Review: Jane Campion returns with a bleak, gorgeous and emotionally riveting 'Power of the Dog'

Director/screenwriter Jane Campion’s first feature film in more than a decade, “The Power of the Dog,” is a shatteringly beautiful return to form, a prickly tale of strained family bonds in the not-so-old West.

Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s acclaimed 1967 novel starts in Montana in 1925, just as the automobile and other refinements of “civilization” are starting to insert themselves in the rough-and-tumble frontier. The story centers on the Burbank brothers, who run the area’s most prosperous ranch. 

The brothers are a study in contrasts: Older brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is gruff and cruel, while George (Jesse Plemons) is quiet and kind, particularly to Rose (Kirsten Dunst), the woman who runs the restaurant in town where the Burbanks and their men have dinner after the cattle drive. And while Phil joins the men at the brothel next door, George stays behind and talks to Rose — a widow with an adult son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who aims to study medicine like his father did.

George and Rose find their conversations are becoming a courtship, and it’s not long before they marry. This shifts the balance in the power dynamics at the Burbank ranch, particularly when Rose’s efforts to add some womanly touches to the house — and invite guests, like the governor (Keith Carradine), to dinner. 

When George is called away on business for a long stretch, Rose finds the ranch lonely — especially with only the gruff, unfeeling Phil for company — and she starts taking to the bottle. When Peter returns from medical school back east, Phil at first taunts him as a “nancy,” but soon starts taking the young man under his wing. There are hints about Phil, and a deceased cowboy he once revered, but those are thoughts Phil tries to brush aside.

Campion, as she did with her 1993 masterwork “The Piano,” uses the physical starkness of the landscape  to reflect the emotional desolation of the people who live in it. (She filmed in her native New Zealand.) Her dialogue is spare, with never a word wasted, the silences serving to convey the longing and regrets these characters are feeling. 

Campion also assembles a strong cast, all hitting at the peak of their powers. Cumberbatch quietly connects the dots between Phil’s outward cruelty and his self-loathing. Plemons and Dunst, a couple in real life, are nicely paired as the late-in-life lovers tenderly reaching for each other. The real breakthrough is Smit-McPhee, whose combination of outward fragility and smart scheming is reminiscent of a young Anthony Perkins. Together, they give “The Power of the Dog” the bite it needs to match Campion’s bleak but beautiful West.

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‘The Power of the Dog’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 24, in theaters; available for streaming December 1 on Netflix. Rated R for brief sexual content/full nudity. Running time: 126 minutes.

Review: Julia Child's life was a four-course meal, but in the documentary 'Julia," the portions aren't big enough

With a life as full and as rich as Julia Child’s, any documentary will feel like a trifle — but filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West do an admirable job getting to the essence of the famed chef in “Julia.”

Cohen and West — who profiled Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“RBG”) and legal pioneer Pauli Murray (“My Name Is Pauli Murray”) — have a lot to cover with Child’s life. Born in a wealthy California family, she sought adventure and found it during World War II, as a typist for the O.S.S. (the precursor to the modern CIA). She was stationed abroad, which is how she met Paul Child, a diplomat who introduced her to culture by way of food. They married, and he was posted to France, where she was introduced to French cooking.

Child wanted to learn how to cook such marvelous food, so she became one of the few women students at the famous cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu. She was imposing, at 6 feet, 3 inches, and soon proved herself an adept cook. Child teamed up with two French friends, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (nicknamed “Simca”), to try to explain the techniques of French cuisine to an American audience. The result was “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

The book was a revelation, in an era of convenience foods and Campbell’s soup casseroles. It was so detailed that its initial publisher rejected it because the editors thought it was too much like an encyclopedia. The publisher Alfred A. Knopf, reportedly on the advice of his wife, picked up the book in 1961, and it became a gold mine for the publishing house.

The book also led Child to another kind of fame. Living in Boston at the time, Child was invited to appear on a talk show about books on the local educational TV station, WGBH. Child asked the station to provide a hot plate, so she could cook something while being interviewed. The segment showed Child’s comfort in front of the camera, and prompted WGBH to hire Child to present a weekly cooking show, “The French Chef.” It made her a star, America’s first celebrity chef.

Cohen and West tell much of Child’s story through her journals, and letters she wrote to friends and, most especially, with Paul. What those writings reveal is a passionate love affair — he wrote her a sonnet, guys — that spanned continents and decades. (The film employs Paul’s photographs, which demonstrate his love for her, including one tastefully composed nude.) 

One story sums up the romance perfectly. Julia developed breast cancer in 1968, and had a radical mastectomy. Julia cried when she lost her breast, and told Paul she worried he wouldn’t love her any more. Paul’s response was the last word on the subject: “I didn’t marry you for your breasts. I married you for your legs.”

The filmmakers don’t shy away from Child’s less-than-perfect qualities. For years, she was something of a homophobe. That changed when her attorney, who was gay, died from AIDS — and Child did an about-face and became a staunch advocate for the LGBTQ community, and a dedicated fund-raiser for AIDS charities.

The movie uses a wealth of archival footage of Child’s numerous TV appearances — including the time in 1978 when she cut her finger during a talk show, inspiring Dan Aykroyd’s bloody parody on “Saturday Night Live” a month later. The movie also includes interviews with current chefs, such as Marcus Samuelsson and Jose Andres, and other foodie celebrities talking about Child’s lasting impact on our TV screens and our taste buds.

There’s so much to be said about Child — and the footage shows how much joy she got in cooking and showing others how to do it — that “Julia” could have been longer than the fleet 95 minutes it takes to watch. That’s a good sign for any host: You never want your time with them to end.

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‘Julia’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 24, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language/sexual reference, and some thematic elements. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: In 'Bruised,' Halle Berry's performance as a grizzled MMA fighter is the best thing in her uneven directing debut

In “Bruised,” Halle Berry has finally found a director who can challenge her, to push her to a performance that rivals her Oscar-winning work in “Monster’s Ball” 20 years ago — and that director’s name is (checks notes) Halle Berry.

Berry plays Jackie Justice, an MMA fighter who once had a promising career, with 10 wins and no losses before a catastrophic fight where she climbed out of the ring. As the movie begins, Jackie is cleaning rich people’s houses, and living with her abusive boyfriend/manager, Desi (Adan Canto), hiding booze in a spray bottle under the sink. 

As her life is hitting rock bottom, two things re-enter her life. One is Manny (Danny Boyd Jr.), the child she gave up as a baby, who’s back because his daddy was killed. The other is a shot at returning to the UFC, the main league for MMA fighters, thanks to a charismatic promoter, Immaculate (Shamier Anderson), who wants to sign Jackie for a shot at the flyweight champ.

Jackie works to juggle caring for Manny while committing to sparring sessions with Immaculate’s top trainer, Buddhakan (Sheila Atim). Dealing with both forces Jackie to examine the worst parts of her life — namely, her arrangement with Desi and her relationship with her mother, Angel (Adriane Lenox). She quickly realizes that what’s most important is protecting Manny, who, like Jackie, has seen his share of trauma in his six years on this planet.

In her directing debut, Berry shows she can place a camera well and let scenes play out for maximum dramatic impact — particularly in the climactic fight scene, which is expertly staged. Berry also has an eye for casting, particularly in picking Atim, a Ugandan-born British actor whose striking beauty and dramatic intensity suggest big things in her future.

The weak link is the script, by rookie screenwriter Michelle Rosenfarb, which recycles every boxing and child cliche this side of Wallace Beery in “The Champ” (1931), as well as every poverty and addiction trope a semi-knowledgeable movie buff can recognize.

The best thing about “Bruised” is that Berry, deglamorizing herself to show the bumps and cuts of being an MMA fighter, delivers a performance that’s powerful both in its physicality and its emotional impact. It will be fascinating to see what Berry’s got up her sleeve for her follow-up.

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‘Bruised’

★★1/2

Opened Wednesday, November 17, in theaters; available for streaming Wednesday, November 24, on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, some sexual content/nudity and violence. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'House of Gucci' is trashy and campy, with a larger-than-life central performance by Lady Gaga

Like the knockoff merchandise by which most people know the brand, director Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci” is a gaudy, garish, tasteless exercise in excess — and, yet, I can’t say I wasn’t entertained.

There’s a lot to be said for camp value, and Lady Gaga’s central performance delivers that by the truckload. In this based-on-a-true-story crime drama, Lady G plays Patrizia Reggiani, who is introduced here in Milan, 1978, as an accountant for her father’s trucking firm. Patrizia aims for the good life, though, which is why she and a friend are at a ritzy party where she meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), a member of the family behind the Gucci fashion label.

Patrizia and Maurizio fall in love, but his father, Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons), is suspicious of anyone from the lower classes circling around the family fortune. But Patrizia charms the old man, while also consulting a TV psychic, Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek), who provides pearls of encouragement about following her heart and making good things come to her.

Rodolfo runs Gucci with his brother, Aldo (Al Pacino), whose main contribution to the business is slapping the company’s double-G logo on coffee mugs and other cheap merchandise. When Rodolfo dies, Aldo encourages Maurizio to be his second-in-command — bypassing Aldo’s buffoon of a son, Paolo, played by Jared Leto under a ton of prosthetics. Paolo fancies himself a fashion designer, though his designs are so garish that Aldo fears they would ruin the Gucci reputation.

Maurizio isn’t a strong business leader, and Patrizia is quick to fill the managerial vacuum. Soon, Patrizia is appealing to Paolo’s vanity to trap him into selling his share of the family’s stock — a power play that puts her and Maurizio in firm control of the company. That’s the first of many twists of the tale, in a story that includes infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, double-dealing and, eventually, a murder.

Scott, on the heels of his powerful medieval drama “The Last Duel,” goes over the top through much of “House of Gucci,” with every plot point and ‘80s needle drop coming together like an 18-car pile-up. The script — by Becky Johnston (“The Prince of Tides”) and Roberto Bentivegna (his first screenplay credit), adapting Sara Gay Forden’s book on the case — dances perilously close to comedy, a parody of “The Godfather” where every man in the Corleone family is a Fredo.

Driver gives a solid, understated performance, which means he’s completely lost amid this gaggle of scenery chewers. It says a lot when Pacino doesn’t give the biggest, hammiest performance in a movie, but he wasn’t conjuring with Leto pulling out the stops to play the balding, heavy-set Paolo with the aid of a talented make-up team and a series of ugly track suits.

Gaga, in her first leading role since her breakout turn in “A Star Is Born,” struggles with finding the humanity in the cartoonish depiction of Patrizia, as she cycles through several of the deadly sins — lust, avarice, envy, pride and wrath — largely unchecked. Clearly Scott has told Gaga to go big or go home, and she goes big in every scene, until the law of diminishing returns takes her and the movie down. But it’s a wild ride along the way.

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‘House of Gucci’

★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 24, in theaters. Rated R for language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence. Running time: 157 minutes.

Review: 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife' is too haunted by its franchise's history, and its fans' limited imaginations, to deliver anything truly exciting

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I gave up on “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” when I knew that director Jason Reitman had no intention of creating something original within the universe begun with his dad Ivan’s 1984 action comedy.

I’d say “spoiler alert” here, but it’s hard to spoil a moment that’s the focus of the movie’s marketing campaign. It’s the moment where They show up — and you know exactly who They are, because everything that Jason Reitman and his co-screenwriter, Gil Kenan, have laid in place sets us up for when They enter the picture.

It’s too bad, because the idea that starts this film showed the promise of taking the familiar franchise in an interesting direction — just as intriguing as director Paul Feig’s unfairly maligned 2016 variation, and with as much potential for laughs and excitement.

Callie (Carrie Coon) is a single mom with two sharp kids — perpetually mortified 15-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and 12-year-old science nerd Phoebe (McKenna Grace). The family is broke, and their last hope is an inheritance from Callie’s estranged and now deceased father: A dilapidated farm in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma. We are not supposed to know who Callie’s father was, though it’s pretty obvious just looking at Phoebe’s curly black hair and oversized eyeglasses.

The clues pile up when Phoebe finds a still-functioning PKE meter, which guides her to her grandfather’s underground workshop, where a proton pack awaits repairs. Meanwhile, Trevor goes out to the barn and finds a rundown old car — a Cadillac hearse with a familiar red circular logo on the doors and the ECTO-1 license plate.

These Easter eggs and many others will make the diehard “Ghostbusters” fans feel right at home. So will Paul Rudd’s appearance as a summer school teacher who provides plot exposition to tell Phoebe about the Manhattan ghost appearances of the 1980s, thwarted by the OG Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and the late Harold Ramis), whose videotaped exploits live forever on YouTube.

When Reitman focuses on the kids, the movie soars. There’s a great action set piece where Trevor is driving the Ecto-1, while Phoebe wields a proton pack from the vehicle’s gunner seat — a surprise to Phoebe’s ghost-obsessed new friend, Podcast (Logan Kim), as much as it is to us — as they chase a ghost through the streets of their new Oklahoma town. If the whole movie could be like that, this would be a fun and exciting thrill ride.

For a minute, even the grown-ups bring something to the table. Rudd does his patented funny Everyman thing, which still works like a charm. And Coon brings some real emotion to bear, dealing with her pent-up grief and anger at the father she never knew. But Coon and Rudd get sucked into the nostalgia machinery, starting when Rudd’s character is menaced by tiny marshmallow-based creatures in a WalMart.

The rabid fans of the original “Ghostbusters” won’t care — they get to see their beloved franchise just the way they like it, without trying to add anything fresh like the 2016 version where all the Ghostbusters were, gasp, women. That version, those fans declared, ruined their childhoods, but “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” does something worse: It traps those fans within their arrested childhoods, giving them everything they want and nothing they don’t expect.

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‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’

★★

Opening Friday, November 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for supernatural action and some suggestive references. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: 'King Richard' highlights Will Smith and other strong performances, in a straight-ahead account of Venus and Serena Williams' early tennis days

Even as it stays carefully within the lines of a standard sports biography, “King Richard” delivers its emotional punch in some unexpected ways — thanks largely to the performances by Will Smith, Aunjunue Ellis and two promising newcomers.

Smith plays Richard Williams, a former athlete living in Compton, Calif., in the early 1990s with his wife, Brandy (played by Ellis), and their large family. Williams, a tennis coach who obsessively studies every famous coach’s tapes, is pouring everything he knows into two of his daughters — Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton). Knowing those names, you already know how this story ends, with the stellar careers of two of the greatest tennis players to ever pick up a racquet.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (“Joe Bell”) and first-time screenwriter Zach Baylin look at what happens before that. It shows Richard taking his family to the cracked concrete tennis courts in his neighborhood, drilling Venus and Serena while their siblings do their homework — then getting home so Venus and Serena can get their homework done, as well. 

The movie also shows the elder Williams trying to convince top-level coaches to take the girls in as prospects. First, he convinces coach Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), who’s worked with the likes of John McEnroe and Pete Sampras, to teach Venus. 

It’s Cohen who convinces Richard to let Venus compete in some juniors tournaments, where she tears up southern California’s pre-teen tennis hierarchy. At one point, Serena sneaks behind Dad’s back and registers for a juniors tourney — and she shows herself to be as strong a competitor as Venus. “You got the next Michael Jordan,” someone tells Richard at one point, and he replies, “I got the next two.”

Later in the story, Richard gets a recruiting pitch from Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), who’s developed a tennis academy in Florida, and wants the Williams family to relocate so Venus and Serena can train there. Macci lures the family to Florida, but he soon grows frustrated with Richard’s opinions, and his demand that Venus and Serena drop out of juniors tournaments, and focus on Venus turning pro at age 14.

Baylin’s script, a 2018 honoree of The Black List (a Hollywood industry compilation of the best unproduced screenplays), lays down some sharp commentary about the tennis world, from the self-loathing pre-teen players display when they lose a point to the high stakes gamesmanship of athletic shoe contracts. First and foremost, though, it’s a solid story about family, and the sacrifices Richard and Brandy make to ensure their children’s future is better than their present.

Smith gives a powerful performance, capturing the human dynamo that Richard Williams is (as evidenced by the unnecessary closing-credits video of the real Williams), a blend of paternal love and cagey calculation. He’s nicely matched by Ellis (so memorable in “Lovecraft Country”), who fights to protect her girls from anyone who might impede them — even if that might be Richard. And newcomers Sidney and Singleton balance the intensity of Venus and Serena with the joy of being kids who know that their parents love them, no matter how they fare on the court.

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‘King Richard’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, November 19, in theaters everywhere, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated PG-13 for some violence, strong language, a sexual reference and brief drug references. Running time: 137 minutes.

Review: 'The Souvenir: Part II' continues director Joanna Hogg's beautiful exploration of a young woman confronting her grief and finding her artistic voice

Two years after she made one of the best coming-of-age dramas in recent memory in “The Souvenir,” writer-director Joanna Hogg does it again with the well-observed and beautiful “The Souvenir Part II” — which is, as you may have guessed, a continuation of the same story.

It’s helpful to watch “The Souvenir,” because Hogg picks up where the first movie left off, and she frequently references what happened in the earlier film. That movie ended — unavoidable spoiler coming — with shy ‘80s London film student Julie Harte (Honor Swinton Byrne) reeling from the death by suicide of her boyfriend Anthony, who hid his heroin addiction for much of their relationship.

After some time retreating to her parents’ home, where her mum (Swinton Burke’s real mother, the great actor Tilda Swinton) and dad (James Spencer Ashworth) try to be understanding. Mum also tries to distract Julie by talking about her latest hobby, making pottery.

Eventually, Julie returns to university — borrowing more money from Mum first — and joining her classmates in working grunt work at a movie studio in between shooting their own short films. This allows Julie to meet a brooding actor (“Stranger Things’” Charlie Heaton) with whom , and to talk to Patrick (Richard Ayoade), the music-video director who knew of Anthony’s addictions long before she did.

After feeling aimless, Julie decides the way to understand why Anthony killed himself, and how he hid his addiction so long, is to make a movie about their time together. At first, Julie’s floundering. Her professors say her script is too vague, without enough simple directions. Her producing partner (Jaygann Ayeh) is flummoxed that she rejects the actors he suggests, casting instead a French film student, Garance (Ariane Labed), as her character — and Garance complains that the character is “too naive, too fragile.”  Meanwhile, her other classmates, who become her crew, berate her for being indecisive.

Thus, Hogg manages a thoughtful twofer: Examining Julie’s processing of grief, and following the way an artist finds her voice. She does so by expanding the small, detailed canvas of the first “Souvenir” — which focused tightly on how Julie molded herself to fit Anthony’s mentorship — and gives Julie room to discover who she really is as an adult.

Amid a strong supporting cast, notably Swinton as Julie’s eager-to-comfort mom and Ayoade as an untethered filmmaker, Swinton Byrne shines. She turns Julie from a receptacle for other people’s ideas — her mom’s, her therapist’s, her classmates’, and those of Anthony’s memory — into a fully blossoming woman who takes that input and creates her own reality.

The collaboration between Hogg and Swinton Byrne is so sharply focused that it raises an intriguing question: Would we want a “Part III,” to follow the next part of Julie’s story? Or should they leave things as they stand, and start afresh on a different story? The thought-provoking beauty of “The Souvenir: Part II” is that either option sounds like a good one.

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‘The Souvenir Part II’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some strong sexuality, and language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: Disney's 'Encanto' creates a magical house, and a fascinating set of characters to inhabit it

The bright and breezy “Encanto” is, we’re told by the studio logo, the 60th animated feature to come out of the Walt Disney Studios — and it carries the hallmarks of that brand, of a simple story told beautifully.

In a picturesque valley in Colombia, everyone comes over to see what’s happening with the Madrigals, the most prosperous family in the village. The Madrigals arrived in the village 50 years ago, on the run from bandits, according to the matriarch, Abuela Alma (voiced by Maria Cecilia Botero), and her three babies each were given a magical gift: Pepa (voiced by Carolina Gaitan) changes the weather with her moods, Julieta (voiced by Angie Cepeda) can heal with her cooking, and Bruno (voiced by John Leguizamo)… well, “we don’t talk about Bruno,” as it says in one of the bouncy songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The gifts go down to the next generation. Julieta’s daughter Luisa (voiced by Jessica Darrow) can lift a dozen donkeys at once, while her middle daughter Isabela (voiced by Diane Guerrero) makes flowers appear wherever her perfect hair swishes. Only Julieta’s youngest daughter, Mirabel (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) is without a magical gift, so she tries to compensate by being as helpful as she can — even under Abuela’s disapproving eye.

When Mirabel’s cousin Antonio (voiced by Ravi Cabot-Conyers) is about to undergo the ceremony where he receives his magical gift, Mirabel has a vision of the Madrigal casita developing cracks and threatening the candle that is the fount of the family’s magic. Abuela doesn’t want to hear it, and doesn’t believe Mirabel, which makes the girl even more determined to figure out what’s going wrong. Mirabel is sure the answer lies in the family’s most enduring mystery: What happened to Bruno?

Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard (who filled the same jobs on “Zootopia”) create a rich color palette for the Madrigal’s casita — and for the fanciful animation during several of the musical numbers. The sharpest animation work is in depicting the casita, whose floorboard and roof tiles move in rhythm, keeping the Madrigal family on time and on task throughout their busy days.

The script, by Bush and co-director Charise Castro Smith (a playwright making her movie debut), is smart and soulful. It takes the story into some unexpected directions, and finds both the dark and light in several of the main characters — aided by Miranda’s song score, which deliver the clever wordplay, tricky rhythms and emotional punch one expects form the man who wrote “Hamilton” and “In the Heights.”

“Encanto” is, as its name suggests, quite enchanting in its depiction of a family dealing with external crises and internal strife — but weathering them together, to the beat of the music.

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‘Encanto’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, November 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some thematic elements and some mild peril. Running time: 99 minutes; plus a 7-minute short, “Far From the Tree.”