Review: Sundance Short Film Tour helps you imagine the good old days of going to a film festival

Since it’s unclear what going to the Sundance Film Festival will be like in 2021 — whether you’re more likely to travel to Park City or stay in your city or watch on your home screen — it’s good that the Sundance Institute has moved its annual roadshow of short films to “virtual cinemas,” so we can remember how things used to be.

The six shorts in this 80-minute package run are a fascinating mix of drama, comedy, animation and documentary, telling stories of Christian prophesy, menopause, grief, hunger and goats — lots of goats.

A quick rundown, in show order:

• “Benevolent Ba,” written and directed by Diffan Sina Norman, shows a Muslim family in Malaysia, who have driven to fulfill the mother’s wishes of having a goat humanely slaughtered by Muslim halal protocols. Somehow, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is also involved in this quick, frenetic comedy.

• “Hot Flash,” by Canadian director-writer Thea Hollatz, shows a TV weather forecaster dealing with a snowstorm and menopausal hot flashes at the same time. Animated, but definitely not for kids, this one’s funny, shocking and charming in equal measure.

• “The Deepest Hole,” writer-director Matt McCormick’s cleverly surrealist documentary, encompasses the Cold War, conspiracy theorist Art Bell, opportunistic televangelists, and the story of the race to bore a hole through the earth’s crust. (Warning: McCormick uses some strobing effects during this film, so if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, close your eyes for a minute or two and just listen.)

• “Meats” is essentially a filmed monologue by writer-director-actor Ashley Williams, as a pregnant vegan trying to rationalize her desire to butcher a whole lamb. Williams — who played Jim Gaffigan’s wife on his TV show and does a lot of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies (and, in real life, is sister to Kimberly Williams-Paisley) — pours a lot of humorous angst into nine minutes.

• “T” is director Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s tender, eye-opening documentary about Miami’s T Ball, in which people model T-shirts and elaborate costumes to honor people in their lives who have recently died. Witherspoon follows three participants of the ball, collecting heartbreaking stories and memories that make the people telling them smile.

• “So What If the Goats Die?,” this year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for shorts, is the standout of this program. Writer-director Sofia Alaoui goes back to her home country, Morocco, for this engrossing story of a goatherd who rides into town, only to find everyone has disappeared. Is it the end of the world? That’s one of the questions Alaoui’s spare, compelling story considers, with intelligence and heart.

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2020 Sundance Shorts Tour

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, July 24, on virtual cinemas, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably R for cartoon nudity, mature themes and some language. Running time: 80 minutes; one short is in Malay, another in Berber, both with subtitles.

Review: Documentary on Helmut Newton shows the photographer's art, but leaves his muses to dissect his legacy

The documentary “Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful” is caught between its two conflicting attitudes: It wants to be as playfully mischievous as its bad-boy subject, the late fashion photographer Helmut Newton, while also appraising his work as serious, relevant art.

Newton, best known for his provocative images of naked and clothed women in Vogue, hated the word “art,” as much as he hated the phrase “good taste.” (He says so in one of the interview clips, shot shortly before he died in 2004, near the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, hit by a car at 83.) Surely one can argue whether his images are artful — and the fun of director Gero von Boehm’s documentary is diving into that argument.

Through a wealth of footage of Newton at work and at play, von Boehm (German-born, like Newton) shows the nuts-and-bolts of how Newton runs a photo shoot — bouncing around the location, constantly chatting with his models as he seeks the perfect image. It’s in these moments where we see Newton courting controversy, whether it’s showing an able-bodied model using canes or a wheelchair, or photographing millions’ worth of Bulgari diamonds by placing them on hands butchering a roasted chicken.

But it’s the interviews that are most fascinating. Interestingly, all the people von Boehm interviews are women, most of them models or actors who had been on the business end of his cameras. (The notable execeptions are his editor at Vogue, Anna Wintour, and his wife, June — also a photographer, working under the name Alice Springs.) 

Some of the subjects, like the supermodel Claudia Schiffer or the actor Hanna Schygulla, barely go deeper than recalling how fun it was to shoot with Newton. The best, though, go deeper, not just reminiscing about the experience but appraising the photographs for their symbolism and meaning.

The interviews that make “Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful” worth watching are of actors Charlotte Rampling and Isabella Rossellini. Both are not just performers but experts on their craft, and know about the significance of female iconography because they have been those icons. If Rampling and Rossellini ever team up for one of those Masterclass videos, tag-teaming a discussion of feminist film studies, I’m so there.

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‘Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful’

★★★

Available starting Friday, July 24, on virtual cinemas, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably R for images of full-frontal nudity, and language. Running time: 93 minutes; in English, and in German with subtitles. 

Review: French-made children's film 'SamSam' is a superhero story without any oomph

If you’re in that group of parents who think children’s movies shouldn’t be actively harmful to your children’s brains — for the same reason you don’t give a kid a toy car with jagged metal sticking out of it — you will want to give a wide berth to the French animated crapfest called “SamSam.”

On a small planet where everybody has a superpower, little SamSam — whose parents are superheroes — isn’t sure what his superpower is. This makes him unusual at Cosmic Hero School, where every kid practices their superhero.

Enter a new student, Mega, who wants desperately to fit in. She befriends SamSam, using some well-intentioned trickery to fool SamSam into thinking he’s found his superpower. The reason Mega wants to be liked is that her father, King Marchel, is the evil ruler of their neighboring planet, where children are banished — and where Marchel, with his evil-scientist henchman, is developing a monster that will obliterate the sound of children’s laughter.

“SamSam” is adapted from a book by French author and illustrator Serge Bloch, known for his whimsical pen-and-ink drawings. There’s little of that whimsy in the animation style of director Tanguy de Kermel, which looks more like a practice run for a Dr. Seuss knockoff by people who used to work on the “Minions” franchise. 

The screenplay, by Valérie Magis and Jean Regnaud, has some offbeat touches — like when King Marchel’s gloom monster strikes SamSam’s planet, causing all the adults to become gray and depressed. But too much of the plot feels cribbed from “Sky High,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and a dozen better movies, and just remind the viewer of how less-than-super “SamSam” is.

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’SamSam’

★1/2

Opens Friday, July 24, at Megaplex Theaters and the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably PG for mild peril and rude humor. Running time: 77 minutes.

Review: 'The Painted Bird' wallows in the misery of a boy's hard road, in which the Holocaust is just one more pothole

What’s the opposite of a “feel-good movie”? Whatever the term is, director-screenwriter Václav Marhoul’s “The Painted Bird” is that: A painfully self-regarding wallow through the darker aspects of humanity.

Adapting Polish author Jerzy Kozinski’s then-controversial 1965 novel, Marhoul begins in an unnamed eastern European country with a boy (Petr Kotlár) whose name is not immediately disclosed. The boy has been left by his parents in the care of an aged peasant aunt, Marta (Nina Shunevych), on a farm. The era, from available evidence at the beginning, could be anywhere from 1700 to 1950.

With scant information, Marhoul invites us to witness the boy’s struggles after Marta dies and he must venture out on his own. At the first village, he’s branded a gypsy or a warlock, and the town’s mystic, Olga (Alla Sokolova), makes the boy her servant. The boy eventually breaks free of this bondage, only to be treated even worse in the next village, where he becomes the servant of a miller (Udo Kier), who gets violent when he realizes his hired hand (Zdenek Pecha) lusts after the miller’s wife (Michaela Dolezalová).

And so it goes at the boy’s next stop, and the next. At a few locations, the boy sees two symbols that pinpoint the timeframe. One is the hammer and sickle, on the cap of a cruel Soviet military man. The other is the swastika, flying over the building where German soldiers are headquartered.

Yes, as bad as you thought the boy’s life already was, now you know it’s going to get worse — because, if you didn’t know the history of Kosinski’s book, you’re now learning that we’re in the middle of a Holocaust movie.

Up to this point, we have watched this boy suffer various manifestations of cruelty and barbarity. Now, we’re confronted with the most cruel, most barbaric action in modern history — the systematic, industrialized extermination of millions of human beings — and it becomes just one more bad thing that happens to this kid.

What’s more, one of the few times someone is nice to him, it’s a German soldier (Stellan Skarsgard) who’s ordered to take the boy down the railroad tracks and kill him — but, instead, the soldier lets the boy escape, firing his rifle to make the others think he’s completed the task.

Such good luck is short-lived. Even the kindness of a village priest (Harvey Keitel, his Czech dialogue dubbed over), who sends the boy to live with a parishioner (Julian Sands), becomes hollow when we learn the parishioner is a pedophile.

The question at the heart of “The Painted Bird” is not whether the boy will survive the war — that seems inevitable, both because of his talent to adapt to his circumstances and because of the screenwriter’s trick that we’re going to follow this kid to the bitter end. The question becomes whether the boy’s soul can be preserved, or whether exposure to so much nastiness will leave a permanent stain on his heart.

The answer, alas, is as bleak as Marhoul’s plodding pace and cinematographer Vladimir Smutny’s grimly poetic images. At the end of the movie’s nearly three-hour run, a viewer may be left feeling much as critics did when Kosinski’s book was first published: Pummeled into sadness by a story that exploits the Holocaust for the artist’s own nihilistic purposes. 

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‘The Painted Bird’

★1/2

Available Friday, July 17, for rental on most digital platforms. Not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality, nudity, strong violence and language. Running time: 169 minutes; in Czech, German, Russian and Latin, with subtitles.

Review: Documentary 'Runner' spins a fascinating yarn about South Sudan's first Olympian

Sometimes, the best thing a documentarian can do is find a heroic figure and not get in the way of that person’s story — and that’s what director Bill Gallagher does in the inspirational documentary “Runner.”

The movie tells the story of Guor Mading Maker, sometimes known as Guor Marial, who was born in the southern portion of Sudan, in a life of poverty and violence. At the time, in the 1980s and 1990s, Sudan was divided between its Arabic-influenced Muslim north and the African-leaning, predominantly Christian south. As a journalist interviewed in the film explains, the south also had oil under the ground, so it became a political and economic target of the dominant north.

Guor had to run for his life as a child, first from soldiers and later in the refugee camp, separated from his mother. Eight of his nine siblings died in Sudan, but Guor survived and was sent to live in the United States.

At his high school in Concord, N.H., Guor’s ability to run fast attracted the attention of the track coaches. Soon, Guor joined the cross-country team and won meets across New England, usually in the 10,000 meters. Bolstered by the track team moms and the coaching staff, Guor used his running talent to get a scholarship at Iowa State University.

In 2011, South Sudan achieved independence, and Guor had a new dream: To run the marathon at the 2012 Olympics in London, representing his new nation. The problem was that South Sudan didn’t have a local Olympic committee, and the International Olympic Committee gave Guor two options: Don’t compete, or run under the flag of his former oppressors, Sudan.

Gallagher details Guor’s journey from refugee camp to America, and captures the battle and the media circus when the athlete worked to go to London. 

Thankfully, Gallagher doesn’t stop there, with what could have been a traditional happy ending to the story. Like a marathoner, Gallagher keeps going to the next fight: Establishing South Sudan’s Olympic team and preparing for the 2016 games in Rio.

Gallagher pulls out some effective techniques, such as animation to depict Guor’s war-ravaged childhood or creating a fascinating montage of the news coverage Guor got in the run-up to London. But the best thing about “Runner” is Guor himself, a humble and sympathetic character whose life has more twists than the average thriller. 

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‘Runner’

★★★

Available Friday, July 17, through the Salt Lake Film Society’s virtual cinema, SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG for thematic elements. Running time: 88 minutes.

Review: Australian romance 'Dirt Music' suffers from too many discordant notes, but Kelly Macdonald's performance is perfectly pitched

There are moments when the romantic drama “Dirt Music” captures the spare, stark beauty of its Western Australia locations and the broken, beautiful people who inhabit them. Alas, they are only moments, floating in an ocean of plot contrivances and unrelenting grimness.

Georgie (played by Kelly Macdonald) is an ex-nurse who’s a bit lost in her current life, as unappreciated girlfriend of local crayfish legend Jim Buckridge (David Wenham). Georgie spends days tending to Jim’s two sons, children of Jim’s late wife, or exploring the beach near their home. 

One day, she notices a truck parked on the beach, and a boat out in the water. Both belong to Lu Fox (Garrett Hedlund), whose reputation as the town bad boy precedes him. Lu has the main requirements of a tragic romantic figure: Six-pack abs and a sad backstory. So it doesn’t take long for Georgie and Lu to land in bed together in a Perth hotel.

The sad backstory involves the deaths of Lu’s brother, Darkie (George Mason), Darkie’s wife, Sal (Julia Stone), and the couple’s little girl, Bird (Ava Caryofyllis) — whom Lu imagines he sees wherever he turns. The Fox family used to be a folk band, performing the “dirt music” of the title at the local pub, but Lu doesn’t play any more.

It’s no use describing the plot much further because: a) spoilers; and b) what follows is both predictably cliched and randomly ridiculous — and the predictable parts collide with the random bits in ways that will make a viewer’s eyes roll. Whatever poetry was contained in author Tim Winton’s 2001 novel is lost in the screenplay, by Jack Thorne (“The Aeronauts”), that reduces the pain within this love triangle to a lot of shouting.

And yet, Macdonald’s severe beauty shines through. The Scottish actor (“No Country for Old Men,” “Brave”) channels the heartache and longing Georgie feels, caught between a safe life and the prospect of wild love, into economical gestures and a world-weary smile. Macdonald puts the melody into “Dirt Music,” even when the rest of the film can’t keep the beat.

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‘Dirt Music’

★★

Available Friday, July 17, for rental on most digital platforms. Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, some violence, and language. Running time: 105 minutes.

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.