'Motherless Brooklyn'

Edward Norton, the director and screenwriter, is the best thing about “Motherless Brooklyn,” a strange yet compelling noir drama. Now if only he could rein in his over-the-top star, Edward Norton.

Norton plays Lionel Essrog, who works as eyes and ears for a private eye, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) in late-1950s New York, despite Lionel suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. It’s the Tourette’s, and the cascade of tics and blurted-out phrases, that makes Norton’s performance so annoying — and, for a guy who made his bones playing characters with perceived mental disabilities, in “Primal Fear” and “The Score,” it’s also easy to see why Norton wanted to do it.

Frank, Lionel explains in a too-thick narration, rescued Lionel and the other guys at the agency — Tony (Bobby Cannavale), Gilbert (Ethan Suplee) and Danny (Dallas Roberts) — from the orphanage and gave them a job and a purpose. That starts to crumble when, after a busted stakeout, Frank is shot by some thugs and dies. Lionel, who saw Frank as a mentor, decides he’s going to find out what Frank was up to, and see if that can lead Lionel to Frank’s killers.

The trail of clues leads Lionel into a battle over the soul of New York City, being fought on one side by civic activist Gabby Horowitz (Cherry Jones) and on the other by the imperious city planner Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin). These characters are only lightly fictionalized takes on the journalist and firebrand Jane Jacobs and the city builder Robert Moses, and their presence will surprise anyone who read the 1999 Jonathan Lethem novel on which Norton adapted his screenplay.

While digging, Lionel finds two other important figures in the story. One is Paul (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant but unstable engineer with many secrets. The other is Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who rails against Randolph’s so-called “slum clearance” and joins Horowitz’s cause.

Norton steeps “Motherless Brooklyn” in the details of ‘50s New York, where guys in fedoras drive their  tailfin-heavy cars to Harlem clubs to hear bebop jazz. (Michael Kenneth Williams plays a jazzman who befriends Lionel, though the music coming out of his horn is from Wynton Marsalis.) Norton also paces the action well, as Lionel doggedly follows the bread crumbs to an ending that’s not as surprising as a viewer might wish it would be.

Getting past Norton’s tic-filled performance, “Motherless Brooklyn” boasts a strong ensemble, with Baldwin standing out by playing his best role: The power-hungry authoritarian. (It’s not far off from “30 Rock’s” Jack Donaghy or his Trump impersonation.) “Motherless Brooklyn” works better as a meditation on the dangers of limitless power than when Norton remember he’s supposed to be telling a detective yarn.

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‘Motherless Brooklyn’

★★★

Opens Friday, Nov. 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout including some sexual references, brief drug use, and violence. Running time: 144 minutes.

'First Love'

The freakishly prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike throws his all into his latest blood-drenched gangster drama, “First Love,” whose title isn’t as ironic as you might think.

In the darker recesses of a city, Monica (Sakurako Konichi) is trapped. She’s forced to pay off her father’s debts by selling her body to the yakuza, and she’s kept as a slave by Yasu (Takahiro Miura), a drug dealer who keeps Monica high on his product.

Elsewhere in the city lives Leo (Masataka Kubota), a boxer whose promising career seems to be cut short when he goes down too easily during a bout. After looking at his MRI, a neurologist tells Leo that he has an inoperable brain tumor and not long to live.

When Leo crosses paths with Monica, it’s when she’s running in terror from Otomo (Nao Omori), a dirty cop who’s involved in a plot to kidnap Monica so Yasu can deliver drugs to an ambitious junior yakuza, Kase (Shota Sometani). Leo can’t help himself but to drop Otomo on the ground with one punch, and he and Monica are suddenly on the run, as a convoluted gangster plot plays out in their wake.

Mike keeps the action moving with barely room to breathe — and the action is so outlandish and comical that, at one point, it literally becomes a cartoon. When Miike does slow down, he creates space for a tender romance to bloom between Leo and Monica, two innocents amid the gunplay and swordplay going on around them. 

“First Love” is the sort of over-the-top action comedy where when someone mentions a contract killer named One-Armed Wang, you can bet the farm that a guy will eventually show up cocking his shotgun with his one good arm. It’s got plenty of gags, buckets of blood, and a surprising amount of soul.

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‘First Love’

★★★1/2

Opened September 27 in select cities; opens Friday, Nov. 1, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for strong violence, drug use, and some sexual references and language. Running time: 108 minutes; in Japanese with subtitles.

'Jojo Rabbit'

A round of applause, please, for filmmaker Taika Waititi, for the courage he employs in his biting Nazi satire “Jojo Rabbit.” Not for making a comedy about Adolf Hitler but for daring, in an age when a president calls modern neo-Nazis “very fine people,” to remind us of the evil Hitler embodied.

Little Johannes Betzler, played winningly by newcomer Roman Griffin Davis, is eager to show the world how devoted he is to Der Fuehrer. As a new member of the Hitler Youth, 10-year-old Johannes, nicknamed Jojo, jumps into the knife drills set forth by his summer camp’s commander, the freakishly irresponsible Capt. Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell). But Jojo loses his nerve when the teen campers order him to kill a rabbit, so the kids taunt him with a new name: Jojo Rabbit.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

'The Lighthouse'

Isolation, loneliness and the pounding ocean do things to a person — and watching Robert Eggers’ harrowing head-trip, “The Lighthouse” might do a few things to the viewer as well.

It’s sometime in the late 1800s, on a far-off spit of land by the roiling ocean. Two men have arrived to start their work as “wickies,” keepers of the lighthouse. One, Thomas (Willem Dafoe), has been doing this work for years. The other, Ephraim (Robert Pattinson), is new to the lighthouse, after years of cutting timber north in Canada. Ephraim’s contract is for four weeks, and he tells Thomas he’s looking forward to steady work and some time alone.

But Ephraim, while working all the back-breaking jobs Thomas has assigned him, notices some odd things around the lighthouse. There’s the mermaid figurine buried in his mattress by its previous occupant. There’s Thomas’ insistence that he alone tend to the lamp at the top of the lighthouse. There’s the seagull that menaces Ephraim, and Thomas’ stern warning that it’s bad luck to kill a seagull.

One night, with a storm roaring in, Thomas and Ephraim get roaring drunk together, and Ephraim tells Thomas his darkest secret. It’s too much for Thomas, who asks repeatedly, “Why’d you spill your beans?”

Eggers made a stunning debut with his Puritan horror story “The Witch,” and he surpasses that debut with this twisty psychological tale. Writing with his brother Max, and inspired by period novelists such as Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, Eggers steeps the film in authentic period dialogue and design. Eggers goes further, with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shooting in black-and-white 35 millimeter film, in an almost square frame, to add to the claustrophobic atmosphere that seems to be driving both men insane.

But which one is the lunatic? Eggers provides plenty of evidence both ways. Dafoe and Pattinson, in a perfect collaboration of powerhouse actors, give full-throated performances that keep the audience in suspense. Is Thomas the madman? Is Ephraim? Are they both? Or are the brutal conditions of working the lighthouse, and being trapped alone together by a harsh sea, enough to make anyone lose their grip on reality?

Eggers has a Kubrickian streak in him, happier posing questions then answering them. Moviegoers who like their movies tied up neatly may be driven mad by Eggers’ lack of simple resolution. Those of us who like their movies thought-provoking and impressionistic will also go around the bend, but they’ll enjoy the trip more.

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‘The Lighthouse’

★★★1/2

Opened Oct. 18 in select cities; opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for sexual content, nudity, violence, disturbing images, and some language. Running time: 109 minutes.

'Dolemite Is My Name'

When Eddie Murphy is firing on all cylinders, being funny and charming and in command, he’s hard to stop — and in the new biographical story “Dolemite Is My Name,” it’s great to see him keep on going.

Murphy plays Rudy Ray Moore, who is introduced as a struggling comedian and musician in 1970s Los Angeles, working as emcee in a blues bar and a cashier in a record store. He hits on a great idea, adapting old-school African American street tales into a character, Dolemite, pimp extraordinaire. His routine is an instant hit, and soon he’s recording albums that are best-sellers, even though they’re too rough to get radio play.

What’s the next step for Moore? Why, movies, of course. The bulk of the movie centers on Moore willing himself into being the producer and star of a Dolemite movie — enlisting a socially progressive playwright (Keegan-Michael Key) to write a script, a vain and alcoholic actor (Wesley Snipes) to direct, and a bunch of UCLA film students to act as the crew.

Director Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow”) mines the rich vein of ‘70s culture, and the blaxploitation genre that Moore accidentally exemplified, for a fast-paced Kodachrome spectacle. The screenwriting team of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski are masters at comical biography — they were the guys behind “Ed Wood,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt” and “Big Eyes” — and their chronicle of Moore’s career and influence is an exuberant delight.

The movie boasts a strong roster of comic talent, including Craig Robinson, Tituss Burgess, Mike Epps, and particularly Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Lady Reed, Moore’s comic protege and groundbreaking leading lady. Rap stars, including T.I. and Snoop Dogg, also pop up to pay homage to Moore, whose rhyming routines earned him the nickname “the Godfather of Rap.”

But “Dolemite Is My Name” is Murphy’s movie, start to finish, and he knows it. He embraces Moore’s foul-mouthed stage persona and his do-it-yourself optimism — in the vein of “Ed Wood” or “The Disaster Artist,” but with an infectious joy that outdoes both of those movies.

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‘Dolemite Is My Name’

★★★1/2

Opened Oct. 4 in select markets; opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City), and on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, and graphic nudity. Running time: 117 minutes.

'Countdown'

The thriller “Countdown” doesn’t break new ground in PG-13 horror — but it’s quick, efficient, and gets the job done.

The premise is everything: At a high-school party, a bunch of beer-drinking teens dare each other to try a new app that will tell the user exactly how long he or she has to live. It’s all fun and games, until one girl, Courtney (Anne Winters), sees that she has only three hours to live. When she avoids a ride with her drunk-driving boyfriend, Evan (Dillon Lane), the app flashes a notice — “user agreement broken” — and something dark and unseen makes sure she dies when the countdown clock hits zero. 

After introducing the set-up, rookie writer-director Justin Dec settles in on the main story. That starts with Quinn Harris (Elizabeth Lail), a newly graduated nurse, in the same hospital where Evan is soon to undergo surgery. Evan is in a panic, because his death app says he’s going to die on the operating table, and he also gets the dreaded “user agreement broken” notice before dying messily and mysteriously.

Before Evan dies, though, half the hospital staff tries the app — and Quinn learns she has three days to live. She tries various technological means to disable the app, to no avail, though in the process she teams up with Matt Monroe (Jordan Calloway), a nice guy who’s also working on very short time. Quinn and Matt, taking along Quinn’s teen sister Jordan (Talitha Bateman), go to a priest (P.J. Byrne) whose alarming fascination with exorcisms makes him ideal to explain the internal logic of demon narratives.

Dec sets up the horror sequences with a minimum of fuss, and some solid old-school scares. He also injects a nice bit of humor, mostly through Byrne’s overeager priest. Where things go off the rails is when a #MeToo subplot, involving a handsy doctor (Peter Fascinelli), makes an unwelcome return in the final reel.

“Countdown” isn’t too original, with notions about cheating fate that come right out of the “Final Destination” series. But it delivers the goods enough to satisfy one’s appetite for not-too-bloody horror on the weekend before Halloween.

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‘Countdown’

★★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language and thematic elements. Running time: 90 minutes.

'Paradise Hills'

The teens-in-danger thriller “Paradise Hills” is a feast for the eyes, as Spanish director Allice Waddington puts painterly settings to an engrossing thriller with a generous dollop of science fiction.

Emma Roberts stars as Uma, who wakes up in a strange bed, and finds herself in an even stranger facility on a remote island that something between a spa and a rehab clinic. She’s there along with several other teen girls, all wearing white dresses — corsets with white-vinyl straps by day, pouffy taffeta numbers by night — in a tightly regulated environment, overseen by someone called The Duchess (played by Mita Jovovich).

Uma — who, in a prologue set two months later, is getting married to a young capitalist shark (Arnaud Valois), so something must have worked — bonds quickly with three other guests. Chloe (Danielle Macdonald) is a plus-sized southern belle whose mama wants to be a pageant queen. Yu (Awkwafina) is being taught manners to please her Beijing grandparents. And Amarna (Eiza González) is a pop star who says she sent to the facility because her rebel streak was threatening her managers’ bottom line.

Uma plans to escape, to go back to her boyfriend Markus (Jeremy Irvine), of whom her mother disapproves because he’s not upper class. But when Markus suddenly appears on the island, working as a groundskeeper to be near her, Uma starts to realize something more sinister is happening.

Screenwriters Nacho Vigalondo (“Colossal”) and Brian DeLeeuw — fleshing out a story by Waddngton — steal from the best, with elements of Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” and Patrick McGoohan’s surrealist ‘60s series “The Prisoner” at play here. The narrative train nearly careens out of control toward the end, though, as the dark reality of The Duchess’ realm can’t quite be reconciled with its shimmering artifice.

But Waddington, a photographer and designer making an assured feature-film directing debut, polishes that artifice until it gleams, so it’s easy to get sucked into it. She finds the perfect visuals in the spa (the movie was filmed in the Canary Islands), a seductive trap of beautiful conformity, and places her headstrong heroines there to rise from pampered princesses to valiant valkyries. 

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‘Paradise Hills’

★★★

Opens Friday, Oct. 25, at the Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violence, sexual content and some language. Running time: 95 minutes.

'Where's My Roy Cohn?'

It’s only after death that we fully understand the toxic effect the New York lawyer Roy Cohn had on the American landscape — and Matt Tyrnauer’s intimate, frightening documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” shows how he did it.

Cohn was an intense attorney, equal parts bulldog and bully, who made his early reputation by following J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook for attacking Communists wherever possible. His first national headlines came when he prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason, and put them both in the electric chair despite a worldwide campaign for mercy.

Cohn’s work got the attention of the anti-Communists in Congress, and soon he was counsel to the subcommittee chaired by Sen. Joseph McCarthy as he worked to ferret out Communism in all walks of life. Cohn helped create the M.O. of McCarthy’s committee, where bluster and attack were the order of the day. A major facet of Cohn’s work was to smear anyone who criticized McCarthy’s efforts so the critics would themselves be labeled commies. 

This demagoguery worked for a while, until the U.S. Army embarrassed Cohn by denying a waiver in the draft for his “friend” David Schine. Cohn urged McCarthy to bring Army brass before the committee and question their patriotism — a stunt that ended with the Army’s counsel, Joseph Welch, unloading on McCarthy with the famous quote, “Have you have no sense of decency, at long last?”

After McCarthy’s committee fell apart, Cohn returned to private practice in New York, displaying techniques that were less about knowing the law and more about knowing the judge. He ended up representing such mobsters as Carmine Galente and John Gotti. Cohn, ingratiating himself to Manhattan’s elite, also took under his wings a protege: A cocksure real-estate wheeler-dealer named Donald Trump.

Tyrnauer digs deep to find footage of Cohn in interviews, and augments that with fresh interviews with historians and journalists who have studied Cohn’s Machiavellian traits and their influence on McCarthy and Trump. (Former Trump consultant Roger Stone is among the first talking-head interviewees in the movie, and his presence onscreen prompted a wave of laughter with the Sundance audience at its January premiere — the same day Stone was arrested and indicted as part of the Mueller investigation.)

What’s remarkable about “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” — besides the title, taken from a quote from Trump in the White House — is that Tyrnauer manages not to humanize or make us empathize with Cohn. The movie reminds us that as McCarthy’s committee counsel, he was a closeted gay man who led persecutions of homosexuals, and that he denied he was gay even as he was dying of AIDS.

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‘Where’s My Roy Cohn?’

★★★1/2

Opened September 20 in select cities; opens October 25 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic content, some sexual material and violent images. Running time: 97 minutes.

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This review first ran on this website on Jan. 26, when the movie premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.