Review: Beanie Feldstein takes center stage, with electrifying results, in coming-of-age story 'How to Build a Girl'

It was only a matter of time before Beanie Feldstein took a starring role, as she does in the exuberantly offbeat coming-of-age comedy “How to Build a Girl,” and make a glorious meal out of it.

Feldstein has gone from child actor to supporting player (“Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising,” “Lady Bird”) to co-lead — snagging a Golden Globe nomination for “Booksmart” — and here, she’s front and center where she belongs.

Feldstein plays Johanna Morrigan, a shy teenager living in a council estate in 1990s Wolverhampton, with her drummer dad (Paddy Considine), perpetually exhausted mum (Sarah Solemani), and four brothers — her favorite being the catty Krissi (Laurie Kynaston). It’s far too boring a life for a girl who reads Jane Austen and worships an array of idols on her bedroom wall ranging from the Bronte sisters to Elizabeth Taylor.

A word about that wall. It’s one of the most clever touches director Coky Giedroyc adds to the story, a lovely bit of fantasy as Johanna’s icons dispense advice. It also allows an array of cameos, including singer Lily Allen (as Elizabeth Taylor), Gemma Arterton (as Maria von Trapp), Michael Sheen (as Sigmung Freud, and former “Great British Baking Show” hosts Mel Giedroyc, the director’s sister, and Sue Perkins (as the Brontes).

Johanna sees her chance to expand her writing when she enters a “young gunslinger” contest for a London music magazine. The lads in the office — and they are all lads — like her writing but not her mousy high-school persona. So Johanna reinvents herself on the fly, with thrift-store clothes and cherry-red hair dye, to become Dolly Wilde, the sexiest and most acid-penned music critic Great Britain has ever seen.

Giedroyc and screenwriter Caitlin Moran, who adapted her own novel, run Johanna/Dolly through the many phases of her self-discovery journey — going from swoon fangirl to sexual adventuer to jaded rock critic, all before turning 17. The story also gives Dolly some delightful foils, from an exasperated literature teacher (Joanna Scanlan) to a moody pop star (Alfie Allen) who finds in Johanna a kindred spirit.

Feldstein, though playing a teen, shows she’s grown up enough to fill the screen with her winning personality, her abundant charm, and her stellar acting skills. She captures Johanna’s insecurity and her determination to rewrite her life, and isn’t afraid to take the character to the dark side. “How to Build a Girl” becomes Feldstein’s showcase, and she turns it into a surprising hit.

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‘How to Build a Girl’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, May 8, as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Rated R for sexual content, language throughout and some teen drinking. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: Meet the original self-isolation experts of Biosphere 2 in the engrossing 'Spaceship Earth'

Whether it was a visionary experiment or a stunt to draw sight-seers, Biosphere 2 was all the rage in 1991 — and in his fast-paced documentary “Spaceship Earth,” director Matt Wolf chronicles that crazy moment in American history and aims to explain while it still matters. (In our era of self-quarantine, it might matter even more.)

The idea was hatched by John Allen, the charismatic leader of a theater troupe and communal group that formed in the heart of the San Francisco counter-culture. The notion was to create an enclosed space with every form of habitat — ocean, desert, jungle, and more — to act as an accelerated version of Earth, to show the rest of us how to fix our environmental problems and figure out how to colonize other planets.

Wolf chronicles how the idea for Biosphere 2 developed into a real, functioning laboratory project. As the physical structure was being built in the Arizona desert, Allen and his cohorts started training candidates to be the first eight “Biospherians” who would live in this oversized terrarium for two years.

In 1991, those eight walked into Biosphere 2, and the hatch was sealed behind them. The copious footage — this was an experiment, and someone wanted it documented — shows how the crew had highs and lows, and dealt with challenges such as the build-up of carbon dioxide in the dome. Meanwhile, Allen and his staff fielded journalists’ questions about the scientific value of the project, and the credentials of Allen and the Biospherians.

Though it’s clear Wolf sides with the Biospherians, whom he sees as the first people to illustrate the dangers of climate change, the director is smart enough to present the facts and let viewers draw their own conclusion. One might wish for interviews with more skeptics, beyond archival footage of the “that thing will never fly, Orville” variety. However, the story Wolf tells remains a fascinating tale of idealism smacking into harsh reality and surviving, bloodied but unbowed. 

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‘Spaceship Earth’

★★★

Available starting Friday, May 8, as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language, mild drug use and sexual content. Running time: 115 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this website on January 26, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

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.