Review: 'Mulan,' Disney's live-action adaptation of its animated classic, is an epic drama with a warrior's heart

Director Niki Caro’s “Mulan” isn’t just the best adaptation Disney has done from its animated catalog, but one of the most resonant family dramas in a long time — deftly balancing martial-arts excitement, an epic visual sweep and a moving, personal tale of a young woman channeling her warrior spirit.

Disney, in its strip mining of its animated classics, usually goes one of two ways: Either sticking faithfully close to the originals — like “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” — or, like “Dumbo,” going so far afield that it’s scarcely the same story.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: 'The Mole Agent' is a documentary that plays like a sly, and touching, caper comedy

Like a good spy thriller, director Maite Alberti’s documentary “The Mole Agent” works because of some very clever misdirection — going one way when you think it’s going somewhere else — and because the spy in question is so devastatingly charming.

Our hero, Sergio Chamy, is new to the spy game. He’s an 83-year-old widower from Santiago, Chile, who answers an ad in the newspaper. The man who placed the ad, Rómulo Aitken, is looking to hire an elderly man, between 80 and 90, who’s “competent” with technology.

Aitken is a private investigator, and his client wants to know whether her mother, living in a nursing home about 35 miles outside of Santiago, is being ripped off or abused by the staff there. Aitken wants to put someone inside the nursing home who can blend in, and get footage via some sophisticated spy cameras. Sergio fits the bill to be that man on the inside. 

Sergio has to learn the job, and fast. First he has trouble identifying the client’s mother, Sonia — and once he does, he has to be careful not to ask obvious questions. Sergio also has to deal with Rómulo’s impatience and his criticism of Sergio’s daily reports.

While Sergio is investigating, he’s also making fast friends with many of the women at the care facility. They’re a lively bunch of characters, including one who decides instantly that she wants to marry him and another whose mind is so addled that the staff fakes phone falls to her from her (presumably long-dead) mother to calm her down.

At the same time, Alberti’s documentary crew has arranged to go into the home, to capture the residents’ daily life — and the home’s managers have agreed to let the crew follow around their newest resident: Sergio. The crew’s sedate footage, intercut with the jumpy images from Sergio’s spy cameras, make for an oddly exciting depiction of everyday life.

While you’re concerned that Alberti is setting you up for an exposé of the harsh conditions at a nursing home, the real story is much more touching: The day-to-day loneliness of these elderly people, largely ignored by the families who are paying to keep them there. Only once do we see relatives visit someone in the home — Sergio’s daughter, who’s in on the caper, and her family for his 84th birthday. 

Throughout “The Mole Agent,” Alberti gives us tender vignettes of elderly people contemplating the short time they have left in this world. The film also gives us, in Sergio, a graceful reminder that no one is too old to make the most out of life.

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‘The Mole Agent’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, September 4, on the Salt Lake Film Society’s SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Running time: 90 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

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.