Review: The gray vistas of 'Ammonite' are hard to love, but Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan make this passionate romance worth a look

The romantic drama “Ammonite” is as hard and as brittle as the fossilized sea creatures that give the film its name. It’s also as beautiful, thanks to the intense collaboration between writer-director Francis Lee and his stars, Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.

Winslet plays Mary Anning, an archaeologist who spends her days seeking out fossils near the rocky shore near Dorset, sometime in the 1840s, and selling artifacts in a small shop — where she also lives with her ailing mum, Molly (Gemma Jones). One large fossil Mary found as a girl sits in a case in the British Museum, but otherwise her scientific gifts are ignored by the male-dominated establishment.

One day, a would-be member of that establishment, Roderick Murchison (James McArdle), comes to seek Mary’s tutelage in archaeology. Mary, in need of the money Roderick offers, takes him to the shore for a day and shows him the basics of fossil hunting.

Roderick soon returns, with another proposition: To ask Mary to take on his new wife, the frail Charlotte (played by Ronan) for a few weeks while Roderick goes abroad on an expedition. Again, the Annings need the money, so Mary reluctantly agrees. 

Mary has little use for an apprentice, particularly a sickly young woman, so she’s at first cool to this intruder on her solitude. But over time, something sparks between the taciturn fossil hunter and the delicate new bride — and a passionate, sexually charge romance blooms.

Lee, following up his justly acclaimed 2017 drama “God’s Own Country,” places this story in the rough, gray setting of mid-19th century Dorset, where Mary’s stern demeanor seems pounded into her by the rocks, the surf and the inescapable patriarchy. Mary is so used to disappointment and loneliness that she almost doesn’t know what to do — or say, hence the limited dialogue — when a tender flower like Charlotte enters her life.

That emotional astringency makes it difficult, at times, for a viewer to feel welcome as Mary and Charlotte’s relationship evolves. The keys, we discover, are the paired performances of Winslet and Ronan, who seem to radiate with the palpable magnetism that brings these disparate characters together. Their performances are what provide life within the period reserve of “Ammonite.”

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‘Ammonite’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 13, in theaters where open. Rated R for graphic sexuality, some graphic nudity and brief language. Running time: 118 minutes.

Review: 'Let Him Go' is a tense neo-Western with a hair trigger, and three great performances

Though a century removed from the Old West, writer-director Thomas Bezucha’s neo-Western drama “Let Him Go” carries the gruff beauty and hair-trigger violence of a classic Western — and boasts compelling performances by stars Diane Lane, Kevin Costner and Lesley Manville.

Lane and Costner play Margaret and George Blackledge, who live on a small ranch in eastern Montana sometime in the early 1950s. They share their home with their son, James (Ryan Bruce), his wife, Lorna (Kayli Carter), and their baby son, Jimmy. Life is pretty good there, though there’s some noticeable tension between Margaret and Lorna.

Two events, a year or so apart, change Margaret and George’s life radically. First, James dies in an accident at the ranch. Some time later, Lorna remarries, and Margaret discovers the new man, Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), is abusive to Lorna and Jimmy. It’s not long after this discovery that Margaret learns that Lorna, Donnie and Jimmy have left town, moving east to North Dakota, where Donnie’s family lives.

Margaret makes plans to go east to find her grandson, and George, a retired lawman, goes along to keep his wife out of trouble. And there’s plenty of trouble to be had, especially when the Blackledges encounter Manville’s character, Blanche, the steely matriarch of the Weboy clan — and it’s soon apparent the domineering Blanche will never let Jimmy out of her family’s influence.

In the movie’s first two-thirds, Bezucha — adapting Larry Watson’s 2013 novel — deploys a slow burn, as Margaret’s determination and George’s old-school detective work lead them to the Weboys. In the final third, that slow burn ignites a fuse, exploding into brutal violence and an inevitable showdown.

Lane has never been better, as Margaret’s grandmotherly concern grows into a lioness’s ferocious instinct. She shares some tender moments with Costner, as they together establish the rhythms of a decades-long marriage. The way they trade glances in the face of Blanche Weboy, played with oily menace by the British star Manville, is a masterclass in cooperative acting. The three stars make “Let Him Go” a spare, riveting drama that doesn’t let go of its audience.

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‘Let Him Go’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 6, in theaters where open. Rated R for violence. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Kindred' is a moody, broody suspense thriller that works, up until a dismal finale

The suspense thriller “Kindred” is an effective suspense thriller that features many of the essentials of the genre: A spooky mansion, death and mayhem, and the worst in-laws you’ve met in ages.

Charlotte (Tamara Lawrence) and Ben (Edward Holcroft) have a good, loving relationship. He’s a large-animal veterinarian, while she mucks out the stable — both at the English estate where Ben’s overbearing mom, Margaret (Fiona Shaw), rules the roost. 

Charlotte learns she’s pregnant, and she’s not entirely thrilled with the news. Ben’s excited about being a dad, but Charlotte worries she’ll be as bad as her mother, who’s referenced a lot here but never seen. Margaret is thrilled about having a grandchild, but bereft when Ben tells her they’re planning to leave England for Australia.

Not long after, Ben gets kicked in the head by one of the estate’s horses, and dies. That leaves Charlotte at the mercy of Margaret, who is determined to keep Charlotte in good health so she can have the baby. Margaret’s notions of health involve forced bed rest, making Charlotte a veritable prisoner in the mansion. Charlotte, suffering from fatigue and hallucinations, has to figure out whether she can trust Margaret’s overly attentive stepson, Thomas (Jack Lowden), or Jane (Chloe Pirrie), the estate’s horse trainer and Charlotte’s only friend.

Director Joe Marcantonio, a commercial director making his feature debut, deftly captures the sinister, slightly fetid atmosphere of Margaret’s mansion, turning it into a perfect setting for Charlotte’s nightmare pregnancy. The script, by Marcantonio and Jason McColgan, gives every character a moment to show they’re not all good or all bad, which gives the cast opportunities to glow. None is brighter, and at the same darker, than Shaw, a ferociously talented actress best known for “Killing Eve” and playing Harry Potter’s nasty Aunt Petunia.

If not for the movie’s finale, a painted-into-a-corner finish that seems needlessly cruel and inorganic to what’s happened before, “Kindred” could be one of the great thrillers of the last year. As it stands, it has a great build-up, and a somewhat aggravating finish. 

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‘Kindred’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 6, in theaters where open. Not rated, but probably R for violence, bloody images and language. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: Despite solid performances, historical drama 'Radium Girls' feels thin

It’s difficult to get a handle on what feels off about “Radium Girls,” a combination of sisterly melodrama, courtroom drama and historical tale that never comes together.

It’s 1925 in Orange, N.J., and the Cavallo sisters, Bessie (Joey King) and Josephine (Abby Quinn), earn what pennies they can to support themselves and their grandpa (Joe Grifasi) by working as “dial painters” at the local American Radium factory. They gets a penny a dial to paint the luminous dots on watch dials, which glow in the dark because of Marie Curie’s discovery, radium — which is also touted  by the boss, Mr. Roeder (John Bedford Lloyd), as “liquid sunshine,” a miracle substance that is sold as an over-the-counter medicine.

The girls at the factory are taking radium internally as part of their jobs. The technique for getting a fine point on their camel-hair paint brushes is to lick the brush between strokes — thus causing them to ingest bits of the radioactive substance. Some girls get sick and die, as Bessie and Jo’s sister Mary did three years earlier. Such deaths are diagnosed by the company doctor as syphilis, which is an effective lie because the girls who get sick don’t want to talk about it publicly.

When the company doctor (Neal Huff) examines Jo, who is feeling anemic and losing teeth, he makes the same diagnosis — which doesn’t fly, because Jo’s a virgin. Bessie, who would rather talk about Rudolph Valentino, meets a cute guy, Walt (Colin Kelly-Sordelet), who’s a Communist, and spurs Bessie toward activism. As Jo gets more ill, Bessie enlists a labor organizer, Wiley Stephens (Cara Seymour), to find other girls and mount a lawsuit against American Radium.

Rookie screenwriters Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw present a highly fictionalized, and greatly simplified, version of the Radium Girls’ story — as they went from lowly factory workers to media darlings. The narrative is sanded smooth of any rough edges, and complex motivations are boiled down to justice vs. money.

Mohler shares directing credit with Lydia Dean Pilcher, one of the film’s producers, and the barebones production design makes one wonder if there were budgetary conflicts at work. (There’s a wealth of public-domain 1920s newsreel clips that take the place of establishing shots.) The production is so threadbare that it feels like the actors are playing actors and this is the movie-in-a-movie they’re making.

That said, there’s plenty of solid work in the lead performances by King (who’s grown up a lot from “Ramona and Beezus”) as Bessie, letting her inner Mother Jones blossom, and by Quinn (the milkshake girl in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”), who gives Jo a rebel spark even when saddled with having to portray someone with a terminal illness. They give “Radium Girls” a spirit and fire that outdoes the cast’s paltry surroundings. 

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‘Radium Girls’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 6, in Salt Lake Film Society’s virtual cinema, SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for bloody images, sexual dialogue and some language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: Thriller 'Come Play' details the fears of a mother trying to reach her autistic son

An autistic boy and his parents must confront monsters and other terrors in “Come Play,” a sharp and tense debut from director-writer Jacob Chase.

Oliver — played by Azhy Robertson, who portrayed the son at the heart of the custody dispute in Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” — is a third-grader who has non-verbal autism. He works to integrate into a regular school, with an aide and a speaking app on his smartphone. But he has no friends, with one kid, Byron (Winslow Fegley, recently seen in “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made” on Disney+), going out of his way to bully him.

Things at home aren’t going well, either. His mom, Sarah (Gillian Jacobs), labors to do everything to help him, and gets exasperated at her less-than-attentive husband, Marty (John Gallagher Jr.), to the point where he’s sleeping on the couch most nights.

One day, Byron tosses Oliver’s phone, his only communications lifeline, into a field. His dad soon provides a replacement: A tablet that he liberated from the lost-and-found at his dead-end late-shift job as a parking-lot attendant. The tablet soon delivers something strange: A story about  “misunderstood monsters,” specifically Larry, a lonely creature who just wants a friend. But there’s something sinister about this e-book Babadook, which Oliver senses but has trouble communicating that dread to his parents.

Chase, who adapted his feature debut from an earlier short, generates some well-earned jump scares as he incorporates this old-school creeper into an augmented-reality monster — a creature who appears on a screen, but is invisible but dangerous in the physical world. The work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to make lonely Larry appear realistically terrifying.

The atmosphere is deepened by the movie’s sensitive handling of Oliver’s autism. The plot hinges, in part, on Sarah’s understanding of what Oliver needs and how he communicates — which involves the recurring mention of “SpongeBob SquarePants.” (You may scoff, but there’s something to this, as anyone who saw the documentary “Life, Animated,” can confirm.) 

Jacobs’ performance is perfectly grounded, and attuned to Robertson’s incredible portrayal of Oliver, which never lets the character become just the sum of his awkward tics. As “Come Play” unfolds, it does more than deliver some Halloween chills, but it reminds us that there’s nothing scarier to a mother than something bad happening to her child.

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‘Come Play’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for terror, frightening images and some language. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: British thriller 'His House' is a smart, disturbing tale of refugees and the ghosts they carry with them

Writer-director Remi Weekes’ assured debut, “His House,” is a gripping suspense thriller about the demons we have to defeat and the ghosts we have to accept.

The Majurs, Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaka), have left their home in South Sudan as refugees, where their tribe was being massacred in a civil war. They survived a treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean, in which their daughter drowned en route. Now they have been given asylum in the United Kingdom, in a rundown rowhouse outside London, under tight regulations that include weekly check-ins with their caseworker, Mark (Matt Smith, of “The Crown” and “Doctor Who”).

Settling in is not too easy for the couple. Some of this is dealing with their new life in England, like when Rial gets lost in her new neighborhood and are harassed by some Black teens who tell her to “go back to Africa.” 

The bigger problem, though, comes as Bol hears bumps and noises in the walls, and soon realizes there’s something looking at him. Actually, several somethings. All of them tie back to the Majors’ escape from South Sudan, and a secret that haunts them more literally than they realize.

Weekes, who debuted this film at this year’s Sundance Film Festval, turns his simple horror tricks into a brooding meditation on the Majurs’ disorientation at their new home and the survivors’ guilt that lingers because they made it there. Weekes’ imaginative staging of what’s tormenting Bol and Rial creates one of the most chilling atmospheres I’ve seen in a while.

Dirisu, who started in Cinemax’s “Gangs of London” and AMC’s “Humans,” neatly captures the spirit of someone determined make a home and conquer every obstacle, including his memories. He’s well matched by Mosaku, who just wowed fans of HBO’s “Lovecraft Country,” playing the blues singer Ruby, and here conveys Rial’s conflicting emotions with an economy of gestures. With Weekes, the two leads make “His House” an emotionally devastating place to stay.

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‘His House’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, October 30, streaming on Netflix. Not rated, but probably R for terror, violence, disturbing images and some language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: Horror thriller 'Spell' traffics in lazy cliches, which cheapen its scares

With the horror thriller “Spell,” the needle on the cliche meter ticks into the red far too often, making the chills lukewarm at best.

Marquis T. Woods, played by Omari Hardwick (“Power,” “Sorry to Bother You”), is a brash, successful young lawyer, who gets a call that his long-estranged father has died back in Appalachia. To settle his estate, Marquis decides to fly his small plane down to the holler he left behind — taking along his wife, Veora (Lorraine Burroughs), and their two teen children, Samsara (Hannah Gonera) and Tydon (Kalifa Burton).

After a refueling stop at the only gas pump for miles around, the family’s plane runs into a storm and crashes. Marquis wakes up in a bed in a strange attic, his feet and hands bandaged and bloody. His family is nowhere to be seen.

Enter the owner of the attic, Miss Eloise (Loretta Devine), who’s down-home hill folk, sporting an exaggerated country accent that would make a viewer think Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Jemima were still viable commercial brands. I don’t fault Devine for such stereotyping; I reserve that for the director, Mark Tonderai, a Zimbabwean-born Brit with several TV credits (“Locke & Key,” “Gotham” and others), and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (who’s responsible for the remakes of “Total Recall” and “Point Break”). 

Take it as a given that Miss Eloise isn’t as nice as her cornpone dialect and folk remedies would make her out to be. Also take it as a given that the screenplay has to make her not only mean but also stupid — so that Marquis can escape from this attic and uncover her dark secrets.

For a thriller like this to work, the filmmakers have to assume the audience aren’t drooling idiots, but instead will be a step ahead of the characters if they get the chance. Alas, from its thin plotting to the underwritten one-note characters, “Spell” aims for the dumbest common denominator, which is too low to be worth the effort.

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‘Spell’

★★

Opens Friday, October 30, in theaters where open. Rated R for violence, disturbing/bloody images, and language. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Synchronic' is a twisty thriller that goes in fascinating directions, and gives Anthony Mackie a meaty role to make his own

The thriller “Synchronic” brings a chilling atmosphere to an intriguing puzzle story, and represents a step up the ladder for the micro-budget masters Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (“The Endless”).

Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan star as Steve and Dennis, paramedics working the sleazier parts of New Orleans, riding their ambulance from one emergency situation to another. Dennis is the family man, married to Tara (Katie Aselton), with an 18-year-old daughter, Brianna (Ally Ioannides), and a new baby. Steve is a free agent, though he’s not bouncing back from drunken one-night stands as well as he used to, and soon learns he has an inoperable brain tumor.

On their calls, the paramedics have noticed a surge in overdose cases, particularly of a new designer drug, called Synchronic. When they’ve encountered people OD’ing from that drug, they’ve also noticed odd occurrences, like inexplicable wounds; for one woman, it’s a snake bite in a hotel room, while for one man, it’s a sword.

When Brianna goes missing, apparently after trying the drug, Steve takes it upon himself to find as much Synchronic as he can. He soon finds he’s got competition: A chemist, Dr. Kermani (Ramiz Monsef), who developed the drug and is now on a mission to destroy any remaining doses.

That’s when Steve figures out the secret of Synchronic. And, no, I’m not going to tell you the secret here. It’s worth discovering it along with Steve.

Benson and Moorhead are co-directors and co-editors (along with their regular co-director, Michael Felker). Benson is also the screenwriter, while Moorhead is the cinematographer. This division of labor means the filmmakers are attentive to every detail, from the squalor of New Orleans drug dens to the chatter on the ambulance’s radio — all of it building a gritty, authentic world in which the mystery plays out.

“Synchronic” works, though, because the filmmakers have put their trust in Mackie, and the man who now wields Captain America’s shield gives an effective performance as a man determined to find the answers no matter how weird things get. And they do get pretty weird in a story whose twists are always surprising but never too outlandish, which is a tricky balancing act.

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’Synchronic’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 23, in theaters where open. Rated R for drug content and language throughout, and for some violent/bloody images. Running time: 102 minutes.