Review: An artist finds a muse, and a junkie finds a friend, in fascinating documentary 'The Painter and the Thief'

An artist never knows the form a muse will take or where that muse will take the artist — as the documentary “The Painter and the Thief” demonstrates through its fascinating twists and turns.

The story begins with Barbora Kysilkova, a Czech-born painter living in Oslo, Norway. Known for her large naturalist paintings, she had a major exhibition at an Oslo gallery in 2015, when two men broke into the gallery and stole two large canvases off their wooden supporting frames.

One thief, Karl-Bertil Nordlund, was caught quickly, but he couldn’t remember — because of the haze of his heroin addiction — where the paintings wound up. In court, Kysilkova approached Nordlund with an odd request: She wanted him to model for her. Nordlund agreed, and the rest of director Benjamin Ree’s film follows the progression of that artist/model relationship.

Through this story, which has plot twists too outlandish for a fictional film, Ree explores the give and take between artist and subject, and the weight of responsibility for a remorseful criminal and a forgiving victim. Rees presents both sides of the story fairly equally, with Kysilkova’s story and Nordlund’s dovetailing in unexpected ways all the way to a surprising final shot.

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‘The Painter and the Thief’

★★★1/2

Debuts Friday, May 22, as a digital rental on various streaming platforms. Not rated, but probably R for images of nudity, and for language. Running time: 102 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.

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This review appeared previously on this website, on January 23, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: British dramedy 'Military Wives' is predictably heartwarming, but the cast makes it worthwhile

If you’ve seen “The Full Monty” or “Calendar Girls,” you know the kind of movie you’re getting with “Military Wives”: A warm-hearted story of stiff-upper-lipped Brits united by a common purpose, in a narrative that delivers exactly the emotional ride you expect, but with a cast charming enough to make you not mind the manipulation.

At the Flitcroft Garrison, the soldiers prepare for a deployment to Afghanistan, and their wives prepare to carry on while they’re gone. It falls to Lisa (Sharon Horgan), because she’s married to Red (Robbie Gee), the sergeant-major (the ranking enlisted man), to lead the organization of social events for the wives. Usually, this involves morning coffee meetings and the occasional movie night — which is usually a pretense for having a few drinks.

Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of the garrison’s commander, Richard (Greg Wise), decides she wants to help Lisa along. Kate’s agenda is more structured, toward book clubs and knitting circles — and her pert efficiency rubs Lisa the wrong way early on.

For their differences, Kate and Lisa have something in common: Worry about their children. With Lisa, it’s her rebellious teen daughter, Frankie (India Amarteifio). With Kate, it’s the void left by her son, Jamie, a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

Kate and Lisa finally agree on one activity for the soldier’s wives: A singing club. But where Kate wants to teach vocal exercises, Lisa would rather have the women sing pop songs that they enjoy. Despite the battle of wills up front, the ladies’ choir actually starts to sound good — enough so that the visiting brigadier (Colin Mace) pulls some strings and gets the ladies a gig: A performance at the Festival of Remembrance, a Memorial Day-like concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and televised across Britain.

Director Peter Cattaneo directed “The Full Monty” many years ago, so he knows the contours of this story — inspired by the creation of real military-wives’ choirs, and whipped into a screenplay by Rosanne Flynn and Rachel Tunnard. There will be laughs, of course, as the mismatched women battle for the choir’s leadership and respect. There will be moments of tragedy and camaraderie. And there will be a rousing finish.

Yes, “Military Wives” is as formulaic as a movie can get. But the ingredients come together nicely, and Horgan (best known for playing opposite Rob Delaney on the sitcom “Catastrophe”) especially shines as the no-nonsense sergeant’s wife with a hidden rock-band streak. Nobody reinvents the wheel with “Military Wives,” but they spin it well enough to get it where it needs to go.

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‘Military Wives’

★★★

Debuts Friday, May 22, as a digital rental on various streaming platforms. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and sexual references. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Lucky Grandma' shifts from comedy to bloodshed abruptly, but Tsai Chin's central performance is a delight

What starts as an offbeat comedy turns sharply into a bloody gangster drama in “Lucky Grandma,” but what makes this jarring shift watchable is the actress in the title role, Tsai Chin.

Chin, now 86, is one of those faces you’ve seen countless times, without perhaps remembering it. She’s best known, probably, for playing Auntie Lindo in “The Joy Luck Club.” But she’s also had a recurring role on “Grey’s Anatomy,” played Ming-Na Wen’s spymaster mom on “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” and in her younger days assisted Christopher Lee in several “Fu Manchu” movies, and bedded Sean Connery’s James Bond in “You Only Live Twice.” (She returned to James Bond, for a seat at the poker table next to Daniel Craig in “Casino Royale.”)

In “Lucky Grandma,” Chin plays Grandma Wong, an independent, chain-smoking old lady living alone in a walk-up apartment in New York’s Chinatown. She stays there despite the best efforts of her son, Howard (Eddie Yu), to move in with him and his family in the suburbs.

After getting a reading from Lei Lei (Wai Ching Ho), the fortune teller, that Oct. 28 will be a very lucky day, Grandma empties out her bank account and heads to the Foxwoods casino. Her luck at the tables doesn’t last, but on the bus home, the man sitting next to her dies in his seat — and his duffel bag lands in her lap. Inside is a whole lot of cash, which Grandma quietly takes home with her.

Of course, bags full of cash tend to have people looking for them. In this case, those people are two members of the Red Dragons gang, who try to intimidate Grandma into giving up the loot. Grandma is smarter than that, and plays the innocent old lady act. She also goes to the rival Zhongliang gang and hires a bodyguard, a gentle giant names Big Pong (Hsiao-Yuen Ma).

Turns out the dead guy was an accountant for the Zhongliangs, but might have been running a side scam with the Red Dragons. So Grandma is now squarely in the crosshairs of both gangs — and, as menacing as the Red Dragons thugs are, they’re nothing compared to the Zhongliang’s boss, the all-seeing Sister Fong (Yan Xi), who may be the one person here who doesn’t underestimate Grandma’s wits and tenacity.

Rookie director Sasie Sealy and her co-writer, Angela Cheng, bring a wealth of authenticity to this story. Their idea of Chinatown feels detailed and down-to-earth, a fully lived-in place rather than an exotic Hollywood fantasy. Likewise, the characters feel drawn from real life, the sort of people one might regularly run into in Chinatown. The film’s main flaw is that Sealy can’t quite pull off the Coen-esque change in tone as the gangster action turns quite bloody.

Chin, seeing a rare opportunity for the spotlight, doesn’t disappoint. She gives Grandma a gruff, unflappable exterior, but also shows the years of heartache that made her that way — while also slowly, gradually, revealing the tenderness within that shell. This “Lucky Grandma” is a fighter, and Chin’s performance makes her a winner.

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‘Lucky Grandma’

★★★

Debuts Friday, May 22, as a digital rental on various streaming platforms, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably R for violence and language. Running time: 88 minutes; some in English, but mostly in Mandarin and Cantonese, with subtitles.

Review: Eerie 'The Vast of Night' is a show-stopping calling card for its young filmmakers

It’s hard to decide what to admire more about the left-field thriller “The Vast of Night”: The bravura visual strokes of director Andrew Patterson, or the edge-of-your-seat storytelling talents of writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger.

Don’t bother looking those names up in the IMDb: This movie — which earned a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination for first screenplay, and won the audience award at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival — is the first credit for all three of them. Just wait a few years, though: These guys are going places.

In the small town of Cayuga, N.Mex., sometime in the late 1950s, fast-talking teen Everett (Jake Horowitz) is trying to get away from the season-opening basketball game at the high school, so he can start the overnight shift at the town’s radio station. Tagging along is Fay (Sierra McCormick), a classmate who just got her own tape recorder, and wants some tips from Everett about how to use it.

Fay also has a night job, as the switchboard operator for the town’s phone system. Everett walks Fay over to her job from the high school — with Patterson following the action through a series of long, fluid takes — and everything seems to be as normal as a small town can be.

Fay kills time while she’s working by listening to Everett’s radio show, and is surprised when a strange sound comes over the airwaves. She’s even more surprised, even a little terrified, when the same sound comes over her headset from an unknown caller. Then someone on the edge of town calls, frantically talking about something unusual in the night sky. And, again, there’s that sound.

Fay calls Everett, and plays him the sound. Everett records it, and puts it on the air — because it’s “good radio” — and asks his listeners to call if they know what it is. One listener, Billy (Bruce Davis), has heard it, and tells a harrowing story about… well, that would be getting ahead of ourselves.

Much of “The Vast of Night” is dialogue-heavy, like when Billy tells his tale, or when an elderly woman (Gail Cronauer) tells the teens something even more startling. I grew up on the old “CBS Radio Mystery Theatre” in the ’70s, itself a throwback to radio dramas of decades earlier, so I can tell Montague and Sanger are devotees of the format — and the power of using nothing more than language to cast a spell over an audience.

Patterson’s influences might include classic television — he uses a quasi-“Twilight Zone” intro as a framing device — but also master directors like Brian de Palma and David Fincher. Patterson deploys some astonishingly good camera moves for a micro-budget movie, highlighted by one camera shot that goes down a road, across a field, through the high school parking lot, into the gym, among the basketball players, up the bleachers, out a window, down to the street, across another field, and ending at Everett’s radio station.

With a minimum of special effects, “The Vast of Night” also relies on the chemistry of its young stars. McCormick, who cut her teeth on Disney Channel shows, and Horowitz, who got a big break in Julie Taymor’s 2014 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” are great as our teen detectives, their shared curiosity and vulnerability creating as much tension as the odd noises outside. This is the sort of small movie people will discover, and then remember when the actors or filmmakers make it big.

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‘The Vast of Night’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, May 15, at drive-in theaters across the United States, including the Redwood Drive In (West Valley City); streaming on Prime Video starting May 29. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Up From the Streets' packs a lot of New Orleans history, and even more music, into one documentary

Someday, when we’re all vaccinated and can travel further than the grocery store, I want to go to New Orleans, and just soak up the music and the culture for a week. 

Until then, we have filmmaker Michael Murphy and trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard providing a guided tour of the Crescent City’s musical history in “Up From the Streets — New Orleans: The City of Music.”

As Blanchard, who both performs several times in the film and serves as narrator, puts it, New Orleans is a place where the music emanates from every corner. “The beautiful thing about New Orleans is that you feel like you’re part of a tradition,” Blanchard says early in the film. “I can go down on Frenchman Street, and I can hear some young kids playing on the street. And I can hear Louis Armstrong in their playing. And they may not even realize it.”

Murphy starts even earlier than Armstrong, to the influences that created New Orleans: French, Spanish, Cuban, Native American and African — both free blacks and slaves, who were allowed to meet up on Sundays in Congo Square, something slaves elsewhere in the American South didn’t get to do, the historians in the film say.

New Orleans’ music was a confluence of those rhythms — from the drums of Native Americans, drums from Africa, drums from Cuba — blended with the call-and-response chants echoing from slaves in the fields to gospel music. And there were other unique elements, such as French opera, thrown into the mix as well.

Murphy pays due tribute to Louis Armstrong, the trumpet virtuoso and showman, and even Blanchard confesses that he had to come back home to New Orleans to appreciate Satchmo’s greatness.

The movie bounces from distant past to more recent past, stacking up vignettes of such icons as the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, proto-rocker Antoine “Fats” Domino, record producer and rock ’n’ roll pioneer Cosimo Matassa, songwriter Allen Toussaint, and two of the great families of New Orleans music: The Marsalis family and the Nevilles.

Murphy has collected a wealth of interviews from New Orleans musicians, both familiar and not-so-familiar, as well as a handful of admiring outsiders — Robert Plant, Sting, Keith Richards and Bonnie Raitt — who claim connection to the city’s traditions through collaboration or osmosis.

Toward the end of this sprawling documentary that hops from point to point at a ferocious pace, Murphy highlights the new generation of New Orleans musicians — such as Big Freedia and Tank & the Bangas — and suggests how they have carried the tradition forward.

“Up From the Streets” is engrossing as a documentary, if one can keep up with all the names and subgenres that are mentioned. But to get the full force, find the soundtrack album and listen to it on repeat, to immerse yourself in the feeling of New Orleans music without all the talk.

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‘Up From the Streets — New Orleans: the City of Music’

★★★

Available Friday, May 15, as a video on demand, including the SLFS@Home portal. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: French comedy 'On a Magical Night' is a less-than-magical tale of love, lust and memory

Too clever for its own good, writer-director Christophe Honoré’s sex comedy “On a Magical Night” puts its characters and the audience through far too many mental gymnastics about love and lust, age and infidelity, before coming to a dull-as-dishwater conclusion.

Chiara Mastroianni stars as Maria Mortemart, a Parisian college professor who has just called off her affair with one of her students (Harrison Arevalo) — telling him that she was only attracted to him because his name, Asdrubel Electorat, was highly erotic. (I don’t get it; must be a French thing.) Maria goes home to her husband, Richard Warrimer (Benjamin Biolay), who finds evidence of her affair with Asdrubel. An argument ensues, where Maria declares it’s only logical for a long-married person to seek sex with someone else.

Maria then sneaks out of her and Richard’s apartment, and checks into the hotel across the street. In room 212 (the movie’s French title), she can look out the window and watch Richard putter about. But Maria soon gets a surprise when she sees a man in her bed: It’s Richard as a young man (played by Vincent Lacoste), when he and Maria first met and fell in lust. That part of the relationship is still quite active, as Maria wastes no time getting busy with her husband’s hot younger self.

The next morning, someone else shows up in the hotel room: Irène Haffner (Camille Cottin), who taught the 14-year-old Richard (played by Kolia Abiteboul) to play piano — and groomed him as a lover from 14 to 22. (The movie’s casual attitude about pedophilia must also be a French thing.) The Irène that Maria meets is about 40, the age she was when Richard left her for Maria. (Honoré shows us a 60ish Irène; she’s played by Carole Bouquet, a Bond Girl nearly 40 years ago and looking lovely today.)

Honoré bounces Maria and Richard through fantasy conversations — Richard with Iréne, imagining the life they might have had, and Maria with not only young Richard but with a roomful of former lovers. I’d try to explain the character, played by Stéphane Roger, who represents Maria’s will — and looks like the late singer Charles Aznevour — but that would require overcoming the ignorance I brought into the movie and the apathy it created in me.

Biolay’s presence in the movie is more interesting than anything his character does. Biolay is Mastroianni’s real-life ex-husband, and here he looks like what you’d get if Benicio Del Toro — who also once dated Mastroianni — gained 20 pounds for a role.

Mastroianni is genetically predisposed to be watchable on camera (her parents are Catherine Deneuve and the late Marcello Mastroianni), and her performance as Maria is both beguiling and maddening. Beguiling because she effortlessly captures Maria in her 40s, but makes us see the young woman she once was. Maddening, because she’s trapped in a no-win romantic situation — choose between her schlump of a husband or the fantasy ideal of his younger self — in Honoré’s overbaked soufflé of a movie.

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‘On a Magical Night’ (‘Chambre 212’)

★★

Available May 8 as a video-on-demand through select services; debuting Friday, May 15, on the SLFS@Home portal. Not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality and nudity. Running time: 88 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

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.