Review: 'Dune' is big, bold and beautiful — and it's only the first half of a sprawling space epic

The first sign that Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” might have a shot at getting it right — at succeeding where avant-garde directors like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky failed — comes at the very beginning, when two words appear under the title: “Part One.”

This is an instant signal that Villeneuve (“Arrival,” “Blade Runner 2049”) is going to take the time necessary to tell Frank Herbert’s sprawling science-fiction epic properly. No need to cram everything into one movie, as Lynch did in 1984. 

And, even though the plot revolves around a mind-altering spice, Villeneuve soon shows he’s taking a down-to-earth approach to the visuals. Gone are the hallucinatory wonders of Lynch’s pre-“”Blue Velvet” imagination, or the fevered phantasmagoria of Jodorowsky’s doomed ‘70s project (as described in the documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune”). 

Villeneuve, who shares screenplay credit with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, starts with the basics: It’s the year 10,191, and two mighty clans are in conflict. On the bad guys’ side is House Harkonnen, led by the pustulant and corpulent Baron Harkonnen (Stellen Skarsgard), which has operated the spice harvesting on the desert planet Arrakis — collecting the drug that navigators need to “fold space.” The good guys are House Atreides, with Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) grooming his son, Paul (Timothee Chalamet), to one day succeed him, helped by the Duke’s loyal aides: Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) and Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Harrison).

Someone else has been training Paul: His mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson). Jessica is a member of the Bene Gesserit, the holy order that’s officially acting as peacemakers as House Atreides takes over Arrakis’ operations from House Harkonnen, under order of the emperor.

Then the Mother Superior (Charlotte Rampling) comes to test Paul’s abilities and his bravery. These skills will become important, when Duke Leto is betrayed, having walked into the trap set by the nasty Baron. Paul and Jessica must travel the deserts, careful not to attract the skyscraper-sized worms that roam the dunes outside the castle walls. so they can meet the Fremen, the desert-equipped natives. Paul has seen one Fremen, Chani (Zendaya), in his dreams. 

Being the first of a planned two-part adaptation, those dreams are about all you see of Zendaya, and Javier Bardem’s appearance as the Fremen leader, Stilgar, is scant in this chapter. On the other hand, there are characters in this first installment who won’t be around for Part Two. (Not saying who.)

The script includes some of the palace intrigue, without letting the narrative get sucked into it, as happened with Lynch (and, for that matter, Herbert). One clever touch is how Villeneuve tacitly compares Arrakis to Afghanistan, where desert dwellers watch as foreign superpowers, some with better intentions than others, come looking to impose order on a secretive native population. 

The look of Villeneuve’s Arrakis is breathtaking, combining the best of modern CGI images with the sweep of an epic like “Lawrence of Arabia.” Every detail, from the giant sandworms that explode from the sands to the desert “stillsuits” the Fremen wear to collect their sweat, is executed to movie perfection.

First and foremost, “Dune” is a coming-of-age story, with the young Paul growing into the role destiny has assigned — to lead his world into a giant cosmic battle to come. In that context, Chalamet is inspired casting. Chalamet’s Paul can be impetuous at times, like when he begs his pal Duncan to take him along on a reconnaissance flight. But this Paul also can be thoughtful, observant, and heroic. Some heroism won’t come until the second chapter, but there’s enough potential, in Paul and in this franchise, to suggest this “Dune” can go the distance.

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‘Dune’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 22, in theaters everywhere and streaming on HBO Max. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images and suggestive material.

Review: 'The Harder They Fall' is a slick, stylish Western that changes the genre's hero myths to reflect Black lives back then

One might suspect musician-turned-filmmakaer Jeymes Samuel of cribbing from the Quentin Tarantino playbook in “The Harder They Fall,” and certainly this slick Western ticks many of the same boxes.

Dynamic camerawork? Check. Florid mile-a-minute dialogue? Check. Action set pieces as creative as they are violent? Check. Music drops that seem out of place, but end up fitting in perfectly? Check. Deploying historical figures in ways history never did? Check.

The first recognizable difference between Samuel’s approach and Tarantino’s turns out to be a critical one: With Samuels, when someone starts using the “N-word,” Regina King’s character shoots them dead before they finish the first syllable.

This turns out to be a crucial difference, though. Where Tarantino plays with ideas of racism to stir up trouble, Samuel is trying to create a new Western mythology — with Black heroes and villains, based on real figures of the Old West, leading the way.

First we meet the villain, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), a cold-blooded killer who opens the movie by killing a preacher and his wife, and putting a cross-shaped scar on their son’s forehead.

That boy comes back in view as a grown man, Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), an outlaw who doesn’t rob banks, but instead robs the gangs that rob the banks. Love also has hunted down the men who assisted Buck when he killed Love’s parents — until Buck’s the only one left.

Getting to Buck will be difficult, though. He runs his own town, and has a gang of nasty killers on his side, including King’s character, saloon operator Trudy Smith, and the quick-shooting Cherokee Bill (LaKeith Stanfield). 

But Love has his own ride-or-die gang, including the fast-draw champ Jim Beckwourth (RJ Cyler), rifle-toting Bill Pickett (Edi Gathegi), the androgynous but hard-fighting Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler), and the toughest one of all — saloon magnate Stagecoach Mary (Zazie Beetz), who’s also Love’s ex. And there’s someone else, the cagey marshal Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo), who has designs on ending Buck’s reign.

Samuel — who, under the name The Bullitts, is a respected music producer who worked with Jay-Z as a music consultant on Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” — stages action scenes with the fast cadence and insistent beats of a good rap song. There’s never nothing happening in the movie, which can be exciting to watch, but also a little exhausting sometimes. Even at over two hours, there’s almost no room here to breathe.

Samuel and co-screenwriter Boaz Yakin (“Now You See Me”) also give the cast pages and pages of smart, sharp dialogue to chew up and spit out. My favorite line comes early, in the scene where King’s Trudy is leading a train heist and shoots the engineer who starts to call her the “N-word.” Cherokee Bill wryly suggests that Trudy was hasty. “He might have been calling you a nincompoop,” Bill says.

The cast is powerful, individually and as a group. Let’s single out just the ringleaders: Elba cements his badass image as the ruthless Buck, and Majors shows, as he did in HBO’s “Lovecraft Country,” that he has the heart and charisma to be a leading man.

There is symbolism, sometimes none too subtle. At one point, someone has to rob a bank in a nearby all-white town. When Samuel’s camera arrives, it certainly is white — every building is whitewashed as if Tom Sawyer tricked an entire town into painting it. It’s an in-your-face metaphor for the racism our heroes and anti-heroes face in the Old West, and Samuel proves in “The Harder They Fall” that being in one’s face is a faster way to get the message across than the Pony Express.

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‘The Harder They Fall’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 22, in theaters everywhere; available for streaming starting November 3 on Netflix. Rated R for strong violence and language. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'Ron's Gone Wrong' is a bright, breezy story that also critiques the perils of social media

Fast and not too furious — though sometimes a bit peeved — the animated “Ron’s Gone Wrong” is a briskly paced and slyly cautionary story about making the kind of friends you can’t unfriend with a click.

Barney (voiced by “Luca’s” Jack Dylan Grazer) is not like the other kids in Nonsuch Middle School. He’s shy, awkward, and has no friends to hang out with at recess. His dad, Graham (voiced by Ed Helms), spends his days trying to sell novelty items to stores, while his grandmother, Donka (voiced by Olivia Colman), raises chickens and a goat, and cooks undigestible food based on recipes she learned growing up in Bulgaria.

Worst of all, in Barney’s view, is that he’s the only kid who doesn’t have a B-Bot, a two-foot-tall electronic companion that will change color, take your selfies, record your TikTok videos and arrange your social media. When Graham and Donka go to the Bubble Store to buy a B-Bot, they learn there’s a three-month wait. They also see there’s a somewhat banged-up B-Bot on the loading dock, and a delivery man willing to look the other way for a little cash.

Barney quickly learns that his B-Bot (voiced by Zach Galifianakis) isn’t like the others, and can’t download the full software package off the Bubble network. So Barney has to turn his B-Bot, dubbed Ron, into a friend the old-fashioned way, by letting Ron get to know him.

Ron proceeds to produce havoc around the school, particularly when the obnoxious classmate Rich (voiced by Ricardo Hurtado) discovers Ron’s safety protocols are offline — and the ensuing glitch turns every other kids’ B-Bot into something sinister. The malfunctioning bots signal back to Bubble HQ, setting off a power struggle between the B-Bots’ idealist inventor Marc (voice of Justice Smith) and the company’s profit-conscious financial officer, Andrew (voiced by comic Rob Delaney).

Directors Sarah Smith (“Arthur Christmas”) and Jean-Philippe Vine (whose credits include the “Shaun the Sheep” TV series) create a lot of impressive sight gags. The best jokes involve Ron’s clumsy attempts to apply Barney’s friendship lessons as his circuits are still adapting to being turned on. 

The script, by Smith and Peter Baynham, also serves up some sharp commentary about the harmful effects of social media and the less-than-noble intentions of globe-covering computer conglomerates. It helps that the message is cloaked within an effortlessly humorous and well-paced package.

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‘Ron’s Gone Wrong’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some rude material, thematic elements and language. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'The Electrical Life of Louis Wain' is a biopic that wallows too much in its subject's quirks

Movies ask us to believe we are watching epic space battles, wizards performing magic and superheroes flying and fighting — and we readily accept them all as real, or at least plausible. But Benedict Cumberbatch, a man in his 40s, playing an overly energized 20-something, as he does in the first half of “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” is a bridge too far to suspend disbelief.

Casting Cumberbatch in the title role is the central problem of this biographical drama, but not the only one.

Wain, as we meet him, is a many of many talents — composer and inventor among them — but earning a steady income is not one of them. That’s the main concern of his dour oldest sister, Caroline (Andrea Riseborough), who oversees the household that includes herself, Louis, their dotty mother (Phoebe Nicholls) and their four younger sisters, three of them still of school age. The Wain family has some level of prestige, but not the money to maintain it. They’re barely able to scrape buy to hire a governess to teach the younger girls.

When a governess arrives, in the form of Emily Richardson (played by Claire Foy), she’s a bit unsure of herself, awkward and rather eccentric. In short, a woman that the oddball Louis falls in love with almost immediately — and, in spite of the social scandal, he marries her in short order.

To provide for his wife, and his sisters and mother, Wain reluctantly takes a job as illustrator for the Illustrated London News. The editor, Sir Wiiliam Ingram (Toby Jones), likes how fast Wain draws his pictures — and figures he can get twice as many images out of him as another artist.

Years later, when Wain’s drawings are supplanted by a new technology — photography — it seems the artist is headed for unemployment. Making matters worse is news that Emily has breast cancer, a terminal diagnosis in the 1890s.

Wain attempts to lift Emily’s spirits by getting her a kitten. This was something of a novelty in Victorian England, where cats were not considered fit pets, and were seen either as mouse control or feral strays. Wain starts drawing whimsical portraits of Peter and other cats, and Sir William is so taken with the drawings that he gives Wain two pages in his Christmas edition — and setting into orbit Wain’s career of drawing cats as objects of silly delight.

Director Will Sharpe and his co-screenwriter, Scott Stephenson, aim to tell Wain’s story from youth to old age, which means they have to set a blistering pace to cram it all in. Because of that speed, the movie loses a lot of nuance; for example, one would be hard pressed to differentiate Wain’s sisters besides Riseborough’s Caroline and Hayley Squires’ Marie, the center of a tragic subplot. 

It feels as if Sharpe is trying to bring to his observations of Wain’s life the same level of charming humor and ridiculousness as Wain brought to his cat paintings. That’s a hard assignment in a life story that touches on a terminal disease, mental illness and the buildup to World War I, and Sharpe’s kaleidoscope-colored images aren’t up to the moment. The oppressively bubbly narration, by Olivia Colman, is not much help.

Cumberbatch works mightily to overcome the incongruity of his physical age with the character’s youthfulness, and the effort backfires when he continues to play into Wain’s more childish tendencies when he’s an older man. Foy is quite charming in an underdeveloped role, though she and Cumberbatch never really spark — something that’s unfortunate in the attempt to chronicle an “electrical life.”

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‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’

★★

Opens Friday, October 22, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi) and Megaplex Geneva (Vineyard). Rated PG-13 for some thematic material and strong language. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Becoming Cousteau' brings back the legendary ocean explorer, whose environmental message is more needed than ever

Considering Jacques-Yves Cousteau left for that great diving bell in the sky 25 years ago next June, there are many who don’t know his importance in the worlds of oceanography, filmmaking and environmental advocacy.

Director Liz Garbus’ energetic documentary, “Becoming Cousteau,” does a good job of bringing his adventurous spirit back into view.

The sea was not Cousteau’s first love, it turns out. Cousteau, as a young French naval cadet, aimed to become a pilot. But a car accident, in which Cousteau broke several bones, derailed his aviation career. While recuperating, he met two men, Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, on the shore of Toulon, France, and learned the thrill of skin diving.

During World War II, the three men did underwater reconnaissance for the Allies. Cousteau and Émile Magnan, an engineer, developed a way to dive deeper than a man could with a snorkel — by carrying modified oxygen tanks on one’s back. It was the prototype for what became known as the Aqua-Lung, the first form of scuba gear.

After the war, Cousteau, Tailliez and Dumas formed the French Navy’s Underwater Research Group, performing diving missions and testing the Aqua-Lung’s capabilities. (One such test cost the life of their friend, Maurice Fargues, the first diver to die using scuba gear.) By 1950, Cousteau had left the French Navy, and had established his research boat, a decommissioned American minesweeper that he renamed Calypso.

If this was a puff piece — a thought bolstered by the fact that The Cousteau Society, the nonprofit Cousteau founded to support his research, provided support and a copious amount of footage — the rest of the story might be one triumph after another, as Cousteau established his international reputation as a filmmaker, explorer and champion of the environment. But Garbus, whose career has included “The Farm: Angola U.S.A.,” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and the miniseries “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” has too much integrity to soft-pedal Cousteau’s life.

One of the revelations is that Cousteau raised money by renting himself out to petroleum companies, to find underwater drilling locations. (It’s suggested that Cousteau is partly responsible for making Abu Dhabi the center of oil wealth it is today.) There are also scenes from “The Silent World,” his 1956 film that was the first documentary to win the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, of his Calypso crew brutally beating a shark on the deck. In his later years, Cousteau expressed regret for both actions.

Garbus also profiles Cousteau’s first wife, Simone, who managed the finances and Calypso so Cousteau and his crew could mount their expeditions. Simone’s role as business partner came with a cost, though: Emotionally neglecting their sons, Jean-Michel and Philippe. Both boys, when old enough, worked on Calypso’s crew — and Philippe was poised to succeed his father, until he was killed in a plane crash.

The movie draws upon miles of footage from Cousteau’s films, including his long series of specials for ABC, and his many appearances on talk shows. There are few talking-head interviews, as Garbus instead uses audio interviews overlaid on the fascinating views of Cousteau’s explorations and public appearances. 

What emerges is a full portrait of Cousteau’s evolution, from merely an explorer of the oceans to a champion for them, trying to show the world the damage humankind has done to the planet. His remarkable story also acts as reminder that his work isn’t done, and the danger is as great as ever.

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‘Becoming Cousteau’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 22, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Cinemark 24 Jordan Landing (West Jordan). Rated PG-13 for brief strong language, some disturbing images and smoking. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Halloween Kills' is a bloody cash grab that massacres the goodwill David Gordon Green's 2018 version built with horror fans

David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Kills” explores the way a voracious evil destroys everything in its path — and, no, I’m not talking about the masked killer Michael Myers slashing his way through Haddonville, Ill., as he did in Green’s 2018 sequel/reboot “Halloween.”

No, the evil this time is Green himself, laying waste to everything that was good and scary and entertaining about his earlier film — and the franchise that John Carpenter started back in 1978 — in this tediously gory slasher flick.

The “action,” for want of a better word, starts up the night the 2018 film ended, with Laurie Strode — the target of Michael’s killing in the 1978 original, now a vengeance-seeking badass grandma — riding away from her house with her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). They have just left Michael in the basement of Laurie’s house, which set ablaze in an effort to kill Michael once and for all.

While Laurie is taken to the hospital for the stab wound in her gut, the firefighters are headed the other way toward her burning house, not hearing Laurie’s desperate plea to “let it burn.” Sure enough — and because the franchise can’t carry on without him — Michael emerges from the flames and messily butchers a bunch of first responders. Then he sets his sights on Haddonfield.

In town, some of the survivors of the ’78 killing spree hear the news of Michael’s mayhem, and decide they’re going to take him out themselves. It will matter to horror fans that some of the actors from Carpenter’s original, including Kyle Richards and Nancy Stephens, are reprising their roles — and that Anthony Michael Hall, who wasn’t in the first movie, portrays Tommy, the kid Laurie babysat back in ’78. It scarcely matters to the story, but those are Easter eggs the truly obsessed “Halloween” fans can seek out.

Green’s first miscalculation here is trying to establish a mythology for Michael’s blood-dripped story, with a little retcon work to put Will Patton’s lawman, Frank Hawkins, on the scene of the killing in ’78 (with Thomas Man as a young Hawkins). Green and co-writers Scott Teems and Danny McBride are “Halloween” obsessives, so they should know such backstory work has been attempted without success through countless sequels and reboots, and they always come off as idiotic and desperate.

As the body count hits double digits in short order, we see Green’s second calculation: Sidelining Laurie, the one character we care about the most, for almost the entire movie. Curtis, her movie-icon radiance still intact, delivers some arch monologues about Michael as a force of evil, which she does with appropriate gravity. But it’s a performance she could have done in a day on set, so removed is Laurie from the story.

Green also tries, and this is miscalculation No. 3, to make some sort of statement — as Tommy riles up the good folks of Haddonfield, their fear turning the citizens into a mob as monstrous as Michael ever was. It’s accidental, no doubt, that some of the mob scenes evoke memories of the Jan. 6 mob violence at the U.S. Capitol (this movie was filmed well before then, and held a year because of the pandemic), but it’s hard to shake the visual comparisons.

The fourth and final miscalculation — the one that turned my feelings about the movie from annoyance to hostility — is at the very end of the film, a final onscreen death that is a crass reminder that Green has one more of these movies, “Halloween Ends,” coming next year to complete the boxed set. Unless the third movie is Green’s filmed apology for 106 minutes, I don’t care what comes next in this grotesque cash grab.

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‘Halloween Kills’

★

Opens Friday, October 15, in theaters everywhere, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language and some drug use. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'The Last Duel' examines 'truth' three ways, in a medieval tale of power and pride

Two of director Ridley Scott’s trademarks — depicting muscular battles between men, and spotlighting strong female characters — are evident in “The Last Duel,” a surprisingly timely tale of power dynamics in 14th century France.

“Based on true events,” as the opening title card tells us, “The Last Duel” digs into a years-in-the-making feud between a French nobleman, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and his squire, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) — who, Scott shows us at the outset, are about to joust and fight to the death.

The movie then pulls back to tell the history that led to that moment, Actually, three histories, because what we’re shown are three versions of the tale, from three vantage points.

First, the movie shows us de Carrouges’ version of events, in which he’s depicted as a fierce soldier, loyal to young King Charles VI (Alex Lawther) and his local lordship, Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck). De Carrouges needs money to maintain his status, so he does two things: Goes off to fight in King Charles’ wars, and marries Lady Marguerite (Jodie Comer) for her dowry, including a prime piece of land.

That stretch of land becomes the crux of a legal battle, when Marguerite’s father (Nathaniel Parker) is forced to renege on his deal with de Carrouges, and gives it instead to Count Pierre, who then deeds it to Le Gris. Pierre also gives Le Gris a command de Carrouges thought he should get by birthright. And, in a final indignity, Marguerite reports to her husband that while he was away, Le Gris came to the castle and raped her.

The second chapter tells these events from Le Gris’ point of view. There are some differences, such as Le Gris saving de Carrouges’ life in battle, rather than the other way around. We also see Le Gris’ friendship with Pierre, which is largely based on their shared talents for drinking heavily and bedding multiple women.

But Le Gris’ version of the story also includes him raping Marguerite. In his telling, though, it’s because he had fallen hopelessly in love with her — and, according to him, she secretly enjoyed it.

The movie’s third chapter is the most telling viewpoint of all: Lady Marguerite’s.

That third act is largely written by Nicole Holofcener (“Enough Said,” “The Land of Steady Habits”), who was brought aboard by Damon and Affleck (their first shared screenplay since “Good Will Hunting” won them an Oscar) to provide Marguerite’s voice. It’s a strong voice, unwavering when the male powers that be suggest she’s lying about the rape, and incredulous when someone notes that rape then wasn’t a crime against the woman — but a theft of the husband’s property.

Scott has assembled a dynamic cast here. Damon depicts de Carrouges’ inflexible code of honor, and his frustration that being a good soldier isn’t as profitable as Le Gris’ ability to suck up to Pierre. Driver, perhaps the most fascinating movie star of the moment, plays Le Gris as a dashing hero and an abusive cad, depending on whose version of history is being told. In supporting roles, Affleck and Lawther revel in parts that play up the giddy delights of unchecked power. 

It’s not until the back half of “The Last Duel” that the true star emerges, and that’s Comer. She’s already proven her scene-stealing prowess in “Free Guy” and BBC America’s “Killing Eve.” Here, she channels the subsumed rage of a woman who defies convention — and the advice of her mother-in-law (Harriet Walter) — that tells her to shut up and accept her fate, and the courage to speak honestly  no matter the cost.

That cost is shown in the grand finale, the duel between de Carrouges and Le Gris, based on the ancient law of combat as justice — on the theory that God will allow the party who’s telling the truth to win the battle. Scott, who has tackled similar battle sequences in “The Duellists” and “Gladiator,” is in his element here.

But, with Comer’s Lady Marguerite, Scott is also presenting a strong, complex female character — something he’s done with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in “Alien” as well as Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in “Thelma and Louise.” “The Last Duel” satisfies both dynamics from Scott’s long career, and allows the master to deliver a thrilling late-career masterwork.

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‘The Last Duel’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence including sexual assault, sexual content, some graphic nudity, and language. Running time: 152 minutes.

Review: 'Bergman Island' captures with heartbreaking detail the ups and downs of creativity and inspiration

Suffering, of the romantic and artistic varieties, plays out beautifully in Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately droll “Bergman Island,” set in the perfect place for such painful introspection: Fårö Island.

Fårö is the place that the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman called home, and where he shot some his most famous films. It’s also, as Hansen-Løve depicts it, a tourist haven for introspective cinemaphiles who want to overdose on Bergman’s brand of Scandinavian melancholy. There’s even a “Bergman Week” there every June, where film lovers attend panels and tour the sites where Bergman worked.

Here, it’s where married screenwriters Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps, from “Phantom Thread” and “Old”) have come for a week’s escape from parental duties — their daughter is staying with Chris’ mom — so they can write their next scripts. They are set up in one of Bergman’s former homes, where the caretaker cheerfully tells them the master bedroom is where Bergman filmed “Scenes From a Marriage,” “the film that made thousands of people divorce.” Tony and Chris opt to sleep in the smaller second bedroom.

Tony is a Hollywood director, specializing in dark psychological horror thrillers, one of which is screening during the weeklong Bergman festival. Chris, who is less sure of her writing skills, who remarks that “movies can be terribly sad, tough, violent — but in the end, they do you good,” starts working at a desk in the small windmill near the main house.

As Tony and Chris go looking around the island and encountering other Bergman-heads, Hansen-Løve inserts some subtle commentary about the ups and downs of fandom. Bergman may have been one of the greatest filmmakers to have lived, but his fans are sometimes no better than any other fandoms, Trekkies of the bleak emotional wastelands. Some of the locals, our couple soon learns, resent the foreigners descending on their town, while others — like Hampus (Hampus Nordenson), who shows Chris the Bergman-centric spots the tour buses don’t show — embrace the town’s connection to this legendary filmmaker.

Well into the film, Chris is ready to tell Tony about the story she’s writing. As she does, we see the story play out, with Mia Wasikowska (“Crimson Peak”) and Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie in the lead roles. Chris’ movie, like this one, is set on Fårö Island — and sometimes the line between stories gets a little fuzzy.

Hansen-Løve — known for such films as the ‘90s club-scene drama “Eden” and the dysfunctional family story “Father of My Children” — crystallizes the experience of writing, of taking the material floating around them and assembling that inspiration into something poignant, moving and universal. This would seem to ripe for a dark, brooding film worthy of Bergman himself, but instead Hansen-Løve fashions something light and breezy, while still packing an emotional wallop.

What brings “Bergman Island” into focus are the twinned performances of Krieps and Wasikowska. who only share one brief scene but also share the movie’s beating heart. They embody the storyteller and the story being told, and how the wall between the two is thin and crumbling when the story captures the viewer’s imagination as thoroughly as this one does.

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‘Bergman Island’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 15, in select theaters. Rated R for some sexual content, nudity and language. Running time: 112 minutes.