Review: 'Flee' uses animation to tell the true story of an Afghan refugee, and put us in the middle of his journey

The animated documentary “Flee” is doing so many things at the same time, and doing them so well, that it’s breathtaking — but you may not even notice, because director Jonas Poher Rasmussen keeps the focus on the amazing survival story at the center.

Rasmussen is interviewing Amin, 36, an academic originally from Afghanistan and now living in Denmark with his boyfriend, Kasper. Amin tells stories of his childhood in Kabul, flying kites, listening to European pop music, and being a kid — until the Taliban took power and cracked down on all Western influences. The Taliban took his father away, and things went downhill for the family from there.

Amin and his family struggle to get out of Afghanistan, first to Moscow, where things are scarcely better. They live in a tenement, and face regular harassment from corrupt police. Trying to hire a smuggler to get out of Moscow is difficult, and ultimately Amin must go alone.

Amin’s success getting out of Russia comes at a cost, though. To convince officials in Denmark to let him in as a refugee, he’s forced to tell a lie — and he lives the next 20 years fearful that the lie will be exposed, and he’ll be sent back to Russia or, worse, Taliban-run Afghanistan.

And, while he’s dealing with one secret he keeps from the government, there’s another one he’s trying to keep from his family: His homosexuality.

To keep his biggest secret — his identity — Rasmussen employs simple animation to hide Amin’s true face. The medium proves to be an inspired choice, because animation allows Rasmussen to visualize all the steps of Amin’s journey, including events where there were no cameras.

The animation of “Flee” reminded me of Art Spiegelman’s drawings in his landmark graphic history “Maus.” The art in both works adds a layer of artifice to the storytelling, allowing us to take one step back, emotionally — so we can absorb the details of the story without getting overwhelmed by it. Then, at a certain point, the humanity of the characters asserts itself, and we see in sharp relief the cost of Amin’s struggle.

The animation also allows the audience for “Flee” to see themselves in Amin’s place, and feel empathy not only for him but refugees from all over. If that’s not the purpose of movies – “a machine that creates empathy,” as Roger Ebert once said — I don’t know what is.

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‘Flee’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, Salt Lake City. Rated PG-13 for thematic content, disturbing images and strong violence. Running time: 89 minutes; in Dari and Danish, mostly, with subtitles.

Review: In 'Parallel Mothers,' Almodóvar turns melodrama into gold, and gives Penélope Cruz one of her meatiest roles ever

What’s great about Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is how he takes the melodramatic and elevates it into high art, as he does in his latest film, the drama “Parallel Mothers.”

Another thing that Almodóvar does expertly is he creates roles for Penélope Cruz that are light years above what Hollywood has offered her — and how she never squanders that opportunity.

Cruz plays Janis, a Madrid-based magazine photographer who, in 2016, draws the assignment to photograph Arturo (Israel Elejalde), an archaeologist whose work involves finding mass graves left by the fascist Franco regime. Janis’s father was killed by Franco’s death squads, and she asks Arturo for help unearthing her father’s grave.

Janis and Arturo, who’s married to someone else, are soon having sex — and nine months after that, Janis is having a baby, which she intends to raise alone. In the same maternity ward, Janis befriends Ana (Milena Smit), a teen girl who’s scared of becoming a mother. Janis gives Ana some moral support and her phone number, in case she ever wants to call.

A couple years pass, and Janis is happily raising her daughter, Cecilia, as a single mom. But a visit from Arturo to see his daughter leaves her stricken — because Arturo doesn’t see any of himself or his family in Cecilia. Janis performs a DNA test, and the results are a shock: She’s not the mother. This revelation spurs Janis to find Ana, to unravel the mystery.

Ana has her own problems. When we encounter her again, she’s working in a tavern near Janis’ apartment, raising her daughter, Anita, while Ana’s mom, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijon), is away pursuing her dreams of being an actress.

Almodóvar, as writer and director, uses these soap-opera plot devices to a higher purpose, to bring out the powerful emotions we associate with motherhood and let them play out in full. Even though it’s melodrama, though, Cruz and Smit keep their emotions tightly locked down — but when the situation is too much to bear, their hearts explode for us to see.

Cruz has never given a better performance, capturing Janis’s maternal joy and heartache beautifully. Smit is a relative newcomer, but she matches Cruz’s intensity and natural emotions at every turn. Together, these actresses from different generations deliver powerhouse performances in service to a warm and wise movie about the highs and lows of parenting.

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‘Parallel Mothers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinema, Salt Lake City. Rated R for some sexuality. Running time: 123 minutes; in Spanish with subtitles.

Review: 'The King's Daughter' is a chaotic mess of a fairy tale story that sat on the shelf too long

The fantasy “The King’s Daughter” is a mess from start to finish, a slapdash mix of poorly conceived drama, cliched dialogue, hammy acting, shoddy special effects and the scars of too many attempts to salvage something in post-production.

On the bright side, the filmmakers didn’t let Pierce Brosnan sing. 

Brosnan plays King Louis XIV of France, who in the late 1600s is concerned about his legacy. Instead of being nice and generous, as kings almost never are, Louis orders his best naval captain, Yves De La Croix (Benjamin Walker), to sail out to find the fabled city of Atlantis to capture a mermaid, whose life force is believed to bestow immortality.

Because the king wants an appreciative crowd at Versailles, Louis makes arrangements to have his illegitimate daughter, Marie-Josephe D’Alember (Kaya Scodelario), brought from the convent — where she’s a rebellious pain to the abbess (Rachel Griffiths) — to play her cello in the king’s court.

Marie-Josephe no sooner arrives at the castle when she hears the mermaid’s song and wants to replay it on her instrument, and has soon befriended the underwater beauty (played, wordlessly, by the Chinese star Bingbing Fan). Marie-Josephe enlists the remorseful De La Croix to defy the king and his sniveling science advisor, Dr. Labarthe (Pablo Schreiber), by helping the mermaid escape back to open sea and her family. With Marie-Josephe and the good captain on one side and Louis and Labarthe on the other, the mystery becomes which side the King’s private priest, Pere La Chaise (William Hurt), lines up with before the credits roll.

Director Sean McNamara, a prolific filmmaker whose last credit was the made-in-Utah “Sister Swap” Christmas TV movies, probably could have had another eight years to work on the chaotic script (credited to two writers, but evidence suggests there were others) and it wouldn’t have helped. Scenes are cut off abruptly, or allowed to go on too long. Dialogue that is supposed to sound arch comes off as peevish. A open-the-book framing device, complete with Julie Andrews’ narration, is a sad callback to far better fairy-tale stories.

Scodelario — who had come off the first “The Maze Runner” movie when this one was made and was three years away from starring in the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie — is enchanting, again, as the headstrong Marie-Josephe, but even she has trouble finding any scraps from which to build a coherent character. (Apparently, some good did come out of all this for Scodelario: She and Walker, the dashing star of “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter,” started dating, and were married a year and a half later; last month, they had their second child.)

The only person who seems to have succeeded at their job in “The King’s Daughter” is the costume designer, Lizzy Gardiner (an Oscar winner for “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”). Gardiner’s creations for the foppish French court, contrasted by Marie-Josephe’s elegant slim-figured gowns, are more inventive and original than anything else that made it onto the screen. One hopes they aren’t being used as dust rags seven years later.

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‘The King’s Daughter’

★1/2

Opening Friday, January 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some violence, suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Redeeming Love,' a Christian-themed romance with lots of sex in it, is a stew of mixed signals and murky motives

For a drama that’s adapted from a romance novel popular with evangelical Christians, “Redeeming Love” has a lot more sexual content than you’d expect — just one of the aspects of this heavy-handed Western love story that is more confounding than enjoyable.

It’s 1850 in Pair-A-Dice, a boom town during the California gold rush. Those who have found a nugget or two of gold usually line up outside The Palace, the swankiest of the town’s brothels, to see if they win that day’s lottery. The prize: Thirty minutes with the most beautiful prostitute in the place, Angel (played by Abigail Cowen).

It wasn’t always that way, as the flashbacks show us. As a little girl (Livi Birch), Angel was witness when her mother, Mae (Nina Dobrev), was abused and discarded by the married man (Josh Taylor) who was the girl’s daddy. Mae had to take to prostitution, and died too soon of disease — leaving the girl in the not-so-tender mercies of Duke (Eric Dane), an unscrupulous gangster with brothels on both coasts.

Back to Pair-A-Dice — a pun that gets more groan-inducing with every utterance — where a godly farmer, Michael Hosea (Tom Lewis), rides into town. Before getting there, Michael has stopped into a chapel and asked God for a favor, to give him a companion to share his life. His only specific demands is that she have long legs and like fishing.

In town, Michael spots the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, and knows she’s destined to become his wife. Yup, it’s Angel — and winning over the jaded prostitute is no easy challenge, even after getting past the brothel’s madam, Duchess (Famke Janssen), who guards Angel like the moneymaker she is.

It’s only after Angel is beaten horribly by Duchess’ goon Magowan (Brandon Auret) that Angel agrees to marry Michael. He takes her to the farm, tends to her injuries, and otherwise keeps his distance while waiting for Angel to heal from her years of trauma. Even when she offers to sleep with him, Michael demurs, saying he’ll wait until she comes to him out of love and not obligation.

Director D.J. Caruso (an action filmmaker whose last feature was the third “xXx” movie with Vin Diesel) rewrote the script by Francine Rivers, who wrote the Christian-themed novel on which it’s based, and he leans hard into the bodice-ripping elements of the historical romance genre. There are two, count ‘em, steamy sex scenes between Angel and Michael, and numerous scenes where Cowen’s Angel appears topless — though it’s “Little Mermaid” nudity, with her long hair or a stray hand covering up anything that would threaten the carefully constructed PG-13 rating.

Caruso captures the ramshackle ruggedness of the old West well (even if the movie was filmed in South Africa), and the story moves at a furious pace, particularly in the later scenes where Duke returns to the scene. 

Cowen (familiar to fans of “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) is adept at playing the object of men’s lusts, and transitions well into her later role as a helpmeet who regularly abandons Michael because she feels unworthy of his devotion. It’s perhaps not surprising, considering its roots in the Old Testament — also centering on a man named Hosea — that the sexual dynamics here are all about a woman finding worthiness only in a man’s eyes.

“Redeeming Love” takes a page from “The Ten Commandments,” if only for the way Cecil B. deMille got to fill his biblical epics with copious amounts of suggestive content — and Anne Baxter in hip-hugging costumes — and get away with it, because God unleashes his wrath on the sinners in the final reel. Caruso knows he can spend plenty of time in the whorehouse, because his movie will end on the side of the angels.

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‘Redeeming Love’

★★1/2

Opening Friday, January 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content, sexual content, partial nudity, and strong violent content. Running time: 134 minutes.

Review: 'Belle' is a dazzling visual tale, a new spin on a classic story, taking viewers into the heart of cyberspace

Narratively audacious and visually wondrous, writer-director Mamoro Hosoda’s animated tale “Belle” is also a hard movie to pin down — because it’s part cyber-thriller, part high-school romance, part musical, part fantasy and part serious drama.

Hosoda (“Mirai”) starts by introducing us to U, the biggest app in the world — a portal to a cyber realm where a person’s biometric data translates to an avatar who reflects the best parts of one’s personality. Among U’s 5 billion registered users, by far the most popular and most mysterious is Belle, a charismatic singer whose ethereal appearance is somewhere between Taylor Swift and Anya Taylor-Joy.

Belle’s secret is that, in the real world, she’s completely different. She’s Suzu, a high school student in a rural Japanese village, who is shy, sullen and afraid to express herself — everything Belle is not. Suzu can’t even bring herself to tell Shinobu, the boy she’s had a crush on since they were 6, how she feels.

Within U, Belle is about to give a big concert, in a massive forum with dolphins and other visual marvels. The show is interrupted by a mystery figure being chased by U’s police force, called the Justices. The mystery figure zooms close to Belle during the chase, and she becomes intrigued by him and wonders why the Justices — led by the arrogant Justin — are after him.

Belle hears the nicknames this creature is called: “The Dragon,” “Monster” and, yes, “The Beast.” Yup, that’s where Hosoda is taking us — into a beautifully staged variation on “Beauty and the Beast.” But when that shoe is dropped, it doesn’t prepare you for what the second shoe will reveal when Suzu tries, in the real world, to find out who Beast is and why Justin is giving heavy Gaston vibes.

Hosoda holds together these parallel story threads — Suzu’s high-school angst and her unresolved feelings over her mother’s death years ago, and Belle’s pursuit of Beast in his castle — through music. Suzu is a gifted musician, and with the help of her tech-savvy pal Hiro, they turn Belle into a high-quality pop-music factory. (Seriously, if you’re into pop, you’ll want a soundtrack, in Japanese or dubbed.)

Hosoda matches the story and the music with some of the most dazzling animation you’re likely to see anywhere. Take, for example, Belle’s entrance: standing on the snout of a giant airborne whale, who’s equipped with hundreds of stereo speakers to amplify Belle’s songs to all corners.

And the world of U is a fully realized cyber world, while also a parody of out-of-control social media. 

Taken as a whole, “Belle” is one of the most eye-popping movies you’ll see in a while, and one of the most earnestly emotional ones. It’s a beauty, for sure.

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‘Belle’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 14, at Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and several Megaplex locations. Rated PG for thematic content, violence, language and brief suggestive material. Running time: 121 minutes; in Japanese with subtitles or dubbed into English.

Review: Documentary 'Bright Spark' looks at artist Trevor Southey, in all his contradictions, and the art movement he started

Quite some time ago, I was invited to a private screening for a work-in-progress documentary about the painter Trevor Southey and a group of his contemporaries — artists who lived in Utah and were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The screening must have been nearly a decade ago, because Southey was still alive at the time, and he died in 2015. 

I don’t recall much about the film then, other than the fact that the filmmaker, Nathan Florence, was very sincere in his desire to finish the film and show the world the movement Southey and the others represented, called “art and belief.”

Florence has finally finished his film, and I’m glad he persevered — because the movie, “Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey,” is a fitting memorial to Southey’s creativity and gentle spirit, and a call for Latter-day Saint artists to start thinking a little outside the box.

Florence, who co-directed with Matt Black, is a painter himself, and became fascinated with Southey when a retrospective exhibit of his work was shown at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in 2010. So Florence got Southey — who had relocated from Utah to the Bay Area some years earlier — to come to UMFA for an on-camera interview.

The project grew, as Florence captured conversations with the artists Southey — born in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but converted to the Latter-day Faith and relocated to Brigham Young University — befriended and argued about art with into the night. 

The group — made up of Southey, painter Gary Ernest Smith, sculptor Neil Hadlock and sculptor Dennis Smith — were all in the Latter-day Saint faith, but they asked a big question: Why doesn’t their church have any great art?

The question gnawed at Southey since 1964, when on his way from Africa to Utah he stopped at the World’s Fair in New York. He visited the Vatican’s pavilion, where Michelangelo’s Pieta was on loan. Then he went to the pavilion for his faith, and was appalled that church leaders “couldn’t see the mediocrity they were creating.”

The problem, Hadlock says in one interview, is that church leaders saw art only as illustration — and refused to consider any art that told its own story or was subject to individual interpretation.

Southey recalls offering his services as an artist to the church. They gave him an assignment to paint a representation of “The First Vision” — the moment when young Joseph Smith, who would go on to found the Latter-day Saint church, first saw a vision of God and Jesus. Southey returned a painting that captured Smith’s doubt and turmoil. Church fathers wanted Southey to go back and redo it, to show the number of buttons on Smith’s jacket. Southey called the moment “soul-destroying.”

The four artists formed a collective based in Alpine, Utah, and eventually thrived as artists, with Southey the most talented of all. But his connection to the Latter-day Saint faith became frayed — and was severed altogether in 1981 when he asked his wife, Elaine, for a divorce because he was hiding his homosexuality.

Southey lost his teaching job at BYU, and was excommunicated.

The “reconciliation” in the film’s title is broadly focused, covering Southey’s personal efforts to reconcile with people in his life and his efforts to square his love for the Latter-day Saint faith with the way his church’s leaders treated him. Florence doesn’t provide answers to those questions, but just raising them turns “Bright Spark” into a thoughtful examination of the contradictions in Southey’s life and art.

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‘Bright Spark: The Reconciliation of Trevor Southey’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 14, at several Megaplex locations. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for discussions of sexuality and artistic nude images. Running time: 77 minutes.

Review: 'Drive My Car' is a beautifully moving story of love, grief, and the creative process

There are moments during the three-hour run of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” — like when the credits start, and it becomes clear the first 40 minutes was a prologue — that a viewer may wonder what they’ve gotten themselves into.

Bear with it, though, and the richness and devastating emotional impact of this breathtakingly human story — about love and grief and guilt and art — becomes apparent.

In that prologue, Hamaguchi introduces Yûsuke Kabuki (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director, and his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a writer for television. It’s shown early that Oto gets inspiration for her scripts after having sex with Yûsuke, and it’s later shown that Oto also is having an affair with Kôji Takatsuki (Mask Okada), an actor in one of her TV productions. Before Yûsuke and Oto can talk about this, Oto collapses and suddenly dies. That’s the prologue.

Fast-forward two years, and Yûsuke has gone to Hiroshima to direct an international cast in a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic “Uncle Vanya.” The theater company surprises Yûsuke by presenting him with a driver — a quiet young woman, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura) — for the duration of the production. This disrupts Yûsuke’s process, which involved listening to cassettes recorded by Oto reading dialogue from the play he’s working on, but he accepts Misaki’s role as chauffeur.

Meanwhile, as auditions begin, Yûsuke gets another surprise: One of the actors trying out for the play is Kôji, the man who was sleeping with Oto.

(Side note: This isn’t part of the plot, but it’s just fascinating that Yûsuke’s production is performed in several languages at once, with actors speaking Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and even in Korean sign language — all together on the same stage, with supertitles in several languages projected above the proscenium.) 

Of course, “Uncle Vanya” is a considered choice for Hamaguchi, who teamed with Takamasa Oe to adapt the story from a Haruki Murakami short story. “Vanya” is a story of love and loss, and it expresses the emotions that Yûsuke cannot about his complicated feelings for his wife. It’s also a tricky play to stage, and Hamaguchi’s stage adaptation captures that beautifully — notably in the final passages, as an actress, Lee Yoon-a (Yoo-rim Park, the movie’s stealth MVP), portraying the kind-hearted Sonya, delivers the closing soliloquy silently through Korean sign language.

Not all of the film’s revelations take place on the stage. There are some tender moments, and one shatteringly emotional one, between Yûsuke and his driver, Tôko, when she finally reveals how she got to Hiroshima.

So “Drive My Car” is great — but is it three-hours great? That’s a decision left for each viewer. But I’ll tell you this: For three hours, I was raptly paying attention, unable to guess where Hamaguchi was taking us next. 

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‘Drive My Car’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 7, at Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, nudity, some violence, and language. Running time: 179 minutes; mostly in Japanese, and other languages, with subtitles.

Review: 'A Hero' is a quietly devastating drama about a good deed and its aftermath

In the last decade, the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has become one of the most reliably brilliant directors working — with two films he made in Iran, “A Separation” in 2011 and “The Salesman” in 2016, winning Academy Awards, and his European-made films, “The Past” (with Bérénice Bejo) and “Everybody Knows” (with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz), winning acclaim.

With his newest film, “A Hero,” Farhadi raises his game again, with a devastatingly human story about the slippery space between doing good and doing what one must to survive.

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) is a sign painter is serving time in debtor’s prison, because a business prospect went bad and he couldn’t replay the print shop owner, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who loaned him 150,000 tomans (roughly $5,000 in American currency) and stubbornly refuses to forgive the debt.

When Rahim gets a weekend leave from prison, he hopes to execute a plan to get free. His secret girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), recently found a handbag at a bus stop — and 17 gold coins inside, valued at about half of what Rahim owes Bahram. Rahim’s plan is to sell that gold, give the proceeds to Bahram, and convince his creditor to drop charges so Rahim can work off his remaining debt outside of prison.

Three things thwart the plan: Behram’s intransigence, the fluctuating value of gold, and Rahim’s conscience. Rahim decides he can’t steal from the woman who lost her handbag, so he puts out a flyer to find the real owner and — with help from Rahim’s sister, Malileh (Maryam Shadaei) — the owner is reunited with her bag and her gold.

The officials at Rahim’s prison tell the media about his good deed, and soon he becomes a media sensation. But holes in his story — most of them because the full truth could bring harm to women in the narrative — send Rahim’s quest for freedom into a tailspin.

Farhadi’s deceptively calm shooting style allows the strong ensemble cast to shine as they move through some quietly intense scenes of confrontations, verbal and physical. Farhadi also allows room to play with the idea that the earnest Rahim isn’t all good and the abrasive Bahram isn’t all bad, with both living in the in-between space all humans inhabit.

Some parts of Farhadi’s screenplay are specific to Iran (debtors’ prisons aren’t much of a thing in the States, unless you count cash bail, and probably we should). What makes the film so resonant are the parts that could be happening anywhere. The idea of barbering the truth for the sake of someone’s reputation, whether that be a frustrated prisoner or a prestigious charity, is not a foreign concept here. Neither is the concept of a single social-media post upending someone’s life.

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‘A Hero’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 7, at Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and language. Running time: 127 minutes; in Farsi with subtitles.