Review: Documentary 'Time' uses home footage to show the effects of incarceration on the imprisoned person's family

It’s important to understand going into “Time” that director Garrett Bradley does not deliver what one might expect from a documentary that begins with a crime and a trial.

Those elements are mentioned, but not with the just-the-facts approach that hours of true-crime reality TV has trained us to crave. Bradley has a different plan in mind: To show the effect that long-term incarceration has on a family.

When Sybil Fox married Robert Richardson, they dreamed of having children and being successful in business in Shreveport, La. What happened instead is they were involved in an attempted 1997 bank robbery, which landed both of them in prison. Fox Rich (as she’s known) took a plea deal, did a short stretch, got out to raise their sons and reinvent herself as a saleswoman and advocate against unjust incarceration.

A prime example that Rich cites in her motivational talks is her husband’s case. Robert was sentenced to 60 years at Louisiana’s notorious state penitentiary, known commonly as Angola — a former plantation that, Fox Rich argues, is the ground zero for a new system for legalized slave labor.

Bradley follows Fox Rich as she makes the case for Robert’s release to any audience who will listen. But what’s more touching is the footage — both contemporary and from video journals Fox Rich recorded for more than 20 years — that captures the couple’s six sons growing up strong and proud, without their father being around. 

Watching these kids through the years is far more compelling than the usual true-crime fare. “Time” is a reminder that the crime may be the start of the story, but it’s not the whole story.

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’Time’

★★★

Opening Friday, October 9, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at the District (South Jordan); begins streaming October 16 on Amazon Prime Video. Rated PG-13 for some strong language. Running time: 81 minutes. 

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Major Arcana' is a quietly moving drama of a carpenter confronting his past in a Vermont town

Made in Vermont on a budget of pennies and a wealth of soon-to-be-discovered talent, the drama “Major Arcana” is what they once called a “granola movie” — the sort of earnest, introspective regional production that used to dominate the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic competition.

Dink (played by Ujon Tokarski) drives into his former Vermont hometown to collect his inheritance: A beat-up double-wide and the 52 acres of woods on which it sits. These are left to him by his father, who we learn about largely through his horrible housekeeping, his casual attitude about porn, and the amount of beer and liquor Dink pours down the drain. 

No matter. Dink knows his dad also left a stash of cash, and wants to get it before someone else does. That someone else is his mom, Jean (Lane Bradbury), who pops by to cajole, wheedle and browbeat her estranged son. 

Dink sets about on a solitary project, starting by cutting down trees on his acreage. Eventually, we see that he’s building a cabin, using the carpentry skills acquired in his years on the road. (Tokarski, who has never acted before making this film, is a carpenter by trade.) Dink reveals more about his time away from Vermont, most of it fueled by drugs and alcohol, to his ex, Sierra (Tara Summers) — who’s now with a local guy, but after a few drinks isn’t averse to jumping into bed with Dink for old time’s sake. Oh, and reading Dink’s fortune with a deck of tarot cards.

First-time writer-director Josh Melrod focuses the bulk of his story on Dink’s work on the cabin, and the question of whether reuniting with Sierra is a wise move. Both threads run their course in a quiet, unforced way, allowing us to hang out with Dink and Sierra, learning their personalities by observation rather than dialogue. “Major Arcana” is a movie that shows, instead of tells.

What Melrod also delivers is a trio of fascinating performances. Bradbury pours a lot of acid into portraying Jean, a woman bitterly jealous of Dink’s temporary escape from this small town. Summers, a British actress best known for TV roles in “Boston Legal” and “Mercy Street,” plays the sad, soulful blue-collar Sierra with a lot of buried anger and regrets. And Tokarski is a find, bringing an inner fire to this roughhewn wanderer. Together, they give “Major Arcana” the weathered, comfortable feel of a night by the campfire, sharing stories with people you know, spilling their secrets. 

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‘Major Arcana’

★★★

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, language, and alcohol use. Running time: 82 minutes.

Review: Documentary 'Aggie' is a loving, but bland, look into the life of an arts patron and philanthropist

Being a good person doesn’t automatically make one a good subject for a documentary, as the meandering narrative of “Aggie” unfortunately proves.

The title figure is Agnes Gund, contemporary art collector, philanthropist, president emerita of the board of the Museum of Modern Art and chairwoman of MoMA’s offshoot PS1. She has befriended a great many artists over the years, starting with Roy Lichtenstein in the ‘60s through creative minds today. And, at 82, she seems as energetic and engaged as people half her age.

The problem with “Aggie,” the movie, is that the filmmaker — her daughter, Catherine Gund, who has directed such well-received documentaries as “What’s On Your Plate?” and “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity” — is too close to her subject, for obvious reasons, to extract much unknown information about Agnes. She tries to get around this by catching Agnes in conversation with other people, including radio reporter Maria Hinojosa, auteur John Waters, and three of Agnes’ grandchildren. But none of these “interviewers” dig deep into what makes Agnes tick.

The film’s structure is haphazard, roughly a chronological narrative of Agnes’ life, though taking some side roads into her childhood that don’t do enough to illuminate her work today. And that work — launching the Art and Justice Fund to battle mass incarceration, using the $165 million she got for selling a Lichtenstein painting in 2017 — is far too interesting to be left for the film’s last few minutes. What could have been the grist for an entire movie is treated like an infomercial tagged onto the end of a fond but forgettable portrait. 

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‘Aggie’

★★1/2

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 92 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 24, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Horror comedy 'Spontaneous' is a sardonic take on high school life, love, and death

The teen horror-comedy “Spontaneous” is “Heathers” for a generation that didn’t need “Heathers” — because today’s high-schoolers already have enough crap going on in their lives — but they, and anyone else watching, will dig the sharply anarchic humor of this tale of sudden love and even more sudden death.

It’s a normal day at Covington High School, where Mara Carlyle (Katherine Langford) sits at her desk half-listening to her teacher. When she drops her pen, she leans over to pick it up — and misses the moment when the girl sitting in front of her, Katelyn (Mellany Barros), suddenly explodes, her blood coating the walls and her classmates.

Everyone, naturally, freaks out and runs screaming into the hallways. Soon, the class is giving depositions at the police station, and handing over their bloody clothing as evidence. How long will they stay in custody, and in unflattering police-issued sweatpants? “When they know it’s not going to happen again,” Mara tells her classmates.

Once they’re released, something else happens to Mara: She gets a text from Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a shy classmate who, inspired by Katelyn’s unexpected death, decides to live for today — which means admitting his long-standing crush on Mara.

It doesn’t take long for Mara and Dylan to go from talking to hanging out with Mara’s BFF, Tess (Hayley Law), to falling in love. It also doesn’t take long for more students to explode spontaneously, just like Katelyn.

Writer and first-time director Brian Duffield (his writing credits include “The Divergent Series: Insurgent” and the Kristen Stewart thriller “Underwater”) adapts Aaron Starmer’s young-adult novel into a fast-moving, darkly comic tale of teens trying to maintain their wits, and their gallows humor, as the world suddenly stops making sense.

Duffield turns the comically bloody moments of instant human explosions into an all-purpose metaphor — representing, by turns, general get-a-page-in-the-yearbook tragedy, then teen suicide, and, later, school shootings. He also plays up the despairing impotence of the grown-ups, whether it’s government scientists, an exasperated FBI agent (Yvonne Orji), or Mara’s worried parents (Piper Perabo and Rob Huebel).

If you’re not yet on the Katherine Langford bandwagon — I missed seeing her in “13 Reasons Why,” but loved her in supporting roles in “Love, Simon” and “Knives Out” — this movie will seal the deal. The Australian actor is a delight here, capturing Mara’s sardonic humor in the first half, then carrying some heavy drama when necessary. Langford gives “Spontaneous” both a spicy kick and a surprising warmth.

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‘Spontaneous’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 2, in select theaters; streaming on VOD starting Tuesday, October 6. Rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, language and bloody images throughout. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: In documentary 'Dick Johnson Is Dead,' a daughter contemplates her father's old age and helps him have fun with dying

Director Kirsten Johnson’s intimate, funny and vital documentary “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is a living testament to a daughter’s love for her dad and the best “hug your family” message one can imagine.

Dick is Kirsten’s dad, and he’s not dead yet. But he’s in his mid-80s, and showing the signs of Alzheimer’s, and Kirsten knows it’s only a matter of time that Dad will be gone, mentally and then physically.

What does a filmmaker do with this heavy information? Fake his death. Over and over again. With her dad’s willing participation, a few make-up artists and some stunt doubles to make it look realistic.

Johnson (“Cameraperson”) also stages a funeral for her dad’s friends to pay their respects while he’s around to hear them. And she creates, on a soundstage, a version of heaven for him to enjoy — complete with dancers, confetti, and his favorite easy chair and ottoman.

In between the fabricated moments are real, raw and honest conversations about what it means for the Johnson family to watch their patriarch slowly fade away, to be gone before he’s gone. That happened with Kirsten’s mom, Katie Jo, and Dad knows that the same is likely for him.

Still, if one has to go — and dying is the one thing we’re all going to do someday — going in a fun way like this, surrounded by happy grandkids and lots of chocolate cake, is the nicest way to go. It’s the supreme irony of “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is that it shows how, in spirit, he’s never been more alive. 

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‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, October 2, streaming on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements and macabre images. Running time: 89 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Possessor' is a violent and mind-twisting thriller about identity, sex and bloody murder

With his second feature, the mind-twisting and relentless thriller “Possessor,” writer-director Brandon Cronenberg shows that the razor-filled apple doesn’t fall far from the twisted tree — his father, the legendary horror director David Cronenberg.

The younger Cronenberg seems to share some of his dad’s interest in body-horror suspense, and he wraps that gory tension around a thriller that explores the madness of messing with one’s identity.

The science-fiction premise Cronenberg imagines here is a smart one, even if it sounds akin to Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.” Tasya Vox, played by Andrea Riseborough, is an assassin with a special technique: Using machinery set up by a shadowy syndicate, Tasya can insert her consciousness into another person’s body, and use that person to get close enough to the mark to kill. Cronenberg sets up the premise with an efficiently brutal example, when Tasya takes over the body of a hostess (Gabrielle Graham) to murder a bigwig, then dissolves the link to make the hostess a patsy when the cops arrive.

Even in this prologue, Cronenberg leaves clues that Tasya is getting too good at this work, and is taking risks to make it fun for her. For example, though she arranged for her hostess to use a pistol in the killing, Tasya opts to dispatch her mark with a steak knife, stabbing him gleefully and repeatedly.

After that job, Tasya protests to her boss (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that she needs time off to reconnect with her estranged husband, Michael (Rossif Sutherland, son of Donald) and their boy, Ira (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot). But the boss has a big job ahead — and she needs her best killer, Tasya, on the job.

The new mark is Jonathan Parse (Sean Bean), founder of a major tech company that’s data-mining vast amounts of the country. The person Tasya must inhabit to pull off this assassination is Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), the put-upon boyfriend of Parse’s daughter, Ava (Tuppence Middleton). Tasya’s mission is to get inside Colin’s head, make him look like a disgruntled future son-in-law, then kill Jonathan and Ava. The glitch in the plan comes when Tasya has trouble keeping her personality separate from Colin’s, and vice versa.

Cronenberg makes the future-imperfect technology appear plausible, and thinks through the ramifications of such ego-shredding brain manipulation. He also deploys a trippy visual palette to make Tasya’s identity struggle come to vibrant, unsettling life. It’s not for the squeamish, with copious amounts of blood spilled and some raw sex scenes. (The movie is cleverly being marketed as “Possessor Uncut,” though I can’t find any evidence that the film, which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, has been exhibited in any “cut” form.)

Behind the spectacle, though, are a linked pair of sharp performances by Riseborough and Abbott, who are essentially playing the same characters, in one way or another. Their mounting confusion over who they are — Colin or Vasya or something else entirely — keeps the tension of “Possessor” like a tightrope all the way to the unsettling finale.

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‘Possessor’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, October 2, at Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (The District), and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality, violence and gore, and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Save Yourselves!' is a timely comedy about hipsters in isolation, fending off an alien attack

It’s the end of the world as the characters of “Save Yourselves!” know it, as this roughhewn comedy gleefully skewers urbanites’ over-reliance on technology.

Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) are a Brooklyn couple in a rut, and locked onto their screens. Su freaks out when Jack uses her laptop and messes with her browser tabs, which she keeps organized for her job as an assistant to an exceedingly demanding boss. Even a furtive make-out session gets sabotaged by the text-message alert.

After meeting up with an old friend, Raph (Ben Sinclair) — a former investment banker who now makes 3D-printed surfboards from algae in Nicaragua — Jack and Su talk about trying to shake up their lives. Their plan is to spend a week at Raph’s grandpa’s cabin upstate, turning off their phones to disconnect with the internet and reconnect with each other.

The trip gets off to a rocky start, as Jack criticizes the overly prepared Su for repeating lists of conversation starters she Googled and wrote in her notebook. During the argument, Su impulsively turns her phone on for a minute — which is when she gets the first hints that Earth is being invaded by aliens.

Then there are the killer pouffe balls — think a mix of “Star Trek’s” tribbles and the horror movie “Critters” — that show up around the cabin.

The writing-directing team of Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson set up a scenario as a vessel for semi-improvised panic comedy, as Su and Jack try to apply city skills to an end-of-the-world situation — and then freak out when they realize such skills have no practical applications. Their argument about whether to use the rifle Raph has in the basement is a miniature master class in comedic banter.

Fischer and Wilson paint themselves into a corner before the unsatisfying ending, but the ride before that is engaging — and the visual effects, considering the indie budget, are effective. The reason to watch, though, is to appreciate the comic gifts of the scruffy Reynolds (“Search Party”) and particularly the wide-eyed Mani (“Glow”) deployed to their fullest.

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‘Save Yourselves!’

★★★

Opening Friday, October 2, at Megaplex Gateway (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Rated R for language. Running time: 93 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 26, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Glorias' is a sprawling biography of Gloria Steinem, with four actors capturing the feminist icon's different facets

Director Julie Taymor takes the expansive route of biographical drama with “The Glorias,” trying to capture the sweep of the whole life of its subject, writer and feminist icon Gloria Steinem — which is both its strength and its weakness.

It’s a slight weakness because going from Steinem’s childhood in Toledo, Ohio, in the early 1940s to her appearance as an elder stateswoman at the Women’s March in Washington in 2017 is a long haul, and Taymor takes two-and-a-half hours to walk it. But the strength comes in Steinem’s world-changing story, and the flourishes Taymor — the woman who made “Frida,” “Across the Universe” and the Broadway version of “The Lion King” — brings to bear.

In the opening scene, Steinem — played by Julianne Moore — gets off a Greyhound bus in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and steps into a biker bar. She’s headed to the Lakota Sioux reservation, and the bartender informs her that 300,000 motorcycle enthusiasts are about to descend on the town. This would seem to be enemy territory for the world’s most famous feminist, but Steinem’s take-it-as-it-comes attitude comes to her aid unexpectedly.

In the early going, Taymor and co-writer Sara Ruhl show where Steinem got her adventurous streak, and her drive to fight for women’s equality. Taymor intercuts between Steinem’s childhood in Toledo and a college fellowship that took her to India.

In Ohio, an 8-year-old Steinem (played by Ryan Keira Armstrong) learns resilience from her father, Leo (Timothy Hutton), a happy-go-lucky traveling salesman with a scheme for every occasion. As a teen (played by “The Haunting of Hill House’s” Lulu Wilson), Gloria watches her mother, Ruth (Enid Graham), once a journalist before marriage, become diminished as she satisfies the social strictures of marriage. In India, Steinem (played by Alicia Vikander), rides the third-class trains with the poor Indians, and learns how to listen as women in villages tell their horrific stories of oppression, inequality, rape and abuse.

After that, the story goes roughly in chronological order, meaning Vikander gets to portray Steinem as a young journalist pitching stories and battling sexism in the 1960s — her exposé of working conditions as a Playboy bunny made her famous — while Moore takes over in the ‘70s, forming Ms. magazine, shifting from journalist to activist, and helping spur the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment.

These sections are dotted with Steinem’s friendships with leading figures of the women’s movement. These include: The activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monaé), who helps Gloria get over her fear of public speaking; the firebrand lawyer Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint); Cherokee Nation leader Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero); United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez); and — the most fun cameo of all — Bette Midler as the loudmouthed New York congresswoman, Bella Abzug.

It’s a sprawling biography, spanning decades and locations, and sometimes Taymor lets the pace slacken moving from moment to moment. As a connecting device, Taymor brings back that Greyhound, a metaphor for Steinem’s constant traveling and a place where all four actors playing Steinem can occasionally confer — the younger self admitting the doubts the older self long ago forgave, and so on. The bus metaphor strains a bit in places, but Taymor’s final shot on the bus is exhilarating.

The four actors all capture facets of Steinem perfectly, particularly in Vikander’s distillation of the young Gloria’s wide-eyed enthusiasm — which pairs perfectly with the middle-age perspective Moore adds to the mix. When the four tag-team a sexist TV interviewer, casting him into a vortex of his own chauvinism, it’s a capstone to a movie that displays the ferocious power of Steinem’s wit and hard-won wisdom.

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‘The Glorias’

★★★

Available starting Wednesday, September 30, streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated R for some language and brief lewd images. Running time: 147 minutes.