Review: 'The Wretched' is a no-frills horror thriller that showcases a young directing team's talent for execution

Filmmakers Brett and Drew Pierce, known collectively as The Pierce Brothers, have put together a quick and efficient little horror movie in “The Wretched,” generating some solid scares out of basic materials.

Ben (played by John-Paul Howard) is a teen who’s struggling through his parents’ divorce — we learn this with the explanation of why he’s got his arm in a cast. Ben travels up to the north end of Lake Michigan to spend the summer with his father, Liam (Jamison Jones), who operates the marina in a small vacation town. Ben takes a job at the marina, where he gets taunted by the rich kids partying on their parents’ boats, but he finds a friend in a feisty co-worker, Mallory (Piper Curda).

Then Ben notices strange doings in the house next door, where a young mom, Abbie (Zarah Mahler), starts taking nightly walks into the nearby woods. When Abbie’s 7-year-old son, Dillon (Blane Crockarell), comes over to hide from his mom, Ben suspects Abbie might be … well, better for the audience to discover that on their own.

The Pierce Brothers, who wrote and directed, traffic in some tired horror plot points. Of course, Ben has a shady past — and, because of it, neither his dad nor anyone else believes him when he seeks help saving Dillon from the mysterious menace threatening him. Oh, and there are some predictable complications involving Liam’s new girlfriend, Sara (Azie Tesfai, currently on “Supergirl”).

But the Pierces — in only their second movie, after the 2011 zombie comedy “Deadheads” — redeem themselves well with a smart plot twist late in the game, one that elevates the stakes and the terror. The brothers also are masters of execution, and they deploy both physical and computer-generated visual effects to a satisfyingly unsettling conclusion. “The Wretched” is a no-frills horror movie, but the Pierce Brothers’ solid technique will leave horror fans eager to see what they do next.

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‘The Wretched’

★★★

Begins streaming on Friday, May 1, on various platforms. Not rated, but probably R for violence and gore, and some language. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Driveways' is a quietly moving tale of small-town life, and a career summation for Brian Dennehy

Director Andrew Ahn’s sophomore effort, “Driveways,” is the sort of small-town slice-of-life independent film that most film buffs have seen a thousand times before — the kind that rises or falls on the strength of the individual actors.

Ahn has the good fortune to have two strong lead actors here: Hong Chau and, in one of his last roles before his death last week at the age of 81, the burly character actor Brian Dennehy.

Chau (familiar to fans of HBO’s “Watchmen” series as the scheming Lady Trieu) plays Kathy, single mom to a debilitatingly shy 8-year-old, Cody (Lucas Jaye). Kathy and Cody are driving from Michigan to upstate New York to clean out a house, left behind by Kathy’s recently deceased older sister, April. Kathy’s plan is to take a few days to move April’s belongings out of the house, and prep the place to be sold.

Entering the house, though, Kathy learns something distressing: April was a hoarder, and the house is filled with trash, at least one cat carcass, and the million little possessions of a troubled woman who couldn’t let any of them go. Plowing through all this will take Kathy, and Cody, longer than she expected.

Cody meets some of the neighbor kids. Some, like manga-loving Miguel (Jeter Rivera) and his sister Anna (Sophia DiStephano), are nice. Others — like wrestling-obsessed brothers Brandon (Jack Caleb) and Reese (James DiGiacomo), who are staying with their nosy grandma, Linda (Christine Ebersole) — not so much.

Instead, Cody befriends the old man who lives alone next door. That’s Dennehy’s character, Del, a Korean War veteran who spends his days talking to buddies over bingo at the VFW hall and rattling around the house he shared with his departed wife, Vera.

Screenwriters Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, who were nominated a Film Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay for this script, plant clues that blossom with perfect timing. There aren’t a lot of long stretches where characters tell each other — and, by extension, the audience — every little secret in their lives. They learn about each other, and we learn about them, gradually, organically. Just like life.

Ahn, whose debut “Spa Night” was a quiet revelation at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, captures those organic beats with care and precision. Ahn uses a small moment, like when Kathy sneaks out on a sleeping Cody to blow off steam at a bar, to wordlessly convey deep layers of her personality.

Chau (another Spirit Award nominee) gives a tender reading of Kathy, using terse gestures to guard against the grief and guilt she feels for the sister she barely knew. She hangs in there with Dennehy, who delivers a career summation of a performance, his gruff exterior masking a gentle heart.

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‘Driveways’

★★★1/2

Streams online, beginning Friday, April 24, on the SLFS@Home portal. Not rated, but probably R for some F-bombs. Running time: 84 minutes.

Review: 'Trolls World Tour' is colorful, tuneful and forgettable — which is why we need it now

OK, so “Trolls World Tour” is a candy-colored animated confection that has the nutritional value of soda pop and will stay in the memory as long as cotton candy lingers on the tongue.

But after nearly a month of no new Hollywood movies — not since the global coronavirus pandemic forced movie theaters to close, along with everything else fun — it’s enough of an entertainment to tickle the brain’s pleasure centers with its rainbow barrage of playfulness.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' is a harrowing, precisely told tale of a teen's journey to get an abortion

Writer-director Eliza Hittman takes a stark and unflinching look at abortion in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” a drama that doesn’t talk about a teen girl’s wrenching decision than show the emotional stakes of making it.

Seventeen-year-old Autumn (played with soul and steel by Sidney Flanigan) is feeling ill. She goes to a clinic in her rural Pennsylvania town, where she is offered a “self-administered” test — the same one she could have bought at the pharmacy. The women there give her an ultrasound, and tell Autumn she’s about 10 weeks pregnant. They give her brochures about adoption and show a horror-show propaganda video. (Hittman never says it outright, but the “clinic” has the earmarks of an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center.”)

After Googling about ways to self-induce an abortion, she decides she needs to go to a real clinic. Since Pennsylvania requires parental consent for girls under 18 to have an abortion, she decides her only option is to go to New York City. Autumn’s cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), offers to go with her — and, for good measure, steals some cash from the till at the supermarket where they both work as cashiers.

Many of Autumn and Skylar’s interactions on their trip to New York, where they have some harrowing encounters as they are forced to stay overnight, go without dialogue. Hittman (who last came to Sundance with the coming-of-age drama “Beach Rats”) doesn’t have to fill the silences with gab, so she doesn’t — and the emotional communication between these cousins happens through glances and body language.

Flanigan, who never acted before, and Ryder use that quiet chemistry to convey the horrors of being young women in a society where men casually push their dominance on them, in ways large and small. Watching them navigate that minefield is probably all-too-relatable to women in the audience, and a shameful revelation to the men.

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‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’

★★★1/2

Opened March 13 in select cities; available on digital on-demand on Friday, April 3. Rated PG-13 for disturbing/mature thematic content, language, some sexual references and teen drinking. Running time: 101 minutes.

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This review ran on this site on January 25, 2020, when it premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Extra Ordinary' is a horror comedy that mixes subtle verbal humor with not-so-subtle sight gags

Nothing like a quirky Irish horror comedy about paranormal investigators and a Satan-summoning rock star to take your mind off of the troubles of the world — and “Extra Ordinary,” making an earlier-than-planned opening on digital streaming, fills the bill nicely.

Rose, played by the comedian and occasional “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” panelist Maeve Higgins, is a driving instructor living alone in a small Irish town. She keeps a photo of her late father, Vincent, who helped ghosts find their way out of their cursed existence — until a tragedy for which Rose, who was 10 at the time, blames herself. Because of that, she refuses to use her gifts for detecting unsettled spirits.

Rose is pulled, reluctantly, out of her retirement by Martin (Barry Ward), who is forced by his teen daughter, Sarah (Emma Coleman), to confront the hectoring ghost of Martin’s late wife, Bonnie. Rose refuses the case at first, until she sees a sleeping Sarah floating high above her bed — a sign of a satanic possession. To save Sarah, Rose and Martin must team up to find other ghosts, for which Martin turns out to be an effective conduit.

But who’s calling the devil? That would be Christian Winter (played by Will Forte), a has-been American rock star living in Ireland off the dwindling proceeds of his one ‘70s hit. To appease his creditors and his avaricious wife Claudia (Claudia O’Doherty, from Netflix’s “Love”), Christian has signed a pact with Beelzebub, and must sacrifice a virgin on the night of the blood moon. And the last virgin he had waiting accidentally exploded before the ceremony could take place, so he’s scrambling for a replacement.

The writing-directing team of Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman make a free-wheeling debut here. The verbal humor is gentle but subversive, a contrast to the offbeat sight gags (a slow-speed car chase is a highlight) and the occasional flashes of supernatural grossness. The low-budget charm is on the same wavelength as the Scottish horror musical “Anna and the Apocalypse,” minus the great songs.

Higgins makes a charming movie debut, capturing the awkwardness of her singleton status and her spectral talents. Forte chews scenery hilariously in a showy role from which he squeezes every laugh. But the scene-stealer is Ward, who literally channels a cast of characters when ghosts temporarily inhabit the hapless Martin.

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‘Extra Ordinary’

★★★

Opened March 6 in select cities; opens Friday, April 3, on digital streaming through art-house theater websites — including SLFS@Home in Salt Lake City. Rated R for language, sexual content and some horror violence. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Wendy' puts a new spin on 'Peter Pan,' showing kids in the make-it-yourself world of childhood imagination

It’s entirely possible that filmmaker Benh Zeitlin has my number, and I will fall madly in love with whatever movie he tosses up on the screen — just as I did with his 2012 debut “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

On the other hand, lightning only strikes in the same place twice — which may be why Zeitlin’s sophomore effort, “Wendy,” feels like a case of diminishing returns. But when one starts at dizzying heights of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a step down is still in the stratosphere.

Director Zeitlin, who cowrote the script with his sister, Eliza, takes on the story of “Peter Pan,” from the viewpoint of the girl who finds herself among the boys who won’t grow up. This Wendy (played by first-timer Devin France) is a 9-year-old who has grown up in an apartment above the Southern diner where her mom (Shay Walker) has worked since Wendy was a baby and her twin older brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin) were little kids.

One night, as the train roars past the window, Wendy hears the siren call of a boy laughing. She, along with the twins, hop on the train and are transported to a far-away place. It’s a volcanic island (actually, this part of the movie was filmed in Antigua) populated by children — the most prominent one a mischievous Peter (Yashua Mack). These are the lost boys, Wendy explains in voice-over, but there are those who are really lost: The pirates, grizzled adults on a nearby ship. (The way they find their Capt. Hook is clever and beautiful.)

In this imagining, Wendy is freed from the chore of being the Lost Boys’ substitute mother. That role — mashed up, sort of, with Tinkerbell — is a glowing underwater creature referred to as “Mother,” who seems to be the key to Peter’s survival and eternal youth on this island.

There are a lot of ideas brimming about “Wendy,” so many that Zeitlin sometimes has difficulty lassoing them into a coherent narrative. But Zeitlin’s gift for compiling the flotsam and jetsam and letting children build something from it — the quality that made “Beasts of the Southern Wild’s” main character Hushpuppy so captivating — is still an awesome force, one that propels “Wendy” to Neverland and beyond.

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‘Wendy’

★★★1/2

Opened February 28 in select cities; opens Friday, March 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for brief violent/bloody images. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'Swallow' is an unsettling, but sumptuous, drama about a young wife breaking free

A young wife nearly loses control before finding herself in “Swallow,” a disturbingly beautiful first feature from writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis that has a lot going on beneath its polished surfaces.

Hunter (Haley Bennett) and Richie (Austin Stowell) live what outwardly appears to be a perfect life. He’s wealthy, a director in the business founded by his father (David Rasche), and they have a stunning lakeside house away from the city. Hunter tends this house, but she feels confined by the airless decor. 

After reading a line from a self-help book, a gift from Richie’s mom (Elizabeth Marvel), to do something unexpected, Hunter does that. She swallows a marble and, a couple days later, fishes it out of the toilet when she passes it. This begins a series of experiments, in which she tries to swallow all kinds of things. (We learn along the way that there’s a name for this type of eating disorder: pica.)

Hunter’s penchant for eating safety pins, batteries and other objects gets discovered — around the same time she and Richie learn she’s pregnant. Richie, backed by his parents, exercise more control over Hunter, hiring a muscular live-in nurse, Luay (Laith Nakli), and sending her to a psychiatrist (Zabryna Guevara) to learn what’s going on in her head.

Bennett (“The Girl on the Train”) gives a powerful, contained performance here, as Hunter transforms gradually from suburban captive to the heroine of her own story. This transformation culminates in a tension-filled scene opposite the great character actor Denis O’Hare, the details of which I will leave for you to discover. 

Mirabella-Davis finds beauty in the well-appointed rooms of Hunter and Richie’s house, and in the curious, jagged objects that appear as out of place in those rooms as in Hunter’s stomach. “Swallow” contemplates the order in the chaos of that abrupt juxtaposition, just as it lets Hunter find her own place in a disordered universe.

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‘Swallow’

★★★1/2

Opened March 6 in select cities and on demand; opens Friday, March 13, at the Tower Theatre (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, some sexuality and disturbing behavior. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'I Still Believe' is better as a love story than as a Christian sermon

The Christian-themed romance “I Still Believe” suffers when it’s busy being an overbearing Sunday-school lesson, but soars when it concentrates on the tragic, genuine — and true — love story at its heart.

K.J. Apa, currently breaking hearts as Archie Andrews on “Riverdale,” stars as popular Christian singer-songwriter Jeremy Camp, who we meet as he’s leaving his Indiana home for a California bible college. His parents (Gary Sinise and Shania Twain) give him one gift as he leaves: A new guitar.

Jeremy wants to be a successful Christian musician, and finds a mentor in Jean-Luc (singer Nathan Dean), who fronts a Christian country-rock band. Jean-Luc tells Jeremy to think less about how to succeed and more about what he wants to say through his music.

It’s through Jean-Luc that Jeremy meets another student at the college, Melissa Henning (Britt Robertson). Jeremy falls in love at first sight, in part because Melissa expresses her faith so authentically. Romance, or what passes for it at a bible college, blossoms between Melissa and Jeremy, but not without a hitch: Jean-Luc has a crush on Melissa, too, and she’s never had the nerve to talk him down.

That small crisis is averted, but a bigger one looms: Melissa learns she has cancer, and possibly only months to live. She’s confident that her faith, and her love for Jeremy, will provide the miracle that will save her. Meanwhile, Jeremy’s star is on the rise in the Christian-music scene, with fans moved by the stories Jeremy tells about his faith, and Melissa’s.

The Erwin Brothers, Andrew and Jon, are old hands in the Christian film scene, directing such faith-based titles as “Woodlawn” and “I Can Only Imagine.” Subtlety has never been their strong suit, and the script — by Jon Erin and Jon Gunn (adapted from Camp’s memoir) — lays the melodrama, and the faith-promoting speeches, on with a trowel. (Sidebar: Why on earth would you cast Shania Twain in a Christian music movie and not have her sing, even on the soundtrack?)

That said, there are joys to be had in “I Still Believe,” much of it in the chemistry between Apa and Robertson (who were similarly paired as the young lovers in the cornball “A Dog’s Purpose”). They approach the romance with spirit and sincerity, to the point where cynics might believe in them nearly as much as their characters believe in God.

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‘I Still Believe’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic material. Running time: 115 minutes.