Review: 'You Should Have Left' is a deceptively quiet thriller that gives Kevin Bacon a place to shine in the dark

The haunted-house thriller “You Should Have Left” is a mind twister from the old school, and a showcase for Kevin Bacon to quietly give a viewer goosebumps.

Bacon plays Theo Conroy, whose backstory is best left to screenwriter-director David Koepp to unspool a bit at a time. What you need to know going in is that he’s the much-too-old husband of Susanna (Amanda Seyfried), a movie actress with whom he shares a cushy house in the Hollywood hills, a robust sex life, and a very perceptive six-year-old daughter, Ella (Avery Essex, who’s eerily grounded for a child actor).

Something, a reminder of Theo’s past, prompts both Theo and Susanna to want to get out of L.A. for awhile. So they find a cool rental house in Wales, and the three head off for a vacation in the green hills, far from cellphone reception and other cares, with only their suitcases and emotional baggage — which turns out to be the key to what happens the rest of the way.

Koepp, adapting a novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann, sets up the traps, jump scares and dank recesses of a solid horror film. As a veteran screenwriter (he’s had a career of blockbusters from “Jurassic Park” to the last version of “The Mummy”), Koepp knows the clockwork timing needed for a script, and when to drop each morsel of exposition and when to hold back secrets for maximum effect.

He’s nicely teamed with Bacon — a reunion from the 1999 horror thriller “Stir of Echoes,” which Koepp directed — and gets good mileage out of the veteran actor. Bacon, still lean and hungry at 61, conveys the fear, resentment, fatherly love and Catholic guilt that bubble up inside Theo, each emotion surfacing when called upon to propel the movie’s tension.

“You Should Have Left” is a slow build, and Koepp ratchets the suspense so gradually a viewer may be lulled into thinking there’s not much happening. But, at a certain point, the realization comes how much Koepp as been toying with us from the beginning, to get us to a satisfying and chilling conclusion.

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‘You Should Have Left’

★★★

Debuting Friday, June 19, as a video-on-demand on most streaming platforms. Rated R for some violence, disturbing images, sexual content and language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: Frenetic fantasy 'Artemis Fowl' fits on Disney+ — so you can hit 'pause' on the overstuffed narrative

You can see, through the morass of visual effects and narrative short cuts in “Artemis Fowl,” what the folks at Disney were trying to get out of Eion Colfer’s book series: A fast-moving fantasy adventure franchise that could become the next “Harry Potter.”

That’s why Disney invested nearly 20 years in development, after buying the rights to Colfer’s first book before it was published in 2001. Such producers as Robert De Niro and Harvey Weinstein have been attached at different points. (De Niro’s name is still in the credits; Weinstein’s was removed when sexual assault allegations surfaced in 2017.) It was finally to be released in theaters two weeks ago, until the coronavirus pandemic shut down the theaters, and the film was shunted off to the Disney+ streaming service.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: Amazing animation propels 'Marona's Fantastic Tale' beyond your standard dog story

In the Romanian-made, French-dubbed “Marona’s Fantastic Tale,” a simple story of a dog’s hard-luck life gets raised to beautiful levels by some of the most imaginative, colorful animation you’re likely to see anywhere.

We meet Marona, a black-and-white mongrel, at perhaps the worst time in her life — when she’s hit by a car in a busy street, comforted by her owner, a teen girl named Solange. Then, as it does in movies, Marona’s life flashes before her eyes.

First, she sees her parents, a strutting purebred father who had a one-time encounter with a lady mutt. Marona — not her name yet — was one of nine puppies, picked from the litter by her father’s owner. But that human quickly abandons the dog in a downtown trash can. That where she’s found by Manole, an acrobat who busks for tips in the day and entertains at a nightclub in the evenings.

The dog and Manole are close, but the animal soon sees that she must leave the performer to pursue his dreams. She winds up at a construction site, and is befriended by Istvan, a gentle giant who works as a security guard. Istvan is nice to the dog, but the same can’t be said for the women in his life: His senile mother, and his shallow wife. Marona escapes their grasp, and after more misadventures is discovered by a 10-year-old Solange.

The script — begun as a story by director Anca Damian and written by her son, Anghel — is right in the tradition of other dog’s-life stories, such as “A Dog’s Purpose” or “The Art of Racing in the Rain.” With the dog narrating (Lizzie Borcheré provides her voice in the French version), we get a dog’s perspective on cities, cars, food, shelter and every dog’s reason to exist: to keep their human happy. 

Each stop on Marona’s episodic journey is rendered gorgeously by Anca Damian and her animators, with a kaleidoscope of styles and colors. The acrobat Manole is always depicted as a yellow figure with red stripes, a flurry of fluid motion in which the stripes have to catch up with his bendy yellow limbs. When Istvan’s mother sleeps, her face becomes an Etch-a-Sketch depicting her dreams, with her facial features returning only when her son wakes her. Each character is rendered with those kind of smart, inventive details, and when they interact, the results are explosive.

It may seem odd that the least expressive character in “Marona’s Fantastic Tale” is Marona herself, a simple black-and-white figure. But it soon becomes clear that Marona is the portal through which we, the viewers, see her world — and it’s an amazing world to behold.

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‘Marona’s Fantastic Tale’

★★★1/2

Begins streaming for rental Friday, June 12, in virtual cinemas, including the Utah Film Center’s platform. Not rated, but probably PG for mild violence and mature themes. Running time: 92 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

Review: Pete Davidson gets personal in funny, and touching, 'The King of Staten Island'

Anyone familiar with Pete Davidson, either as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” or his appearances in the gossip columns during his brief engagement to pop star Ariana Grande, has seen the hints of tragedy behind his stoner-guy comedy persona.

That tragic shadow takes center stage in director Judd Apatow’s comedy-drama “The King of Staten Island,” a sometimes funny, often heartbreaking story that uses semi-autobiography to let Davidson exorcise his personal demons.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: Elisabeth Moss is remarkable in 'Shirley,' capturing a manipulative, vulnerable author

Director Josephine Decker’s drama “Shirley” is part biographical drama, part murder mystery, part sexually fueled fantasy, and part chronicle of madness — and all of it held together by powerhouse acting, particularly by Elisabeth Moss.

Moss plays Shirley Jackson, the famed author of such macabre stories as “The Lottery” and “The Haunting of Hill House.” In the movie’s telling, it’s the late 1940s in Vermont, and Jackson lives with her husband, the literary critic and scholar Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who teaches at that hotbed of passion, Bennington College.

In this story, adapted from Susan Scarf Merrell’s 2014 novel, Hyman has just taken on a new assistant, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), who is recently married to Rose (Odessa Young). Rose is fascinated with Shirley, though the author’s brusque manner on their first meeting unsettles her — but not as much as Shirley intuiting that Rose is pregnant.

Stanley asks the Nemsers to live with them for awhile, and asks Rose to help out with housekeeping — but, more importantly, to keep an eye on Shirley, who hasn’t left the house in weeks and sometimes never gets out of bed. Rose’s interest in Shirley grows deeper, particularly when Shirley starts researching the case of a missing college student and contemplates writing a novel based on the case, even though Stanley thinks the subject matter beneath her talents. 

Decker and screenwriter Sarah Gubbins — who explored infatuation with artists by creating the series “I Love Dick” — blur the lines between fact and fantasy, suggesting Shirley as fragile flower and master manipulator, sometimes in the same sentence. Several flashbacks (or are they dream sequences?) take us inside the mind of the missing student, suggesting her desires are the same as Rose’s. The audience is left to question how much of Shirley’s quirks are the product of an unstable mind and how much are calculated to produce good material for her book.

“Shirley” eventually becomes a meeting of the minds between the jaded Shirley and the wide-eyed Rose, and both Moss and Young bring ferocity and vulnerability to the pairing. The result is an intriguing “what if” scenario of American literature. 

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‘Shirley’’

★★★1/2

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language and brief disturbing images. Running time: 107 minutes.

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This review ran previously on this website on Feb. 1, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Willem Dafoe's performance as a tortured soul nearly lifts 'Tommaso' from its director's self-indulgence

Veering between brutal self-examination and head-scratching inscrutability, writer-director Abel Ferrara reveals and conceals equally in “Tommaso,” a movie that keeps audiences hooked despite its deep-seated flaws because of its always-fascinating star, Willem Dafoe.

Dafoe plays the title character, an American filmmaker living in Italy who, we have to assume, is a stand-in for Ferrara himself. Tommaso lives what on the surface looks like a perfect life for a middle-aged artist: Married to the beautiful, and much younger, Nikki (Cristina Chiriac), and their 3-year-old daughter, Deedee (played by Ferrara’s own child, Anna). He spends his days learning Italian, teaching young actors, and developing the script for an existential science-fiction movie.

Not everything is perfect, though. Tommaso — who is six years’ sober, and uses his regular AA meetings as talk therapy — is frustrated is frustrated because Nikki is so invested in Deedee’s care that she never gives him time for romance.

For a creature of passions like Tommaso, enforced celibacy takes its toll — though in Ferrara’s telling, it’s sometimes up to the viewer to decide what’s really happening and what’s in his character’s head. He think he sees Nikki in the park, flirting with a younger man. And when Tommaso goes into a cafe, or his acting class, he’s presented with beautiful young women who are completely naked.

There’s more to Ferrara’s narrative than Tommaso going crazy because he can’t get laid — but what that extra something is open to the viewer’s interpretation. To get to that interpretation, the viewer must have the patience to stick with Tommaso’s mood swings and Ferrara’s oblique storytelling cues. Fans of Ferrara’s past work — most notably his controversial 1992 thriller “Bad Lieutenant” — will know what they’re getting into here, but newcomers may have trepidations about following him diwb his character’s dark path.

Dafoe, as he so often does, makes the trip interesting. As he did as Van Gogh in “At Eternity’s Gate,” Dafoe climes into the skin of the tortured artist and helps us understand — to some degree, at least — how the mental anguish fuels the creative fire. If Ferrara had given Dafoe a complete arc rather than an incomplete series of dead ends, “Tommaso” could have been their shared masterpiece, rather than an uneven portrait of artistic madness.

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‘Tommaso’

★★1/2

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably R for graphic nudity, sexuality, violence and language. Running time: 118 minutes; mostly in English, but some in Italian with subtitles.

Review: Documentary '2040' gives a hopeful look at climate change, and the solutions that could be available to us now

Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau manages something quite remarkable with his documentary “2040”: He makes a documentary about climate change that isn’t doom-laden and pessimistic, but hopeful and, believe it or not, joyous.

It all starts with the premise. Gameau first shows us his happy home life, with his wife Zoe and their 4-year-old daughter, Velvet. Then he asks, as any father would, what kind of future Velvet will have — and what technologies exist right now that, if fully implemented, could give her a decent future when she’s 25 years old, in the year 2040.

So Gameau travels around the world (all carbon emissions used on his travels are offset by carbon credits, the opening title card tells us) to see what’s being developed. He shows us solar panels on homes in Bangladesh, networked through “microgrid” systems that pay back homeowners for unused electricity. He talks about driverless cars that people will use on an as-needed basis, reducing the need to buy and park their own autos. He shows us regenerative agriculture in Australia and seaweed cultivation in the ocean — both of which can both reduce carbon but also produce healthier food.

In Gameau’s show-and-tell of these forward-thinking technologies, he makes brief mention of the forces arrayed against them — namely, entrenched industries like agribusiness and Big Oil that won’t want to give up their hold on the status quo. But Gameau prefers not to be a downer, instead showing us a lighthearted look at an adult Velvet (Eva Lazzaro) living her best life in a utopian future of self-driving cars, urban farms, coffee cups that can be planted for crops after use, and empowered girls getting their educations.

A little too pie in the sky? Perhaps. But after years of environmental documentaries that are aimed at scaring us into composting and putting coastal cities on stilts, Gameau’s view of “2040” is a welcome approach that shows what positive steps Velvet’s generation can do to make up for what her predecessors have done wrong.

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‘2040’

★★★

Available beginning Friday, June 5, as a video-on-demand rental through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably PG for mature themes.  Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: Music fuels 'The High Note,' but Tracee Ellis Ross' comic turn as a diva makes it sing

Taking an unfamiliar route to a well-traveled destination, the music-fueled comedy-drama “The High Note” is a witty, warm-hearted story about the recording industry seen from the top and the bottom.

On top is Grace Davis (played by “Black-ish” star Tracee Ellis Ross), a superstar singer whose career has spanned more than 30 years, and is facing the prospect of becoming a “legacy” act. Her longtime manager, Jack Robertson (played by Ice Cube), is nudging her toward signing a contract with Caesars Palace for a Las Vegas residency — a sure sign that her hit-making days are over.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.