Review: 'The Vigil' is a horror drama, based on Jewish folklore, that's both terrifying and thoughtful

Every culture has its demons, the things that scare people down to their souls — and writer-director Keith Thomas’s moody thriller “The Vigil” finds its intense shocks rooted in the folklore of Orthodox Judaism.

When we meet Yakov Rohen (played by Dave Davis), he’s working very hard to get away from his Orthodox Jewish past. He’s taking part in a support group for former members of the Orthodox community, and gets the attention of an attractive group member, Sarah (Malky Goldman). Outside the meeting, though, his former rabbi, Reb Shulem (Menashe Lustig), is very eager to talk to Yakov.

Reb Shulem needs Yakov’s help, and in a hurry. A neighbor, a reclusive Holocaust survivor named Rubin Litvak, has died, and there’s no one available to sit with the body until morning when the morticians arrive — a position called a Shomer. Reb Shulem offers Yakov $400 to be a Shomer for the night, and Yakov, who’s short on rent money, takes the job.

Entering the Litvak home, though, Yakov gets a desperate request to leave from Mrs. Litvak. (She’s played by the legendary Lynn Cohen, who died last year at age 86. You might recognize her as Miranda’s stern housekeeper Magda on “Sex and the City,” or as the veteran tribute Mags in “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” or as Golda Meir in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.”) But Yakov stays, and soon realizes the demons that beset Mr. Litvak in his life are looking for a new person to torment — and Yakov, still suffering from a trauma in his past, is a perfect candidate.

Thomas, directing his first feature, has a strong sense of pacing and atmosphere, and he’s able to build up the dread Yakov is experiencing and release the jump-out-of-your-seat scares a good horror movie needs. Thomas also steeps the film in the folklore and rituals of Orthodox Judaism, and uses that authenticity to make the scares somehow meaningful. “The Vigil,” in Thomas’ hands, becomes that rare horror movie that engages the brain while it delivers the terror.

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‘The Vigil’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, February 26, in theaters where open, and as a premium video-on-demand. Rated PG-13 for terror, some disturbing/violent images, thematic elements and brief strong language. Running time: 90 minutes; In English, and Yiddish and Hebrew, with subtitles.

Review: 'Silk Road' is a procedural slog through the plot to bring down a drug-dealing website.

It’s not a requirement that every movie have clearly drawn good guys and bad guys — but, for heaven’s sake, do they all need to be the unrelenting dirtbags we get in the based-on-a-true-story thriller “Silk Road”?

Director-screenwriter Tiller Russell aims to chronicle the rise and fall fo Silk Road, the “dark web” internet site that was called “eBay for drugs.” It was the brainchild of Ross Ulbricht (played by “Love, Simon” star Nick Robinson), a would-be philosopher who decides to put his libertarian views into practice by creating a site where one can go outside the view of the government to buy contraband, deploying untraceable internet routing and the then-trendy new cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

While Ulbricht is growing his illicit cyber business in Austin, Texas, over in Baltimore, washed-up DEA agent Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke) is frustrated. Taken off of undercover narcotics work, after his last assignment ended with him crashing a car and going to rehab for his cocaine habit, Bowden is shunted aside to the DEA’s cyber crimes division — where, because of his limited computer skills, he’s told by way-too-young supervisor (Will Ropp) to sit back and wait until his pension kicks in.

Instead, Bowden enlists one of his old informants (Darrell Britt-Gibson) to show him how Silk Road works, and ends up busting Ulbricht’s one-and-only employee, Curtis Green (Paul Walter Hauser), in, of all places, Spanish Fork, Utah. Along the way, Bowden gets in a text conversation with Ulbricht — under his cool code name, Dread Pirate Roberts — and pinches Silk Road’s Bitcoin escrow account, which is where Bowden starts thinking about taking the money and running.

Freely adapting his screenplay from David Kushner’s 2016 article in Rolling Stone — for example, Bowden is based on two law officers who went bad during the Feds’ pursuit of Ulbricht — Russell presents the twists and turns of Silk Road’s brief existence in plodding detail. What’s missing is any thoughtful examination of why Ulbricht would do all this, other than some self-serving narration about personal liberty that sounds like the most boring manifesto ever.

Attempts at providing motivation are pointlessly cliched, when they’re included at all. Robinson is given little to work with in his scenes where he gets stressed over his creation’s Zuckerbergian success or melodramatically ignoring his too-good-for-him girlfriend (Alexandra Shipp, another “Love, Simon” alum). “Silk Road,” whether as a keyboard-heavy police procedural or a character study of power corrupting, goes nowhere and takes far too long to get there.

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‘Silk Road’

★1/2

Opens Friday, February 19, at the Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), and other theaters where open, and as a video-on-demand rental. Rated R for pervasive language and drug content. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: This 'Blithe Spirit' adaptation isn't as light or as substantial as Noël Coward intended.

We don’t usually blame William Shakespeare when a production of “As You Like It” goes off the rails — but Noël Coward doesn’t completely get off the hook for the problems in “Blithe Spirit,” a pale adaptation of Coward’s 1941 farce.

On the other hand, the three credited screenwriters — Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard and Piers Ashworth — who messed around with Coward’s quick-witted dialogue may bear the blame, along with director Edward Hall, who strikes a dull visual tone that makes it hard to differentiate between the living and the recently deceased.

The movie’s ostensible hero is Charles Condomine (Dan Stevens), a crime novelist in 1937 who’s got writer’s block as he tries to adapt his first best-seller into a screenplay. He’s supposed to deliver a script to a demanding producer, Harold (Dave Johns), who happens to be the father of Charles’ prim-and-proper wife, Ruth (Isla Fisher). What Charles can’t admit, to Ruth or to himself, is that he hasn’t written a thing since his first wife, Elvira, died seven years earlier.

After seeing a stage show featuring a klutzy psychic, Madame Arcati (Judi Dench), Charles has the idea of incorporating a medium into his detective screenplay. To learn some of the patter, Charles invites Madame Arcati to the house for a private seance — which ends with Elvira materializing in the living room, visible only to Charles. Elvira is none too pleased with how Ruth has altered her old house, or with how Charles seems to have moved on from their passionate romance just because Elvira is, well, deceased.

Coward’s storyline feels painfully dated, and the efforts by the new writers to goose things up with references to the pre-war equivalent of Viagra seem to go in the wrong direction entirely.

The cast is game to zip through the dialogue and throw themselves into the various pratfalls. Alas, only Mann seems to be enjoying herself as the spectral first wife causing mischief. Next to her, nobody else in this “Blithe Spirit” has a ghost of a chance. 

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‘Blithe Spirit’

★★

Opens Friday, February 19, in theaters where open, and as a video-on-demand rental. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and some drug material. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Test Pattern' is a quietly moving look at sexual assault and its aftermath, and an assured debut for director Shatara Michelle Ford

In its quietly devastating way, first-time writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford’s drama “Test Pattern” cuts to the heart of an important topic — sexual assault and the further assaults suffered through the system.

Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) has just started her new job, as development director for the Austin Humane Society — a far cry from the dull-but-lucrative corporate job she had when she met her devoted boyfriend, Evan (Will Brill), a tattoo artist. It should be mentioned, because it comes up later, that Renesha is black and Evan is white.

After her first day at her new job, Renesha goes to meet her best friend Amber (Gail Bean) for a drink — and Evan begs off going along, sensing Amber is in need of a little girls’ night commiseration.

While Renesha and Amber are talking at the bar, a couple of guys — Mike (Drew Fuller) and Chris (Ben Levin) — start chatting them up, and are soon buying champagne for everyone. 

More booze and a gummy edible later, Renesha is barely staying on her feet. Mike offers to drive her home, and instead we’re in the opening scene of “Promising Young Woman” — without Renesha snapping out of it before it’s too late.

The next morning, Renesha is reunited with Evan, who sets a goal for them: Go to a clinic or hospital to get a rape kit and examination for Renesha. This leads to a Kafkaesque nightmare of health care bureaucracy and antiseptic waiting rooms, one to which Evan responds with more outward anger than Renesha does.

Renesha’s resignation seems to be the point, as Ford makes us bear silent witness to Renesha being victimized a second time by an unfeeling system. It’s quite late in the story, long after Renesha has stopped talking to the increasingly agitated Evan, that anyone — in this case, the nurse (Amani Starnes) who administers the forensic exam — speaks to her like a human being who’s just gone through a horrific trauma.

Ford allows some room to explore Evan’s emotions, predominantly the anger he feels that he can’t fix this, without taking away from Renesha’s story. And the movie includes ample flashbacks, to show how Renesha and Evan became a couple, and what’s at stake if an unspeakable event should shatter their beautiful life together.

In her brave filmmaking debut, Ford and Hall collaborate on a vast catalog of Renesha’s conflicting emotions — shame, anger, frustration at the system and at Evan for not dropping the matter — that inform each steps she takes to make sense out of a senseless act. “Test Pattern” is an intense experience, and an indicator that we should keep an eye on Ford when her next movie comes along. 

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‘Test Pattern’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, February 19, for streaming on the SLFS@Home virtual cinema. Not rated, but probably R for sexual violence, discussion of rape, and language. Running time: 83 minutes.

Review: 'Barb & Star' is a wacky comedy centered around two fierce, funny females

The power of friendship is at the heart of “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” a wickedly funny if sometimes scattershot comedy by real-life friends Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

Mumolo plays Barb and Wiig plays Star, middle-aged best pals, co-workers and roommates in their small Nebraska town. They spend practically every waking moment together, but they don’t mind because their favorite things include telling the other the smallest details of their lives.

One day, though, they lose their furniture-store jobs, and that same night are booted from their “talking club” by the officious Debbie (Vanessa Bayer). They need something to shake up their lives, so they follow a friend’s advice and book a trip to Vista Del Mar, a sun-dappled resort on Florida’s Gulf Coast. What could go wrong?

Well, unbeknownst to Barb and Star, an evil villain — also played by Wiig, in eggshell-white face makeup and a severe brunette wig — has hatched a dastardly plot to let loose a swarm of killer mosquitos onto Vista Del Mar. To carry out the details, the villain sends the assassin henchman she’s been stringing along for years, Edgar (Jamie Dornan), to carry out the details of the plot. But Edgar hasn’t calculated the devastating effect of meeting two Midwestern women with a penchant for culottes.

Watching “Barb & Star” feels as if Wiig and Mumolo, who co-wrote the 2011 classic “Bridesmaids,” have been talking to each other as these characters as a private joke for years, and someone decided to just film them doing the bit in a resort hotel. They seem so natural as comedy partners, each trusting the other to take the scenes in odd directions.

Director Josh Greenbaum — a TV and documentary veteran, making his first feature film — helps Wiig and Mumolo throw every wacky idea onto the screen, just to see what sticks. Some of the gags, like an opening bit with a kid (Reyn Doi) delivering newspapers and lip-synching Barbra Streisand, are offbeat enough to be funny. Other elements, like Damon Wayans’ not-too-bright spy character, fall flat.

But Greenbaum’s number one job is to not get in the way when Wiig and Mumolo get riffing as their off-the-wall characters. They so sweetly and hilariously inhabit these friendships that it seems they could make a series of their adventures. Where will Barb and Star go next? Zanzibar? Madagascar? Back to the U.S.S.R.? Wherever they go, we will follow them.

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‘Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar’

★★★

Available starting Friday, February 12, for streaming as a video-on-demand rental. Rated PG-13 for crude sexual content, drug use and some strong language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Judas and the Black Messiah' is an explosive tale of a Black Panther leader and the man who betrayed him to the FBI

History may be written by the winners, but movies about historical events — like the incendiary drama “Judas and the Black Messiah” — are an indication that the battle for hearts and minds is never over.

Director Shaka King takes a passage from recent history, chronicling a span from 1968 to 1969, recounting the career and assassination of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. It’s also, as the title suggests, a morality play, with a party member, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), turned by the FBI into Hampton’s betrayer.

As with Jesus, the title “black Messiah” isn’t one Hampton chose — it’s only used by the one undeniable villain in the piece, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen). So-called radicals like the Black Panthers — who practiced socialism and community building, as well as keeping plenty of firearms at the ready — were, in Hoover’s view, the biggest threat to (white) America’s way of life.

An ambitious young FBI agent, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), finds O’Neal facing an auto-theft charge — using a fake FBI badge to make the theft easier because “a badge is scarier than a gun.” Mitchell tells O’Neal he can avoid prison time if he infiltrates the Black Panther Party and brings back information to bring down Hampton.

O’Neal quickly works his way into the Illinois Black Panther Party, and gets a job as Hampton’s driver, using a car provided by the FBI. This gives O’Neal a front-row seat as Hampton tries to unite gangs in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods — Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Confederate flag-flying whites — against the “pigs,” police both from Chicago and Hoover’s bureau.

King, co-writing with Will Berson (with story credit to brothers Keith and Kenneth Lucas), gives us two sides of Hampton’s life. One is the public face, the fiery orator who tells followers the Panthers’ most powerful weapon is the people. The other is his private side, shown in his romance with Deborah Johnson (tenderly played by Dominique Fishback), a poet who helps Hampton perfect his rhetoric and reach more people.

King packs a lot into his movie — history, allegory, romance, suspense — and does so with an adrenaline-pumping pace, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s strong visuals and a production and costume design that bring the swinging ‘60s to life.

King structures this history like a Passion Play, with Hampton as Christ, O’Neal as Judas taking his silver, and Hoover’s boys as the Pharisees. There’s also a Last Supper, and a moment where O’Neal denies his connection to Hampton. And, as with some interpretations of Jesus’ crucifixion (“Jesus Christ Superstar” comes to mind), much of the drama comes from O’Neal’s torn feelings over what he’s doing — supporting the aims of Hampton’s cause, but corrupted into actions that will lead to a martyr’s death.

For this to work, both sides of the duo must be at their sharpest, and Kaluuya and Stanfield are. Kaluuya produces some forceful oratory, and he’s soulful and introspective in the quiet moments where Hampton contemplates the sacrifice he’s making for the cause. Stanfield gives an equally dynamic performance, as O’Neal tries to justify his betrayal and make peace with his guilt. Together, they make “Judas and the Black Messiah” one of the most intense movies you’ll see this year.

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‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

★★★★

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for violence and pervasive language. Running time: 126 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on February 1, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Minari' is a warm and wise look at a Korean family trying to make it in America

Culture clashes and family struggles are at the heart of “Minari,” an emotionally resonant drama from director-writer Lee Isaac Chung.

Jacob Yi (Stephen Yeun, formerly of “The Walking Dead”) and his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), are a Korean-born couple who have left California for Arkansas in the mid-1980s, to pursue Jacob’s dream of running his own farm. With them are their American-born kids, Ann (Noel Kate Cho), who’s about 11, and 7-year-old David (Alan Kim), who gets extra pampering and worry from Monica because he has a heart murmur.

Jacob is enthusiastic about the fresh start, from buying a new tractor to hiring Paul (Will Patton), a local laborer who practices his own eccentric brand of Christianity. Monica is less thrilled about the single-wide pre-fab home they are living in, though her spirits pick up when her mother (Youn Yuh Jung) comes to live with them, bringing Korean chili powder and a penchant for playing cards. David is reluctant to befriend Grandma, whom he’s never met, but they bond over planting seeds of minari, a Korean plant and on-the-nose metaphor that fares well wherever it’s sown.

Chung’s script runs the Yi family through hardships, both financial and marital, while also displaying David’s child’s-eye view of life in the South. Chung’s direction captures the details of life in Reagan’s America, of Sunday church services and summer heat waves. And the cast, particularly Yeun and Han as the couple struggling to stay together through hardship, is exceptional. 

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‘Minari’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open, and in virtual cinemas. Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and a rude gesture. Running time: 115 minutes; in English and in Korean, with subtitles.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 28, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Mauritanian' is an unflinching drama about one detainee's horrific time at Guantanamo Bay

In the harrowing true-life drama “The Mauritanian,” audiences are confronted with America’s foreign policy and its most horrific symbol of injustice and fear in the name of security: The American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Guantanamo Bay — a U.S. military base conveniently out of the reach of most American jurisprudence — is where Mohamedou Ould Salahi (played by Tahar Rahim) spends most of the 14-plus years in which he was held captive by U.S. forces. Detained by corrupt law officers in Mauritania, he is ultimately accused of being the recruiter for Al Qaeda who, while a student in Germany, befriended a couple of the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Salahi’s case, four years after that attack, becomes a high priority for the Bush administration, who want to see Salahi tried, convicted and executed. The prosecutor brought on board is Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch), a Marine attorney whose moral rectitude is as thick as his Southern accent.

Taking up Salahi’s defense is Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster), an ACLU attorney who sees in her client’s captivity a snake pit of constitutional violations. Aided by a young lawyer, Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), Hollander fights the secrets-obsessed bureaucracy surrounding Guantanamo, and convinces Salahi to write her letters that reveal the stomach-churning details of the interrogation techniques used on him.

Director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) pulls no punches in depicting the waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques of “enhanced interrogation” — or, as sensible people who aren’t hiding their crimes call it, torture. The description Macdonald and screenewriters M.B. Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani give to the torture Salahi suffered is frightening and infuriating.

In a cast with such heavyweights as Foster and Cumberbatch, Rahim (the star of the French prison drama “A Prophet”) is compelling, and Macdonald makes a wise choice to center the film around his performance. His take on the character is carefully ambiguous, so the audience isn’t sure for a long time whether Salahi is an innocent man caught in hell or a cagey terrorist sympathizer manipulating this situation for his own gain.

“The Mauritanian” isn’t likely to sway opinion about Guantanamo Bay or America’s shameful record of civil rights after 9/11 — those attitudes are too deeply engrained by now. But as a first-person account of the toll left by America’s embrace of such torture, the movie is thorough, arresting and alarming.

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‘The Mauritanian’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open. Rated R for violence including a sexual assault, and language. Running time: 129 minutes.