Review: 'Belly of the Beast' documents eugenics in a California prison, and introduces two heroes fighting to end it

Filmmaker Erika Cohn’s “Belly of the Beast” tackles a tough subject — the forced sterilization of women inmates at a California prison — with journalistic fire and sensitive artistry.

The statistics are harrowing: At one large California women’s prison, some 1,400 women between 1997 and 2013 were given hysterectomies, usually without their informed consent. And that number is part of a terrible tradition in California, where some 20,000 women — most of them Latina and indigenous — were sterilized against their will from 1903 to 1979. 

California’s eugenics program, meant to keep “undesirables” from having children, was so horrifically efficient that the Nazis in the early 1930s sent officials to California to learn the nuts-and-bolts of genocide.

But Cohn — a Salt Lake City native whose directing credits include “In Football We Trust,” about teens in Utah’s Polynesian community using football as a step to a better life, and “The Judge,” about the first woman jurist in a Palestinian Sharia court — isn’t just about the grim numbers. She finds two people whose stories illuminate this issue, and whose fight helps bring it to light.

One is Cynthia Chandler, an activist lawyer who represents women in this California prison, and whose Bay Area nonprofit, Justice Now, works to document how many women have been sterilized. The other is Kelli Dillon, a former inmate whose sad story — she was in prison for killing her abusive husband, and denied by a doctor’s decision to ever have more children — fuels her work as a domestic violence counselor who turns lobbyist to get California’s laws regarding prison sterilizations changed in the legislature.

With a combination of archival footage, animation, as-it-happens drama in Justice Now’s offices and in Sacramento, and collected audio of Chandler’s clients, Cohn describes the issue and digs into the personal lives of Chandler and Dillon. Cohn beautifully shows us both what they’re fighting for and what their personal stake is in seeing it through.

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‘Belly of the Beast’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, October 23, on virtual cinemas, including Salt Lake Film Society’s SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for descriptions of sexuality and violence, and for language. Running time: 82 minutes.

Review: 'Love and Monsters' is a post-apocalyptic YA tale with action, humor, and a solid performance by Dylan O'Brien

Young-adult romance meets post-apocalyptic action in “Love and Monsters,” a movie that isn’t nearly as boring as that title.

In the near future, an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth. Humanity figures out how to shoot rockets to destroy the asteroid, but fails to reckon with the chemical fallout from the rockets, which turn all cold-blooded creatures into mutated monsters — which then eat 95% of all humans on Earth.

We’re told all this, in sardonic college-kid fashion, by Joel Dawson (played by “The Maze Runner” star Dylan O’Brien), the least battle-ready member of a survivors’ colony in what used to be called California. Joel can’t hunt, freezing up when he needs to shoot his crossbow, but he makes a great minestrone and handles the radio — through which he finds Aimee (Jessica Henwick, formerly of Marvel’s “Iron Fist”), his high-school girlfriend seven years ago, before the mutants attacked.

Joel, feeling alone in a colony filled with couples, decides to risk death by trekking 85 miles to the coastal colony where Aimee lives. His friends in his colony don’t expect him to survive, and at first they would seem to be right, as Joel barely escapes the darting tongue of a giant toad and a few other creatures. Joel gets some help from two veteran surface dweller, old Clyde (Michael Rooker) and 8-year-old Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt), whose advice helps Joel make it to Aimee’s colony — where things don’t go as he hoped.

The screenplay, by Brian Duffield (who directed the recent YA horror comedy “Spontaneous”) and Matthew Robinson (“The Invention of Lying”), propels Joel from one harrowing adventure to the next, with a healthy dose of sarcastic humor. Director Michael Matthews, on his second feature (after a little-known Western from South Africa, “five Fingers for Marseilles”), balances the scares and jokes with some impressive visual effects and a consistent tone that suggests the end of the world isn’t worth losing one’s snarky attitude.

O’Brien is the key to “Love and Monsters,” since the story makes the audience his travel companions for the whole journey. Thankfully, O’Brien is an easygoing charmer, handsome without being too showy about it, who gives Joel a pleasantly self-deprecating side. He makes “Love and Monsters” worth the walk. 

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‘Love and Monsters’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 16, at theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for action/violence, language and some suggestive material. Running time: 109 minutes.

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.