Review: Todd Haynes makes a 'Velvet Underground' documentary as layered and artful as the band's songs — and as hard as to connect with

The director Todd Haynes has made, in “The Velvet Underground,” the most appropriate documentary possible for the influential avant-garde rock band: An eclectic, challenging and artful movie that a lot of people may not get.

There are moments that Haynes, the director of such narrative gems as “Carol” and “Velvet Goldmine,” absolutely floors us with his visual daring. There’s a moment, early in the film, where several people try to describe the Velvet Underground’s front man, Lou Reed — while, in a split screen, an unbroken three-minute take of Reed’s face runs alongside. That’s followed by a similar three-minute image of Reed’s collaborator, the Welsh composer John Cale, while people talk about what he brought to the band.

After that, Haynes sets the scene for the world in which the Velvets were to enter. Starting with the conformity of the 1950s and into the free-spirited ‘60s, Haynes uses archival footage and some dynamic interviews to introduce viewers to the crazy art scene of ‘60s New York. The ringmaster of the biggest gathering spot was Andy Warhol, who opened up The Factory, a combination of art studio and hangout spot. Warhol encouraged Reed and Cale to start performing, and with drummer Maureen Tucker and guitarist Sterling Morrison, they became The Factory’s in-house band.

Cale brought the musicianship, as a classically trained violist who morphed into an experimental composer who once (as it’s described in a clip from the old game show “I’ve Got a Secret”) performed an 18-hour concert. Reed brought the lyrics, dark poetry gleaned from his experiences with heroin and the characters he knew on the New York streets.

When it came time to record an album, though, Warhol decided the band needed something more. That something was a German singer-songwriter with an ethereal voice, who went by the name Nico. Reed and Cale fought over how to incorporate Nico into the band’s musical dynamic — and the result was a now-legendary album, “The Velvet Underground and Nico,” whose banana-peel cover Warhol designed.

More music, and more fights, followed — most of them about who was in control of the band’s direction. Ultimately, Reed won that fight, because Cale was out. The band’s commercial success grew — they had their most recognizable hit, “Sweet Jane,” after Cale’s departure — but the art-rock spark wasn’t as bright and as brash as before.

Haynes’ documentary is lively and thorough, with plenty of interviews from people who were on the scene — including the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas (who died in 2019) as well as Warhol devotees Mary Woronov (who became an actress, in such cult classics as “Eating Raoul”) and Amy Taubin (who became a prominent film critic, with whom I’ve stood in line at several Sundance Film Festival screenings).

Haynes’ film is also quite dense, visually and sonically, which feels proper when trying to get a viewer close to the sensory experience of the band’s performances. But it’s not the most accessible of films, and a viewer unfamiliar with the Velvet Underground may feel overwhelmed by it all.

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‘The Velvet Underground’

★★★

Available for streaming starting October 15 on Apple TV+. Rated R for language, sexual content, nudity and some drug material. Running time: 121 minutes.

Review: 'Lamb' is a dark, sometimes surreal tale of loneliness and parenthood in the Icelandic hills

Proving that the midnight sun produces some dark thoughts, the Icelandic drama “Lamb” is a consistently absorbing and sometimes disturbing tale of an unsettling family dynamic.

Maria (played beautifully by the Swedish star Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) are a married couple having a largely happy existence running a sheep farm in the remote hills of Iceland. They drive the tractor, check on their herds, and handle the routines of farm life. They have no children, but there’s some sadness in their demeanor that suggests this wasn’t always the case.

One day, while checking on the pregnant ewes in their flock, one of the ewes falls over. Maria and Ingvar help with the birth, and notice something unusual about this particular little lamb. Maria wraps the lamb in her coat, takes it into the house, and sets about trying to feed and care for this baby creature — treating it very much like a human child.

This goes on for some time, until tending to their new lamb — whom they call Ada — becomes one more part of the routine. It only seems strange when Ingvar’s brother Pétur (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) makes an unnanounced visit to the farm family.

First-time director Valdimar Jóhannsson sets “Lamb” in a stark landscape, and the bleakness of the environment is a somber backdrop for the serious — one might say “creepy” — events happening before our eyes. There’s an austere beauty in this place, and that beauty helps Rapace (the original “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) and Guðnason bring the humanity to this surreal scenario.

Jóhannsson and his one-named co-screenwriter Sjón — an Icelandic poet and frequent collaborator with Björk — spins this story into directions most viewers won’t see coming. With sparse dialogue and the deceptive simplicity of folk tale, Jóhannsson deftly captures the primal fear of parenthood: The feeling you’re not in control.

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‘Lamb’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 8, in theaters. Rated R for some bloody violent images and sexuality/nudity. Running time: 106 minutes; in Icelandic, with subtitles.

Review: 'I'm Your Man' throws together a woman and a robot for a smartly funny look at algorithmic love

A thoroughly modern romance in every sense, director Maria Schrader’s “I’m Your Man” examines with dry humor and deep insight whether love is biological or programmable.

The nature of romance is what Alma Felsen (Maren Eggert), a Berlin archaeologist who is recruited to be a beta-tester for a tech company’s newest product: A robot romantic partner. Tom — played by Dan Stevens, the English actor who starred on “Downton Abbey” and the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” — is programmed to know all of Alma’s preferences and desires, with a built-in algorithm to adjust his responses and behavior to her tastes. Tom even speaks with a British accent, because Alma prefers foreign men.

For three weeks, Alma is supposed to let Tom into her apartment, and her life, to see whether his pre-set romantic gestures can approximate real love. But Alma’s a tough customer, seemingly immune to scented candles and rose petals in the bath, which Tom says 93% of German women would enjoy.

Slowly, Alma lets Tom in on more of her life — her work studying Sumerian cuneiform, her visits to her dementia-afflicted father (Wolfgang Hübsch), and why she can’t get over her colleague Julian (Hans Löw). But as Alma allows herself to get closer to Tom, she wonders whether this arrangement can ever be real, or just a computer-aided self-delusion.

Eggert, a veteran in German films but relatively unknown abroad, gives a nicely understated performance as a woman teaching this machine about the intricacies of being human. Stevens, who’s so drop-dead handsome you’d be surprised if his cheekbones weren’t made in a factory, brings the right amount of robotic hesitancy to Tom, and finds both humor and romantic charm in the A.I.’s efforts to approximate being a tender boyfriend. There’s also a nifty turn by Sandra Hüller (“Toni Erdmann”) as the tech-company rep who oversees the beta test.

Schrader, who won an Emmy for directing the miniseries “Unorthodox,” doesn’t overwhelm with the science-fiction aspects of the story (though the scene where a nightclub is populated with holograms is cleverly done), instead letting the human elements unfold gracefully and into unexpected directions. Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg (adapting a short story by Emma Braslavsky) playfully explore what it means to have a lover who gives a woman everything she desires — and whether that’s a good thing after all.

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‘I’m Your Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 8, in theaters. Rated R for some sexual content and language. Running time: 108 minutes; in German, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Addams Family 2' puts the macabre clan on the road, where the laughs are abundant

The animated sequel “The Addams Family 2” improves on its predecessor in much the same way 1993’s “Addams Family Values” did to the 1991 live-action version. Maybe movies about the ghoulish Addams Family work like the old “Star Trek” franchise, where the even-numbered ones were the good ones.

Like “Addams Family Values,” the animated sequel centers on someone trying to exploit a rift within the solid-as-a-gravestone cohesion of the Addams clan. This time, it’s middle-school genius Wednesday (voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz), feeling suffocated by the doting attention of her father, Gomez (voiced by Oscar Isaac), as she demonstrates her science-fair project — grafting the intelligence of her pet squid, Socrates, into her none-too-bright Uncle Fester (voiced by Nick Kroll).

The science fair is a disappointment for Wednesday, because Gomez and Morticia (voiced by Charlize Theron) showed up, and because the powers that be declared everyone a winner. Wednesday is assuaged somewhat when Cyrus Strange (voiced by Bill Hader), the tech billionaire who sponsors the science fair, praises her originality and genius.

A fretful Gomez grasps at straws to find a way to bond with his precious daughter, landing on the idea of a cross-country family vacation. Wednesday hates the idea, but is soon swept up in Gomez’ eager efforts to create some bonding time at such tourist havens as Salem, Mass., Niagara Falls and Death Valley. What Wednesday doesn’t know is that Gomez is also hiding something on this trip: The claims of a lawyer (voiced by Wallace Shawn) representing an unknown client, who believes Wednesday was switched for another baby in the maternity ward.

As the family drives their frightful RV across the country, Wednesday comforts herself by torturing her brother, Pugsley (voiced by Javon “Wanna” Walton), while Fester discovers Wednesday’s squid experiment has some unpredicted side effects.

Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon find lots of good humor in the weirdness of this strange family, and the script (by Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit) mines Wednesday’s alienation angst for some genuinely funny moments. The writers also pepper the narrative with jokes that might sail over the small viewers’ heads, but land appreciatively with the older members of the audience. (Example: The signpost in Death Valley, pointing to such slasher-film locations as Crystal Lake and Elm Street.)

“The Addams Family 2” doesn’t hit the comic heights that Paul Rudnick’s satiric script for “Addams Family Values” did. But it does show sparks of wit and absurdity that the first animated film lacked, and proves that there may be some life in this thought-to-be-undead franchise after all.

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‘The Addams Family 2’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for macabre and rude humor, violence and mild language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: Second 'Venom' movie is all speed and action, with no time to rest or think about the 'Carnage' on display

There’s no subtlety in “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” the second installment in the Spider-Man-adjacent comic-book franchise — there’s just breakneck action and mayhem, loud, fast and barely in control.

Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, the self-destructive San Francisco reporter who was taken over in the 2018 film “Venom” by an alien symbiote with a lot of teeth and an appetite for human brains. Eddie’s still something of a screw-up, but he’s reached a truce of sorts with his alien alter ego, where Venom agrees not to eat people, no matter how much they might deserve it. In exchange, Venom helps Eddie on his news gathering.

Eddie has been handed a big scoop, exclusive access to imprisoned serial killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), whose crimes are so heinous, we’re told, that the governor of California has lifted the moratorium on the death penalty. Shortly before his execution, though, Eddie gets a little too close to Cletus, who bites Eddie on the hand — and transferring a little bit of Venom’s powers into Cletus’ blood stream. In the death chamber, Cletus’ blood fights back against the lethal injection, and out emerges a bigger, meaner symbiote, which takes the name Carnage.

Carnage tells Cletus that he wants to kill his maker, Venom. Cletus wants Carnage to help find and free his lady love, Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), who was separated from Cletus in the orphanage, and has been sitting in a top-secret lab ever since. Frances, we learn, has the ability to scream at ear-piercing decibel levels, earning her the supervillain moniker Shriek.

Frances also has someone she wants killed: The cop who shot out her left eye. That cop is now an SFPD detective, Mulligan (Stephen Graham), who suspects Eddie knows more about Cletus’ escape than he’s letting on. When Mulligan takes Eddie in for questioning, Eddie uses his one phone call to call his lawyer ex-girlfriend, Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), who’s now engaged to her boyfriend from the first movie, Dr. Dan Lewis (Reid Scott).

Director Andy Serkis has his foot on the accelerator from start to finish, scarcely allowing a moment’s relief from the boom-boom action and computer-animated chaos. That’s probably a wise choice, because the plot — the script is by Kelly Marcel, who co-wrote the first one, and who shares story credit with Hardy — would probably fall apart if one were given 30 seconds to think about it. For starters, it does no good to dwell on how Harrelson’s over-the-top performance, all sneering and snarling and Freddy Krueger-level one-liners, is practically a return to his character from “Natural Born Killers.”

But there is a ruthless efficiency in how Serkis fast-forwards through the action beats. And his expertise on performance-capture acting — he is the guy who portrayed Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” and Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” — is deployed well to help Hardy bring out Venom’s physicality.

Hardy comes close to appearing like he’s actually enjoying himself in this big, loud action movie, which may be all we can hope for from such a “serious” actor. He leans into the humor of Eddie’s love-hate relationship with his alien “roommate,” and in the quirks of this Jekyll/Hyde dynamic. Hardy signals to the audience that we shouldn’t take “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” too seriously, whatever the body count, and just treat it like a very messy video game.

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‘Venom: Let There Be Carnage’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'The Many Saints of Newark' veers between 'Sopranos' nostalgia and a fresh view of New Jersey gangsters

On “The Sopranos,” there were classic episodes that set the iconography of creator David Chase’s New Jersey gangster family, and there were the lesser episodes between those classics that moved the chess pieces into position.

The first movie based on Chase’s series, “The Many Saints of Newark,” plays half like a classic and half like a lesser effort.

The movie begins in a cemetery, with the voices of the dead telling their tales. When the camera comes upon the grave marker for the apprentice gangster Christopher Moltisanti, the voice (provided by Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher in the series) tells of two people. One is Tony Soprano, “the man who choked me to death.” The other is Christopher’s father, whom he barely knew in life, Dickie Moltisanti, played by Alessandro Nivola.

It’s 1967, and Dickie is one of the young bucks in the employ of the old guard, represented by Johnny Boy Soprano (Jon Bernthal) and Dickie’s father, “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti (Ray Liotta), who is recently returned from Italy with a lovely new bride, Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi). Dickie bears many of the traits “Sopranos” fans will recognize in Tony Soprano: A gruff charm, a slippery view of morality, appeal to women besides his wife, a quick-triggered temper, and a capacity for rage and violence that results in people dying.

When Johnny Boy ends up going to prison for a short stretch, it’s Dickie who’s entrusted to look over Johnny’s wife, Livia (Vera Farmiga), and their children, Jackie and Tony. 

Four years later, when Johnny’s out of prison, the kids are teens, with Tony smartly portrayed by Michael Gandolfini, the son of James Gandolfini, who so memorably played Tony on the series. The young Tony is at times a bit of a goofball, but he also shows flashes of intelligence. In a key scene, Tony’s principal (Talia Balsam) tells Livia that he has a genius IQ, but gets low grades because he doesn’t apply himself. The principal’s conversation with Tony himself plays like a precursor to the adult Tony’s psychiatric sessions with Dr. Melfi, and hint at the other lives the young Soprano might have had.

Dickie continues to be an outsized influence on Tony, getting him stolen speakers and consoling him at the disturbing number of funerals this family attends. It’s up to Hollywood Dick’s brother, Sal (also played by Liotta), to give Dickie, whose professional and personal lives are spiraling out of control, the necessary advice to stay out of Tony’s life.

While all this happens, hinting at the downward slope of a mob family that Chase’s series depicted, director Alan Taylor and screenwriter Lawrence Konner (both veterans of the series) present a kind of alternate universe to “The Sopranos.” It centers on Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), an up-and-coming Black criminal who starts as a numbers runner for the Italian mobsters, but has the ambition to survive the racial tensions of Newark and build his own enterprise to cater to a changing demographic. These sections of the film suggest a more interesting original story that doesn’t recycle the familiar parts of “The Sopranos.”

Taylor — who directed nine episodes of the series, including the one where Tony killed Christopher — burrows into perfectly creating the period detail of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He also leans in hard in hiring young actors to play the familiar old characters, including Billy Magnussen as the handsome Paulie Walnuts, John Magaro as the dapper Silvio, and particularly Corey Stoll as Uncle Junior, who captures the menace and petty vindictiveness that the late Dominic Chianese brought to the role on TV.

Best of all in that regard is Farmiga, who — aided by a prosthetic nose to resemble the late Nancy Marchand — neatly re-creates the Soprano matriarch’s coldness and tart-tongued belittling of everyone around her, especially her son.

The best performances are from the new players on the scene. Nivola captures Dickie’s arrogance, and his belief that he can do anything with impunity. Odom makes Harold a fascinating wild card, whose anger prompts him to become calculating, to find the cracks in a racist system that he can work to his advantage.

“The Many Saints of Newark” will give fans of “The Sopranos” a fair amount of the tension and character detail they loved on the series. It also delivers the flashes of unsettling violence that were the show’s trademark — though they don’t surprise us as much, because we see them as part of Dickie’s sadly inevitable cycle. When we see Dickie holding his baby son, Christopher, we already know how this story is going to end.

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‘The Many Saints of Newark’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 1, in theaters everywhere, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for strong violence, pervasive language, sexual content and some nudity. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'Stop and Go,' a made-in-Utah comedy, finds approachable humor in the panicky early days of COVID-19

If we’re going to have movies about the COVID-19 pandemic, let them be as funny and as charming as “Stop and Go,” a light and bouncy comedy that shows that talent and chemistry can compensate for zero dollars in the production budget.

Set in March 2020, in the early weeks of the pandemic hitting the United States, this comedy centers on two sisters, Jamie (Whitney Call) and Blake (Mallory Everton), who are trying to maintain their sanity as they’re cooped up in their Albuquerque house, only occasionally going out for groceries — which are, of course, sprayed with Lysol the second they enter the home.

Then Jamie and Blake get a disturbing call from their grandmother (Anne Sward Hansen), who’s in quarantine in her room at her nursing home in eastern Washington. Jamie and Blake want to help Nana, and they don’t trust their sister Erin (Julia Jolley), who also lives in Washington state, but doesn’t take the coronavirus seriously — as evidence by the fact that she and her husband just got on a cruise ship in the middle of a pandemic.

So Jamie and Blake decide they need to go rescue Nana from her nursing home themselves. This leads to a 1,200-mile road trip where various forms of wackiness follow them.

Jamie and Blake turn out to be great company on a cinematic car ride like this, because Call and Everton have such easygoing screen chemistry. Call and Everton — who also wrote the screenplay here — have been friends since they were small children, and they honed their comedy skills in the improv scene around Brigham Young University (improv is apparently BYU’s substitute for not having keggers) and on the BYUtv sketch comedy series “Studio C.” Their byplay takes a bit of time to settle into a rhythm, but it’s confidently funny and surprisingly polished when it kicks into gear.

It’s helpful that Everton is also the movie’s co-director, along with fellow “Studio C” alum Stephen Meek (who’s also Call’s real-life husband), and that all three principals — Call, Everton and Meek — are so in sync, which allows the performers to riff into unexpected directions. 

“Stop and Go” captures a particular moment of the pandemic, that period in March 2020 when we were scared and didn’t yet know how much we should be scared. Call and Everton, who bounce funny ideas around like old pros, channel that fear into a hilarious and heartfelt road comedy that feels like it’s arriving just in time.

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‘Stop and Go’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 1, at the Megaplex Theaters at Thanksgiving Point, Lehi. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for thematic elements and mild language. Running time: 80 minutes.

Review: 'The Jesus Music' explores the secular side of Christian music, focusing on performers and the industry's human side

For a movie made by believers about believers, the documentary “The Jesus Music” is a surprisingly secular look at the growth of the contemporary Christian music industry — and that’s the best part about it.

Directed by brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin — who have become moguls of faith-based movies, with such titles as “I Can Only Imagine” and “I Still Believe” — begin their survey of the genre in the early 1970s in Costa Mesa, Calif.. That’s where a young preacher named Lonnie Frisbee began attracting followers to his charismatic evangelism. 

Frisbee wasn’t your typical button-down preacher. He had long hair and a beard, and looked a bit like the person his flock came to talk about: Jesus. For young people — the hippies — who had become disillusioned by the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that the ‘60s provided, Frisbee’s type of church was just what they needed. 

Part of Frisbee’s appeal was the music, and allowing people to adapt rock music to a liturgical setting. Not everyone in mainline Christianity was a fan, but one prominent person was: Billy Graham, who organized a landmark event in Dallas, Explo ’72, dubbed a “Christian Woodstock” that brought thousands of young converts to Christ into Graham’s orbit.

The Erwins move briskly from there, highlighting some of the artists who popularized Christian music over the last half century. In the ‘70s, there was Larry Norman, “the father of Christian rock,” who once released a song called “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” The ‘80s brought Stryper, who brought glam-rock sensibilities and savvy marketing, to the Christian genre — even as preachers like Jimmy Swaggart railed against them.

The game-changer for the CCM genre, the experts here say, was Amy Grant, an unassuming college student who made leather pants and a leopard-print jacket seem wholesome.

Grant, one of the film’s producers, sums up the difference between her music and standard church hymns. Those hymns, Grant says, are sung up to God, with the singer’s eyes closed. “I wanted to sing songs with my eyes wide open, singing to each other,” she says.

From Grant and her friend Michael W. Smith, who have become the elder statespeople of the genre, the movie spreads out to highlight a few other big names, including DC Talk — the closest thing Christian music had to a boy band — and the multi-talented Kirk Franklin, who talks honestly about the difficulties crossing the racial divide within America’s Christian community.

Some of the most touching moments of “The Jesus Music” come when the Erwins show performers at their low points. Grant talks about the blowback she received from so-called Christian fans when she divorced her first husband, and shortly thereafter married country singer Vince Gill. And Russ Taff, a superstar in the ‘80s, describes how alcoholism wrecked his career. The superstar TobyMac describes the pain when his 21-year-old son died from an overdose — and how, at the funeral, he had a tearful reunion with his former DC Talk bandmate, Michael Tait.

The documentary wraps up with some of the up-and-comers in the genre, such as LaCrae and Lauren Daigle, and talking about the growing subgenre of “worship music,” propelled by groups like Hillsong United, whose concerts are more like a church service.

“The Jesus Music” suffers from being a bit too narrowly focused on the marketers’ view of the contemporary Christian music genre. People forget that U2 was, in its earliest days, pitched as a Christian band. And any movie about Christian music from the late ‘60s to now that doesn’t at least mention Aretha Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” sessions has a gaping hole in its narrative.

But the Erwins do bring the movie around to the way faith propels the music, and vice versa. The message is summed up best by TobyMac, when he notes that “God uses people that are broken to write music to reach out to the broken.”

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‘The Jesus Music’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some drug material and thematic elements. Running time: 109 minutes.