Review: In 'Limbo,' filmmaker Ben Sharrock makes a strong debut with a funny and absurd story about refugees dealing with boredom and guilt

Finding the funny in a tragic situation, writer-director Ben Sharrock’s “Limbo” is an offbeat but oddly warm story of men trapped in a bureaucratic nowhere.

The men are all refugees from the Middle East and Africa, living on a remote island in Scotland, waiting for their asylum appeals to be approved. They spend their days waiting to use the island’s one pay phone — there being only one spot where the cellphone reception is better than the boat that took them across the Mediterranean — or taking lessons in cultural assimilation by a local couple, Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard). They spend their off hours finding items from the local donation center, such as the DVD set of “Friends” that sparks an argument between two African brothers (Kwabena Ansah and Ola Orebiyi) about the meaning of being “on a break.”

At the center of the film is Omar (Amir El-Masry), a refugee from war-ravaged Syria, who carries around his oud (sort of a round guitar) but never plays it, despite the urging of his perpetually chipper Afghani flatmate, Farhad (Vikash Bhai). As Sharrock takes us deeper into Omar’s story, we hear from his parents in Turkey, and hear about his brother, Nabil, who stayed in Syria to fight with the rebels.

Sharrock, in an impressively restrained feature debut, uses the absurd situation of strangers in an out-of-the-way little town to deadpan comic effect. Think “Schitt’s Creek” by way of “Napoleon Dynamite,” and you get a sense of the vibe Sharrock creates.

At the same time, though, Sharrock never forgets the tragedies and pain these characters have suffered to get to this point. He lets his talented actors, particularly El-Masry and Bhai, play through their conflicting emotions: Boredom because they cannot seek employment, frustration that their asylum approval letter never comes, and anxiety that it will come with bad news. They may be stuck in “Limbo,” but the viewer may delight in where they’ve landed.

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‘Limbo’ 

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 30, in theaters where open. Rated R for language. Running time: 104 minutes; in English and in Arabic, with subtitles.

Review: 'Separation' is effective as a horror movie, and as a drama about divorce and death through a little girl's eyes

As a horror movie, director William Brent Bell’s “Separation” is an effective dispenser of creepy atmosphere and unsettling shocks — but as an allegory for the emotional trauma of divorce and grief, it’s got a little more going on upstairs than the average gorefest.

The Vahns, from the outside, would seem to have a perfect family. Mom, Maggie (Mamie Gummer), works in her father’s law firm, while the dad, Jeff (Rupert Friend), works from home as a comic-book artist and watches their 8-year-old daughter, Jenny (Violet McGraw). 

But from within, there are tensions. Jenny hears them at night when her parents argue. Maggie is angry at Jeff for not growing up and getting a real job, and spending more time talking about art with Jenny’s babysitter, Samantha (Madeline Brewer), than keeping Jenny from playing in the attic of their Brooklyn brownstone.

Maggie and Jeff are on the verge of divorce, with Maggie’s dad, Paul (Brian Cox, owning every scene he’s in), backing up his daughter’s desire for sole custody of Jenny. Then Maggie is suddenly killed, run over by an SUV. Jeff tries to help Jenny grieve her mother’s death, though he’s also dealing with that emotional weight — as well as finding a job at a comics publisher, run by an old pal (Eric T. Miller), so he can keep Paul from continuing his fight for custody of Jenny.

Jenny, for her part, takes comfort in her toys — many of them based on the creepy, Tim Burton-esque characters from the comic Jeff and Maggie created before Jenny was born. But there’s something about those characters that’s different now, as if they have minds and vengeful agendas of their own.

Bell — whose last credits were the spooky doll movie “The Boy” and its sequel, “Brahms: The Boy II” — knows how to pull dread out of the air, and he orchestrates the oppressive atmosphere and the periodic scares with masterful precision. He also is smart about how he presents the themes in the script, by first-time feature writers Nick Amadeus and Josh Braun, of divorce and death seen through a child’s eyes. The result is a scary movie that’s also a thoughtful one.

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‘Separation’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 30, in theaters where open. Rated R for language, some violence, and brief drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Mortal Kombat,' a visually stunning and bloody take on the video game, only works when it's not taking itself seriously

A quarter century later, and moviemakers still haven’t figured out what to do with the video game franchise “Mortal Kombat” — a ridiculous and violent martial arts game that has been turned into a movie that’s still violent but not quite ridiculous enough.

If you’re familiar with the game, which turns 30 next year, it’s a gathering of fighters who square off, one-on-one, for martial arts battles. What makes the fights legendary are the characters’ finishing moves — which, if your parents didn’t know you were playing, usually involved gross bodily injuries like tearing out someone’s heart or pulling out someone’s spine. 

Over the years, and many reiterations of the game, a mythology has grown to explain why the people are fighting each other. Here, it’s explained that the fighters of the Earthrealm (that’s us) battle other worlds in a tournament — and the nasty Outworld fighters, led by the sorcerer Shang Tsung (played by Chinese actor Chin Han), have won the last nine tournaments; one more, and they will rule Earth forever.

The movie starts instead with one of Shang Tsung’s stable of fighters, Bi-Han (played by Indonesian action star Joe Taslim), wreaking bloody havoc on the family of the warrior Hanso Hasashi (played by Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada) in 17th century Japan. Bi-Han — who later takes the fighting name Sub-Zero, due to his freezing powers — defeats Hasashi, and with him his entire bloodline. Or so he thinks; the mystical Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) descends to find Hasashi’s family hid Hanso’s baby daughter from Bi-Han, so the bloodline survives.

Cut to the present day, and a whole new set of characters to learn. The central character now is one not in the game: Cole Young (played by Lewis Tan), an MMA fighter who’s too undisciplined to win in the cage. But he bears the symbol of the dragon, and according to another warrior, Jax (Mehcad Brooks, from “Supergirl”), that means he’s been chosen to fight in Mortal Kombat. Jax also warns Cole that Sub-Zero is trying to kill all the Earth fighters before the tournament, and that Cole’s wife Allison (Laura Brent) and 12-year-old daughter Emily (Matilda Kimber) are in danger.

After finding a safe spot for his family, Cole finds Jax’s friend Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), who’s both a strong fighter and a human plot-exposition dispenser. Sonya also has chained up Kano (Josh Larsen), an Australian mercenary who also has the dragon mark — though, we’re informed, he got it by killing another prospective warrior. Sonya and Cole reluctantly team up with Kano to find the secret training center for Earth’s defenders in the tournament — led by the powerful fighters Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Kung Lao (Max Huang).

Confused? Don’t be, it’s not worth the trouble. Just know that the forces of good are preparing for battle with Shang Tsung’s minions, who include the four-armed giant Goro. And Liu Kang and Kung Lao are trying to get their team battle-ready and motivated, by unleashing their hidden superpower — because why just fight when you can fight by throwing balls of fire or shooting a laser out of your eye.

Director Simon McQuoid is making his feature debut here, but he’s got an extensive resumé in commercials and video games. His focus is on capturing the game’s atmosphere and icons with up-to-date computer graphics, and fans of the game will recognize certain catchphrases and battle moves. Fans will also appreciate how McQuoid, in a departure from the sanitized 1995 movie, has transferred the game’s hyper-violence and spurting blood intact.

The gushers of blood become almost comical, in a movie that could use more humor. “Mortal Kombat” was always a ludicrous, over-the-top game — and the overwhelming flaw of this movie adaptation is that McQuoid and his crew take it all too seriously. When the movie sticks to the martial-arts action and the cartoonishly gory dispatching of bad guys, it’s not so bad.

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‘Mortal Kombat

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 23, in theaters where open, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, and some crude references. Running time: 110 minutes; in English, with some scenes in Japanese and Chinese with subtitles. 

Review: 'Together Together' is a smart, sly comedy about relationships as a transaction, with a breakout comic performance by Patti Harrison

Writer-director Nikole Beckwith fashions a new genre — the platonic romantic comedy — in “Together Together,” a wry comedy about the transactional nature of relationships.

The relationship at the center of this film is literally transactional: Matt (Ed Helms), a successful middle-aged app designer, hires Anna (Patti Harrison), a 26-year-old barista, to be the gestational surrogate to carry his baby. The $15,000 fee, Anna believes, will allow her to finish the college degree that was derailed when she got pregnant as a teen (she put the baby up for adoption).

Anna aims to live her life as normally as possible, given that her belly is gradually swelling. But Matt can’t help but micromanage, concerned that she eats properly and so on. When Matt tries to surprise Anna at her apartment, and sees a guy leaving, an argument ensues about whether sex during pregnancy is safe. “You know the baby is not in my vagina, right?” Anna asks Matt, as these two people realize they’re thrown together in an incredibly intimate relationship with an expiration date.

Beckwith (whose “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015) is clearly influenced by Woody Allen movies — she even uses the same typeface in the credits — while also commenting humorously and pointedly about the male gaze that dominates Allen’s work. Where Allen’s sympathies would have been entirely with Matt, Beckwith levels the playing field by focusing on Anna’s feelings and experience.

Beckwith creates some quietly funny scenes between Helms and Harrison, as they navigate Matt’s involvement in the pregnancy and how close Anna allows herself to get to Matt. The movie’s final shot is a heartbreaker.

Helms is in his wheelhouse as Matt, the nerdy 40-something trying to rein in his enthusiasm and failing. For people who aren’t fans of Harrison’s work in “Shrill” or “Big Mouth” (where she’s a staff writer), this performance is eye-opening, as she navigates the emotional and physical changes of this pregnant pause in Anna’s life.

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‘Together Together’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, April 23, in theaters where open. Rated R for some sexual references and language. Running time: 90 minutes.

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This review first appeared on this site on January 31, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'In the Earth' considers modern terrors before opening up to a hallucinatory horror ride

Modern fears give way to ancient ones in “In the Earth,” a trippy lost-in-the-woods horror thriller that lives in the middle ground between David Lynch and “The Blair Witch Project.”

In a remote English forest, far from where a viral outbreak is decimating cities, scientist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) has arrived to help solve a mystery: What happened to Martin’s former mentor, Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who went into the woods and lost contact with the outside. Martin starts a two-day hike to Dr. Wendle’s last known location, with a park ranger, Alma (Ellora Torchia), as his guide on the two-day hike.

On the second day, Martin and Alma are bludgeoned by an unseen attacker. When they wake up, their shoes are gone, Martin’s scientific equipment is trashed, and they’re lost. Soon they are befriended by a hermit, Zach (Reece Shearsmith, late of the UK comedy “The League of Gentlemen”), whose goodwill hides a darker motive.

Writer-director Ben Wheatley, whose past credits include the dystopian “High-Rise” and the guns-ablazin’ “Free Fire,” filmed this movie in a COVID-19 “bubble,” and the eerie dissonance of our pandemic-ruled lives envelops the early scenes of Martin’s arrival. But Wheatley soon plunges his characters, and his audience, into more traditional terrors — shadows in the forest, ancient books, strange noises and the paired madness of Zach’s and Dr. Wendle’s obsessions.

There’s a hallucinogenic quality to Wheatley’s images, as Martin and Alma try to reckon with things they can’t quite believe are happening. Some of those things are bloody and gory, others are just plain weird, and audiences may be torn as to how effective or inscrutable it all becomes. Viewers may find what they get out of “In the Earth” depends on what expectations they bring to it.

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‘In the Earth’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 16, in theaters where open. Rated R for strong violent content, grisly images, and language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Vanquish' puts Ruby Rose on a motorcycle, Morgan Freeman in a wheelchair, and the audience in a coma

It’s hard to fathom how many things can go wrong in a movie as thoroughly and consistently as they go wrong in “Vanquish,” an organized crime thriller curiously devoid of thrills.

Morgan Freeman has top billing, playing Damon, a retired police commissioner who’s paralyzed and in a wheelchair in his expansive waterfront mansion. The only person he trusts is his caretaker, Victoria (Ruby Rose), a single mom who frets over getting medical care for her daughter, Lily (Juju Journey Brener).

On this night, though, Victoria learns that Damon, despite his hero-cop reputation, is the godfather of the city’s crooked cops — who are feeling an FBI agent, Monroe (Patrick Muldoon), breathing down their necks. Damon asks Victoria to run a series of errands, “five stops, five pickups,” to collect money from Damon’s various criminal enterprises. When Victoria refuses, Damon forces her into it by holding Lily hostage.

What the audience soon learns is that Victoria is no ordinary caretaker. She’s got a dark past of con games, double crosses and murder. And at each of the five stops, she’s going to encounter people from her past life, and some old scores are going to be settled.

The premise is OK; heck, Jackie Chan has worked magic with less. But director George Gallo, who wrote the classic buddy-chase “Midnight Run” and directed the atrocious Nicolas Cage vehicle “Trapped in Paradise,” seems singularly incapable of staging an action sequence. 

Gallo’s idea of a street chase involves Rose (or her stunt double) whirring along on her motorcycle in front of cars moving a good 20 mph. Gallo doesn’t even try to mount a decent hand-to-hand fight, something at which Rose was fairly adept during her one season as Batwoman. The only time she springs to action is when Victoria is drugged, and then lands in a “Scarface”-sized pile of cocaine — which produces the same effect as a can of spinach to Popeye.

Without any action sequences, Gallo relies on Rose’s acting and charisma, which turns out to be a severe miscalculation. Meanwhile, Freeman looks like he signed on for maybe two days’ work — and spends almost all of it i one room, sitting in a motorized wheelchair.

At a brief 94 minutes, “Vanquish” feels padded to the gills. Maybe it’s the six-minute credit sequence, that uses newspaper headlines and too much percussion to lay out Damon’s unnecessarily elaborate backstory. Or maybe it’s how every time Victoria jumps on her bike to her next pickup, she has flashbacks to things we saw three minutes earlier. Either way, Gallo’s ineptitude is on glaring display, in a movie that will soon fulfill its destiny as one of those titles you skip past on Netflix on the way to something else.

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‘Vanquish’

★

Opens Friday, April 16, in select theaters; on digital VOD starting Tuesday, April 20. Rated R for bloody violence, language, some sexual material and drug use. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Voyagers' is a teen-driven science-fiction parable that never really gets off the ground

As slick and as antiseptic as the spaceship where it all happens, the science-fiction parable “Voyagers” has a lot of big ideas but none of the emotional heft needed to make those ideas resonate.

Starting in 2063, scientists have found a new Earth-like planet that could be humanity’s last chance for survival — though there’s little evidence shown of our current planet’s looming apocalypse other than the furrowed looks given by one scientist, Richard (Colin Farrell). Richard leads a plan to raise a crew, from in vitro, that will begin the 86-year journey to the new planet and sire the second and third generations that will finish the trip. When the children are about 11 or so, they take off in their spaceship, with Richard as their teacher and leader.

Ten years later, Richard is in charge of a crew of 30 teen-agers, whose emotions and hormones are kept in check using a daily drug called The Blue. When two bright boys, Christopher (Tye Sheridan, from “Ready Player One”) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead, from “Dunkirk”), figure out they’re all being drugged into docile worker bees, and decide to stop taking The Blue. Soon they’re getting rebellious and aggressive, with much of that alpha-male energy directed at the ship’s teen medical officer, Sela (Lily-Rose Depp).

Then something bad happens to Richard, and the crew votes Christopher as the new leader — which rankles Zac, and begins a power struggle that’s somewhere between the U.S. Capitol insurrection and “Lord of the Flies.”

Writer-director Neil Burger (“Limitless,” “Divergent”) expertly sets the table for this science-fiction parable about the seductive nature of power, and what happens when libidinous teens are given free rein to follow their impulses. The early scenes with Farrell are touching, as Richard labors to keep everything under control while practically acknowledging how impossible that task is.

But once Farrell is out of the picture, the movie sputters to find a new groove. It’s as if the actors are still under the influence of The Blue, barely being expressive when the story calls for heightened emotions. Even with a talented cast of mostly fresh faces — the most recognizable is Isaach Hempstead Wright, Bran Stark from “Game of Thrones” — Burger can’t propel “Voyagers” to reach escape velocity.

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‘Voyagers’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 9, in theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for violence, some strong sexuality, bloody images, a sexual assault and brief strong language. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Shiva Baby' is a painfully funny comedy, set during a Jewish funeral, that builds its tension like a thriller.

Writer-director Emma Seligman makes a strong feature debut with “Shiva Baby,” a deliciously and painfully tense comedy following one young woman through the torture of the post-funeral reception.

Danielle, played by Rachel Sennott, has survived into her 20s by compartmentalizing her life. She lives with her parents, Debbie (Polly Draper) and Joel (Fred Melamed), while trying to finish college with her vaguely defined major. While her parents think she’s earning extra money babysitting, she’s really getting her cash by acting as occasional sex partner to a “sugar daddy,” Max (Danny Deferrari).

The day depicted in “Shiva Baby” starts with Danielle and Max having sex in Soho apartment. She leaves there to meet her parents for the shiva of a family friend — though she’s not quite clear on who the deceased is. What Danielle does know is that all of her mom’s friends are asking about her college career or her romantic prospects, both tender subjects that Danielle would rather avoid.

Debbie also warns Danielle “no funny business” at the shiva, especially when Danielle notices Maya (Molly Gordon) anter the room. Seligman doesn’t tell us much at first about Maya, but we suspect she and Danielle are either former high-school rivals or ex-girlfriends, or maybe a combination of the two.

Just as Danielle is beginning to grapple with how to explain her college life and whether to avoid Maya, someone else joins the party: Max, with his blonde overachieving wife, Kim (Dianna Agron, formerly of “Glee”), and their 18-month-old daughter in tow. It’s enough to make Danielle, a professed vegan, stress-eat a bagel with lox and a schemer.

Seligman, in expanding a 2018 short of the same name (and also starring Sennott), revels in the tension produced when Danielle watches the elements of her messy life come together after she’s spent so long keeping them separated. Seligman ratchets up the tension with Maria Rusches claustrophobic camera work, a tense score by Ariel Marx, and a thorough understanding of the gossipy undercurrents of a traditional shiva.

The supporting players — particularly Draper (“thirtysomething”), Melamed (“WandaVision”) and especially the scene-stealing Gordon (“Booksmart,” “The Broken Hearts Gallery”) — are terrific. But “Shiva Baby” belongs to Sennott, a burgeoning talent known for her comic Twitter videos and now playing Kyra Sedgwick’s daughter in the sitcom “Call Your Mother.” Sennott nails every facet of Danielle’s splintering life, and finds the frantic humanity through all of it.

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‘Shiva Baby’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, April 2, through the Salt Lake Film Society’s virtual cinema, SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably R for sexual content and language. Running time: 77 minutes.