Review: 'Sundown' is a fast and sharp study of a man at the end of his rope, with a strong performance by Tim Roth

The latest drama from Mexican director Michel Franco, “Sundown,” is quite fascinating and a little bit frustrating, a character study of one man apparently deciding to chuck it all.

Neil Bennett (Tim Roth) and Alice Bennett (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are wealthy British siblings, on vacation at an Acapulco resort with Alice’s grown children, Colin (Samuel Bottomless) and Alexa (Albertine Kotting McMillan). The vacation is cut short when Alice gets a call that their mother is dying. After rushing to book flights and pack up, another call on the way to the airport informs Alice and Neil that their mother has died.

At the airport, Neil tells Alice that he’s forgotten his passport back at the resort. With the flight boarding in minutes, Alice and the kids rush to the plane, and Neil says he’ll catch a later flight once he has his passport.

Here is where the movie makes a sharp turn into mystery. Neil doesn’t go back to the resort, but instead books a room in a cheap hotel near the beach. When he opens his suitcase, we can see that he had his passport with him all along.

Franco — whose last film was the Mexican political thriller “New Order,” where a rich family gets caught in a revolution — writes the script for “Sundown” in the opposite direction from most films. In other films, writers would lay bits of information like land mines, and the audience anticipates when they’ll go off later. With Franco’s script, those bits of information are withheld for an annoyingly long time — but when we get them, it makes Neil’s behavior suddenly make sense.

Roth gives a strong performance, as a man seemingly chucking it all and starting over. It’s a role that is predicated on the audience knowing little about Neil and receiving eyedropper amounts of information as we go along, and Roth keeps the mystery alive from start to finish.

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‘Sundown’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 4, in area theaters. Rated R for sexual content, violence, language and some graphic nudity. Running time: 83 minutes; in English, and Spanish with subtitles.

Review: 'The Wolf and the Lion' is ridiculous family fare, but the four-legged stars and their two-legged friend are charming

The four-legged stars in the family film “The Wolf and the Lion” fare a lot better than their two-legged co-stars, if only because they aren’t saddled with clunky dialogue and ludicrous plot development.

Alma (played by Molly Kunz) is a 20-year-old student pianist who seems to have her life mapped out in front of her. She’ll ace her upcoming piano competition, score a slot with the L.A. Philharmonic, and her career is set. But the death of her grandfather, who raised her when her parents died years earlier, forces Alma to return home, to an island in a lake in the forests of Canada.

In her grandfather’s cabin, she learns that a female snow wolf has been venturing close to the cabin, friendly but still wild. One day, the she-wolf enters the cabin, looking for a place to rest and nurse her wolf pup. At the same time, a storm cause a plane to crash near the cabin — and a lion cub, destined for a place in a circus, lands literally in Alma’s arms.

Soon Alma is cutting up steak meat and feeding two young predators, with the reluctant aid of her godfather, Joe (played by the great Canadian actor Graham Greene). The animals — Alma names the wolf Mozart, and the lion Dreamer — roughhouse with each other and bond like animal siblings. (I’m not sure if it’s heartwarming or creepy that the filmmakers raised a wolf pup and a lion cub for the purpose of making this movie — and that they now live together on a reservation owned by one of the executive producers.)

But the animals’ presence on the island doesn’t go unnoticed. There’s a wolf researcher (Charlie Carrick), who wants to preserve the wolf and help the species re-establish its wild populations. And there’s a nasty circus operator (Evan Buliung) who aims, with drugs and bullwhip, to tame a lion for the ring.

French director Gilles de Maistre developed the story with his wife, Prune, who is credited with the screenplay, which is both earnest and stilted. The wolf scientist and the wildlife protection officers are played for bumbling comic relief, while the circus boss is a one-note villain.

Kunz has to hold her own with her furry co-stars (reportedly, she was one of the few cast members who could get close to the animals), and she does so with poise and an adventurous spirit. She even makes Alma’s questionable choices — without which there would be no movie — come off as charming.

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‘The Wolf and the Lion’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 4, in area theaters. Rated PG for thematic elements, language and some peril. Running time: 98 minutes.

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.