Review: 'Palm Springs' adds nihilism, and Andy Samberg's good cheer, to a well-worked 'Groundhog Day' scenario

Take “Groudhog Day,” move it to the California desert and a destination wedding, and make it a lot more existential, and you get “Palm Springs,” a hilarious comedy from the minds of The Lonely Island.

Lonely Islander Andy Samberg stars as Nyles, who walks through the wedding of a distant acquaintance — his girlfriend, Misty (Meredith Hagner), is a bridesmaid — in board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Mostly, though, he hangs around the pool at the Palm Springs resort where the destination wedding is being held, drinking beer and looking cynical about it all.

Near the end of the reception, Nyles makes eyes at Sarah (Cristin Milioti), another bridesmaid and sister of the bride, Tala (Camila Mendes). After proving that Misty is busy having sex with the DJ (Chris Pang), Nyles convinces Sarah to go make out by the rocks. Nyles’ hopes of having sex are thwarted when someone pops up and starts shooting arrows into Nyles. Nyles crawls to a nearby cave, and Sarah — despite Nyles’ warnings — follows him in.

Cut to: Nyles waking up, all over again, watching Misty getting ready. Nyles goes back to the pool, again, but this time, Sarah finds him, demanding to know what happened to her. Nyles explains that he’s been in an infinite time loop, repeating this wedding day over and over again — and that Sarah, because she entered the cave, is in that loop, too.

A lot of the humor in the script by Andy Siara — who developed the story with the film’s director, Max Barbakow — is in Nyles mentoring Sarah in her new life of repeating the same day again and again. Nyles has become jaded and existential, believing that there is no point in the universe so he tries to do as little as possible to get through his day, because he’s tried the alternative and he always winds up back at square one.

Barbakow paces the story, particularly the backward leapfrog of the resetting timer, with precision. But he also leaves room for his leads room to let the jokes and their personalities come out.

Samberg gives the most mature performance of his career, and his funniest since “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” Milioti, already a Broadway phenom (“Once”) and a sitcom savior (she was the mother on “How I Met Your Mother”), deserves some full-fledged movie stardom — even if it comes with offers of rom-coms that aren’t half as smart as this one. 

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‘Palm Springs’

★★★1/2

Streaming on Hulu, starting Friday, July 10. Rated R for sexual content, language throughout, drug use and some violence. Running time: 90 minutes.

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

Review: 'Aviva' explores the intricacies of love with tender artistry, raw sexuality, and a lot of dance

At the intersection of dance, drama and sexuality lies “Aviva,” writer-director Boaz Yakin’s life-affirming depiction of a young couple’s meeting, romance, marriage and disillusionment — all depicted in dance.

It starts with a naked woman, who describes herself as an actress — actually a dancer, because, as she explains, the decision was made that teaching a dancer to act is easier than the other way around. This woman, played by Bobbi Jene Smith, tells the story of Eden, a guy in New York who starts an email correspondence with a woman, Aviva, living in Paris.

Eden is played by Texas-born dancer Tyler Phillips, and Aviva is played by Zina Zinchenko, a dancer from Russia. Except sometimes Eden is depicted as a woman, played by Smith, and sometimes Aviva is played by a male dancer, Or Schraiber — who is Smith’s real-life husband, and her collaborator on the movie’s raw, explosive choreography. Sometimes, one of the Edens will be speaking to both of the Avivas, or vice versa. And sometimes they won’t be speaking, but having sex.

This sounds confusing, but in practice it’s sensible, and serves Yakin’s narrative that each of us has a male spirt and a female spirit, each responsible for elements of our personality. At one point, near the downslope of their relationship, when Eden and Aviva are having sex, it’s the male Eden failing to make the female Aviva climax — and the female Eden, exasperated, eventually steps in to provide the orgasmic touch the male Eden can’t give on his own.

Yakin — whose resumé includes the ‘90s coming-of-age drama “Fresh” and the Disney-fied football saga “Remember the Titans” — follows Eden and Aviva through the first throes of new love, the impulsiveness of Aviva pulling up roots to join Eden in New York, and the realities that threaten their romance nearly from the beginning. Yakin deploys a running motif, showing every notable character fully nude on our first meeting them, whether it’s the globetrotting lothario who introduces the couple or the aged immigration lawyer who advises them to marry so she can get a green card. The nudity may seem gratuitous, but it also makes literal the idea that everyone is a person first and the rest is embellishment.

The stars of “Aviva” are the elaborate, kinetic dance sequences through which the two lovers — as duets, trios or quartets — show their lust, love, anger and remorse. Some of the numbers are big and showy, like the flashback of young Eden that ends with literal fireworks at Coney Island. The sequence that packs the biggest punch, though, is Smith’s solo piece in a studio, in which she enacts every detail of Eden’s fateful trip to Los Angeles and into the bed of another woman.

“Aviva” is not for every taste — especially if you’re uncomfortable with full-frontal nudity and highly charged sex scenes. For those willing to go on this exuberant, erotic rollercoaster, “Aviva” delivers an emotional and artistic payoff that only a risk-taking high-wire act like this can achieve.

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‘Aviva’

★★★★

Available Friday, July 3, on the Utah Film Center virtual cinema and other rental platforms. Not rated, but probably NC-17 for explicit nudity and strong sexuality. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: A civil-rights leader's past and present inform each other in documentary 'John Lewis; Good Trouble'

In the absorbing documentary “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” director Dawn Porter tells two remarkable stories: One about an aging Georgia congressman scrapping to preserve voting-rights legislation under attack; the other about a young firebrand in the 1960s who nearly got killed protesting at lunch counters and in marches in the segregated South.

Yes, the subjects of both stories are the same man, Rep. John Lewis, which adds urgency to the historical record and gravity to the current action.

In the film, Porter (“Gideon’s Army,” “Trapped”) follows Lewis during the 2018 midterm elections. Then 78, Lewis keeps up an impressive schedule in his D.C. and Atlanta offices, and makes appearances for progressive Democratic candidates — all the while sounding the warnings about Republican efforts to suppress the vote, with voter ID laws and limits on polling places, all aimed at the young, the elderly and people of color.

Porter intercuts scenes of Lewis’ current fights with stirring footage of Lewis’ days as an activist during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. He sat at whites-only lunch counters in Nashville, where he went to college. He rode with the Freedom Riders to desegregate bus stations across the South. He spoke at the March on Washington, one of the opening acts for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He marched on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala., and got his skull cracked by an Alabama state policeman’s club for his efforts — and, a week later, marched from that bridge to Montgomery with Dr. King.

Porter captures those moments of history with interviews with Lewis and others who are still alive to tell the story, augmented with remarkable footage — some of which, Lewis says at one point, he had never seen. She also tells Lewis’ personal story, of a young Alabama boy who went from raising chickens to raising awareness of the injustices against African-Americans.

Porter gets interviews with plenty of the greats, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, but doesn’t dwell on them. More interesting are interviews with his older colleagues — including Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina and the late Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland — who understand where Lewis’ came from, and the next generation of leaders who are following his example of righteous radicalism. (The whole “squad” is here: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar all make appearances.) 

Porter’s documentary also shows the span of years between the ’60s and today, including the contentious primary against friend and fellow civil-rights icon Julian Bond in 1986, which first put Lewis in Congress. The movie shows how Lewis pivoted from activist to legislator, while always remembering that there are times where it’s important, in his words, “to make trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble” — and how Lewis, at 80, isn’t done doing just that. 

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‘John Lewis: Good Trouble’

★★★1/2

Available Friday, July 3, on the SLFS@Home and Utah Film Center virtual cinemas and other rental platforms, and playing at the Megaplex Theatres at The Gateway (Salt Lake City), Jordan Commons (Sandy) and The Junction (Ogden). Rated PG for thematic material including some racial epithets/violence, and for smoking. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: In 'The Truth,' French film icons Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche pair up for a quietly stirring mother-daughter standoff

It’s a bit of a shock to learn that, before writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “The Truth,” its stars — Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, two icons of French film — have never done a movie together. It’s less shocking to see how natural a pairing they are, portraying opposite ends of a prickly mother-daughter relationship.

Deneuve plays Fabienne Dangeville, a famous French movie star whose diva tendencies are apparent in the first scene, when a nervous journalist is interviewing her on the occasion of her about-to-be-published memoir. The interview is cut short with the arrival of her daughter, Lumir (Binoche), a New York-based screenwriter, along with her husband, Hank (Ethan Hawke), a second-tier TV actor, and their 7-year-old daughter, Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier).

Lumir’s visit is partly a vacation, but also her first chance to read Fabienne’s memoir. When she does, Lumir isn’t happy about it. Lumir accuses her mother of fabricating parts of her life, like the story about the mother picking the daughter up from school — something Fabienne was always too busy to do. What’s worse, in Lumir’s mind, is that Fabienne has omitted any mention to her onetime friend and acting rival, Sarah, for reasons that are explained as the story progresses.

Also omitted from the book is Fabienne’s long-suffering assistant Luc (Alain Libolt), who quits his job in protest. This leaves Lumir to hold Fabienne’s hand on her new movie set, where she plays the oldest incarnation of a woman whose mother goes into space and never ages. (Kore-eda based the film-within-a-film on a short story by Ken Liu.) Fabienne’s regular insecurity while performing is compounded by the fact that the actress playing her ageless mother (played by newcomer Manon Clavel) reminds Fabienne and Lumir of Sarah.

Kore-eda, who directed the 2018 Palme D’Or winner “Shoplifters,” is writing and directing his first film outside his native Japan, but he doesn’t stray far from the small domestic dramas at which he excels. We learn, more by observation than exposition, that Jacques (Christian Crahay) is Fabienne’s current live-in boyfriend, and that Pierre (Roger Van Hool), her ex, sometimes drops by. We also learn that Lumir’s relationship with Hank is strained, again for reasons Kore-eda unfolds gradually.

Deneuve — who gave Fabienne her own middle name — seems to revel in playing off her persona as a legendary movie star, rolling her eyes at the mention of Brigitte Bardot and revealing the neuroses beneath the thespian facade. Binoche, whose screen persona has always been more raw and vulnerable than Deneuve’s, uses that difference to full advantage, portraying Lumir as the wounded daughter who had to go to America to get out from under her mother’s shadow. The combination is quietly intense, setting off small emotional explosions on the path toward a moving conclusion.

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‘The Truth’

★★★1/2

Available Friday, July 3, on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema and other rental platforms. Rated PG for thematic and suggestive elements, and for smoking and brief language. Running time: 107 minutes; mostly in French, with subtitles.

Review: Filmed version of 'Hamilton' captures the moment and the movement of a revolutionary play

Like a Fourth of July firework, the movie version of “Hamilton” bursts forth with color and spectacle, bottling the emotional fire that made Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop history lesson a Tony- and Pulitzer-winning masterpiece and a cross-cultural hit.

Miranda’s collaborator Thomas Kail, who directed both the stage version and this movie, makes the smart move of rendering “Hamilton” in its purest, original form, from the stage of the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway. Shot with multiple cameras during two performances in June 2016, with Miranda in the title role and with most of the original cast — and with close-ups and crane shots taken without an audience present — the movie harnesses the evocative lighting, surrealistic staging and hip-hop inventiveness.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: 'My Spy' can't decide if it's an action movie or a kiddie film, and fails at both

When you’re a big guy like Dave Bautista — 6-foot-6, 290 pounds, and none of it flabby — you’re either going to wind up in action movies or kiddie comedies. If you try to do both at once, you’re likely to end up with a violent, unappealing mess like “My Spy.”

Bautista plays J.J., a former Army Ranger who’s now an agent for the CIA, though he’s not exactly adept at the whole stealth thing. That’s why, after taking down a Russian smuggler in an explosion-filled opening, his boss (Ken Jeong) assigns him to a boring mission: To go to Chicago (which, as usual, means they shot in Toronto) to run surveillance on Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), the widow of a dead arms dealer whose brother, Marquez (Greg Bryk), is trying to obtain classified blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

As much as J.J. loathes the assignment, he’s even grumpier that the boss has paired him with a tech analyst, Bobbi (Kristen Schaal), an eager beaver who idolizes J.J.’s exploits. But things take a turn when Kate’s 9-year-old daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), figures out that the new neighbors down the hall are, in fact, CIA agents. It takes Sophie less than five minutes to figure this out, but that’s because she’s in the movie and not as smart as the 9-year-olds in the audience who will take half that time to predict all the film’s moves.

Screenwriting brothers Erich and Joh Hoeber (“RED,” “The Meg”) never met an action-movie cliche they didn’t love — which is fine, if the purpose is to satirize the genre, but their tone is at once too serious and too silly to make that work. Director Peter Segal, who plowed similar ground in the 2008 reboot of “Get Smart,” can’t decide whether to make a movie for action-hungry teens or humor-seeking little kids, and ends up making an undigestible catastrophe that neither group will love.

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‘My Spy’

★1/2

Available Friday, June 26, for streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and language. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: 'The Last Tree' is a touching portrait of a boy growing up alienated in London

Calling “The Last Tree” a coming-of-age story is both accurate and inadequate, because the brief descriptor doesn’t begin to hint at the emotion and insight writer-director Shola Amoo packs into this intense drama.

The story starts in the English countryside, with a Black boy, Femi (Tai Golding), who’s about 11 or 12, playing in a muddy field with three white friends. The opening shots of Femi and his friends — just playing rough, having fun and ignoring everything outside of their circle — are poignant, in part because we know they won’t last.

Femi is a foster child, living with Mary (Denise Black), who loves her charges like they were her own. But they’re not, and that point is made with shattering force when Femi’s Nigerian-born mother, Yinka (Gbemisola Ikumelo), comes after several years, with plans to reclaim her son. Femi doesn’t want to go, but Mary tearfully informs him he has no choice.

Yinka takes Femi to London, to a small apartment on a council estate (what in America they’d call “the Projects”). Femi quickly learns that Yinka, who has lived a hard life, demands that Femi do his chores — and gets physically violent when he disobeys her. Femi also finds school difficult, getting into a fight on the first day of class.

After establishing young Femi’s new life in London, the movie abruptly jumps ahead, to Femi as a teen, played by Samuel Adewunmi. (The cut suggests the story has a three-part structure, similar to “Moonlight.”) Teen Femi has settled into London life, though still at odds with his mother. Mostly, Femi hangs out with his friends at school, until he’s befriended by Mace (Demmy Ladipo), the neighborhood crime lord. Femi also finds time to talk to Tope (Ruthxjiah Bellenea), a shy student who shares Femi’s secret passion for The Cure.

In the third act, Aloo’s theme of finding home where you can is taken in another direction, when Yinka brings Femi to Nigeria to connect with his roots — and the father he never knew.

Aloo captures the details of Femi’s two lives, and the juxtaposition of Mary’s quiet country home and the airless box that is Yinka’s apartment, with solid detail and sensitivity. The filmmaker also draws a powerful performance from Adewumni, who conveys the hurt and the survival instinct in Femi with spare gestures and soulful eyes. It’s a breakout portrayal that helps make “The Last Tree” so much more than your ordinary coming-of-age story.

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‘The Last Tree’

★★★1/2

Available Friday, June 26, as a VOD rental on most platforms, and through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably R for violence, drug use and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: Ella Fitzgerald documentary shows how she became a musical icon and a showbiz chameleon

There are two things to know about Ella Fitzgerald, two things that director Leslie Woodhead’s fleet-footed documentary “Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things” spells out wonderfully:

 1) Ella Fitzgerald remains the pre-eminent singer of the 20th century.

 2) She worked very hard, and sacrificed much of herself and her personal life, to make that happen.

Woodhead follows Fitzgerald’s career from when she was a skinny-legged teen, nervously giving her first performance in front of an audience — on an amateur-night open-mic show at The Apollo, the legendary Harlem theater. They laughed at her shabby dress, but they thrilled to her voice.

So did the bandleader Chick Webb, who hired Ella as his singer. She was an instant star and landed on the hit parade, with her nursery-rhyme adaptation “A-Tisket A-Tasket.” When Webb died young, Fitzgerald’s name replaces his as the band leader.

But while Fitzgerald was becoming the queen of swing jazz, she started branching out. She started hanging out with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, and reinvented herself as a bebop jazz musician — using her voice as an improvisational instrument the way horn players and pianists did. In her scat solos, she could work in dozens of samples from other songs, all off the top of her head.

The third major phase of Fitzgerald’s career is when she became a global headliner. With guidance from her manager, Norman Granz, Fitzgerald recorded albums in which she reinterpreted the Great American Songbook — works by the Gershwins, Cole Porter and other great songwriters.

Woodhead assembles a wide range of interviewees — writers, biographers, former colleagues, and her adopted son, jazz musician Ray Brown Jr. — to reflect on Fitzgerald’s talent and impact. She also collects comments from generations of admiring musicians, including Johnny Mathis, Smokey Robinson, Patti Austin, Tony Bennett, Itzhak Perlman, Andre Previn (who died in 2019), Jamie Cullum and Laura Mvula. They tell us what we already know: That Fitzgerald’s talent and drive were one of a kind.

Thankfully, there’s a good amount to Fitzgerald’s own voice, both in interviews and her music, throughout Woodhead’s thorough documentary. There’s enough of that voice — the one Stevie Wonder praised in “Sir Duke” — to entertain and enthrall, and make us bookmark our favorite streaming service to hear more.

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‘Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things’

★★★

Available Friday, June 26, as a VOD rental on most platforms, and through virtual cinemas (including SLFS@Home). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and mature themes. Running time: 89 minutes.