct, angering Mostel — because Mostel had been blacklisted during the McCarthy years, and Robbins had testified and named names, to keep himself from being outed as a homosexual.

With interviews from Harnick, Bock and Stein, as well as surviving original cast member Austin Pendleton, the documentary tells of a disastrous tryout run in Detroit, of retooling (a satirical ditty about the Messiah near the finale was dumped) and revival in its Washington run and its Broadway premiere on Sept. 22, 1964.

Next came the 1971 movie, directed by Norman Jewison — hired even though he informed the producers that “I’m a goy” — and starring the Israeli actor Chaim Topol, a surprise to Hollywood observers who assumed Mostel would get the gig. Topol, by the way, gives one of the more charming interviews here, though maybe it’s just a relief to see that he’s still alive and smiling.

To demonstrate the universality of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the filmmakers go to a university in Thailand, where a student production of the show is in rehearsals. And there’s a montage of “Do You Love Me?”, the tender duet between Tevye and his wife, Golde,” made up of renditions from the recent Broadway revival, a production at the Chichester Festival Theatre in the UK, and a Japanese-language production in Tokyo.

Stories of “Fiddler’s” impact and influence abound, as do the deeply personal connections. My favorite is from Michael Bernardi, who played Mordcha the Inkeeper in the 2015 revival, and played Danny Burstein’s understudy as Tevye. Bernardi’s father, Herschel Bernardi, took over from Mostel in the original production, and played Tevye in a 1982 revival — and Michael wears his father’s boots when he plays the role now.

“Everybody thinks it’s about them,” says Joel Grey, who directed a Yiddish translation that’s now playing off-Broadway. That, in a nutshell, may be why “Fiddler on the Roof” has endured, and why “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles” is so rich with stories of connection with this stage classic.

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‘Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles’

★★★1/2

Opened August 23 in select cities; opens Friday, September 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements/disturbing images. Running time: 97 minutes.

'Vita & Virginia'

The biographical drama “Vita & Virginia” manages, in its second half, to present a thorough portrait of one of the most fascinating figures in 20th century literature, the author Virginia Woolf.

To get there, though, director Chanya Button first introduces us to a far less impressive figure: Vita Sackville-West, the socialite and popular author who befriended and bedded Woolf.

Button, co-writing with Eileen Atkins (adapting Atkins’ 1992 play), introduces us first to Vita, played with English refinement by Gemma Arterton. Vita is married to a diplomat, Harold Nicolson (Rupert Henry-Jones), and writes popular travelogues and poetry anthologies. She also has a scandalous reputation for her many affairs, with men and women, which incenses her society-conscious baroness mother (Isabella Rossellini). 

Harold is more tolerant of Vita’s wild ways, largely because of his own peccadillos, but he warns Vita not to get too infatuated with Woolf and her bohemian Bloomsbury circle. Vita dives in, though, encountering Woolf (played by Elizabeth Debicki) at a party. Vita pursues Virginia, first through letters in which she makes her desires plain, and eventually in person, inviting Virginia to her country estate.

The movie presents Vita as a libertine, and a bit of a predator, crashing through Virginia’s circle of artists — including her publisher husband, Leonard (Peter Ferdinando) and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell (Emerald Fennell) — to possess some portion of Virginia’s heart and mind. The result is a rather shallow character, with which Arterton (one of the movie’s executive producers) can do very little, despite great effort.

Debicki’s portrayal of Woolf, on the other hand, is heartbreaking, as she captures both her literary drive and the fragility that bedeviled her. In the movie’s second half, the roles are switched, when Woolf pegs Vita as the model for her gender-bending novel “Orlando,” and suddenly Virginia is taking what she needs from Vita.

The problem with “Vita & Virginia” is that Button tries to present their story as one of equals, with each woman giving and taking in the same measure. But even she must acknowledge, as the story reaches its conclusion, how much more Virginia put into and received from their arrangement.

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‘Vita & Virginia’

★★1/2

Opened August 23 in select cities; opens Friday, September 6, at the Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan). Not rated, but probably R for sexual content and some language. Running time: 110 minutes.

'The Cat Rescuers'

There’s no denying the good works being performed by the people chronicled in the documentary “The Cat Rescuers” — so much so that a viewer might wish the movie did more to address the problem those people battle on a daily basis.

It’s estimated, the movie tells us, that there are some 500,000 abandoned, stray and feral cats living on the streets, alleyways and open lots of New York City — as many as live in apartments and houses with loving owners. Some are left behind by uncaring owners, while others breed new litters of kittens regularly because they haven’t been spayed or neutered.

Cat lovers are hesitant to bring unwanted cats into Animal Care & Control, the city agency that deals with the overflow cat population, because they are known to euthanize cats who aren’t adopted or are difficult to handle. So many cats on the street are cared for by a loose network of volunteers, who spend their own money to feed, temporarily shelter and sometimes get veterinary aid for these felines.

Directors Rob Fruchtman and Steven Lawrence follow four of these volunteers as they patrol their neighborhoods in Brooklyn, helping street cats. There’s Sassee, who sets traps from her car and houses them in her apartment. There’s Claire, whose cat care becomes an expensive proposition, and a worry for her husband. There’s Stu, a fire department radio engineer who spends his early mornings setting food out for 20 to 25 cats a day. And there’s Tara, who rescues cats because two cats once saved her life when she was at a low point in life.

The filmmakers make some efforts to show the reluctance for officials to take the issue seriously. (Eric Davis, the borough president of Brooklyn, comes off as a glad-handing jerk when a vaunted “animal summit” becomes a talky waste of time.) There’s not much here about the scope of pet overpopulation, so “The Cat Rescuers” remains a small, charming story that stays strictly on the street level.

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‘The Cat Rescuers’

★★1/2

Opened July 5 in select cities; opens Friday, September 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 87 minutes.

'The Nightingale'

Hard to sit through and harder to forget, “The Nightingale” is a brutal and poetic tale of revenge and hardship in 19th century Australia — and proof that director Jennifer Kent, following her astonishing debut in “The Babadook,” is an artistic force.

It’s 1825, and young Clare (played by Aisling Franciosi) is the only pretty face a unit of lonely British soldiers sees in their posting in Tasmania. A servant, Clare sings for the troops’ entertainment, and for the whims of Lt. Hawkins (Sam Claflin), their ambitious and arrogant commander. 

Clare has finished her sentence for theft, back home in Ireland, but Hawkins refuses to sign the papers that would give her the freedom she has earned. So she waits, with her husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) and their baby son.

Then something happens. The movie’s distributors have asked critics not to describe that something in detail, so I won’t. I will say it’s horrific, possibly triggering to some audiences, and leaves Clare eager to seek revenge on Hawkins and his officers.

Hawkins, afraid the fort’s new major (Christopher Stollery) will deny him his sought-after promotion, rushes north to apply in person to the colony’s commander. It’s an arduous journey, four or five days, with Hawkins accompanied by his loutish sergeant, Ruse (Damon Herriman), and greenhorn Ensign Jago (Harry Greenwood), and three servants: Two convicts and a boy, Eddie (Charlie Shotwell). Hawkins has also hired an elderly native tracker, Uncle Charlie (Charlie Jampijinpa Brown), to guide them through the wilderness.

Clare, on horseback, goes after Hawkins and his men. She finds another tracker, Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), to get her close to Hawkins’ party. Billy, like Clare, has lost much at the hands of the “English bastards,” as he calls them, and slowly their commonalities overcome the barriers of bigotry between them.

Much has been said of the violent scenes Kent, as writer and director, puts on the screen, and there’s no denying the intense power those moments hold. Out of context, they aren’t as awful as some gory slasher movies — but in context, they are devastating, because Kent invests so much into her characters, particularly the resilient Clare and the spiritually battered Billy. As we get to know them, we feel more deeply the cruelty inflicted on them by the likes of Hawkins.

Having created a superatural evil so convincingly in “The Babadook,” the human monsters here are even more fearsome. Claflin becomes the embodiment of English privilege, who believes everything — his promotion, respect, Clare’s favor — is his simply because he wants it. Also effective, as the boorish sergeant, is Herriman, who’s having a moment right now playing cult leader Charles Manson in both Netflix’ “Mindhunter” and in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”

Ganambarr is a dancer who has never acted on screen before, but he gives a moving performance that captures Billy’s pride for his people and his guile that has allowed him to survive lethal racism. Ganambarr also is the receptacle that carries, effortlessly, the research into Aboriginal culture that Kent and her advisers gathered — including the use of the Palawa Kani language, a modern revival of once-lost ancient tongues.

But the blood-red heart of “The Nightingale” is Franciosi. The actress (perhaps familiar to “Game of Thrones” fans as the mysterious Lyanna Stark) seethes as Clare is so devastatingly wronged, shows determination as she sets her sights on revenge, and shows her humanity when she must confront the deadly results behind that vengeance. Franciosi goes through a lot in “The Nightingale,” and her reward is that audiences go through it with her.

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‘The Nightingale’

★★★1/2

Opened August 2 in select cities; opens Friday, August 30, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for strong violent and disturbing content including rape, language throughout, and brief sexuality. Running time: 136 minutes; in English, and Scottish Gaelic and Palawa Kani (Tasmanian Aboriginal), with subtitles.

'After the Wedding'

If a filmmaker is going to remake a much-admired movie, and premiere it on the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival, that filmmaker had better bring a fresh approach — which is what director-screenwriter Bart Freundlich does with the intense melodrama “After the Wedding.”

Isabel (Michelle Williams) is an American living in India, running a school for orphaned children. The school is desperately short of money, and Isabel’s only hope is a wealthy New York tech CEO, Theresa (Julianne Moore), who has promised a $2 million donation — but she wants to meet Isabel in person first.

Theresa puts Isabel up in a ritzy Manhattan hotel, and Isabel feels put off by the lavish treatment; her week’s stay, she tells folks back in India, could buy textbooks for a whole grade. Isabel is even more put off when Theresa delays her donation decision, citing her stress over planning the wedding of her daughter Grace (Abby Quinn). Theresa invites Isabel to the wedding, at the Long Island mansion she shares with her husband Oscar (Billy Crudup), a sculptor.

Isabel arrives just as the wedding ceremony is starting, but one look at the principals tells Isabel there are other motives at play. The way the sickening realization crosses Williams’ face is a master class in wordless acting, and it’s only the first of many performance beats — by Williams, Moore, Crudup and Quinn — that elevate the story above the level of soap opera.

Freundlich (“The Myth of Fingerprints”) puts a fresh gloss on the 2006 Danish film, directed by “Bird Box’s” Susanne Bier, with a not-so-simple gender flip. (In the original, Williams’ character was played by Mads Mikkelsen.) The switch deepens Isabel’s pain and feeling of betrayal, and puts Theresa’s manipulations in a different context, adding a sharp sense of melancholy as the story builds to a shattering conclusion.

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‘After the Wedding’

★★★1/2

Opened August 9 in select cities; opens Friday, August 30, at Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated PG-13 for thematic material and some strong language. Running time: 112 minutes.

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This review first was posted on this site on January 25, 2019, after the movie premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

'Cold Case Hammarskjöld'

Danish filmmaker and provocateur Mads Brügger knows how to tell a compelling story, which is both the draw and the Achilles’ heel of his latest documentary, “Cold Case Hammarskjöld.”

Brügger starts out the film by trying to investigate the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the second man to hold the title of secretary-general of the United Nations. Hammarskjöld was killed when his plane crashed on Sept. 18, 1961, near the city of Ndola in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Hammarskjöld was on a diplomatic mission to negotiate for peace in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to meet with Moise Tshombe, leader of the breakaway territory of Katanga. Tshombe was backed by Belgian mining interests who feared Congolese independence would threaten their lucrative business. That’s why some people believe there was an order to kill Hammarskjöld, who endorsed the African independence movements of the ’60s.

One who believes this is Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish private investigator who has made solving Hammarskjöld’s death his life’s work. Björkdahl’s main piece of evidence is a metal plate, which he believes came from Hammarskjöld’s DC-6, punctured with tiny holes. Brügger follows Björkdahl as he seeks to dig up the wreckage of that plane, which was bulldozed not long after the crash.

But when that particular well runs dry, Brügger has already jumped to the next thread. With Björkdahl’s aid, Brügger tries to find evidence of the existence of a shadowy mercenary group, the innocuous-sounding South African Institute for Marine Research (SAIMR), which they believe has been involved in black-ops jobs like the downing of Hammarskjölds plane.

Finding anyone willing to talk openly about SAIMR is difficult, but when one does come forward, Brügger thinks he’s hit the jackpot — especially when the guy implicates SAIMR in a crime even bigger, and more horrific, than the assassination of a top UN official.

This is where Brügger’s method catches him short. The accusation is a bombshell, certainly, but the proof is non-existent (which is why I’m not divulging it here). It is so big that it throws off the trajectory of the Hammarskjöld investigation. And because the evidence is scant, mentioning it in this movie throws Brügger’s other investigative work into question.

Brügger — who set himself up as a corrupt diplomat in his 2011 documentary, “The Ambassador” — deploys s narrative device in which he, dressed in the all-white colonialist garb favored by SAIMR recruits, dictates his story to two secretaries who type on a manual typewriter. The secretaries, both black African women, serve as sounding board and Greek chorus, as well as a visual representation of the uneven power dynamic that has defined Africa since Europeans first invaded the continent. Brügger plays with fire by using such imagery, and he knows it.

Still, it’s a good yarn Brügger relays in “Cold Case Hammarskjöld,” full of political intrigue and outlandish characters. Too bad he tells it in such a way that we’re in doubt about its truthfulness.

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‘Cold Case Hammarskjöld’

★★★

Opened August 16 in select cities; opens Friday, August 30, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and descriptions of violence. Running time: 124 minutes; in English, and in Danish, Bemba, Swedish and French, with subtitles.