Review: 'No Time to Die' ends Daniel Craig's run as James Bond on a high note, and suggests possibilities for a franchise-era future

James Bond has fought and conquered the Soviets, gold-greedy thieves, monomaniacal villains bent on destroying humanity, global criminal conspiracies, the disco era, corporate greed, and someone giving the title “Octopussy” to one of his 25 movie adventures.

In the latest Bond movie, “No Time to Die” — the fifth and final outing for star Daniel Craig — Bond may finally have met his match: True love.

That’s how the movie starts, with Bond on a lovely Italian honeymoon with Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the psychiatrist with whom he rode away in 2015’s “Spectre.” This is a first for Bond — starting a movie with the woman with whom he was kissing at the end of the previous movie. This is an indicator of how the Broccoli family, who have been in charge of the Bond franchise since 1962’s “Dr. No,” has learned to adapt to the age of movie franchises and continuity spanning across movies.

“We have all the time in the world,” Bond tells Madeleine as they drive on a winding road. Tellingly, that was the last line Bond (then played by George Lazenby) spoke in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” after he married Tracy di Vincenzo (Diana Rigg), and she was assassinated by supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. So the current director, Cary Joji Fukunaga (“It: Chapter One,” “Beasts of No Nation”), and his writing crew know their Bond lore well.

Of course, they don’t have time — because someone has found the couple in this idyllic Italian town, and is trying to kill him. He survives, through some breakneck car chases and the franchise’s always-audacious stunt work, but the relationship does not. Bond believes Madeleine, the daughter of a deceased Spectre assassin, has somehow betrayed him, so he puts her on a train and they part ways.

Cut to five years later, and another evil plot is afoot. Someone has broken into a biological lab in a London skyscraper, stolen a deadly and secret technology, and kidnapped a Russian scientist, Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), who knows more about the big, bad biological weapon than he’s letting on.

It turns out that M (Ralph Fiennes), the head of the British spy agency MI6, also knows more about the biological weapon — and something called Project Heracles — than he is telling. For awhile, M stonewalls not only Bond, who has retired to a peaceful life in Jamaica, but the current holder of the 007 number, Nomi (Lashana Lynch).

Bond is coaxed out of retirement by his old CIA friend, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), to go to Cuba, where they believe Obruchev is hiding out — and where a meeting of all of Spectre’s top agents are gathering. With the help of a local operative, Paloma (Ana de Armas, Craig’s co-star from “Knives Out”), Bond infiltrates the shindig, which isn’t at all what it appears to be.

Eventually, Bond must confront the real bad guy of the film, the mastermind Lyutsifir Safin, played by Remi Malik. But to get there, Bond must cross paths with two figures from his past: Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), and the only person Blofeld will speak to while in the prison Bond put him in — his psychiatrist, Madeleine, who turns out to have some history of her own with Safin (as seen in the movie’s prologue).

That’s a whole lot of synopsis, and I barely scratched the surface of this sprawling, nearly three-hour movie, which hops from Italy to Jamaica to Cuba to London to Norway to a few more stops. But globe-hopping is as much a part of the Bond tradition as the stunts and car chases, and Fukunaga — rewriting a script by Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, with more writing from British comedian Phoebe Waller-Bridge — doesn’t skimp on what we like about these movies.

Malek makes an odd choice for a Bond villain, and he brings an unsettling stamp to Safin. He’s more comfortable telling Bond about his madman plans for world domination, and finds parallels between himself and Bond — both killers in the name of improving the world, Safin says, though his way is “a bit tidier.”

There are plenty of solid action pieces, though the most fun is when de Armas’ Paloma dispatches a foyer full of gunmen while wearing an evening gown. Thankfully, Craig’s is a Bond who’s secure enough in his manhood to let Paloma or Lynch’s Nomi shine — and strong enough to bring some emotional weight, and even tears, to 007’s world-saving mission.

Craig has made it clear this is his final go-round as Bond, and the movie leaves little room for doubt that the franchise will have to retool to continue. But the credits of “No Time to Die” end as all Bond movies do, with the words “James Bond will return” — and, whoever takes over the role, Craig has set a high bar while also leaving plenty of possibilities for what that return might look like. 

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‘No Time to Die’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive material. Running time: 163 minutes.

Review: 'Dear Evan Hansen' is a misguided mess of a musical, whose sincere moments can't make up for its many errors

We can talk about how Ben Platt, who turns 28 on the day “Dear Evan Hansen” arrives in U.S. theaters, looks creepily miscast as the 17-year-old title character he brought to life on Broadway. But, really, that’s not the worst element of this misguided musical about depression, grief and the need to find meaning in the unfathomable.

The story starts with Platt’s Evan, whose social anxiety and depression have led his overworked mom, Heidi (Julianne Moore), to get him to see a therapist — who has prescribed several antidepressants, and has assigned him to write letters of encouragement to himself every day. Evan is walking into the first day of his senior year of high school with his arm in a cast, the result of a fall from a tree during his summer job.

Only one person in the class asks to sign Evan’s cast, and it’s Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan), a rage-filled classmate who only signs it “so we can both pretend we have a friend.” Moments later, when Connor intercepts a printout of Evan’s latest letter to himself, Connor erupts again, thinking Evan is trying to mock Connor by including comments about Connor’s sister, Zoe (“Booksmart’s” Kaitlyn Dever) — on whom Evan has a crush. Connor takes the letter, and Evan fears it will be all over social media by the weekend.

When Evan returns to school, he meets Connor’s mom, Cynthia (Amy Adams), and stepdad, Larry (Danny Pino), who deliver the news that Connor died by suicide — and that the letter they found with his body, addressed to Evan, is Connor’s suicide note. Evan, afraid to speak up and unwilling to dash Cynthia’s last hope of connection with her deceased son, tells the lie she wants to hear: That the letter shows Connor had a friend, and wasn’t the “monster that I knew” (as Zoe sings in “Requiem”).

Like a twist in a bad sitcom script, Evan’s lie soon spirals out of control. The Murphys invite Evan to dinner, and when they pump him for details of his “friendship” with Connor, Evan obliges — even turning his broken arm into a bonding moment (in the song “”For Forever”). With help from his semi-friend Jared (Nik Dodani), Evan concocts a fake email exchange (in the curiously bouncy “Sincerely, Me”), to show the Murphys that their friendship happened. 

Soon, class overachiever Alana (Amandla Stenberg) is organizing a charity project in Connor’s honor, and asking Evan to help spearhead the campaign to ensure Connor’s memory can inspire others who feel alone in the world. This leads to what’s supposed to be the musical’s emotional high point, as Platt sings the inspirational “You Will Be Found.”

There’s plenty of uplift provided by the songs, penned by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the songwriting team responsible for “La La Land” and “The Greatest Showman.” But their songs, and the script by Steven Levenson (who wrote the book for the stage version), are what’s most problematic about the movie: A tasteless attempt to turn a boy’s suicide into a farcical plot device. (This is the second time in two years — the last time was “Cats” — where I watched a movie adaptation of a much-loved, Tony-winning Broadway musical and thought, “Seriously?!?”)

Director Stephen Chbosky, who depicted painful teen awkwardness so well in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” commits another grievous error — by filming everything in a drab palette, as if what a musical like this needs is a realistic high-school setting. That said, there is one upside of this approach, and that’s eliminating the role Connor took in the stage version, as Evan’s self-induced conscience.

Also excised from the stage version are nearly every song the parents sing — from the opening number “Anybody Got a Map?,” in which Heidi and Cynthia express parallel concerns about motherhood, as well as Larry’s lament “To Break in a Glove” and Heidi’s angry “Good For You.” Adams and Pino are heard briefly during “Requiem,” and Moore makes the most out of the maternal ballad “So Big / So Small.” Still, one gets the feeling that if Chbosky & Co. could have replaced the parents’ dialogue with a muted trombone, Charlie Brown-style, they would have. Adams, tasked with a thankless role as the grieving mom stuck in denial, may have been better off.

In place of the parents’ influence, the film adds a new song, sung by Alana, who confides in Evan that she’s as alone and screwed up as he is, and her overachieving is her way of hiding that anxiety. The song, “The Anonymous Ones” (co-written by Pasek, Paul and Stenberg) is quite moving, and you’ll probably hear Stenberg sing it at next year’s Oscars.

Platt — once you get past how sallow and un-teenager-like Evan looks, and how the whole enterprise hinges on the audience liking a character whose lies put the Murphy family through hell — does give a solid performance. The problem is that it’s too much like a stage performance, with Platt still singing to the second balcony.

Dever, the movie’s shining light, is singing to the camera — to us — and that directness brings out the heartfelt pain Zoe expresses in “Requiem,” and the longing in her duet with Evan, “Only Us,” in which they imagine a romance apart from their spurious connection to Connor. (Dever has singing experience — she and her sister, Mady, comprise the singer-songwriter duo Beulahbelle. Their cover of the James Bond theme “You Only Live Twice” appeared on the “Tully” soundtrack — and, yes, I realize how random that is.)

Alas, the moments of sincerity Dever and Moore bring to bear in “Dear Evan Hansen” also throw the mawkish fakery of the rest of the movie into sharp relief. Somehow, seeing their brief shimmers of brilliance amid the manipulations makes a viewer feel sadder and angrier than a uniformly bad movie would have.

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‘Dear Evan Hansen’

★★

Opens Friday, September 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving suicide, brief strong language and some suggestive references. Running time: 137 minutes.

Review: 'Ema' introduces a fiery talent in Mariana di Girolámo, as a woman dancing on the edge of an emotional eruption

There’s a thin line between love and hate, The Persuaders (and, later, The Pretenders) sang — and in director Pablo Larrain’s propulsive drama “Ema,” a woman dances on that line for all she’s worth.

Mariana di Girolámo plays Ema, a reggaeton dancer in Valparaiso, Chile, who is in a tempestuous marriage with a choreographer, Gastón, played by Gael García Bernal. Yes, there’s an age difference — and it’s suggested that Ema was once a protege who became a romantic partner. 

It’s also suggested early on — explanations come later — that Ema desires to be a mother, but something horrible happened when they adopted a 7-year-old boy, Polo. The aftermath involves Gastón’s sister, in the hospital with burn scars, and Ema’s fascination with using a flame thrower in her outdoor dance works.

In between dance performances on the streets, and enduring the withering looks from colleagues at the school where she teaches, Ema hatches a plan. It involves a lawyer, Raquel (Paola Giannini), and a man, Anîbal (Santiago Cabrera), and it could give her a chance to reconnect with Polo — or blow up her, and his, world.

Larrain, known to U.S. audiences for “Jackie” and the upcoming Princess Diana biopic “Spencer,” returns to his native Chile (where he also made “Neruda” and “No,” both with Garcîa Bernal) and dives deep into the reggaeton culture. With a vibrant color palette, Larrain (co-writing with Guillermo Calderón, who wrote “Neruda,” and Alejandro Moreno) traverses the chasm of Eta’s emotional state, as she wrestles with her own mistakes and the guilt Gastón heaps on her for their mutual faults.

The movie is a showcase for di Girolámo, in her first internationally seen film (which finished its festival run at this year’s mostly virtual Sundance Film Festival). Both in her dance moves and her acting, de Girolámo channels the pain and rage Ema is processing, as she pushes to have it all — artistic freedom, sexual liberation, family comfort — on her own terms, no matter the cost. It’s a stunning introduction to the world, and makes di Girolámo a face to watch in the future.

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‘Ema’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, September 24, for streaming via the Salt Lake Film Society’s virtual cinema, SLFS@Home. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity and language. Running time: 107 minutes; in Spanish with subtitles.

Review: 'Eyes of Tammy Faye' is a shallow look at the televangelist, but Jessica Chastain finds layers in her portrayal.

In the movies, as in life, the icon known to the world as Tammy Faye Bakker has been done wrong by the men who claim to have her best interests at heart.

This time, it wasn’t her caddish husband, televangelist Jim Bakker, who exploited her open nature to pry open viewers’ wallets. No, this time the culprit is director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick,” “The Lovebirds”), who never gets more than mascara-deep in telling Tammy Faye’s story.

Spanning more than four decades of her life, the movie starts with young Tammy Faye Grover (Chandler Head) being drawn to the Assemblies of God church where her stern mother, Rachel (Cherry Jones), plays piano during services. But Mom has banned Tammy from the church, because she’s the daughter of Rachel’s first husband, and an unfortunate reminder of Rachel’s divorce. Still, Tammy talks to God — something she does throughout the story — and does what she thinks God wants her to do.

Cut to 1960, when Tammy (played from here on out by Jessica Chastain) attends bible college and meets the charming Bakker (Andrew Garfield), who preaches a “prosperity gospel,” using selective bible verses to argue that God wants people to get rich — and to give generously to their church to make that happen. Tammy and Jim are quickly married, to Rachel’s horror, and hit the road as traveling preachers, with Jim delivering sermons and Tammy Faye singing and performing puppet shows for the children in the crowds.

Within a few years, the Bakkers join up with Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) and his fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network. It’s not long before Jim and Tammy Faye are the network’s stars, with Jim launching his brainchild: A nighttime talk show, which he pitches as “Johnny Carson for Christians,” called “The 700 Club.” 

When Tammy Faye sees how well the Robertsons live, off the wealth the Bankers’ hard work has created, the Bakkers strike out on their own, forming the PTL (“Praise the Lord”) network. Keeping that empire afloat takes a lot of donations, and a lot of debt — and the strain drives a wedge between Jim and Tammy Faye.

Everything depicted here will be familiar to anyone who saw Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s  2000 documentary, also called “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” which is credited as inspiration for the script by Abe Sylvia (a TV writer making his feature debut). That documentary leaned into Tammy Faye’s camp value — it featured puppets similar to hers, and enlisted RuPaul as the narrator. (Seeing RuPaul and Tammy Faye walking the streets of Park City the year the movie debuted at Sundance was a surreal delight.)

The movie delves into Tammy Faye’s weaknesses — her pill-popping and a brief instance of infidelity, both of which Jim holds over her head, while also using Tammy Faye’s tearful confessions as money-raising ploys for PTL. It also shows moments when Tammy Faye’s generous spirit ran counter to Christian doctrine, such as when she did a sympathetic interview with a gay man with AIDS, or when she opined to Rev. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio) that evangelicals should stay out of politics. (The movie depicts Falwell as a humorless scold and, when the Bakkers’ empire collapses, a duplicitous backstabber — and I am here for all of it.)

Everything looks note-perfect, from the period details of Tammy Faye’s childhood to the garish soundstage where Jim and Tammy Faye broadcast PTL to millions of viewers. And certainly the cast — namely Chastain, Garfield and D’Onofrio — look like the people they’re portraying.

But there’s a hollowness to the narrative, as if Showalter and Sylvia saw the ‘90s comedians mocking Tammy Faye for her over-the-top make-up and chipmunk voice — shown here in a montage that will make you cringe today — and decided they weren’t going to explore past that surface.

Only Chastain, in a tour de force performance, gets past the make-up and mannerisms to plunge into the soul of this unfairly maligned woman. Chastain seems to understand that Tammy Faye’s secret was in how the pancake make-up and permanent eyeliner were her armor, constructed in response to her mother’s condemnation and Jim’s manipulations — and that while Tammy Faye’s look was fake, her compassion and her Christian heart were the real thing.

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‘The Eyes of Tammy Faye’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content and drug abuse. Running time: 126 minutes.

Review: 'Everybody's Talking About Jamie' is a love-filled LGBTQ musical about a boy who wants to hit the prom in drag.

An exuberant blend of industrial grit and fantasy glitter, the musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is a bouncy, inclusive high school musical loaded with humor and heart.

It’s also a delightful introduction to Max Harwood, a winning young actor in the title role of Jamie New, a 16-year-old gay teen living in Sheffield, England. Jamie’s tough enough to stand up to his class bully, Dean (Samuel Bottomley), but sensitive enough to care that his father (Ralph Ineson) is a no-show at his 16th birthday party. Jamie’s parents have divorced, and Mum (Sarah Lancashire) covers up the fact that Dad, who has remarried, is a homophobe who wants nothing to do with his son.

At his birthday party, Jamie receives the gift he’s been saving up for: A dazzling pair of glittering red heels. Walking in those towering shoes gives Jamie confidence to pursue his dream of being a drag performer — a job that his 11th grade careers teacher, Miss Hedge (Sharon Horgan), dismisses as unrealistic. Jamie tells his only school friend, Pritti (Lauren Patel), a nerdy Muslim girl who gets mocked for her hijab, that he plans to unveil his drag persona at his school’s prom.

Jamie is eager to be a drag queen, but needs to learn how to be one. He finds Sheffield’s most drag-friendly shop, House of Loco — whose proprietor, Hugo Battersby (Richard E. Grant), recounts his days as Miss Loco Chanelle, the toast of Sheffield’s ‘80s club scene. A series of flashbacks, framed as Hugo’s VHS memories, show how the ‘80s queens stood up to police raids and survived the AIDS epidemic. (Young Loco is played by John McCrea, who played Jamie in the original London stage production.)

Jonathan Butterell, who directed the London stage production, proves himself a smart choice to direct the film, his first feature. Butterell captures the gray dinginess of working-class Sheffield, and offsets it with flashes of theatrical sparkle and razzle-dazzle that matches Jamie’s rainbow-hued take on his world. He also balances the comedy of Jamie’s school life with the dramatic arcs of the teen’s relationships with both of his parents.

With powerful supporting work by Patel and Grant, the real find of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is Harwood, who makes a stellar debut. Harwood shows Jamie as eternally optimistic, seeking glamour and paternal approval in equal measure, and his winning performance carries the movie on his slender shoulders. 

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‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, September 17, for streaming on Prime video. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, strong language, and suggestive material. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: Clint Eastwood, at 91, still delivers in "Cry Macho," an odd movie that aims to dismantle movie tropes about masculinity

Confession time: I never saw Clint Eastwood’s 2018 drama “The Mule,” in which Eastwood directed and starred as an elderly man who became a drug-runner for Mexican cartels — and my knowledge of “The Mule” comes solely from the review comedians John Mulaney and Pete Davidson gave it on  “Saturday Night Live,” where they marveled at “the most bananas movie” ever made.

With that much knowledge, I feel fairly safe in declaring Eastwood’s newest movie, “Cry Macho,” a somewhat tamer but still offbeat movie, as something of a spiritual sequel to “The Mule” — in that it’s another story of an old man crossing into Mexico to bring something back and find some personal redemption along the way.

Eastwood plays Mike Milo, who long ago was a rodeo star, until a bronco landed on him and broke his back. Years later — 1979, to be exact — he’s working as a Texas horse trainer, until his boss, Howard (Dwight Yoakam), fires him for drunkenness and unreliability.

A year later, Howard returns to Mike’s life, with a job offer: He wants Mike to cross the border, drive to Mexico City, and retrieve Howard’s 13-year-old son, Rafa (Eduardo Minett), from the clutches of his Howard’s ex-wife, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), who is abusing Rafa — at least, that’s the way Howard tells it.

When Mike gets to Mexico City, and Leta’s mansion, he finds the situation is more complicated. Leta, who lives in a mansion with his bodyguard, has no idea where Rafa is, but suspects he may be trying to compete in cockfighting. Sure enough, Mike finds Rafa in the poor part of town, preparing to have his rooster — called Macho, which Rafa says means “strength” — battle in a cockfight.

After dodging a police raid, Mike takes the reluctant Rafa under his wing. This is where the bulk of the script — credited by Nick Schenk (who wrote “The Mule”) and N. Richard Nash, on whose 1975 novel the film is based — sets up shop. Mike, Rafa and Macho hit the road toward the Texas border. Sometimes they take the back roads, to avoid Leta’s bodyguards and the Federales she’s called in to find Rafa. For awhile, they hole up in a small town, where Mike teaches Rafa about training horses, and about how the concept of being “macho” is a limited view of masculinity. Also in this town, Mike — whose wife and son died years earlier — kicks up a little romance with Marta (Natalia Traven), a widow who runs the cantina and looks after her four granddaughters.

So the story is a little out there, and some of the plot points make no sense when held up to scrutiny, but there’s something charming and tender in Eastwood’s telling of it. At 91, Eastwood doesn’t have to prove anything to anybody, and he can make any shaggy dog story he wants, and if he wants to direct himself into a romance at his age, who’s going to stop him.

Eastwood’s direction is smooth and economical, almost never a wasted moment or shot — and cinematographer Ben Davis (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “Captain Marvel”) brings a calm beauty to the film. The weakness may be in the script, which takes a few pedestrian shortcuts as it imparts its lessons about masculinity and its limitations.

Eastwood gives a solid performance in “Cry Macho,” still charismatic even when he’s slightly hunched over by his age. He seems to understand that the myth of the West probably dies with Mike — but until that happens, he’s willing to impart what he knows to future generations.

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‘Cry Macho’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 17, in theaters, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated PG-13 for language and thematic elements. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: Documentary 'My Name Is Pauli Murray' gives proper credit to an unsung hero of the civil rights movement

Unless you’re well versed in American legal theory or LGBTQ history, you may not know who Pauli Murray — a situation the thoughtful and informative documentary “My Name Is Pauli Murray” works to rectify.

Murray was an activist for civil rights and women’s rights, and an icon for LGBTQ people. At different points in her life, she was a pioneering student, a poet, a lawyer, an unsung legal scholar, an author, a professor and Episcopal minister.

Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West, who profiled the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “RBG,” chronicle Murray’s birth in Baltimore and upbringing in Durham, N.C., where she felt the sting of racism firsthand. The directors often point out moments in Murray’s life where she fought battles long before others; for example, she and a friend were arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a segregated bus, in 1940 — 15 years before Rosa Parks famously did the same. (Murray and the friend were outmaneuvered by the prosecution, who dropped the segregation charge that she wanted to fight as unconstitutional, and merely charged her with disturbing the peace.)

In law school, at Howard University in 1942, Murray wrote a paper arguing that segregation violated both the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Though the paper was disputed by some of her professors, it was filed away — and became a core argument when the NAACP’s legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, argued before the Supreme Court in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education. But, for years, Murray was not told of her contribution for decades.

Another of Murray’s arguments, this one about discrimination by sex, was taken up by Ginsburg when she worked on the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. (Ginsburg cited Murray by name in her amicus brief in the precedent-setting 1971 case Reed v. Reed.) Cohen and West present an outtake from “RBG,” in which Ginsburg praises the strength of Murray’s legal mind, and the clip takes on the air of a holy relic.

The film also takes pains to document Murray’s sexual identity, something she had to hide from the world. Murray preferred trousers over skirts, and begged doctors to prescribe hormones because she was convinced she was a man born in a woman’s body. She also had a long, loving relationship with Irene Barlow — once an office manager at a law firm where Murray worked — that lasted nearly a quarter-century. By today’s measure, according to her biographers, Murray likely would have identified as transgender.

Cohen and West rely on a wealth of Murray’s writings, including legal briefs, poetry and personal letters that depict her struggles with depression. They also interview a wealth of scholars who detail Murray’s contributions to legal thinking, and provide the context for how those lessons apply today. Those voices turn “My Name Is Pauli Murray” into a dynamic history lesson, and an introduction to a hero for civil rights for whom recognition is long overdue.

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‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 17, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Megaplex at The District (South Jordan); also streaming on Prime video starting October 1. Rated PG-13 for disturbing/violent images and thematic elements. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'The Card Counter' is a sly and absorbing character study of a gambler on the brink.

Like the diamond-sharp movies he used to write for Martin Scorsese — a Murderer’s Row of films that includes “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” — Paul Schrader creates in his new film, “The Card Counter,” a fascinating study of a loner whose past and present collide.

Oscar Isaac stars as the title character, who has taken the alias William Tell as he travels from casino to casino across the country. He can keep track of what kinds of cards have been played at the blackjack table, which allows him to win consistently. He usually leaves the table before he wins too much, before casino security can get wise and throw him out. Bill, as he sometimes is known, does catch the attention of La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), a pro gamer who keeps a stable of card players, finding them investors who will stake them in big tournaments.

Schrader, who wrote and directed, reveals early on that Bill learned card counting in prison. Soon, Schrader also reveals the prison was in Leavenworth, Kan., and Bill’s crime was his involvement in the torture and humiliation of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The ones in the pictures, Bill remarks in the running narration, got prison time; their superiors, and their superiors’ superiors, did not.

In the convention center of one casino, Bill walks into a law enforcement conference and sits in on a lecture by a Maj. John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). A flashback shows us that Gordo was a civilian contractor in Iraq, who ordered around Bill and other men to commit the atrocities that led to Bill’s incarceration.

Back in the present, Bill also notices a young man looking very intently at Gordo. The man introduces himself as Cirk — “‘Kirk’ with a ‘C’,” he tells Bill. Cirk explains to Bill that Gordo also commanded Cirk’s father during the Iraq War, and that Cirk blames Gordo for his dad’s PTSD and suicide. Cirk tells Bill he has a plan to kidnap, torture and kill Gordo.

Bill then does something uncharacteristic for him: He gets involved. Bill takes Cirk under his wing, bringing him along on the road, as he takes up La Linda’s offer to get into the lucrative World Series of Poker, which could end with a run in Vegas.

As he did in his last film, “First Reformed,” Schrader creates a self-contained little world in which the main character — Isaac’s guilt-stricken gambler here, Ethan Hawke’s haunted priest there — wrestles with ghosts from his past while being prodded to take action in the present. If Bill is a bit enigmatic, that’s to be expected, given the nature of card playing, and of the size of the demons he’s facing.

Isaac leads a solid ensemble cast with under-the-radar intensity, conveying through small gestures and Schrader’s economical dialogue Bill’s desire to live quietly and make small jackpots where he can — while also seeing this kid as a chance to atone for past mistakes. Isaac’s performance is one of the best you’ll see all year, one that will be admired for its honesty and quiet menace.

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‘The Card Counter’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 10, in select theaters. Rated R for some disturbing violence, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality. Running time: 109 minutes.