Review: Frontier drama 'First Cow' benefits from director Kelly Reichert's thoughtful pacing

You might think of director Kelly Reichert’s latest film, “First Cow,” as a companion piece of sorts to her wagon-train drama “Meek’s Cutoff” — if only for how they both capture the desperation and hopefulness of those settling of the American West.

It also shares its DNA with “Meek’s Cutoff,” since that movie’s screenwriter, Jonathan Raymond, wrote the novel “The Half-Life,” on which “First Cow” is based — and Reichert and Raymond adapted the novel into this film’s screenplay. (Raymond also wrote the short stories that were the basis of Reichert’s films “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy.”)

But “First Cow” is its own animal, so to speak — a thoughtful, yet tense, look at ambition taking people down dark roads at the end of the Oregon Trail.

Cookie Figowitz (played by John Magaro) has signed on as cook for a band of fur trappers in the Oregon territory, sometime in the early 19th century. While foraging for mushrooms to feed the demanding trappers, he runs into King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant who’s running through the woods to get away from Russians who want him dead, for reasons he never fully explains. Cookie helps King-Lu evade his pursuers, and then he disappears into the woods.

At Fort Tillicum, the trapping party’s destination, Cookie again runs into King-Lu — who is grateful for Cookie’s kindness, and offers the hospitality of his modest shack. Over a campfire dinner and some whiskey, the two men talk about their dreams. Cookie, who apprenticed for a baker back in Maryland, would like to run a hotel in San Francisco. King-Lu just wants to make money, however he can.

The talk then turns to Cookie’s baking skills, and how he could make some delicious fried cakes if he had some milk. This prompts King-Lu to hatch a plan, to sneak onto the grounds of the fort’s wealthy boss, Chief Factor (Toby Jones), and milk the chief’s newly arrived dairy cow. The resulting “oily cakes” are so tasty that King-Lu thinks they could sell a batch to the men at the fort — which would require more milk.

You might imagine how this situation could spiral out of control. What is harder to imagine is how carefully, deliberately, Reichert lets the story unfold — as King-Lu gently nudges Cookie further and further into deception, dangling the hope that their “oily cakes” are worth the risk of angering the richest man in the territory.

Magaro (“Carol,” “Overlord,” “The Umbrella Academy”) neatly conveys, with few words spoken, Cookie’s willingness to please and his naive trust in King-Lu’s judgment. Magaro’s work perfectly supports Lee, allowing the relative unknown to give a breakout performance that defies every stereotype of Chinese immigrants in the movies — and brings out hidden facets of King-Lu’s somewhat larcenous heart.

Reichert moves with her customary pace, not slow but never rushed, allowing time to let us examine the minute details of Cookie’s ramshackle surroundings so we feel them in our bones. “First Cow” lets us experience this frontier life, and feel what these two wanderers — the itinerant baker and the Chinese schemer — wanted to overcome.

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‘First Cow’

★★★1/2

Opened in select theaters on March 6; available for rental on most digital platforms on Friday, July 10. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 122 minutes.

Review: In the atmospheric horror thriller 'Relic,' the menace becomes the metaphor for a real-life fear

It’s weird to use words like “touching” and “heartbreaking” to describe a body-horror thriller, but Natalia Erika James’ stunning directing debut “Relic” earns those adjectives by putting a literal spin on the figurative dismemberment of dementia.

When elderly Edna (Robyn Nevin) goes missing for three days, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and adult granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) drive up from Melbourne to join the search. Setting up in Edna’s home, cluttered with memories of Kay’s childhood, Kay and Sam wait for word of Edna’s whereabouts.

After a day or so, Edna suddenly reappears in the kitchen, not sure why her daughter and granddaughter are there. Sam gives her grandma a warm hug, but Kay is more reserved, sensing that something’s off about her mum. More volatile behavior — lucid and happy one moment, raving and angry the next — fuels Kay’s suspicions that the Edna who returned from her disappearance isn’t the same one who left.

As a thriller, “Relic” is a slow-burning fuse that produces a dread-soaked atmosphere before igniting into a terrifying climax that has Sam and Kay fighting for their lives. Not only are they dealing with what Edna has become, but they’re also facing the specter of the house, a dank, fetid place that seems to shape-shift around them.

The three actresses make a strong ensemble, but Nevin — a veteran in Australian TV and movies, who appeared in “The Matrix” sequels and Jane Campion’s miniseries “Top of the Lake” — dominates the screen. Nevin captures the fear and rage brought on by dementia, and infuses the film’s entire atmosphere with those emotions.

James, who wrote and directed, gives physical form to the metaphorical terrors of dementia, creating a visual metaphor for losing a loved one that’s both horrific and strangely beautiful. “Relic” is that rare horror movie where the scares aren’t just what’s on screen, but what they represent.

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‘Relic’

★★★1/2

Available for rental on most digital platforms on Friday, July 10; also opening at the Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City). Rated R for some horror violence/disturbing images, and language. Running time: 90 minutes.

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.