Review: David Cronenberg's 'Crimes of the Future' is weird, disturbing, and completely fascinating

Of all the weird things in the futuristic freak show “Crimes of the Future” — the exploration of internal organs, the kid eating plastic, the guy with ear lobes all over his body — the weirdest might be how comforting it is to watch director David Cronenberg, at age 79, revisiting the body-horror themes that have marked his long career.

In a rather grungy near-future, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his professional and life partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) are performance artists with a particularly specific act: Saul grows new organs in his body, to which Caprice applies tattoos before surgically removing them — all in front of an audience. In this future, pain and infection are practically nonexistent, so surgery can happen anywhere. As Timlin (the always engaged Kristen Stewart), a rabbity government functionary with a fascination for Saul’s organs, puts it, “surgery is the new sex.”

As Saul seems to have trouble swallowing, even sitting in his special chair for digesting, he meets with Timlin and her boss, Wippet (Don McKellar), who runs the secret government National Organ Registry. Wippet knows about something called “the inner beauty pageant,” and suggests that Saul, if he grows another organ, could take best in show.

So where does an underground environmental activist (Scott Speedman), two slightly unhinged technicians (Tanaya Beatty and Nadia Litz), and a sarcophagus that performs autopsies factor into all of this? And what about Saul’s continued body augmentations — including a zipper in his belly — and how Caprice is reacting to it all?

This is Cronenberg, after all — the guy who has explored “the new flesh” in such films as “Videodrome,” “The Fly,” “Dead Ringers,” “Crash” (the car-accident one) and “Naked Lunch,” among others. (He started his career with a 1970 film, also titled “Crimes of the Future,” that touches on some of the same themes.) Some of the scenes— of beds with built-in scalpels, and cutting as foreplay — are not for the squeamish.

What Cronenberg, who also wrote the screenplay, seems interested in talking about what the world around us, and generations of pollution and medical breakthroughs, are doing to our insides, physically and mentally. He doesn’t have the answers, but in “Crimes of the Future,” he’s asking the most interesting questions.

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‘Crimes of the Future’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity and some language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Jazz Fest' talks a lot about New Orleans, but it works best when the music is center stage

The documentary “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” is a valentine to the Crescent City, told by a talkative gaggle of musicians representing multiple generations. And, like navigating a massive music festival, a viewer wishes they could enjoy more music and less down time.

It takes a good 10 minutes for directors Frank Marshall (the veteran producer of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and other films) and Ryan Suffern to rifff through a bunch of quick clips of interviews — with such musicians as Jimmy Buffett, Tom Jones, Pitfall and Ellis Marsalis — and a basic introduction of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest, which in 2019 marked its 50th year.

Finally, after 10 minutes, we get to hear some music, and it’s worth the wait — because it’s Earth, Wind and Fire performing “Dancing in September” at the 2019 festival. If that doesn’t get dancing in your seat, check your pulse, because you might be dead.

The movie progresses like that for most of its 95-minute run. Lots of interviews, an unbroken string of musicians saying how great New Orleans is, intercut with some strong performances. Most of the music cuts are from the 2019 show, with some notable archival selections — including a surprise performer at the 2006 festival, the first show after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Some of the musical highlights: Ellis Marsalis leading all four of his musician sons; Irma Thomas, who has performed at every Jazz Fest since 1974, belting out the blues; Rev. Al Green, long dormant, still sounding soulful on “Let’s Stay Together”; Jimmy Buffett, still wasting away on “Margaritaville”; and Katy Perry, segueing from a gospel-choir version of “Oh Happy Day” into her motivational pop hit “Firework.”

The directors get a sampling of the different genres represented at the festival, and making the point that music is the great uniter of people. But one wishes the filmmakers gave us more music to which a united audience can dance like crazy.

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‘Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for brief language and some suggestive material. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: Real drama of 'Eiffel' is ignored for some sappy, and poorly done, romance.

The French drama “Eiffel” isn’t nearly as interested in its title character — the engineer Gustave Eiffel — and his namesake Parisian landmark as it is in serving up a cheesy romantic plot that defies credulity and history.

That’s too bad, because the drama behind designing and building the Eiffel Tower on the banks of the Seine would be enough for a good movie. Director Martin Bourboulon and screenwriter Caroline Bongrand (who received dialogue and adaptation assistance from the director and three other writers) stage some fascinating and tension-filled scenes of Eiffel (Romain Duris) promising his crew the construction site will be the safest in France — then risking life and limb pumping compressed air into the caissons to keep them from flooding, or putting in the bolts to connect the tower’s four legs with its lower platform.

Duris, one of France’s biggest stars, depicts Eiffel as a somberly serious egalitarian, who would rather build Paris’ Metro than some gaudy monument for the 1893 World’s Fair. As he creates the plan for his tower, which he will submit to a national competition, he runs into a lost love of his past, Adrienne de Restac (played by Emma Mackey, last seen in Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile”). Adrienne is married to Eiffel’s publicist, Antoine (Pierre Deladonchamps), and Eiffel is a widow with a doting adult daughter, Claire (Armande Boulanger) and a passel of young sons.

The romance between Eiffel and Adrienne is the part of “Eiffel” referred to by the opening title card, which says it’s “freely inspired by the true story.” Bourboulon and Bongrand stages the characters’ young romance in flashbacks, 20 years before Eiffel starts work his tower in 1889. Eiffel is building a bridge in Bordeaux for Adrienne’s wealthy father, and she invites him to her birthday party. Adrienne is taken by Eiffel’s seriousness, and Eiffel is smitten but heartbroken as Adrienne can’t pull away from her superficial rich friends.

The depiction of the youthful romance, and the possible rekindling of it 20 years later, is where the movie stumbles the worst. Much of this is in the casting: Duris, who’s now 48, looks hopelessly aged in the flashback scenes, while the 26-year-old Mackey is out of place playing Adrienne as a 40ish woman — and their later-in-life coupling plays more like a male fantasy than an authentic romance.

For the rivet counters in the audience, “Eiffel” has its delights — the period depiction of 1890s Paris and the special effects to depict the tower’s slow construction are note-perfect. Too bad the human story at the movie’s heart was anywhere close to being as believable.

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‘Eiffel’

★★

Opens Friday, June 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexuality/nudity. Running time: 108 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Top Gun: Maverick' benefits from the technological, and screenwriting, improvements since the '80s

I remember the first time I saw Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” — because it was less than two weeks ago.

I can’t explain why I never saw the Tony Scott-directed 1986 action movie when it came out — except that I was a senior in college, and probably too cool and elitist for that kind of popcorn entertainment. Or maybe I was worried about finals. That part I don’t remember so clearly.

What I saw in the original “Top Gun,” when I finally saw it, was a movie that was outstanding when Cruise was airborne, and ridiculous when he was on the ground. I don’t blame Cruise for that, since he was 23 and still getting his footing as a movie star. The blame here goes to Scott, a director who always more about the whoosh of the machinery than the emotions of his human characters. It made me think back in agreement with Pauline Kael’s famously devastating summation of the movie that it was “a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.”

“Top Gun: Maverick,” though director Joseph Kosinski (who made “Tron: Legacy,” speaking of decades-delayed revisits of classic ‘80s movies) tries to evoke the original, is truly its own beast — and a nimble, energetic one at that.

When we catch up with Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, he’s fixing up an ancient propeller-powered fighter plane — a relic, like himself, as someone later comments — when he hops on his motorcycle and heads to work. He’s now a test pilot for an experimental stealth fighter jet, trying to hit Mach 10 before a rear admiral (Ed Harris) shuts down the project.

Then Maverick gets his new orders: To return to Top Gun, the Navy’s fighter pilot training program, to work with the best of the best. Maverick’s orders are to train a group of pilots for a dangerous mission — destroying a uranium processing plant being built by an unnamed enemy country — in less than a month.

Adm. Beau “Cyclone” Simpson (Jon Hamm) doesn’t see the need for Maverick’s mentoring, but Simpson is being overruled by the base’s commander: Adam. Tom Kazansky, better known as “Iceman” (Val Kilmer), Maverick’s rival and eventual wingman from the original. Iceman’s presence here suggests Quentin Tarantino’s famous monologue (in the 1994 indie “Sleep With Me”), theorizing that Maverick’s true love interest in the first movie wasn’t Kelly McGillis’ Charlie but Iceman, might have been on point.

Maverick has other relationship issues to deal with on the ground here. There’s a reunion with Penny (Jennifer Connelly), who owns the bar near the base, and who has a history with Maverick. But more pressing is the fact that one of the pilots he must train, Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), is the son of Maverick’s best friend, Tom Bradshaw, aka “Goose” — who died during a training mission in the backseat when Maverick was the pilot.

Rooster (nobody is referenced in this movie by their names, just their call signs) has his own rivalry — his Iceman, as it were — in another top pilot, the supremely confident Lt. Jake “Hangman” Seresin (Glen Powell). If Maverick is going to turn these hotshots into a cohesive team, he’ll have to deal with that competition as well as the ghosts of his past.

Kosinski takes inspiration from the dogfights of the 1986 movie, but updates them to state-of-the-art movie technology. Many of the shots make the audience feel like they’re in the cockpit with Maverick through every spin, dive and rise of the mission. (The best way to describe the actual mission is to quote another talented movie pilot: It’s “just like Beggar’s Canyon back home.”) Many of the flight scenes were filmed with IMAX cameras, so watching the movie on the biggest possible screen makes sense.

But if the filmmaking technology has advanced, the screenwriting craft has also kept pace. The tag-teamed script — where, I’m guessing, Cruise’s go-to screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie had a big influence — deepens Maverick’s emotional stakes, and those of the other pilots, in ways the first movie never could. It’s not Shakespeare by any stretch, but it shows the expectations for solid character development for even a big-budget popcorn movie have been raised in the last four decades.

First, last and always, though, “Top Gun: Maverick” gives us Tom Cruise doing what he does best: Applying his charm, his acting chops, and that indefinable movie-star thing to make big movies feel even bigger. When it comes to pleasing an audience, once again, Cruise makes sure it’s mission accomplished.

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language. Running time: 131 minutes.

Review: Fans will relish 'The Bob's Burgers Movie,' which delivers the same fast-talking humor as the TV show

Fans of the animated family comedy “Bob’s Burgers” will surely get a kick out of the expanded version, “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” — and comparative newbies, like me, should become converts to the rapid-fire vocal rhythms and inventive gags that creator Loren Bouchard and company have constructed here.

The Belcher family lives in an apartment upstairs from the burger restaurant in a seaside vacation community, not too far from the town pier and amusement park. Bob (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) is the hangdog patriarch, married to the perpetually optimistic Linda (voiced by John Roberts). They have three kids: The reasonable oldest daughter, Tina (voiced by Dan Mintz); the chipper son, Gene (voiced by Eugene Mirman), and the youngest, the sometimes aggressive Louise (voiced by Kristen Schaal). Yes, you observed correctly that in a family with three women or girls, only one of them is voiced by a human female.

As the movie starts, the Belchers are facing a financial crisis, after the bank refuses to extend the loan on the restaurant, leaving Bob and Linda a week to earn enough money to pay off the loan. This is made more difficult when a giant sinkhole opens up in front of the restaurant, blocking the door from customers. While Bob and Linda try to persevere, their main hope is to talk their doddering landlord, Calvin Fischoeder (voiced by Kevin Kline), into letting them delay their rent payment.

Mr. Fischoeder has problems of his own, when Louise — in an effort to prove she’s not a scared little girl, despite her insistence to continue to wear her rabbit-ear knit cap — climbs into the sinkhole, where she finds a rotting corpse. That body turns out to be a carny who’s been missing from the amusement park for six years, and Fischoeder is the suspect in the man’s murder.

Louise cajoles Tina and Gene to look into the killing, and try to prove Mr. Fischoeder’s innocence. The effort leads them to encounter Mr. Fischoeder’s eccentric brother, Felix (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), and their detail-oriented cousin Grover (voiced by David Wain). The kids also find some secrets underneath the amusement park’s pier.

Bouchard, co-directing with Bernard Derriman and working off a script from series writer Nora Smith, doesn’t do much to reinvent the wheel. The animation expands from time to time to fit its larger screen, but mostly it stays in the confines established by the TV version. The visual humor is mostly concerned with pun-filled names for the businesses on the burger joint’s street.

The reliable wellspring of humor in “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is the quick-witted banter among the Belchers, particularly when the kids get going. Schaal, Mirman and Mintz are as well practiced as any comedy team — and their overlapping dialogue overflows with wry humor. When these three really get going, the audience will laugh their buns off.

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‘The Bob’s Burgers Movie’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for rude/suggestive material and language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Downton Abbey: A New Era' jams together dozens of familiar characters, and a plagiarized plot line, for a movie only the fans will love

Movie snobs who criticize the Marvel Cinematic Universe for too much “fan service” — throwing in unnecessary characters or references to make the diehard fans swoon — should take a long look at what the folks behind “Downton Abbey” do with their sprawling cast of English upper-crust and their devoted servants.

In “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” the second feature film based on the popular ITV and PBS series, the two dozen or so regular characters — and a few new ones — are bounced around by series creator Julian Fellowes’ script higgledy-piggledy, with all but one making no lasting impression that one didn’t get from the regularity of seeing them on TV for years.

The exception is Dame Maggie Smith, who gets one more opportunity as the Dowager Countess, Violet Grantham, to show everyone how much fun she’s having with droll witticisms and an unmistakeable air of being so much better than the material with which she’s working.

Two plot threads are fighting for dominance in this movie — one maudlin soap opera, the other rank plagiarism.

In the first one, Violet tells the family that she has inherited a villa in the south of France, given to her by a viscount she knew some 64 years previously. Violet’s son, Lord Robert Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), leads a sizable contingent of the family to check out the villa. There, they become embroiled in intrigue, because the viscount’s widow (the great French star Nathalie Baye) doesn’t want to give up the property, while the viscount’s son (Jonathan Zaccal) aims to fulfill his father’s wishes, for reasons that become clear over time.

Meanwhile, back at Downton Abbey, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) — left in charge of the house by Violet at the end of the last movie — weighs an offer to have a British movie production film in the house. Mary accepts, knowing the money could go to fixing the leaky roof. The movie people arrive, bringing with them the expected amount of backstage drama. And that’s where the plagiarism comes into the script.

It’s 1928, you see, and in the middle of filming a silent melodrama about a gambler and a noblewoman, the movie’s producer/director, Jack Barber (Hugh Dancy), gets a call from his studio to call it off — because talkies are now all the rage. Lady Mary suggests they turn the current production into a talking picture, but there’s a snag: The glamorous platinum-blonde leading lady, Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock), has a Cockney accent that could peel paint off the walls.

Yup, you sussed it out: Fellowes is cribbing the plot from one of the greatest movies of all time, 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain.” The only thing missing is knowing which character will take on the Debbie Reynolds role of dubbing their voice over Myrna’s.

You can throw a rock in any direction and hit another subplot, usually involving one of the beloved side characters finding true love. For example, the deep-in-the-closet head butler Barrow (Robert James-Collier) sees a chance at happiness when he catches the eye of the movie’s dashing leading man, Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who’s apparently living in a more luxurious closet. Or former servant Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) gets a chance to propose, finally, to the spinsterish maid Miss Baxter (Raquel Cassidy). And so on down the line.

With all these characters, director Simon Curtis (“My Week With Marilyn”) has only one job, and that’s traffic control. He manages to avoid any major crashes, but there are enough minor ones to prevent the movie from gaining any sense of rhythm.

It’s hard to imagine a third “Downton Abbey” movie, if only because the writers have a big historic wall ahead of them: The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression to follow. Surely, a household that has to bring in a movie production to pay for a new roof is destined for collapse when the world’s economy tanks — and I can’t believe the Anglophilic audience that eats this show up like crumpets will want to watch Lord Grantham fire the staff and sell off the antiques. “Downton Abbey” fans better soak up the luxury life while they can.

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‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some suggestive references, language and thematic elements. Running time: 125 minutes.

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.