Review: 'The Dog Doc' takes a thoughtful look at a different kind of veterinarian

The documentary “The Dog Doc” is both a profile of a maverick in the world of veterinary medicine and a thoughtful examination of the pros and cons — mostly pros — of his brand of holistic treatment for his four-footed clientele.

The veterinarian in question is Dr. Martin Goldstein — Dr. Marty to his friends, colleagues and the humans who bring their ailing animals to the Smith Ridge Veterinary Center in South Salem, N.Y., about 50 miles northeast of New York City. For 47 years, Dr. Marty has practiced and espoused an approach to animal care that goes beyond the traditional veterinary medicine he learned at Cornell, including nutritional supplements, acupuncture, magnetic-wave therapy, intravenous vitamin C and cryosurgery.

Goldstein has been called a quack, a charlatan, and worse. (The criticisms are seen in quick clips in the documentary’s early stages.) But he swears by his brand of medicine, and can produce files of many cases where other vets had given a dog or a cat only months to live — only to help the animal live a better, and often longer, life.

This isn’t about miracle cures, Goldstein is quick to say — it’s about helping the animal’s immune system kick in so the animal’s body does the healing. Goldstein rails against pet foods with too many additives and not enough nutrition, and he believes many pet vaccines are overprescribed and improperly given to unhealthy pets. “I’m not anti-vaccine. I’m pro-sanity,” he adds.

Director Cindy Meehl, who immortalized the work of “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman in the 2011 documentary “Buck,” takes her crew into Smith Ridge’s offices and examination rooms, as Goldstein and his staff try to understand what makes their patients tick. Often, the owners say they have gone to other vets who offered medicines and not much hope. For them, Goldstein’s holistic medicine is a last chance to keep their pets alive.

The stories Meehl chronicles — like the dog, Scooby, whose mouth tumors Goldstein freezes with liquid nitrogen — bear witness to the success Goldstein has had over the years. So does the vet Goldstein meets at a convention, who years earlier confronted Goldstein and was determined to call him out as a fraud, but became a convert and changed his own practice.

Maybe, after listening to the public health experts trying to subdue the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve grown skeptical of anecdotal evidence. Watching “The Dog Doc,” I wished Meehl had featured more of Goldstein’s detractors, and not just shown Goldstein’s dismissal of the criticism against him. I want to believe in Goldstein’s kind of veterinary science, because it looks at pets as creatures rather than chemistry sets wrapped in fur. But, right now, I need more science to convince me.

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‘The Dog Doc’

★★★

Opened March 13 in select cities; available starting Friday, May 8, as a video-on-demand rental on some streaming platforms, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some graphic veterinary surgery scenes. Running time; 101 minutes.

Review: Committed performances sell 'Deerskin,' a trippy thriller that tracks one man's killer obsession with fringe

Clothes make the man, but what do they make him into? That’s the question posed by French writer-director Quentin Dupieux’s blood-soaked thriller “Deerskin.”

The man here is Georges, played by Oscar winner Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”). Georges is apparently in full-blown midlife crisis, having left his wife and taken 7,500 euros out of their bank account to buy a vintage deerskin jacket. The guy who sells him the jacket (played by Albert Delpy, father of Julie Delpy) throws in a digital camera as part of the deal.

Georges checks into an inn, and starts admiring himself and his new jacket in the mirror. He gets out the camera, and starts shooting footage of himself and the jacket. In that moment, Georges decides on the purpose of his new life: To become a filmmaker.

When his wife puts a block on their bank accounts, Georges scrambles to find an alternate source of money. He finds it in Denise (Adèle Haenel), a bartender who dreams of being a film editor. (For practice, she recut “Pulp Fiction” in chronological order, with unsatisfying results.) Georges signs her on as his editor, on the conditions that she bankroll the film until his “producers” secure funding, and that she never again wear a jacket.

This is where Georges’ other dream takes over: To be the only person in the world to wear a jacket. His jacket — who starts talking back, in Georges’ voice — has its own dream, which is to be the only jacket in the world. How they achieve that shared dream takes a disturbing and bloody path into crime.

Dupieux — who famously built an entire movie, 2010’s “Rubber,” around a sentient, telekinetic truck tire — creates a darkly comic story around Georges’ obsession and hubris, as he turns his pursuit of the perfect outfit into a murderous art project. (It’s deliciously self-referential that Dupieux makes such a self-absorbed man into a movie director.) Dupieux is judicious in depicting onscreen carnage, and some of the scariest moments happen outside the camera’s view.

Dujardin gives a compelling performance as Georges, and is especially chilling when Georges begins talking to himself, in his own voice and in the voice of the jacket. But Haenel is the wild card here; as she did in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Haenel begins with a character who we meet as just a pretty face, but whose passion and ambition show a lot more going on beneath the surface.

If there’s a weakness in “Deerskin,” it’s an underwhelming final payoff — but, considering how Dupieux’s fascinating set-up paints the movie into a corner, perhaps no ending would have worked.

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‘Deerskin’

★★★

Begins streaming on Friday, May 1, on various platforms, including the SLFS@Home portal. Not rated, but probably R for strong violence and language. Running time: 77 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

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.