A modern 'Les Misérables' captures the energy and tension of a Paris neighborhood on the brink

In director Ladj Ly’s incendiary debut, and Academy Award nominee in the International Film category, “Les Misérables,” you won’t find a 19th century student revolt or Jean Valjean trying to protect his adopted daughter. But Victor Hugo would have no trouble recognizing the tensions between police and the people living in his old neighborhood.

In this modern tale, a rural cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), is a new transfer to a police station in the Paris suburb or Montfermeil. That’s the area where the Threnadiers’ had their inn in Hugo’s novel, and now there’s a school there that carries Hugo’s name. It’s a low-income area, dominated by a housing project called Los Bosquets, whose residents deal with crime, poverty and an uncaring police force — embodied by Stéphane’s new partners, Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djebril Zonga).

While making their rounds, the three cops try to make an arrest, but the incident turns violent in a hurry — and while the officers are trying to deal with the aftermath, they notice a drone with a camera flying above. Fearful that video of the incident will go viral, Chris and Gwada go on a rampage to track down the operator of that drone.

Ly was born in Mali and grew up in Los Bouquets, and like Jean Valjean spent some time in prison. (He served two years for being an accomplice in a kidnapping, according to the French paper Libération, which wrote about the case last month while debunking claims in right-wing papers that he was charged with attempted murder.) Ly brings a chilling authenticity to the scenes of civic unrest and police intimidation, with the fish-out-of-water Stéphane as the observer being shocked and then appalled by what he witnesses and is forced to take part in.

Los Bosquete is a powderkeg, as Ly depicts it in “Les Misérables,” and the cops are the gasoline — a situation familiar and all-too-real to people in Paris or any major American city. The question Ly asks provocatively, but leaves for us to consider, is what to do when a spark lands on it all.

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‘Les Misérables’

★★★1/2

Opened January 10 in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language throughout, some disturbing/violent content, and sexual references. Running time: 102 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

'Varda by Agnès' is a great director's final masterclass, capturing the humanity and sweat of her films

If all my professors were as knowledgeable, as caring, and as fun as Agnès Varda — as demonstrated in her final film, the self-reflective documentary “Varda by Agnès” — I wouldn’t have skipped class so often.

Shot shortly before her death last March at the age of 90 — and shown on French TV as a two-episode miniseries — this lively documentary is set up like a masterclass. Varda sits on a stage in a grand opera house, talking to her audience about how she made her films, working roughly in chronological order.

Varda begins with her 1954 debut, the rough-and-tumble “La Pointe Courte,” and her early masterpiece “Clèo From 5 to 7” (1961), a semi-improvised slice of life of a self-involved pop singer (Corinne Marchand) wandering the Rue Daguerre — the street where Varda lived — while waiting for the results of a cancer test. Varda talks about how she structured the film so Clèo would sing a song at the movie’s exact midpoint, and everything before and after would radiate from that moment.

The class doesn’t stay in the opera house, though. When talking about her 1985 drama “Vagabond,” about a teen girl, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, walking across the French countryside, Varda is suddenly outside, sitting on a camera dolly similar to the one she used in the film for its trademark tracking shots. A minute later, Bonnaire, who’s now 52 and a big star in France, is on the dolly with Varda, reminiscing about the shoot.

The first half of the film covers Varda’s work in the 20th century, and the second half her work in the 21st, with a diversion to talk about her photography and exhibition work as an intermission. The turning point for Varda was her 2000 documentary “The Gleaners and I,” in which she followed people who made their living picking up what others threw away — whether in potato fields in the country or the dumpsters of Paris. Varda’s camera mirrors its subjects, considering the value of people that others would ignore.

For fans of Varda or those unfamiliar with Varda’s work — from her early standing as “the godmother of the French New Wave,” in the same circles as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy (her husband until his death in 1990), to her end-of-career rediscovery partnering with street artist JR in “Faces Places” — “Varda by Agnès” is an eye-opening look at an artist dissecting her works and revealing the threads that connect them. Watch it, then make time to binge-watch her earlier films.

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‘Varda by Agnès’

★★★1/2

Opened November 20, 2019, in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some nudity and sexual content. Running time: 115 minutes; in French with subtitles.

'Cunningham' documentary features dance legend's beautiful steps, but not much information on how he decided to place them

Merce Cunningham — the choreographer, dancer and icon of modern dance, whose career is chronicled in the documentary “Cunningham” — resisted when interviewers asked him to describe his style. “I don’t describe it, I just do it,” he would say.

That may be a good way for a choreographer to cut through the labels and traditions of dance, but it leaves a documentarian — in this case, Alla Kovgan, who also wrote and edited the film — in a bind. If Cunningham refused to describe the themes behind his art, how the hell does a filmmaker do the job? And how does an audience who isn’t versed in dance history make sense of it all?

Kovgan does it by showing rather than telling. She employs a troupe of dancers to re-create Cunningham’s classic choreography, from 1942 to 1972, strikingly captured by cinematographer Mko Malkhasyan. The moves are sometimes fluid and graceful, other times energetic and angular.

How it got that way, and how Cunningham developed his unique and often-imitated style is harder for Kovgan to pin down. Through archival footage and excerpts from Cunningham’s letters and diaries, she is able to chronicle the high points of Cunningham’s remarkable career — and get some of his dancers to comment on the process, through rehearsal and performance, that Cunningham used to draw from his dancers’ individual abilities to fuel his works.

One fascinating feature of Cunningham’s career that Kovgan explores is the influence of his collaborators, and Cunningham had some heavy hitters. Much of his music was composed, sometimes on the spot, by John Cage, Cunningham’s partner until Cage’s death in 1990. And the first artist to create set backdrops and costumes for the troupe was Robert Rauschenberg — and when his painting career took off, artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns stepped in.

A hole in the narrative is how little is discussed of Cunningham’s home life with Cage. That could be attributed to Kovgan relying exclusively on archival interviews, from a time when homosexual relationships weren’t talked about in public.

With so little of “Cunningham” covering his private life or his themes, it leaves a dance novice with little to grasp onto except the images of the dance itself. Experts may get a lot more out of the documentary, but the rest of us get gorgeous but inscrutable motion. 

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‘Cunningham’

★★★

Opened December 13, 2019, in select cities; opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some smoking. Running time: 93 minutes.

Well-acted and painfully earnest, 'Just Mercy' is Oscar bait of another era

The legal drama “Just Mercy” is the sort of heart-in-the-right-place movie that would have been a shoo-in for Academy Award glory a decade ago. The fact that it’s not in the award conversation, despite a powerhouse cast, says a lot about the changing landscape of prestige pictures.

Based on a true story, the movie follows the fortunes of Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan). We first meet Bryan as an eager law student at Harvard, working a summer internship in Georgia for a group trying to provide legal help to death-row inmates. The experience helps guide Bryan’s future, to use his law degree to do the most good.

Two years later, in 1992, a freshly graduated Bryan is leaving his family in Delaware to move to Alabama. With a federal grant and the support of an anti-death-penalty activist, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), Bryan sets up the Equal Justice Initiative, to provide legal aid to soon-to-be-executed inmates.

Bryan isn’t given a warm welcome upon arrival. The landlord Eva paid for office space backs out at the last minute, leaving Bryan to do his office work in Eva’s living room. And the guards at the state penitentiary order Bryan to a strip-search on his first visit — something other attorneys never have to do. Bryan maintains his composure, but Jordan shows the simmering anger underneath.

One case in particular draws Bryan’s attention: Walter “Johnnie D” McMillan (played by Jamie Foxx), facing execution for the murder of an 18-year-old white woman in 1986. Bryan quickly discovers there was no evidence linking McMillan to the crime, plenty of witnesses who could testify McMillan was elsewhere at the time of the murder, and the state’s only witness was a criminal (Tim Blake Nelson) who only avoided Death Row himself by testifying against McMillan.

Bryan confronts the racist sheriff (Michael Harding), a district attorney (Rafe Spall) unwilling to open old wounds, and a judicial system stacked against the convicted — especially when they’re black. That racism is so engrained in the Alabama psyche that McMillan himself tells Bryan, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into here in Alabama … when you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.”

Director Destin Daniel Cretton (who helmed Larson in “Short Term 12” and “The Glass Castle”) — who co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Lanham, adapting Stevenson’s memoir — finds its most moving passages in the conversations between Bryan and Johnnie D, as the young lawyer shows respect to the condemned man’s dignity and gives the inmate a glimmer of hope. Equally moving are the scenes of Johnnie D in the cellblock, talking to other inmates (played by Rob Morgan and O’Shea Jackson Jr.) who know their days are numbered, too.

If only those scenes were enough to counter the by-the-numbers moments of predictably lofty courtroom speeches and one-dimensional racists in pickup trucks. That’s where, I think, “Just Mercy” misses out on the next-level appreciation that an issue-driven movie like this once would have gotten from Oscar voters. As good as the performances by Jordan and Foxx are, the eat-your-vegetables feel of the inspirational dialogue and change-the-world narrative hold the movie back. 

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‘Just Mercy’

★★★

Opened December 25 in select cities; opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic content including some racial epithets. Running time: 137 minutes.

‘Underwater’ is a thriller that doesn’t quite embrace its weirdness enough

The generically titled thriller “Underwater” veers between being too crazy and not quite crazy enough, without ever hitting the sweet spot a ludicrously premised movie like this requires.

Caught at the nexus of “Alien,” “The Abyss” and “The Blair Witch Project,” “Underwater” is set in a drilling facility at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, nearly seven miles down in the Pacific Ocean. There lies the Kepler station, housing 316 crew members that control the nearby Roebuck drilling rig. When an earthquake hits, the Kepler station is severely damaged, and the pressure of the depths starts buckling sections of the massive facility.

After some scrambling about, six survivors land in one room. The one we’ve seen the most of is Norah (Kristen Stewart), a mechanical engineer who seemingly can hack or rewire anything. There’s also Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), Paul (T.J. Miller), Smith (John Gallagher Jr.) and his marine biologist girlfriend, Emily (Jessica Henwick), and Capt. Lucien (Vincent Cassel), who managed to evacuate a fair number of people before the escape pods ran out. Weirdly, except for the captain, the guys don’t have actual jobs — and only Miller’s Paul is allowed any personality quirks.

Capt. Lucien devises a plan for them to get out alive as the Kepler crashes down to the ocean floor. The plan requires them donning diving suits and traversing the ocean floor to the Roebuck drilling site, a mile away, where there should be more escape pods. That’s if the pressure of being that far underwater doesn’t kill them.

Once they get going, though, the crewmembers learn there’s something else they haven’t considered: Something else is down there with them, and could kill them, too.

Director William Eubank (who made the effective low-budget alien thriller “The Signal”) devises some nasty set pieces full of creepy effects, knocking members out of the party one at a time. But there’s a rote feeling to some of the jump scares, as well as the sort of narrative confusion when you put all six of your cast members in identical diving suits.

That’s the not-crazy-enough part of “Underwater.” The too-crazy part comes in the monster mash of a finale, which plays more like a video game’s final boss battle than a sensible action ending. But the cast, particularly Stewart, is game for anything — even crawling through the guts of a slimy beast, which is something no one needs to see.

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‘Underwater’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sci-fi action and terror, and brief strong language. Running time: 95 minutes.

Cringe-worthy 'Like a Boss' isn't half as funny as the people in it

There’s a vast gulf between a funny movie and a movie with a lot of funny people in it, and within that gulf rests “Like a Boss,” whose raunchy humor misses more than it hits.

Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne star as Mia and Mel, women who have been friends since middle school, through high school and college, and launching their cosmetics line as a garage start-up. They do good business online, with a “one-night stand” mini make-up kit as their top-selling item. Their brick-and-mortar store, where Mia has the color ideas and Mel keeps the books, is hemorrhaging money — though it doesn’t keep the partners from leaving their employees, awkward Syd (Jennifer Coolidge) and flamboyant Barret (Billy Porter, stealing every scene), alone while they party with their wealthy, married-with-kids gal pals (Jessica St. Clair, Ari Graynor and Natasha Rothwell).

One day, in walks what could be the answer to Mia & Mel’s financial woes: Beauty mogul Claire Luna (Salma Hayek), a cosmetics CEO who wants to invest in the partners’ operation, in exchange for 49% interest in the business. The hitch is that if Mia and Mel ever break up, Claire gets controlling interest in the company. Mel, always eager to please, talks the more temperamental Mia into signing — but soon Claire is picking at the cracks in the partners’ relationship.

There’s certainly room in this premise — credited to two male screenwriters, Sam Pitman and Adam Cole-Kelly (sharing story credit with Danelle Sanchez-Witzel) — and director Miguel Arteta (“Beatriz at Dinner”) gathers together plenty of funny people to fill the space. But there’s not enough jokes baked into the script for the stars to latch onto, and the hope of spontaneous on-set hilarity doesn’t pay off as much as you’d like. There are occasional flashes of humor in “Like a Boss,” but the stars are in the position of trying to pretty up a bad situation without enough foundation.

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‘Like a Boss’

★★

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, crude sexual material, and drug use..Running time: 83 minutes.

Single-take '1917' is technically brilliant, but its story is not so strong

The World War I drama “1917” raises a big question for a moviegoer: What matters more? The story a movie tells, or the technique used to tell it?

This is a question that usually comes up with summer blockbusters, where the whizbang special effects often drive the bus and the human interaction of characters takes a back seat, and fans enjoy the spectacle, eat their popcorn and curse those critics who can’t “leave their brains at the door.” But when the divide between technical wizardry and storytelling happens with a movie that’s considered an Academy Awards favorite — winning top honors at last weekend’s Golden Globes for the film and director Sam Mendes — the divide can’t be brushed aside so easily.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Documentary '63 Up' is a bittersweet reunion with people we've gotten to know over the decades

If you have never seen any of director Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, “63 Up” is not the place to start. 

For those of us who have watched them — and followed the lives Apted has chronicled  since they were seven years old — seeing “63 Up” is like a reunion with old friends. For a 55-year-old movie critic who saw “35 Up” when he was 27, the series has been a glimpse into one’s own future, a sneak preview of life eight years later.

Apted (“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The World Is Not Enough”) was a researcher for Granada TV’s newsmagazine “World In Action,” which in 1964 interviewed seven-year-olds, from rich schools and poor ones, to show viewers who would have their hands on Britain’s future. The documentary was inspired by the quote, attributed to Aristotle: “Give me the child to the age of 7, and I will show you the man.”

Apted went back and interviewed those same kids when they were 14. And when they were 21. And 28. And so on, every seven years, which is where we are now with “63 Up.”

Over the years, fans of the series have watched rich kids become successful rich adults, or chuck it all and go teach in Bangladesh. At the same time, the films have shown working-class kids grow into successful adults, or struggle with poverty and other problems.

As Apted combs through the lives of these people — and there’s plenty of footage from past installments to capture their personalities at different ages — a few common threads have permeated the series, and show up again in “63 Up.”

One is that they all, at one time or another, have gotten fed up with Apted poking his camera into their lives at seven-year intervals. Some of them have said so to his face — and Apted, to his credit, includes those moments. Most, as “63 Up” shows, have grown to appreciate being part of one of the most comprehensive experiments in film history.

Another is that life cares less about class divisions than snooty ‘60s TV producers did. There is some talk of politics, of Brexit and Donald Trump, but not too much. Everyone, regardless of their economic status, are dealing with everyday things, like children and health issues.

Death hangs over “63 Up” more than in past chapters. Many of the subjects have buried their parents. Others — spoiler alert! — are dealing with death in a more immediate way.

For those reasons, “63 Up” feels like it may be the end of the line. There’s also the fact that Apted turns 79 in February, and it’s unclear whether he would direct “70 Up” or if someone would take over the work. However, when I was 27, I arrogantly predicted the series would be over at “35 Up” — and I’d be happy to be wrong again.

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“63 Up”

★★★1/2

Opened November 27, 2019, in select cities; opens Friday, January 3, 2020, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and mature themes. Running time: 139 minutes.