Review: 'Firebird' is a sincere drama about a forbidden gay love affair, raised up by its passionate performances

The British-Estonian drama “Firebird” is a type of movie we don’t see as much as we used to: An earnestly presented gay romance, centering on the heartbreak of having to hide who and how one loves.

On a Soviet military base in Estonia in 1977, Sergey Serebrennikov (Tom Prior) is a reluctant private who is counting the days until his military service is over and going back to working on his family’s farm. His dream, if he ever dared to pursue it, would be to enroll in drama school in Moscow and become an actor.

Sergey tells his dreams to his best friend on base, Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya), who works in the office of the base’s commander, Comrade Colonel Kuznetsov (Nicholas Woodeson). Luisa is sweet on Sergey, but he never reciprocates — because he’s gay, a secret that will get him court-martialed and imprisoned if it’s ever found out.

A new arrival on base threatens the order in Sergey’s life: Lt. Roman Matvejev (Oleg Zagorodnii), a charming pilot who has even Luisa taking notice. But Roman and Sergey discover a shared interest in photography — and, over time, in each other. But with a KGB-connected major (Margus Prangel) nosing around, they try to keep their love affair out of view.

The story skips ahead a year, with Sergey in Moscow, following his drama-school dreams. He gets a surprise visit from Roman, who on an assignment. They resume their romance, again in secret. But when Roman fears being caught, he leaves, only to return with news that he’s going to marry Luisa.

Director Peeter Rebane and Prior, the actor playing Sergey, co-wrote the script — a direct, heartfelt drama based on the true story of ex-soldier Sergey Fetisov, told without a speck of cynicism or irony. That kind of sincerity doesn’t allow for many twists in the narrative, just a steady pounding home of the passion and danger in Sergey and Roman’s relationship.

What carries “Firebird” are the equally sincere, and passionate, performances by the three leads: Prior and Zagorodnii as the military men who find themselves in each other’s arms, and Pozharskaya as the woman who loves both of them and doesn’t fathom why that love isn’t returned. Those performances are what send the emotions of “Firebird” soaring.

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‘Firebird’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Memory' pits Neeson the actor against Neeson the action star — and the results are forgettable.

The unnecessarily convoluted psychological thriller “Memory” proves two things: 1) That Liam Neeson, when he wants to, can really act; and, 2) that Liam Neeson acting doesn’t mesh well with Liam Neeson being an action star.

Neeson plays Alex Lewis, a smooth contract killer known for his precision and his discretion. He wants out of the life, though, because he is feeling the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s — an inevitable condition, Alex knows, because his brother is in an advanced state of dementia. But his handler, Mauricio (Lee Boardman), insists he take this job, commenting, “men like us don’t retire.”

The job seems straightforward enough: Murder a shady lawyer (Scot Williams) in El Paso, Texas, and steal the thumb drives in the lawyer’s safe. But the second part of the job — killing a 13-year-old Mexican girl, Beatriz (Mia Sanchez), who was being sold into prostitution by her father — crosses a line for Alex, and he demands his contact (Daniel De Bourg) tell his employer to cancel the hit.

Meanwhile, an El Paso police detective, Danny Mora (Ray Stevenson), is going over the crime scene of the dead lawyer — and FBI agents Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce) and Linda Amistead (Taj Atwal) arrive, because they suspect the lawyer is tied in with the human trafficking that Beatriz’ father was conducting. Serra has vowed to keep Beatriz safe, so when she gets killed, Serra vows revenge. 

At first, Serra thinks Alex is responsible for Beatriz’ death. It takes a little while for Serra, and screenwriter Dario Scardapane (adapting a 2003 Belgian cop thriller), to get to what we already know: That Serra and Alex are going after the same power structure that protects men who want to have sex with underage girls. At the top of this food chain of wealth is El Paso real-estate tycoon Davana Sealman, played by the ageless Monica Bellucci. (I say “ageless,” but she’s actually 57, five days older than me — though she looks 20 years younger.)

Scardapane and director Martin Campbell (“GoldenEye,” “Casino Royale,” “The Mask of Zorro”) seem to be at odds, with the screenwriter trying to create a dense character study of a hitman losing his faculties, and Campbell wanting to make things shoot and explode at regular intervals. Neeson is good at both of these things, but making him do both in the same movie is a stretch.

There also are too many characters in the bloated narrative, particularly among the bad guys — though Neeson’s Alex prunes those branches at regular intervals. Pearce is left to fume and brood, and make dark pronouncements about how Alex is doing the job the FBI can’t do — taking out the evildoers, just outside the law.

Pearce’s presence is a reminder that the bouts of forgetfulness Alex endures in “Memory” were handled so much better in a movie Pearce made a couple decades ago: Christopher Nolan’s “Memento.” Now that’s a movie that’s unforgettable.

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‘Memory’

★★

Opens Friday, April 29, in theaters. Rated R for violence, some bloody images and language throughout. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Hatching,' from Finland, is a smart suburban satire wrapped in a chilling body-horror thriller

A girl and her egg are the launching point for “Hatching,” an expertly turned body-horror thriller from first-time Finnish director Hanna Bergholm.

Bergholm starts with a family showing off their picture-perfect life in the suburbs. Mother (Sofia Heikkilä) narrates the tour, which features her smiling husband (Jani Volanen), their too-cute younger son Matias (Oiva Ollila), and the pride of the family, 12-year-old budding gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna). We soon realize this perfection is for show, specifically for Mother’s homemaking vlog. 

While Mother is shooting the introduction for her vlog, cracks appear in her carefully orchestrated pastel-colored world, when a bird flies into the house and starts breaking things. Tinja captures the bird in a blanket, and before she can take it outside to free it, Mother snaps the creature’s neck and tells Tinja to take the body to the compost bin.

Later, Tinja discovers the bird wasn’t quite dead, and crawling out to the backyard woods. It’s there that Tinja discovers the bird’s egg — which she takes into her room to incubate. The egg grows to the size of a coffee table before a scraggly black-feathered beast emerges, and imprints on Tinja, who becomes Elliott to the bird’s E.T.

But the real monster here is Mother, pushing Tinja to the breaking point in her gymnastics practices. When a new girl in the gymnasium, Reetta (Ida Määttânen), moves in next door and befriends Tinja, Mother sees her as a challenger and therefore an enemy. This adds to Tinja’s stress, and when she’s feeling the pressure, the creature does, too — with alarming results.

Bergholm and screenwriter Ilja Rautsi turn this premise into a disturbing changeling tale, as Tinja’s bond with the creature fills in the psychic hole left by her mother’s harsh perfectionism and hypocrisy. (Did I mention Tinja catches Mother making out with the handyman Tero, played by Reino Nordin?) 

Heikkilä makes a compelling wicked queen in this fractured fairy tale, but Solalinna, in her first movie, is a real find — bringing out all of Tinja’s doubts and vulnerabilities, and twisting them as the story reaches its shocking conclusion.

“Hatching” works as both a solid horror movie and as a satire of suburban shallowness and fleeting internet glory — a reminder that scary things don’t just happen in the dark.

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‘Hatching’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore and some sexuality. Running time: 86 minutes; in Finnish, with subtitles.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 23, 2022, when the film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Northman' is a brawny, beguiling mix of gory action and mystical sorcery in the days of the Vikings.

Like the muscular fighter and the seductive sorceress at its heart, Robert Eggers’ “The Northman” besieges and bewitches the viewer in equal measure with its realistically bloody and enthrallingly haunted view of life among the Vikings.

It’s near the end of the 10th century C.E., and a Viking castle is awaiting the return of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) and his cohort from their latest battles. The queen, Gudrun (Nicole Kidman), prepares for the king’s arrival, as is their teen son, Amleth (Oscar Novak). Aurvandil takes Amleth on a vision quest — involving a steam hut, psychedelics and the leering jester, Helmir (Willem Dafoe) — that’s the first step of the lad’s eventual ascension to his dad’s throne.

But Arvandil’s brother, Fjölnir (Danish actor Claes Bang), has other ideas. He leads a group of soldiers to assassinate the king, kidnap Gudrun, and declare himself the new king. The only mistake Fjölnir makes is letting Amleth get away. The lad rows a small boat out to sea, with three vows on his lips: “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.”

Years pass, and Amleth — played as a strapping adult by Alexander Skarsgård — is still reciting those vows, but as a soldier in a mercenary army. After his group pillages a village, he rescues a Slavic maiden, Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), from getting killed in the melee. When he hears Olga is being shipped off with some newly enslaved villagers to Iceland, where Fjölnir now lives, Amleth becomes a slave himself to join the voyage and finally exact his revenge.

In Iceland, Amleth discovers Fjölnir has already lost Aurvandil’s kingdom, and the new settlement he leads is managed through fear by Fjölnir’s sniveling prince, Thórir (Gustav Lindh), who looks like a Dark Ages version of Jared Kushner. Amleth works cautiously at first, scoping out Fjölnir’s new kingdom before taking it down. Amleth also teams with Olga, who is as ruthless as he is. “Your strength breaks men’s bones,” Olga tells Amleth, adding, “I have the cunning to break their minds.”

Eggers — as he did in his first two films, “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” — creates a world where harsh reality and mysticism live side by side. In long, fluid takes, Eggers captures the unrelenting violence of marauders ransacking villages and slaughtering the locals. But the script, which Eggers wrote with the Icelandic writer Sjón (“Lamb”), also leaves room for psychedelic spirit journeys, visits with vision-seeing priestesses (one of them played by Björk), and the influence of dreams on Amleth’s gory reality.

Taylor-Joy, following her run that included “The Queen’s Gambit” and “Last Night in Soho,” continues to be one of the most fascinating young stars to watch. Kidman makes the most out of her one surprising moment, and Bang (“The Square,” “The Burnt Orange Heresy”) brings a weary menace to the traitorous Fjölnir.

But “The Northman” forces all eyes toward Skarsgård, who presents Amleth as a brawny, brooding hero who must learn that the childhood ideas of vengeance must inevitably yield to the adult reality that many things are not what they appear to be. 

Fans of “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse,” low-budget movies that orchestrated an atmosphere of dread, were going to be curious what Eggers could do on a larger scale. What he’s created is an authentic-looking and dream-filled world of a thousand years ago, sometimes beautiful and often brutal — but always fascinating.

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‘The Northman’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 22, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, some sexual content and nudity. Running time: 136 minutes.

Review: 'The Bad Guys' is a smart, hilarious heist comedy for the junior set

There’s a simple idea behind the animated “The Bad Guys” — famously notorious creatures trying to be good — but if you think that’s all there is to this witty and inventive cartoon comedy, you’ll miss out on one of the funniest movies of the year.

The movie starts with two of those animals, the Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Sam Rockwell) and Snake (voiced by Marc Maron), shooting the breeze in a diner, like characters out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Then the shot pans around the diner, and all the other patrons recoiling in terror at Wolf and Snake’s mere presence. 

Then they cross the street, meeting their cohorts — disguise expert Shark (voiced by Craig Robinson), supreme hacker Tarantula (voiced by Awkwafina) and slightly unhinged Piranha (voiced by Anthony Ramos) — to pull off yet another bank heist. Snake, by the way, is an ace safecracker, and Wolf, besides being the gang’s charismatic leader, is a deft pickpocket.

Retreating to their lair, the gang celebrates their latest success, watching the results on TV. That’s when they see the governor, Diane Foxington (yes, she’s a fox, in every sense of the word — and voiced by Zazie Beetz), calling Wolf’s crew a bunch of pathetic has-beens. Wolf is incensed, and decides the ultimate revenge would be to steal the famed Golden Dolphin statue, a trophy Gov. Foxington is set to award to their city’s greatest humanitarian, Professor Marmalade (voiced by Richard Ayoade). Snake signs on only because Marmalade is a guinea pig, his favorite food.

A funny thing happens during the robbery, though: Wolf gets a taste of what it’s like to be treated like a good guy — and the wag in his tail gives them away. The gang is caught, but before Gov. Foxington and the police chief (voiced by Alex Borstein) can send them to prison, Marmalade talks the governor into letting the gang live on his island compound, so he can try to get them to turn good.

Directing his first feature after years in DreamWorks’ animation department, Pierre Perifel captures the giddy spirit of these characters, in a story that’s a surprisingly workable mix of “Zootopia” and “Ocean’s Eleven.” In adapting Aaron Blabey’s graphic novels, screenwriter Etan Cohen (“Men in Black 3,” “Tropic Thunder,” “Idiocracy”) not only delivers solid gags, but a tight, economical script with tricky plot twists — nothing children in the audience won’t understand, but the kids who figure them out first will feel super-smart.

Among the voice actors, the revelation is Maron, who’s note-perfect as Snake, the most cynical member of the gang — a gruff, cantankerous voice that keeps “The Bad Guys” from slipping into phony melodramatics. He gives “The Bad Guys” the complexity a lesser animated movie would avoid, resulting in a movie kids and adults can enjoy in equal measure.  

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‘The Bad Guys’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 22, in theaters. Rated PG for action and rude humor. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent' gives Nicolas Cage his greatest role — a version of himself — but doesn't provide everything the movie needs

If ever there was a movie star deserving of a meta-analysis of his work, under the cover of a movie that is both an embodiment and parody of that star’s traits, it’s Nicolas Cage — which is why “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” feels, at times, like a missed opportunity that only sometimes hits on the mysterious force that makes Cage who he is.

Cage stars as Nick Cage, a somewhat fictionalized version of himself — one that’s more his screen persona than what he claims is his real life. The Nick Cage of this movie is hyper-focused on acting and his career, so much so that he intimidates a director for whom he’s auditioning, and tends to irritate his ex-wife, Olivia (Sharon Horgan), and mortify his teen daughter, Addy (Lily Sheen).

Nick is also strapped for cash, so he says yes when his agent, Richard (Neil Patrick Harris), tells him he can earn a quick $1 million by attending a billionaire’s birthday celebration in Mallorca. The billionaire, Javi (Pedro Pascal), is Cage’s biggest fan — his favorite movie is “Face/Off” — and has written a screenplay for Nick to produce and star in.

Nick isn’t in Mallorca long when he’s hustled into a panel truck by a couple of U.S. intelligence agents, Vivian (Tiffany Haddish) and Martin (Ike Barinholtz). They tell Nick that Javi’s wealth is from his work as an international drug cartel — and that Javi and his goons are trying to leverage the upcoming Spanish election by kidnapping the daughter of a presidential candidate. Vivian asks Nick to work undercover to find the hostage and take down the operation, getting close to Javi by developing his screenplay with him.

Director Tom Gormican uses this development to deconstruct the script he and Kevin Etten as we’re watching it — as Nick and Javi discuss the story’s evolution from character-driven drama to action-heavy crowd-pleaser.  One wishes the movie we were watching could move more smoothly from one style to another, showing us the shift rather than telling us it’s happening.

Where there are holes in Gormican’s story, the cast does a good job of rolling past them. Pascal, who looks like a Chilean version of Liam Neeson, is particularly charming as he shows strong comic chops to go along with his action credentials (“The Mandalorian,” “Wonder Woman 1984”).

But “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” is Nicolas Cage’s show, and he knows it. Playing the slightly puffy movie star in decline, or a CGI-created younger self who serves as the devil on his shoulder, Cage shows he gets the joke by transcending it. To borrow a running joke between Cage and Fink, the movie confirms that Cage is back — not that he ever went anywhere.

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‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 22, in theaters. Rated R for language throughout, some sexual references, drug use and violence. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Aline' is a weird, and oddly touching, fictional biography 'freely inspired' by the life of Celine Dion

The French comic actress and filmmaker Valérie Lemercier has invented something new with “Aline”: A fictional musical biopic that’s more true to its subject than a documentary would be. And that’s not the weirdest part of this fan letter to one of the world’s biggest singing stars.

We don’t meet the title character of Aline Dieu right away. First, Lemercier, as director and co-writer (with Brigitte Buc), introduces us to her parents, Sylvette and Anglomard, as they fall in love, marry, vow not to have children — and then proceed to raise a family of 14 kids, with Aline the youngest, with a sock drawer as her crib.

The Dieu children, growing up in a small house in Quebec in the 1970s, form a singing group — and eventually the family learns little Aline has the most beautiful, and most powerful, voice of all. Her parents (Danielle Michaud and Roc Lafortune) and older brother Jean-Bobin (Antoine Vézina) record a demo tape of Aline at age 12, and send it to a record producer, Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel).

If you’re up on your Quebecois-born megastars, you may have deduced that this all sounds like the life story of Celine Dion. Lemercier makes no bones about that: There’s an opening title card saying the film is “inspired by the life” of Dion, but told as fiction. Why Lemercier changed the names of the main figures is never fully explained, as the plot points match as closely to Dion’s life as the scripts for “Walk the Line” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” or most any Hollywood-produced biopic does of their subjects.

But the bigger mystery comes when Lemercier, who’s 58, appears as Aline at age 12 — through a combination of forced-perspective angles, body doubles and computerized face-swapping. The effect is eerie, in an uncanny-valley sort of way, and darn near takes us out of the narrative.

That narrative continues with Kamar becoming Aline’s manager and guiding her early career. After some success with French songs, for audiences in Quebec and Paris, Aline follows Kamar’s advice to take a break, fix her crooked teeth, and learn English so she can conquer the American and British markets — and, eventually, the world.

As the teen Aline becomes a rising star in Europe, she also falls deeply in love with Kamar, who is more than twice her age, and twice divorced. Kamar, with Mama Sylvette watching like a hawk, does the gentlemanly thing and avoids giving any indication that he reciprocates Aline’s feelings. After winning the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest at age 20, Aline is old enough to act on her feelings — and Kamar finally admits that he loves her, too.

Kamar is a stand-in for Dion’s real-life husband/manager, René Angélil — and the movie follows the version of the story Dion tells in her autobiography, holding that he resisted her advances until she was of age. Having Lemercier and Marcel, who were born in the same year, play the roles doesn’t make it feel less weird, especially when Lemercier is playing Aline between 17 and 21 in those scenes.

The rest of the movie hits the high points of Celine, er, Aline’s life: World tours, years in Vegas, battles against infertility, a stretch where she has to rest her vocal cords, and the opportunity to sing a song for a movie about the Titanic. (In an amusing scene, Kamar plays the instrumental for the “Titanic” score, and a temporarily mute Aline writes on her pad, “I don’t like it.”)

Lemercier’s sincerity in depicting the larger-than-life story of a major pop star doesn’t keep her from embracing the kitschiness of such a life — the sequins, the limousines, the whole nine yards. Also, any movie that tells of a musician’s life, even a fictionalized take like this, must contend with the long shadow of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” which parodied all the cliches this movie employs without shame.

“Aline” can’t be dismissed, in part because the cast is so winning — particularly Marcel’s Kamar and Jean-Noël Brouté as Fred, Aline’s makeup artist and confidante. And a shout-out to Victoria Sio, who provides the singing voice to which Lemercier lip-syncs, belting out Celine-style covers of “All By Myself,” “River Deep / Mountain High” and other hits.

The driving force of “Aline,” in front of the camera and behind it, is Lemercier. Her past work as a director have all been light French comedies, and she sprinkles in some light-hearted moments (like when Aline gets lost in her own mansion), but keeps it serious when needed. Lemercier’s performance shows how completely she embraces Celine Dion, as a performer and an icon. Lemercier puts her whole heart into “Aline,” and that heart will go on.

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‘Aline’

★★★

Opening Friday, April 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and brief language. Running time: 126 minutes; mostly in French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Dual' is a droll and deadpan look at a woman deciding to live again — and deciding whether to kill her clone.

The idea that someone has to be dying to appreciate what it means to live is a Hollywood trope that goes back to “Dark Victory” — but writer-director Riley Stearns takes it to absurd lengths in his dark comedy “Dual.”

Set in the near future, the story starts when Sarah (Karen Gillan) throws up blood one night, and is ultimately told she has a rare terminal illness and will die soon. She is offered one option, “replacement therapy,” in which she is cloned, and then trains the clone to live out her life after she’s gone.

Not that Sarah’s life is going that well, otherwise. Her boyfriend, Peter (Beulah Koale), is away on business and inattentive in their FaceTime calls. And she’s made an art of avoiding calls and texts from her mom (Maika Paunio). But Sarah goes through with the cloning, and starts training her double in what she likes and doesn’t like.

Ten months go by, Sarah hasn’t died yet, and she learns that her double is living her life better than she is. Peter enjoys the double’s company more, and the double is much more attentive to Sarah’s mother. Then Sarah is told that her supposedly terminal illness is in remission and she’s not going to die. 

Normally, she’s told, the clone would be “decommissioned” — but the double demands to remain alive. In such cases, the solution is a televised duel to the death between original and clone. Sarah has one year to prepare, and hires a trainer (Aaron Paul) to get her ready.

In some ways, “Dual” follows some of the contours of Stearns’ last movie, 2019’s “The Art of Self-Defense,” another story of a lonely character finding purpose through personal combat. Stearns’ comic style here is deadpan to the extreme, and some of the humor is bone-dry.

Gillan, known to many for her stint on “Doctor Who” and her role as Nebula in the Marvel universe, throws herself into the double role — the jaded Sarah and her inquisitive double — with relish. She locks into Stearns’ droll wavelength, while deepening and humanizing the two Sarahs as they go through this odd experience.

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‘Dual’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 15, at the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated R for violent content, some sexual content, language and graphic nudity. Running time: 94 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 23, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.