Review: "2 Hearts" tells two stories of romance, but withholds the connection that makes the audience care

There’s a heartfelt, inspirational story buried somewhere within the based-on-a-true-story “2 Hearts,” if only director Lance Hool knew how to tell it with any clarity or authenticity.

The movie presents two parallel stories, and then takes its sweet time telling us how one connects to the other — enough time that anyone with any movie-watching experience should be able to figure it out.

One story centers on Chris Gregory (Jacob Elordi, from HBO’s “Euphoria”), a college student who, when we first meet him, is being wheeled into the emergency room, unconscious. The story flashes back to Chris as a high school senior, being lectured by his dad (Tahmoh Penikett) about his grades, and barely getting into Loyola University in Louisiana. At college, he becomes smitten by a senior student, Sam (Tiera Skovbye, from “Riverdale”) — and immediately volunteers to help with her campus safety patrol program.

Cutting away from this burgeoning college romance, the movie introduces us to Jorge Bolivar (Adan Canto), scion of a famous rum-making family. (If you know anything about liquor, you can probably guess the real family name, which somehow the filmmakers couldn’t use.) Jorge suffers from a congenital lung problem, and is told by doctors that he may not live past 20. Still, he makes it to his 30s, which is when he meets Leslie (Radha Mitchell), a Pan Am stewardess (they weren’t calling them “flight attendants” yet), and a whirlwind romance ensues.

There must be a way to present these parallel romances — and hint at the link that connects them — that isn’t as hamfisted as what Hool does here. He serves up painfully awkward transitions, time jumps that make the connection less believable, and gorgeous but dull scenery of tropical vacation spots from wherever Jorge has followed the Pan Am-flying Leslie.

There’s a sweet message after the central plot twist is revealed, about sacrifice and lasting effect of thinking beyond one’s own life. But one must slog through the contrivance and forced sentimentality of the script — by Robin U. Russin and Veronica Hool (one of several of the director’s family in the credits) — to get to it, and audiences shouldn’t have to hold their breath to get to it.

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‘2 Hearts’

★★

Opens Friday, October 16, at theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'The Kid Detective' turns Encyclopedia Brown upside down, for a weird stab at suburban noir

Writer-director Evan Morgan’s “The Kid Detective” is one of those rare films that could earn a one-star review or a four-star review, or anything in between — and a critic could find himself leaning one way on a particular day, and the other way just hours later.

Morgan’s suburban noir thriller centers on Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody), who was once the most talked-about 12-year-old in town, as a private detective who could solve any mystery brought before him — usually involving shenanigans at the school.

But that was 20 years ago, and he’s still a detective, but the town isn’t as impressed any more. His mom (Wendy Crewson) is still proud of his industrious brain, though his dad (Jonathan Whittaker) wishes he would get a real job. Abe also drinks a lot, and barely maintains his detective agency and pays his Goth secretary, Lucy (Sarah Sutherland, Keifer’s daughter).

Morgan tells us, fairly soon, what led to Abe’s downfall. It was the one case he couldn’t solve: His 14-year-old secretary, and the mayor’s daughter, Gracie Gulliver (Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato) was kidnapped. The whole town, and Abe himself, expected him to crack it. Instead, it cracked him.

Abe’s memories and insecurities resurface 20 years later, when a high school boy is stabbed and thrown into a river. The boy’s girlfriend, Caroline (Sophie Nélisse, all grown up from “The Book Thief”), hires Abe to find out who killed him.

The trail of clues leads Abe to the high school, a reunion with his old principal, Mr. Erwin (Peter MacNeill), and some harsh memories about his past cases — the one he couldn’t solve, and the ones he did solve that left a mark on the community.

As a first-time director, Morgan has trouble finding the right tone. Early on, we’re invited to think of Abe as a laughable screwball. The deeper the story goes, into some disturbing material, it’s hard not to think about when the movie was lulling us into a false sense of emotional security. And the ending is supposed to be an emotional gut punch, but it’s hard to feel it when the rest of the movie works to convince you that nothing really matters.

Like I said, though, “The Kid Detective” carries a high “your mileage may vary” quotient. Ask me in a week and I might hate it. Ask me in two weeks and I may defend it to the ends of the earth. It’s that kind of strangeness.

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‘The Kid Detective’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 16, at theaters where open. Rated R for language, drug use, some sexual references, brief nudity and violence. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: Long-shelved 'The War With Grandpa' is all pratfalls and cartoonish humor, without a laugh to be had

At 77, Robert De Niro has built enough of a reputation as one of America’s greatest actors that he should be able to say “no” occasionally — and the misbegotten, slapdash kiddie comedy “The War With Grandpa” is one of those occasions.

De Niro plays Ed, a retired contractor who, after one too many incidents at his local grocery store, is convinced by his daughter, Sally (Uma Thurman), that he should come live with her family. Then she has to break the news to her family — architect husband Arthur (Rob Riggle), teen daughter Mia (former Disney Channel star Laura Marano), youngest daughter Jenny (Poppy Gagnon), and sixth-grade son Peter (Oakes Fegley, from “Wonderstruck” and “Pete’s Dragon”).

Peter takes Grandpa’s arrival particularly hard, because he’s required to give up his bedroom to the old man and move into the attic. Peter does what any reasonable 12-year-old would do: He writes a declaration of war, to drive Grandpa out of the house and reclaim the room.

Grandpa, sensing a chance for a teaching moment about the futility of war, accepts Peter’s challenge, setting up ground rules: No tattling, and no collateral damage on the rest of the family. With that, the pranks begin — small at first, but escalating in scope and property damage, though not in comedic content. Peter is egged on by his fellow sixth-graders, while Grandpa forms a posse of sprightly senior citizens: His old buddy Jerry (Christopher Walken), Jerry’s friend Danny (Cheech Marin), and the surprisingly age-appropriate Diane (Jane Seymour). 

Director Tim Hill — whose resumé includes two terrible animation/live-action hybrids, “Alvin and the Chipmunks” (2007) and “Hop” (2011) — doesn’t fare much better when all the actors are flesh-and-blood. They’re all made to act like cartoons, mugging and over-reacting to the pratfalls they must take in service to a hackneyed script by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember.

The movie is adapted from a novel by Robert Kimmel Smith, who died in April. He may not have been lucky enough to miss this terrible movie, though — because it’s been on the shelf about as long as “The New Mutants” was. Blame production delays, and the fact that its original distributor was Dimension Films, a branch of Hollywood’s pariah corporation, The Weinstein Company. (Another distributor, 101 Studios, bought it off of Weinstein. No matter how much it cost, they paid too much.)

With a movie this ineptly handled and shamelessly predictable, a critic’s mind starts to wander into the actors’ prior connections. It’s interesting that this is the first movie to pair De Niro and Walken since “The Deer Hunter,” back in 1978. And it’s a curiosity to see De Niro playing father to Thurman, when in 1993 they were paired romantically in “Mad Dog and Glory,” when Thurman was 23 and De Niro was 50 — the age Thurman is now. 

“The War With Grandpa,” despite its nod toward nobility with its anti-war message, is a humorless mess of a movie. Skip it at the theaters, and don’t plant your kids in front of the TV when it lands on the small screen. That would be, I think, a violation of the Geneva Convention.

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‘The War With Grandpa’

★

Opening Friday, October 9, in theaters where open. Rated PG for rude humor, language, and some thematic elements. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: Utah-made 'The Wolf of Snow Hollow' is a psychological drama wrapped in a gory werewolf mystery

Monsters come in many forms, and in the sometimes comedic filmed-in-Utah horror thriller “The Wolf of Snow Hollow,” those monsters are both external and internal.

In a small Utah ski town, a couple is enjoying a getaway in a rental cabin — until P.J. (Jimmy Tatro) leaves the hot tub to take a shower, and doesn’t hear his girlfriend, Brianne (Annie Hamilton), being brutally attacked and dismembered. The one clue left by the killer is a bloody paw print, like a wolf’s, in the snow.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: In 'The Trial of the Chicago 7,' Aaron Sorkin makes a 50-year-old court case as lively as today's headlines

The old adage — that historical drama says more about the time it was made than the time it depicts — has hardly ever been more true than with writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” a riveting portrayal of events from 50 years ago that feels as vital as the latest news bulletin.

The Chicago 7, as we old people can tell you, were the leaders of the anti-war protests that arrived in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention — and ran headlong into Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago Police, which led to beatings, tear gas and arrests. The protesters chanted “The whole world is watching!” but it didn’t seem to matter, as the establishment Democrat, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, took the nomination, and then lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

Review: A writer reinvents herself in 'The Forty-Year-Old Version,' a comedy that introduces the world to the funny and captivating Radha Blank

Watching “The 40-Year-Old Version,” is hard not to fall a little in love with its writer-director-star Radha Blank, and to wish her debut feature worked better than it does.

Blank plays a character not unlike herself, a Brooklyn playwright trying to get her career on track. The play she’s writing is a tough-minded work about the effects of gentrification on married Harlem shipowners, but her options for producing it are a barely paying black theater or a rich white producer (Reed Birney) who will want her message watered down for rich white theater patrons.

Meanwhile, Radha is frustrated by her work teaching theater to high-school kids, while she’s facing 40 with no significant other and avoiding the pain of dealing with her late mother’s belongings.

What to do? Why, become a rapper, of course. She puts her anger into verse, and it sounds pretty good, if she says so herself. (The wry fourth-wall-breaking look at the camera tells us that.) She finds a DJ who goes by D (played by hip-hop musician Oswin Benjamin, in his acting debut), to lay down some beats for a potential mixtape — an idea that horrifies Radha’s agent Archie (Peter Kim), who has been Radha’s best friend since they were prom dates (she was his beard).

Blank aims to stuff so much into her movie that the elements work against each other. A subplot about a surly student (Imani Lewis) never pays off, for example. And the movie’s second half extends the joke about Radha’s compromised play far longer than is necessary. Maybe another pass through editing would tighten up the slack.

But there’s a lot to admire about “The 40-Year-Old Version,” from the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography to Kim’s funny supporting performance that puts a new twist on the sassy gay best friend. Blank herself is charismatic, witty and funny, and it’s too bad her movie blurs the line between self-empowering and self-indulgent.

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‘The Forty-Year-Old Version’

★★1/2

Available, starting Friday, October 9, streaming on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, some drug use and brief nudity. Running time: 129 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 27, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

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.