Review: 'Summerland' tells a tender story of love during wartime, but the director's timing is off

The wartime melodrama “Summerland” works better in theory than in practice, as first-time feature director Jessica Swale’s script suffers from a smarmy delivery.

It’s 1940, or thereabouts, and Alice (Gemma Arterton) lives alone in a small house in a seaside town near the white cliffs of Dover. She spends much of her time typing furiously on an old manual typewriter, or out doing research on the origins of folklore and mythology — particularly “floating islands,” the shoreline version of mirages, and the myths of Summerland, the pagan version of heaven.

One day, one of the town ladies — none of whom care much for Alice — arrives at her door, with a boy, Frank (Lucas Bond), an evacuee from London who’s been assigned to live with Alice. The solitary writer objects to the placement, but is coerced into caring for Frank for a week, at least, until other arrangements are made. Frank finds Alice to be gruff and unsmiling, though not the witch that his new school friend Edie (Dixie Egerickx) claims she is.

Alice, we learn, wasn’t always so dour. In flashbacks, we see a younger Alice meeting the free-spirited Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw). A passionate romance ensues, quietly ignored by their Jazz Age contemporaries — until Vera’s desire to become a mother drives a wedge between them.

Swale, a playwright with whom Arterton worked on the West End production of her comedy “Nell Gwynn,” lays in all the right land mines in her script, timed to go off for maximum emotional impact. Then Swale loses the detonator, with choppy pacing and some rookie moves that telegraph the plot’s punchline long before it arrives.

It’s too bad, because the raw materials are there for a loving, if overly nostalgic, look at a small piece of the English home front and the community effort to protect London’s children. There are moments when Swale seems about to deliver a heartfelt, emotionally charged drama — but, like the mirages Alice chases along the coast, the moments evaporate into thin air.

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‘Summerland’

★★

Available starting Friday, July 31, as a video-on-demand on various streaming platforms, and at most Megaplex Theaters locations. Rated PG for thematic content, some suggestive comments, language, and smoking. Running time: 99 minutes.

Review: Documentary 'Marley' returns, after 8 years, as a fitting 75th birthday remembrance of the reggae legend

Director Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland," "Touching the Void") aims to make the definitive documentary about Jamaican music legend Bob Marley in “Marley,” and it would be difficult (from this non-fan's perspective) to think of any part of the reggae musician’s life that Macdonald leaves untouched in nearly two-and-a-half hours. 

From Marley's childhood as a mixed-race child in the poor Trench Town neighborhood of Kingston to his death from cancer in 1981, Macdonald covers it all: His discovery of the guitar, the formation of the Wailers, his work with producer Lee "Scratch" Perry, his conversion to Rastafarianism, and his skyrocketing fame.

The movie sometimes gets a bit professorial (like when explaining the development of the offbeat guitar sound that is the basis of reggae), but the thorough interviews with many of Marley's colleagues, friends and family (including wife Rita, children Ziggy and Cedella, and his former mistress, Miss World 1976 Cindy Breakspeare) paint a rounded portrait of the artist and the man. Alas, for a movie this long, it's too bad there isn't more footage of Marley in performance, joyously bringing music to the world.

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‘Marley’

★★★

Available starting Friday, July 31, on the Salt Lake Film Society’s ‘virtual cinema,” and the Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for drug content, thematic elements and some violent images. Running time: 144 minutes.

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This review was published originally in The Salt Lake Tribune on May 4, 2012.

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.