Review: 'Death on the Nile,' Kenneth Branagh's solid second turn with Hercule Poirot, brings melancholy to the murder mystery

“Death on the Nile” is Kenneth Branagh’s second stab at playing Agatha Christie’s prim and proper detective Hercule Poirot, and directing a murder mystery that’s not quite as twisty as “Murder on the Orient Express,” but just as stylish.

An air of melancholy has always hung around the Belgian detective, and here screenwriter Michael Green (who also adapted “Murder on the Orient Express”) provides a prologue to deliver the backstory. We see a young, clean-shaven Poirot (played by Branagh with some de-aging CGI) in the trenches of the Great War, using his observational skills to give his commander advice for a forward push. The plan is successful, but at a cost that explains Poirot’s famous mustache — an addition that may rankle some Christie fans. (The one to whom I’m married didn’t think it necessary.)

Cut to 1937 London, and we find Poirot in a nightclub, enjoying the song stylings of blues singer Salome Otterbourne (Sophie Okenedo), when he witnesses a love triangle in the making. Gorgeous Jacqueline de Belleforte (Emma Mackey) is in love and lust with dashing Simon Doyle (Armie Hammer), when in walks Jacqueline’s school friend, the super-rich and super-beautiful Linnet Ridgeway (Gal Gadot).

Flash-forward six weeks from this scene, and we find Poirot vacationing in Egypt, and running into his young friend Bouc (Tom Bateman), who’s there as part of a wedding celebration. The happy couple is none other than Simon and Linnet — whose newlywed joy is interrupted by the unwelcome arrival of Jacqueline.

The wedding party is sizable, and everyone has a connection to Linnet, and a potential motive to do her harm. They include: Linnet’s former fiance, Dr. Windlesham (Russell Brand); her business manager and “cousin,” Andrew Katchadourian (Ali Fazal); her godmother, Marie Van Schuyler (Jennifer Saunders), a Communist who has given away part of the family fortune; Marie’s nurse-maid, Miss Bowers (Dawn French); Linnet’s personal maid, Louise Bourget (Rose Leslie); Bouc and his mother, Euphemia (Annette Bening); and Salome and her niece/manager Rosalie (Letitia Wright), who was also a classmate of Linnet’s. And, as it turns out, Jacqueline isn’t too far away.

Once the party board the S.S. Karnak for a trip down the Nile, Linnet confides in Poirot. “When you have money, no one is your friend,” she tells him. “I don’t feel safe with any of them.”

Sure enough, this being an Agatha Christie story, someone is murdered, and Poirot finds his vacation becomes a case to which he must apply “the little gray cells” of his prodigious brain.

Branagh adds a touch of melancholy to his second outing as Poirot, ruminating on love, the one emotion that can drive someone to murder. In his directing role, Branagh revels in the period trappings paid for by the Ridgeway fortune, and the lush Egyptian vistas provided by cinematographer Hans Zambarloukos (who also worked on Branagh’s “Belfast”) and some computer embellishment.

The ensemble is strong throughout, with the standouts being Gadot as the object of desire and envy, Mackey’s femme fatale, Leslie’s shy maid, Bening’s acerbic Mrs. Bouc, and Okenedo’s world-weary musician — who comes off as a kindred spirit to the jaded Poirot. (It’s also a hoot to see French and Saunders, who have been comedy partners for some 40 years, as sharp as ever.)  

It works well enough, even if you’re familiar with the story, either through Christie’s novel or the 1978 adaptation that starred Peter Ustinov as Poirot with a cast that included Mia Farrow, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith and Jane Birkin. (The ’78 was on heavy rotation on HBO when I was in high school, so I saw it a lot.) As a companion to Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” it’s a solid, and visually arresting, whodunit — and makes one wonder how many more times Branagh wants to portray the detective again.

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‘Death on the Nile’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, bloody images, and sexual material. Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Jockey' is a beautifully rendered look at a horse racer in his twilight, with a moving performance by Clifton Collins Jr.

There is beauty and pain at the heart of “Jockey,” director Clint Bentley poetic and spartan study of a man realizing he’s near the end of his ride.

Jackson Silva, played by the veteran character Clifton Collins Jr., is a jockey who’s worked the circuit of thoroughbred racing for decades, and has the scars and mended bones to show for it. He mostly works with one trainer, Ruth (Molly Parker), usually riding the horses she trains for other owners.

This season, at Phoenix’s Turf Paradise (where the film was shot), Ruth has her own horse, a filly Ruth bought as a yearling when other owners passed her over. Ruth sees something in this horse, named Dido’s Lament, and Jackson sees it, too. They make a deal that Jackson will ride Dido’s Lament, provided he bring his weight down.

Jackson’s pursuit of a late-career championship hits some snags. There’s a health issue that he tries to ignore, until he can’t. One of his best friends, Leo (Logan Cormier), takes a spill in a race, and lands in the hospital. And a young jockey, Gabriel (Moises Arias), arrives at the track to declare that Jackson is the kid’s father.

Within this simple story, Bentley and his writing partner Greg Kwedar explore the rough-and-tumble life of a jockey. Bentley, whose father was a jockey, goes into the locker rooms and onto the track with real-life jockeys, capturing the racetrack life with more authenticity than most horse-related movies ever get. Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shoots most of the film at “magic hour,” those times near sunrise and sunset when the light is just perfect — a visual match for the twilight of Jackson’s career.

Parker and Arias are powerful in their supporting roles. But the movie belongs, first and foremost, to Collins, who has earned his spot in the saddle after a long career as a supporting player that runs from “Traffic” to “Westworld.” Collins embodies the bone-weary struggles of an aging athlete, when there’s more track behind him than in front, in a performance that is spare and graceful.

There’s an amazing moment where Bentley and Collins crystalize the thrill and peril of the racer’s life. There’s a race midway through the film, which Bentley shows us only as a single long take, the camera close up on Jackson’s face, from the starting gate to the finish line. Everything we need to know is conveyed in that scene, and it’s an indicator of what a mature, beautiful film “Jockey” is.

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‘Jockey’

★★★★

Opens Friday, February 11, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for language. Running time: 95 minutes.

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This review ran previously on this site on January 31, 2021, when the film premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Moonfall' is a science-fiction mash-up that's silly and stupid, even by the standards of 'Independence Day' director Roland Emmerich

Director Roland Emmerich has made a career out of facepalm-inducing dumb science-fiction — from “Independence Day” (where Jeff Goldblum found alien tech was Mac-compatible) to “The Day After Tomorrow” (where Jake Gyllenhaal outran cold) to “2012” (which treated plate tectonics like Chutes and Ladders).

But he outdoes himself with the silliness of “Moonfall,” a bombardment of fake-science nonsense and ludicrous action set pieces. It’s a movie that seems designed for one purpose only: To make Neil deGrasse Tyson cry.

The prologue puts in outer space in 2011, as astronaut Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) and a crewmate are on an EVA, while his — and “work wife,” as he puts it — Jocinda Fowl (Halle Berry) monitors things in the space shuttle’s cockpit. Then something big and ugly attacks the shuttle, killing the crewmate, knocking Jocinda unconscious, and forcing Brian to land the shuttle without power. NASA investigators don’t believe Brian’s account, Jocinda doesn’t back him up, and his life and reputation are destroyed.

Flash-forward to today, and a shady scientist, Dr. K.C. Houseman (John Bradley, who was the bookish Samwell Tarley on “Game of Thrones”) has the calculations to show the moon is out of orbit, but he can’t convince anyone at NASA to take him seriously. K.C. tries to enlist Brian — who’s now divorced with a troubled 18-year-old son, Sonny (Charlie Plummer) — to advocate for him with NASA, but, as Brian says, “NASA and I aren’t on speaking terms.”

Not necessary, as it turns out NASA has spotted the moon’s orbital problems already, and Jocinda — now second-in-command at NASA — and the folks at Mission Control see something inexplicable: A deep hole in the middle of a massive moon crater. The hole is at the same spot Brian said the space anomaly emerged a decade before.

This being a Roland Emmerich movie — he cowrote with Harald Kloser, his regular collaborator and composer, and Spenser Cohen — things start going haywire. Gravity shifts and high tides cause disasters, flooding the west coast, and sending the top of the Chrysler building airborne. Jocinda has a desperate plan, to unretire a space shuttle and get a crew to the moon. And since staffing decisions like this are decided by which characters have the steepest redemption arc, and which actors have top billing, you know that it’s going to be Brian, Jocinda and K.C. in the cockpit.

All of this is fine, as far as it goes, and Emmerich still knows how to introduce a lot of potentially interesting characters and stage exciting escape scenes. (Nice job working in the Lexus product placement, too, by casting Michael Peña as a car-salesman stepdad for Sonny.) But as the moon gets dangerously close to Earth, and gravity waves turn up to down, the movie throws everything at the screen except common sense.

Of course, any disaster movie today — whether it means to or not — must carry the burden of becoming a metaphor for our current struggles with COVID-19 and climate change. With “Moonfall,” the danger comes in the way Emmerich treats scientists, the people who understand what’s going on, as either crackpots or nerdy know-it-alls. And when the “science” they’re trying to explain is rank nonsense about “megastructures” and manufactured planets, the net effect is making science look like guesswork — and we don’t need any more voices doing that.

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‘Moonfall’

★★

Opens Friday, February 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, disaster action, strong language, and some drug use. Running time: 135 minutes.

Review: 'Jackass Forever' shows the law of diminishing returns also applies to taking shots to the groin

Is it even necessary, after more than 20 years of this crap, to send movie critics to see “Jackass Forever”?

Certainly the critics are in a no-win situation in the eyes of the makers of this fourth movie installment of men enduring idiotic stunts and shots to the crotch. If a critic likes the movie, then the “Jackass” faithful can declare they’ve made another convert. If the critic dislikes the movie — and this is the more likely scenario — then they “don’t get it,” and have a stick up their ass. 

Oddly, “stick up their ass” is one of the few physical challenges the “Jackass” guys — and, with one exception, they all are guys — put on display in “Jackass Forever.” Also on display are their poor judgment, their willingness to do anything for a laugh, and their obsession with the penis and, frequently, the scrotum.

The opening sequence pretty much sets us up for what’s to come. Johnny Knoxville, who is both the Riff and the Tony to the “Jackass” gang’s Jets, dresses as a general, barking orders to soldiers during a kaiju attack on a city. Every so often we see what the monster is: Co-star Chris Pontius’ penis and scrotum, both painted green, being maneuvered through a model-sized Tokyo.

The movie re-creations don’t end there. There’s a bit where co-conspirator Preston Lacy inserts his scrotum into a hole — which is revealed to lead to the ceiling of a mock boxing gym, so that Lacy’s testicles become a punching bag.

Sometimes a stunt isn’t enough, and they take the act out into public. These person-on-the-street segments are my favorite, because they show how much people should be reviled by the nonsense going on.

Beyond the bad taste — which is in the eye of the beholder — the most consistent problem of “Jackass Forever” is that the jokes hit a level of diminishing returns, which means things must escalate. After someone gets hit in the nuts five times, the next guy can only be funny after getting hit in the nuts 10 times. This gets old really fast.

Speaking of old, “Jackass’s” Pied Piper, Johnny Knoxville, is 50 years old, and his hair, a silver fox white because he stopped dying his hair during the pandemic, looks the part. He’s surrounded himself with a new generation of performers, many of whom seem to have gotten the job because they were fans of the show when they were kids. 

And while these fans-turned-performers seem to be having a good time, one senses they would turn hostile at anyone who, for a moment, questions the entertainment value of having high-speed objects hurtling toward their crotch. I’d strongly advise them not to read the reviews, including this one.

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‘Jackass Forever’

★★

Opens Friday, February 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong crude material and dangerous stunts, graphic nudity and language throughout. Running time: 96 minutes.

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.