Review: Claire Denis' stark, gorgeous 'Beau Travail' returns for a 20th anniversary re-release

Gorgeous and austere, Claire Denis' "Beau Travail" — being re-released for its 20th anniversary — is a fascinating woman's-eye view into one of the Western world's last all-male bastions: The French Foreign Legion.

Cribbing a bit from Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Denis tells of Galoup (Denis Lavant), sitting in a Marseilles apartment recalling the events that got him drummed out of the Legion. Galoup was a master sergeant in the east African nation of Djibouti, where he shaped raw recruits into battle-ready fighting men. He was the favorite of his commandant, Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), a veteran soldier now content to chew the local narcotic of choice, qat.

But Galoup begins to believe that Forestier's attentions are focused on a new recruit, Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin). Galoup's jealousy turns to obsession, and not even his relationship with a local beauty can stop him from pursuing Sentain's destruction — with disastrous results.

Denis' attention to the plot, though, is secondary to her spare, ritualistic depiction of the Foreign Legion's training regimen. Denis has Galoup put these bare-chested young men through their paces, running obstacle courses and fighting in the impossibly blue ocean.

The scenes — which look like a modern-dance performance photographed for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog — are an idealized look at male bonding at its most regimented. But Galoup longs for that structure and struggles when let loose in the chaotic freedom of civilian life. In those scenes, "Beau Travail" becomes a fascinating meditation on one man's well-governed paradise, and how easily he can let his darker thoughts destroy it.

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‘Beau Travail’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, September 4, on the Salt Lake Film Society’s SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably R for nudity and suggestions of violence. Running time: 93 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

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This review originally appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune, on August 11, 2000, when the movie first screened in Salt Lake City.

Review: Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet' is an exciting thriller, but don't fall into the trap of trying to make sense of it

What would a Christopher Nolan movie be if there wasn’t someone onscreen to explain his labyrinthine plots? Audiences — at least the ones willing to brave going into a theater in our virus-plagued times — get their answer with “Tenet,” a maze-like action thriller that’s exciting in the moment, even if it’s gratuitously complicated.

We get our first dollop of extraneous plot exposition when a CIA Black Ops agent — played by John David Washington and referred to in the credits only as “Protagonist” — wakes up on a boat, after he thought he had taken a cyanide pill when captured. No, that was a test, says a shadowy fixer (Martin Donovan), who gives him an assignment to stop a plot to destroy the world. His only tip is a single word, “tenet,” which “will open the right doors, and some of the wrong ones, too.”

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: Armando Iannucci's take on 'David Copperfield' is grandly Victorian and fully modern, funny and heart-warming

For a filmmaker best known for lacerating satire, director Armando Iannucci manages something delightful in his newest movie, “The Personal History of David Copperfield”: He blows the cobwebs off of the classic Charles Dickens novel, bringing it to rambunctious life without sacrificing a jot of its Victorian sensibility.

There’s still a spirited wit at work in Iannucci’s and co-screenwriter Simon Blackwell’s script — something to be expected from the minds behind HBO’s “Veep” and its British predecessor, “The Thick of It.” But in this “David Copperfield,” there also are a warmth and hopefulness missing from Iannucci’s past movies, the political satires “In the Loop” and “The Death of Stalin.”

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: Werner Herzog gets personal with 'Nomad,' an examination of writer and kindred spirit Bruce Chatwin

I had never heard of the British writer Bruce Chatwin before watching Werner Herzog’s documentary about him, “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin” — and now, I’m kind of obsessed with him, though not nearly as obsessed as Herzog is during this thought-provoking and surprisingly heartfelt tribute from one madman to another.

Herzog visits the places that Chatwin, a travel writer with a yen for following nomadic peoples, liked to frequent — from Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in South America to central Australia, with stops in Wales and Wiltshire, England.

The two men met a few times before Chatwin’s death from AIDS in 1989. Herzog says that Chatwin was driven to go to strange places and meet interesting people. In the film, Herzog says in his famously morose German accent, “I will follow a similar quest for wild characters, strange dreamers and big ideas about the nature of human existence.” 

Those who know Herzog’s films, and don’t just know him from “The Mandalorian,” are saying to themselves, “Yup, that’s Werner, all right.”

A Chatwin story about a childhood memory of his grandmother having a swatch of dinosaur skin sent Chatwin on a quest to Punta Arenas, in Patagonia — and it takes Herzog there, as well. Chatwin’s book, “The Songlines,” and his obsession with the songs of Australian aboriginal people, sends Herzog down a similar path — though with a significant difference, as Herzog takes pains to talk to aboriginal people, to show sensitivity to their much-abused culture.

Herzog’s observations about Chatwin, arrange into chapter headings in the film, are backed up by two people who knew him well: His biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, and Chatwin’s wife, Elizabeth. Through them, we see artifacts — like Chatwin’s many notebooks — and a sense of the man behind the writings.

Herzog also has personal recollections of Chatwin. One is a fascinating tale of how Herzog came to own Chatwin’s rucksack, and how it ended up with a role in Herzog’s 1991 mountain-climbing drama “Scream of Stone” — and remains in Herzog’s possession to this day.

Another memory is from the production of Herzog’s 1987 drama “Cobra Verde,” adapted from Chatwin’s book “The Viceroy of Ouidah,” about a 19th-century Brazilian rancher who becomes a bandit and west African slave trader. Chatwin, then in poor health, visited Herzog on the set in Ghana, where he was tickled by the attention to his book’s details — and appalled by the tyrannical behavior of Herzog’s star, Klaus Kinski. (It was the last film Herzog and Kinski worked on together, and their breakup is explored in Herzog’s 1999 documentary “My Best Fiend.”)

Herzog finds in Chatwin another restless artist, a man whose appetites and curiosity match his own. That curiosity seems to be contagious, because after being exposed to it in “Nomad,” I find myself compelled to learn more about Chatwin’s work and his determination to go to all the places he could.

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‘Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, August 28, in the Salt Lake Film Society’s SLFS@Home virtual cinema portal. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and mature themes. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: Punks vs. aristocrats in 'Get Duked!', a raunchy and hilarious British stoner comedy

As a critic, I could detail why the British stoner comedy “Get Duked!” is worth your time — that’s the whole purpose of a review — but whether you actually enjoy it will come down to one unknowable, subjective thing: Does it make you laugh?

“Get Duked!” made me laugh, sometimes embarrassingly hard. And, in these times, that’s about all one can ask for, isn’t it?

Writer-director Ninian Doff begins off a premise based on The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a real, :”no we didn’t make this up” program through which young adults take part in physical and philanthropic activities — including a multi-day expedition — to improve themselves and benefit society.

Doff’s story imagines the four least likely teens joining forces, reluctantly, to earn the DofE. Three lads know each other through detention: Dean (Rian Gordon), a frequently drunken vandal; Duncan (Lewis Gribben), a disgusting idiot; and William, aka DJ Beatroot (Viraj Juneja), a vain amateur rapper. The fourth is Ian (Samuel Bottomley), a homeschooled nerd.

Their advisor, Mr. Carlyle (Jonathan Aris), drives them to a remote spot in the Scottish Highlands, gives them a map and tells them they have a day to reach a campsite and another day to get to the coast — after which they will receive their reward. Never mind that the boys are ill-equipped for orienteering or foraging or teamwork, the three skills needed to complete the DofE. But that’s nothing when you also factor in the rifle-toting nobleman (Eddie Izzard) who’s trying to kill them.

The chase is exhilarating enough, but it’s the added goofball touches Doff brings to the story. They include: A taciturn farmer (James Cosmo), an overeager police sergeant (Kate Dickey), exploding hashish, hallucinogenic rabbit poop, and a local bread thief.

The four young actors make an engaging, whacked-out ensemble, and Izzard and Dickey (who played the insane Lysa Arryn in “Game of Thrones”) add some veteran comic chops.

But, like I said, the only thing that matters in “Get Duked!” is whether you laugh — and Doff is willing to bend the rules of pharmacopeia and physics to make that happen. With me, he succeeded. With you? That’s the test.

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‘Get Duked’

★★★

Available starting Friday, August 28, streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated R for drug content, language throughout including sexual references, and some violence/bloody images. Running time: 87 minutes.

Review: 'Fatima' tells of a well-known miracle, with gorgeous images and a not-too-deep intellectual fervor

Jesus told his disciples (as recalled in the gospel of Matthew), “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” — which is as good a place as any to consider “Fatima,” a by-the-numbers religious drama that delves into the childlike nature of faith.

Based on true events, “Fatima” shows what happens when three children, between the ages of 7 and 10, saw the Virgin Mary appear to them in a field outside their village in Portugal in 1917. The three are told to come back to the same spot, once a month for six months, where Mary (Joana Ribeiro) will deliver her message of peace through prayer on the rosary.

Soon, the village catches wind of the children’s vision, and the kids face a sea of troubles. The oldest girl, Lucia (Stephanie Gil), gets the brunt of it — from her mother, Maria (Lúcia Moniz), and their parish priest, Father Ferreira (Joaquim de Almeida), who think the children are lying; and the mayor, Artur (Goran Visnjic), who fears this peasant “superstition” will undermine the modern, enlightened rule of Portugal’s secular government.

The next month, when the children return to the spot for another message from Mary, a crowd of pilgrims is also waiting. They want the children to pass their prayers — for health, for reassurance, for the return of their loved ones from the Great War — onto the Virgin. Their presence, though, means more hardship for Luca’s father, Antonio (Marco D’Almeida), because the pilgrims trample his hay crop.

Italian director Marco Pontecorvo (whose father, Gillo, directed the 1966 classic “The Battle of Algiers”) does a lovely job capturing the beauty and struggles of rural Portugal, and creating a visual realization of the actual miracle for which Fatima is famous. The script, which Pontecorvo wrote with Valerio D’Annunzio and Barbara Nicolosi, also crystalizes in simple strokes the story’s essential tug-of-war between the jaded, suspicious adults and the truthful, innocent children.

The real missed opportunity in “Fatima” is in the framing story, decades later, as Lucia (played by Sonia Braga), an elderly nun, invites a skeptical theological scholar (Harvey Keitel) to interview her for his next book.Pontecorvo could have used those conversations to probe the mysteries of faith, and add some deeper meaning to the children’s stalwart insistence on having their truth be heard. Instead, Keitel and Braga just add another layer of pieties to a movie that has plenty already.

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‘Fatima’

★★1/2

Available starting Friday, August 28, streaming as a video-on-demand rental on most platforms. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence and disturbing images. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: YA romance 'Chemical Hearts' channels raw emotion about first love, grief and guilt

For a young-adult romance, “Chemical Hearts” packs a lot of raw, genuine emotion as it delves into young love, first love, and the pain that comes with it.

Henry Page (played by Austin Abrams) has reached the pinnacle for a teen writer: Editor of his high school newspaper in his senior year. His problem, he says in the movie’s narration, is that he’s a great writer but hasn’t lived enough in his life to have something interesting to write about.

A new transfer student, Grace Town (played by “Riverdale” star Lili Reinhart), changes that in a hurry. Henry’s journalism teacher selects Grace to co-edit the paper with Henry, though she demurs and offers to be assistant editor — though she refuses to write anything herself. The only other information Henry gleans from Grace at first is that she walks with a cane, she has a car that she lets Henry drive, and that she refuses to drive it herself.

Through a combination of befriending Grace and stalking her, Henry sees more of the picture. Grace’s leg was severely injured in a car crash nine months previous — a crash that killed Grace’s first boyfriend, Dom, her old school’s star quarterback. But there’s still a big chunk of the story that Grace is leaving out, even as she and Henry fall in love.

Writer-director Richard Tanne — following up his 2016 romance “Southside With You,” which depicted Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson’s first date — adapts Krystal Sutherland’s YA novel “Our Chemical Hearts” with a respect for the genre and its teen audience that’s often lacking. Tanne knows that love in the teen years is particularly intense, because the participants have not yet developed the perspective with which to measure it. That’s true here for Henry, who sees Grace as a mystery waiting to be solved, and for Grace, wrestling with her feelings for Henry and whether she’s betraying her deceased first love.

Besides Tanne’s sensitive handling of the material, the emotional punch of “Chemical Hearts” comes from its young leads. Abrams (“Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”) gives Henry a soulful puppy-dog demeanor with flashes of self-effacing wit, while Reinhart channels the grief and guilt of a young woman trying to move forward in her life without completely forgetting her past. Together, they throw off some considerable sparks, making “Chemical Hearts” a combustible mix.

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‘Chemical Hearts’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, August 21, streaming on Amazon Primel. Rated R for language, sexuality and teen drug use. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Words on Bathroom Walls' is an honest, heartfelt portrayal of a teen's battle with schizophrenia

Though it’s being sold as a young-adult romance — which it is, at times — the teen drama “Words on Bathroom Walls” is more effective as an honest, engaging portrayal of a young man’s struggle with mental illness and finding himself separate from his condition.

Adam (Charlie Plummer) is our hero, a teen who reacts to his parents’ divorce by developing a passion for cooking — and a drive to get into culinary school after high school. But after a freakout in chemistry class, and an accident that gives his best buddy a serious acid burn, Adam is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and everything around him changes.

On the inside, Adam is accompanied by three hallucinatory characters: Zen spirit Rebecca (AnnaSophia Robb), stoner lothario Joaquin (Devon Bostick), and a bat-wielding muscleman called The Bodyguard (Lobo Sebastian), whose appearance usually signals a major attack is coming.

On the outside, Adam’s mom (Molly Parker) and her current boyfriend, Paul (Walton Goggins), have found one last chance for Adam’s academic career: A strict Catholic school, whose principal, Sister Catherine (Beth Grant), informs Adam he has to score highly on his exams and not have any episodes.

Adam, having been subjected to a slew of drug treatments, doesn’t hold out much hope for a new drug he’s given in a clinical trial. But the drug seems to help squelch the voices and allow him to concentrate on his studies — and on Maya (Taylor Russell), a hard-charging classmate who’s bucking to be valedictorian. But when Adam starts feeling the drug’s side effects, including a loss of taste, things get complicated.

The script — written by Nick Naveda, adapted from Julia Walton’s novel — explores the nuts and bolts of mental illness, from the mechanics of treatment to dealing with the reactions of others. Predominantly, it’s about Adam struggling to beat back the dark forces his brain musters against him, while learning that he is more than the sum of his symptoms and treatments.

Director Thor Freudenthal’s past work — “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” the second “Percy Jackson” movie, and journeyman work on several episodes in the “Arrow”-verse — doesn’t give one confidence that he can pull off such tricky material. But Freudenthal acquits himself well, especially in creating visuals to make Adam’s inner torment relatable to the rest of us.

Freudenthal also has attracted a solid cast, with strong support from Parker and Goggins as Adam’s parents, Andy Garcia as a wise priest, and Russell (“Waves”) as a spunky love interest. But mostly it’s young Plummer, cutting through the teen angst to give a performance that’s authentic and touching, who makes “Words on Bathroom Walls” such a lucid, thoughtful movie.

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‘Words on Bathroom Walls’

★★★

Opening Friday, August 21, in many theaters nationwide. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving mental illness, some sexual references, strong language and smoking. Running time: 111 minutes.