Review: Alex Garland's 'Men' starts as an unsettling thriller about trauma, but goes off the rails in the end

Filmmaker Alex Garland’s latest jump down the rabbit hole of perception, titled simply and confrontationally “Men,” is like a Russian nesting doll — a metaphor that pops up in an unexpected and disturbing way in due course — as it takes us layer by layer into something that may not actually be there.

The story starts with Harper (Jessie Buckley), a recent widow who’s leaving London for some alone time in a quaint rural house she’s renting. The country life appeals to Harper, who plucks an apple off the tree in the courtyard and eats it. This earns her a rebuke from the rental manager, Geoffrey (played by Rory Kinnear), who admonishes her: “You shouldn’t do that — forbidden fruit.” He then guffaws, and tells her he was joking.

Harper wonders if she hasn’t stepped into some torturous dark place. When she sleeps, she relives the moment her husband, James (Pappa Essiedu) — moments after punching her in the face — falls to his death from an upper balcony, his look directed at her as he falls past the window. When she’s awake, she’s stalked by a man who has scars on his face and no clothes covering any other part of him.

Harper calls the cops to deal with the scary naked man, and later seeks some comfort from the town’s vicar. The fact that every man — the cop, the vicar, and the scary naked man — has a similar face (and are all, in fact, played by Kinnear) makes Harper’s hold on reality slip a bit more.

Buckley is quickly becoming one of our most reliable young actresses, and here she brings a morbid determination to the usual horror-heroine tropes. Equally adept here is Kinnear, playing the different strains of toxic manhood — the jocular landlord, the condescending cop, the judgmental vicar, and so on — with impressive shadings.

Garland — following up the android dreams of “Ex Machina” and existential dread of “Annihilation” — seems eager to make a point about trauma, and how it creates its own kind of monsters, and that those monsters are usually men. But whatever subtlety and tension Garland built in the first half evaporates into body-horror ickiness, as Harper’s imagined terrors become all too real.

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‘Men’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for disturbing and violent content, graphic nudity, grisly images and language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Emergency' sneaks a serious message about racism into a hard-partying college buddy comedy

Smuggling a lot of importance under the guise of a college buddy romp, director Carey Williams’ acidic comedy “Emergency” generates laughs, tears and a bracing look at the continuing perils of being Black in America.

Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) are roommates and best friends about to graduate from college. Kunle has his future well in hand, with graduate school at Princeton and a budding career as a biologist. Sean is more laid-back, more interested in vaping and drinking than in getting his thesis done. On this Friday night, Sean is determined to get Kunle to join him for the “Legendary Tour,” a run through all the parties at their school’s seven Greek houses.

Sean and Kunle’s party plans hit a snag when they notice a white girl passed out in their living room. Kunle’s first instinct is to call 911 — but Sean vetoes that idea, predicting that the cops would automatically think the worst. Instead, Kunle and Sean, with their dorky third roomie Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), load the vomit-stained girl into Sean’s minivan, to take her to the hospital, and hoping they don’t get pulled over first.

The plan goes awry, thanks to DUI checkpoints and Sean’s pre-function buzz. Also, there’s the matter of the girl’s older sister, Maddy (played by pop star and former Disney Channel icon Sabrina Carpenter), who notices her sister’s missing and goes in hot pursuit, with her BFF Alice (Madison Thompson) and hunky Rafael (Diego Abraham) along for the ride.

Williams (whose “R#J” premiered at Sundance last year) and screenwriter K.D. Da’Vila expanded this story from a short of the same name that won a special jury award at Sundance in 2018. This version has its share of wacky mix-ups — like a gag involving a spiked energy drink — and frenetic bickering among the main characters. But there’s a sharp undertone at work, too, as Kunle, Sean and Carlos (who’s Latino) must deal with the ever-present danger of life of being, as Sean puts it, “darker than a brown paper bag.”

Cyler (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) and Watkins pair up strongly, as their harrowing night reveals their characters’ contrasting attitudes and a few secrets the friends have kept from each other. For all of its sly humor and observations about race in America, “Emergency” is at its heart a buddy picture, and these two make that friendship feel like the real thing.

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‘Emergency’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters; will stream on Prime starting May 27. Rated R for for pervasive language, drug use and some sexual references. Running time: 104 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 21, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Firestarter,' once again, doesn't generate enough sparks for a Stephen King adaptation.

You know how film snobs always say Hollywood shouldn’t remake classics, but remake bad movies that had a spark of potential? That doesn’t work out so well, either — as a new version of Stephen King’s paranoid thriller “Firestarter” shows.

The 1984 version was notable for being the first big movie 8-year-old Drew Barrymore made after “E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial.” It was a random mess of a movie, with anonymous agents chasing down little Charlie McGee and her dad because she has the power of pyrokinesis — starting fires with her mind.

The new version starts much the same way, with college kids Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) going in for some pharmaceutical research and coming out with stunning powers. Vicky has telekinesis, being able to move objects with her mind, though she seldom uses it. Andy can “push” others into doing things and thinking things that would never have occurred to them. Andy once used this power to make two agents — who were stealing their baby, Charlie, from the maternity ward — kill themselves, so the family has been living as fugitives.

In the movie’s present-day, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) is 11 years old, and bullied by the other kids at her school. She tries to hold in her rage, which leads to her surroundings getting very hot — enough to draw the attention of Capt. Hollister (Gloria Reuben), head of the shadowy agency known only as DSI.

Hollister calls upon a retired assassin, Rainbird (played by Michael Greyeyes), who has powers of his own. His mission is to bring in Charlie, alive, so Hollister’s agency can start studying her powers and possibly exploiting them. Killing Vicky early in the proceedings is just part of the job.

The bulk of Scott Teems’ script, adapting King’s novel, centers on Charlie and Andy on the road — as the father belatedly tries to train Charlie in the controlled use of her awesome power, and seeing if she can pull off any of her parents’ tricks, too. This could have made for some strong action sequences, along with some tender daddy-daughter time between Efron and Armstrong. But Teems and director Kevin Thomas don’t have the skill to make those scenes work, as evidenced by their attempt to give Armstrong’s Charlie her own sequence, a training montage that plays like a peewee rendition of a Rocky Balboa sparring session.

The acting is serviceable enough for a cheap horror movie, but none of the onscreen performers really make the audience shiver. If anyone does, it’s the guy making spooky music as composer: Horror maestro John Carpenter, working with his son Cody and frequent collaborator Daniel Davies.

So who gets the blame for two lackluster adaptations of the same Stephen King novel? Is it the filmmakers, unable to make an interesting premise work over the course of a full movie? Or is it King, for serving up an undernourished book and hoping the filmmakers will put some meat on the bones? I don’t have an answer, but the argument would be a hotter ticket than anything in “Firestarter.”

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‘Firestarter’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for violent content. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Memoria' is a hypnotic meditation on sound and nostalgia, a fertile field for actress Tilda Swinton's eerie magic

With the filmed-in-Colombia tale “Memoria,” the Palme D’Or-winning Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul proves that his meditative, hypnotic style of filmmaking can cross oceans and retain its alluring power.

The only unsurprising thing in this movie is that Weerasethakul convinced the chameleonic actress Tilda Swinton — who has worked with a constellation of great directors, including Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Lynne Ramsay, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg, Bong Joon-Ho, Bela Tarr, Judd Apatow, Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodóvar — to star in his first English-language movie. 

Swinton plays Jessica, a Scottish archaeologist living in Medellin, Colombia, where an excavation crew building a tunnel recently unearthed human bones that may be millennia old. But something else is distracting Jessica from her work. Early one morning, she hears a loud sound, a “thwack” that she cannot identify or pinpoint.

Early in the film, Jessica goes to meet a sound engineer named Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), to ask him to create an approximate version of the sound. Later in the film, in a bit of film symmetry, she goes to the jungle and meets another man named Hernán (Elkin Diaz), who knows the sound from his dreams.

In long, static, evocative takes, Weerasethakul (who won the Palme D’Or for his 2010 memory play “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”) captures the locations of Colombia — from the city to the jungle — and Jessica’s small but important place in their midst. Swinton, with her infinite curiosity, gently pokes and prods the contours of this setting and these situations, slowly discovering how much wider this world is than we realize.

“Memoria” should be experienced, if one is comfortable doing so, in a theater with a rich sound system. The journey Weerasethakul takes us on is sonic as well as cinematic, and that takes some extra space.

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‘Memoria’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some thematic elements and brief language. for Running time: 136 minutes; in English and Spanish with subtitles.

Review: 'Happening' is a harrowing — and now frighteningly timely — story of a young woman trying to obtain an illegal abortion

When director Audrey Diwan’s drama “Happening” opened in France last year, it was no doubt seen as a chilling reminder of the barbaric times women faced before abortion was legalized there. Opening this week in the United States, it’s a disturbing look ahead to what many women will likely face when — not if, apparently — Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Diwan and co-writer Marcia Romano have masterfully adapted Annie Ernaux’s novel, a thinly veiled memoir of a three-month period in university that threatened to upend her life as it was just beginning. It’s 1963, and Anne Duchesne (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) is a literature major at a university in Bordeaux, with high grades and a desire to become a teacher.

She’s also, at 22, attracted to young men, and they to her — a completely normal thing for a college student to be. One evening, she writes in her journal that her period is late. A week later, she sees her family doctor (Fabrizio Rongione), who examines her and tells her that she’s pregnant. 

When Anne tells her doctor that she doesn’t want to be pregnant, and wants help to have an abortion, the doctor won’t discuss it. In 1963 France, abortion is illegal — and both Anne and the doctor could go to prison if he performed the procedure. A title card informs the audience that she’s three weeks along.

Diwan shows the audience the next nine weeks of Anne’s life. She becomes closed off to her college friends, dismissive of the young men flirting with her in the bar. She falls behind in her studies, and argumentative with her mother (Sandrine Bonnaire). She also continues to seek a way out of her pregnancy, even if it means taking on the task by herself.

In a solid ensemble cast — which includes Anna Mouglalis in an uncompromising performance cannot be recounted in text — Vartolomei is a stunning revelation. Playing a young woman risking prison and death to put her life back on its path, Vartolomei gives a slow-burn performance of steadily rising tension.

Anne’s journey nears its end with one of the most unsettling scenes a movie is likely to produce this year. It graphically depicts what pro-abortion rights advocates say with regularity: That laws to ban abortions will only outlaw medically safe ones. It’s a scene I wanted to turn away from, but knew I had to watch, to bear witness to what the real Anne likely suffered before abortion was legalized in France — and what many American Annes in the future will face.

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‘Happening’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for graphic nudity, simulated depictions of abortion procedures, and language. Running time: 100 minutes; in French with subtitles.

Review: 'Petite Maman' is a deftly told and quietly moving story of the bonds between mothers and daughters

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma makes a small, perfect gem with “Petite Maman,” a quiet story of a little girl finding connection with her mother — a movie that’s as thematically different and emotionally moving as her torrid period romance, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

This spartan drama centers on Nelly (played by Joséphine Sanz), an 8-year-old girl who’s grandmother has just died. Sciamma, as writer and director, begins with Nelly saying goodbye to the other ladies she’s met in her grandmother’s nursing home. Then she rides along with her mom (Nina Meurisse) and dad (Stéphane Varupenne) to the house where Grandma lived — the house in which Nelly’s mother experienced her childhood.

While exploring the woods behind the house, Nelly finds a hut made out of tree branches — similar to the one her mother said she built when she was a child. Nelly also finds a little girl, about her age (and played by Joséphine’s sister, Gabrielle), in the hut. 

The girl, Marion, invites Nelly to play at her house on the other end of the path from Nelly’s grandma’s home. Marion’s house, where she lives with her mother (Margot Abascal), looks almost exactly like grandma’s — just 20-some years in the past. Nelly figures out, as the audience does, that Marion is her mother as a girl, and that the path between the two houses is really a time portal.

Sciamma doesn’t need expensive movie magic to make this act of time travel work. It’s powered by childhood magic, which is powerful enough for the task. The Sanz sisters — especially Joséphine as Nelly — make this relationship feel as natural as two girls who just met but are fast friends, because of a connection Nelly soon realizes she’s had since before she was born.

Nelly gets to see her mother in a new light, by seeing Marion’s mother — Nelly’s grandmother — as a woman in her 40s, rather than the gray-haired woman she knew from trips to the nursing home. The parallels between Marion and her mom, and Nelly and the adult Marion, are portrayed quietly and subtly, but still pack an emotional wallop.

“Petite Maman” is a marvel of storytelling efficiency, as Sciamma takes us through Nelly’s and Marion’s story, and leaves us in a puddle of well-earned tears, all in a mere 72 minutes. Sciamma pours meaning into every move, every moment, every object, in a beautiful story about two daughters and two mothers, and what separates and bonds them.

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‘Petite Maman’

★★★★

Opens Friday, May 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for some thematic elements and brief smoking. Running time: 72 minutes; in French with subtitles.

Review: 'The Duke' is a heist story loaded with whimsy, but it's Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren who steal the show.

There are strains of the old Ealing Studios comedies — whimsical tales of plucky Brits taking on the system with guile and eccentricity — running through “The Duke,” a based-on-a-true-story tale that’s enlivened by the pairing of Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren.

Broadbent plays Kempton Bunton, who we meet in 1961, in the dock at the Old Bailey. He’s accused of pulling off the heist of the century — the theft from the National Gallery of a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington, priced at 140,000 pounds. (In the UK, the disappearance of the Goya was so noteworthy that it was used as a gag in the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No.”)

Director Roger Michell (who died in September) and screenwriters Richard Bean and Clive Coleman then rewind to six months earlier. Kempton is a cabbie whose big mouth and big ideas keep getting him into trouble. He runs afoul of the law for not keeping a television license, under the quaint UK law that one must pay a regular fee for owning a TV set. He petitions the government, without success, to eliminate the TV license fee for pensioners (something Parliament finally did 40 years later). 

Kempton doesn’t object to the BBC; in fact, he regularly sends them scripts he’s written for TV dramas. The only one his infinitely patient wife, Dorothy (Mirren), objects to is one that references the death of their daughter — a loss neither parent has allowed themselves to grieve sufficiently.

When news breaks that the UK government has bought the Goya, Kempton rails to Dorothy and their younger son, Jackie (Fionn Whitehead, from “Dunkirk”), about the unfairness of the government spending money on a painting rather than on helping the people. Then, suddenly, the Goya is stolen — and Kempton and Jackie are busy hiding it in the wardrobe in the spare bedroom, where Jackie’s wayward older brother, Kenny (Jack Bandera), sometimes sleeps.

Michell (“Notting Hill,” “Persuasion”) gets a fair amount of humor out of Kempton’s irascible activism and Dorothy’s exasperation when his do-gooder streak costs him another job. But there’s a serious undertone, as well, and Broadbent and Mirren are just the wise theatrical hands who can navigate both the comical and tragic elements of the story.

The capper is, of course, the trial — with Matthew Goode (now appearing as studio boss Robert Evans in “The Offer”) adding some late-innings spice as Kempton’s highly amused barrister. The result may feel a bit inevitable, but the road Michell takes getting there makes “The Duke” a noble effort. 

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‘The Duke’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 6, at select theaters. Rated R for language and brief sexuality. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness' is a fun, dark ride through the MCU, and a perfect fit for director Sam Raimi

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its best when it’s toying with genres outside the superhero action movie — such as the patriotic war movie in “Captain America: The First Avenger,” the political thriller in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” or now flirting with elements of horror in the fiendishly entertaining “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

(I will attempt to avoid spoilers or any details that haven’t appeared in the movie’s trailer.)

We first see our title hero, surgeon-turned-sorcerer Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), running through a chaotic starscape of floating debris, accompanied by a young woman (Xochitl Gomez), trying to outrun a flaming monster to get to some unidentified glowing thing.

The audience ultimately sees this chase didn’t really happen — but was a dream Strange was having. Or was it? 

When the young woman, who identifies herself as America Chavez, shows up not in Strange’s dream but on his Manhattan street, being pursued by a different tentacled monster, the good sorcerer wonders what is up.

Strange goes to ask an old acquaintance, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a question: “What do you know about the multiverse?” She replies that her husband, Vision, “believed it was dangerous.”

(That exchange is in the trailer. I will add that if you haven’t watched “WandaVision” on Disney+, you should — both because it’s really good, and because it sets up a few things that play out here.)

Director Sam Raimi, who kickstarted the superhero movie with the Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” movies, and screenwriter Michael Waldron (who was the show runner on Marvel’s “Loki”) take viewers on a ride through several multiverses, with a visual inventiveness that’s just breathtaking. Yes, the filmmaking team known as Daniels recently plowed through a different multiverse, in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — and one wonders if the teams consulted each other or took the same drugs or something.

Many of the multiverses allow Strange to encounter some faces from his 2016 screen debut, “Doctor Strange,” such as Benedict Wong, Rachel McAdams and Chiwetel Ejiofor. (Again, they are all in the trailer.) In one universe, Strange encounters characters he hasn’t met before — and there’s not a price you could name that would make me spill the beans about that.

Dark magic and a book of spells are ideas that are right up Raimi’s alley, since they were focal points of his “Evil Dead” movies. Raimi applies some of his horror skills to this story’s spookier passages, with some terrifying CGI imagery and some unsettling camerawork.

Cumberbatch, in his sixth movie as Strange, seems to have found the battered soul of the character — someone coming to terms with the idea that being a superhero doesn’t mean you get everything you want. He’s well matched by McAdams, as Strange’s almost-paramour, and Wong as his most trusted friend. The standout, though, is 16-year-old Gomez, who channels both the confusion and determination of a kid just learning to harness a dangerous superpower.

“Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” also shows the continuation of an encouraging trend: Hiring directors and letting them put their filmmaking stamp on the MCU. It didn’t work too well for Chloé Zhao, adding her sunsets and naturalist style to “Eternals,” but here, Raimi’s dark manic force fits the material as well as Strange’s cloak.

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‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, frightening images and some language. Running time: 126 minutes.