Review: 'The Rental' is a creepy, twisty thriller, smartly constructed by first-time director Dave Franco

Mark the horror thriller “The Rental” as the beginning of a change, one where we stop thinking of Dave Franco as James’ comparatively normal brother and start thinking of him as a crackerjack director.

Franco, co-writing with indie director Joe Swanberg and sharing story credit with Swanberg and Mike Demski, creates one type of suspense thriller that’s deviously disguised as another kind of thriller. It starts with two couples who decide to get out of Los Angeles for a celebratory weekend at a huge Oregon seaside house they find on an online rental site.

The foursome are: Charlie (Dan Stevens); Charlie’s creative partner, Mina (Sheila Vand); Charlie’s wife, Michelle (Alison Brie); and Charlie’s brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White), who’s dating Mina. They get to the house, get some creepy vibes off the racist guy (Toby Huss) renting the house to them, and then try to enjoy themselves for the weekend.

Many drinks and a fair amount of molly later, and things start happening that one might predict in such a situation. Then things start happening that one would never predict. No, I’m not going to tell you what those things are. That’s for you to discover, and then pry your fingernails off your armrest.

(Yes, armrests — you can go see this movie in actual movie theaters, if any are open in your town. But wear a mask and stay away from everybody else. Or, better yet, rent this to stream at home, and make your own popcorn.)

Franco knows his way around a thriller, having starred in “Now You See Me” and “Nerve,” among others. As a director, he masters the rhythms of a good suspenseful movie, building up tension in measured doses, springing the trap when you’re not expecting it. And he can lay down a creepy undertone that will unsettle you from beginning to end.

Stevens (“Beauty and the Beast”) and Brie (“Community,” “Mad Men”) are familiar faces, and they provide new wrinkles to what we think we know about their screen personas. (Brie is also married to the director.) White, familiar to fans of Showtime’s “Shameless,” gives an impressive turn as the screw-up brother trying to get on the right track. Vand (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”) is the breakthrough here, acting as the catalyst whose righteous anger has far-reaching consequences. As a quartet, in service to Franco’s disturbing story, they make “The Rental” a singularly tension-building experience.

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‘The Rental’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 24, at Megaplex Theatres across Utah, Redwood Drive-in, and as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Rated R for violence, language throughout, drug use and some sexuality. Running time: 88 minutes.

Review: 'Radioactive' is an illuminating look at Marie Curie, with a powerful performance by Rosamund Pike

How do you tell the story of a well-known historic figure that doesn’t entirely tread over familiar ground or come off like a Wikipedia entry listing by rote one event after another? Having the visual flair of director Marjane Satrapi, and a fiery actor like Rosamund Pike, certainly help in “Radioactive,” an engrossing biography of physicist and chemist Marie Curie.

Pike plays Polish-born Marie Sklodowska, who we meet in Paris in 1893, as she butts heads with the establishment males in charge of the University of Paris — who won’t give her the space or equipment she demands for her research. Instead, she meets Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), one of the few male scientists who takes Marie’s theories seriously, though it takes him some convincing before she’s willing to take up his offer for laboratory space.

Curie carries the determination, some call it arrogance, familiar to anyone who’s seen “Hamilton”; she is the person who assumes she’s the smartest in the room, often because she is. While this angers some men, like the officious Prof. Lippmann (Simon Russell Beale), it intrigues Pierre. Soon enough, Pierre intrigues Marie — and soon after that, they fall in love and marry.

Their partnership in the lab leads them to follow up on Marie’s belief that there’s something in pitchblende, the ore from which uranium is extracted, that gives off more energy than refined uranium. After much effort, nicely compacted into an energetic montage, they discover two new elements, radium and polonium — as well as an energy force emitted by both elements, a force Marie calls “radioactivity.”

Satrapi — best known for creating the graphic-novel memoir “Persepolis,” and co-directing its animated adaptation — and screenwriter Jack Thorne (“The Aeronauts”), often go beyond the usual biopic by intercutting the Curies’ life story with vignettes of what their discovery unleashed on the world. Some things are good, like radiation therapy for cancer; others not so good, such as making the names Hiroshima and Chernobyl the stuff of nightmares.

Thorne, in adapting Lauren Redness’ graphic novel of the Curies’ lives, sometimes resorts to the hoariest screenwriting cliches — like when Pierre coughs into his hankie too many times. But he and Satrapi make up for that by venturing past the familiar territory of Marie’s research and her two Nobel Prizes, to Marie supporting her daughter Irene (Anya Taylor-Joy) in her effort to get X-ray machines to the World War I battlefields to reduce unnecessary amputations.

For all of Satrapi’s visual inventiveness in capturing Marie’s story and its legacy, the MVP of “Radioactive” is Pike, who embodies Marie’s flinty brilliance and her impatience that no one takes it for granted that she’s a genius. She gives “Radioactive” a passion, an energy, that few actors today can match.

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‘Radioactive’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, July 24, streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, brief nudity and a scene of sexuality. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Yes, God, Yes' is a biting, funny comedy about a girl getting mixed messages about sex

If your screenplay can be pinpoint accurate about your setting, while also being emotionally universal, you will go far in the movie world — and Karen Maine shows in her Catholic-school comedy “Yes, God, Yes” that she can find the relatable in the specific.

It’s the ‘90s, and Alice (played by “Stranger Things” star Natalia Dyer) works to be a good girl — though her best friend Laura (Francesca Reale) knows Alice’s most sinful vice: Rewinding and rewatching the part of “Titanic” where Leo and Kate make out in the car with the steamed-up windows.

So when kids at her Catholic school gossip about her and a boy in class, Wade (Parker Wierling) — even though both know nothing happened — Alice’s reputation and self-esteem plummet. Her chance at redemption, so to speak, comes when she goes to a Catholic teen retreat for four days of walking in the woods, thinking about God, and listening to lessons from their trying-to-be-cool priest, Father Murphy (“Veep” star Timothy Simons).

But when Alice’s body is telling her one thing — especially when she’s near hunky quarterback Chris (Wolfgang Novogratz) — and her camp counselor Nina (Alisha Boe) is telling her something else, what’s a horny Catholic girl to do? And how does the vibrate function on her cellphone work into that?

Maine (who co-wrote the story that became the abortion romantic comedy “Obvious Child”) captures in excruciatingly funny detail the ins and outs of Catholic youth retreats of a certain era, from the barely submerged sexual tension to the awkward group discussion sessions. Through those culturally specific scenes, Maine also finds the yearning of every teen to make sense out of their hormonal urges when the supposed adults can’t get over their hang-ups long enough to provide honest answers.

Dyer, who looks like she could play high-schoolers until she’s 40 (she’s 25 now), shows some comedic chops as the confused teen undergoing her sexual awakening with no guide map. She gives “Yes, God, Yes” the spunk and warmth a coming-of-age story like this needs. 

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‘Yes, God, Yes’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, July 24, on virtual cinemas, including SLFS@Home. Rated R for sexual content and some nudity. Running time: 78 minutes.

Review: 'Amulet' is a brooding horror thriller, and a smart directing debut for actor Romola Garai

Mixing a brooding atmosphere and a sly feminist spin on the horror genre, “Amulet” is a solid statement debut for actor-turned-filmmaker Romola Garai. 

Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) is a homeless immigrant in London, finding odd jobs in construction — when a kindly nun (Imelda Staunton) finds him work as a live-in handyman in a rundown house. Living in the house are Magda (Carla Juri), a lonely young woman who cooks and cleans, and Magda’s ill mother, living unseen in the attic.

Tomaz is urged never to venture upstairs, even when he hears what sounds like Magda being abused, verbally and physically, by her mother. The longer he lives there, the more Tomaz becomes attracted to Magda — but a guilty secret from his past, when he was a soldier at a wartime border post in some unnamed country, weighs on his conscience.

Garai (you may remember her as the adult Saoirse Ronan in “Atonement,” or as Diego Luna’s dance partner in “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights”) has a good eye for creepy detail, and every spot of mildew or peeled paint in Magda’s house adds to a feeling of festering rot. She doesn’t traffic in cheap jump scares, preferring to build the dread gradually — that is, until some cunning twists in the final half hour that pack a gut-punch. 

“Amulet” shows that Garai knows what she’s doing behind the camera, and I’m curious to see what she does next. 

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‘Amulet’

★★★

Available starting Friday, July 24, as a video-on-demand rental on most streaming platforms. Rated R for some strong violence, bloody images, a sexual assault, and brief language and nudity. Running time: 99 minutes.

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This review first was published on this site on January 27, 2020, when the movie premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

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.