Review: 'A Chiara' is a raw and vital coming-of-age story, of a teen girl in Calabria discovering the dark truth about her father

It’s true that the best movies are very specific to the details of their place and their characters — and that’s particularly true of Italian writer-director Jonas Carpignano’s coming-of-age drama “A Chiara.”

The place is Giola Tauro, a seaside town in Calabria, the region that forms the “toe” of Italy’s “boot.” It’s here where 15-year-old Chiara (Swamy Rotolo) lives with her family — who are played by Rotolo’s real family: Claudio (Claudio Rotolo), her father; Carmela (Carmela Fumo), her mother; her little sister, Giorgia (Giorgia Rotolo); and her 18-year-old sister Giulia (Grecia Rotolo).

The movie starts with the preparations for Giulia’s 18th birthday, a big party with all of their family and friends in attendance. This includes a lot of Claudio’s male relations, who huddle together somewhat menacingly.

As the party breaks up, something startling happens: Claudio’s car explodes. No one is in the car, but Claudio goes off with some of his male relations. And Chiara doesn’t see him again for a long time.

Chiara, being 15 and considering herself invincible, starts asking questions about her father’s disappearance, and whether Dad is involved in the Calabrian mafia — which, the movie shows us, is so tight-knit it makes the Sicilian mafia of “The Godfather” look like a group of random strangers.

Everyone around Chiara — Mom, Giulia, her cousin Giusi (Giuseppina Rotolo) — tells her to stop asking questions. Eventually, her uncle Antonio (Antonio Rotolo Uno) gives her some information, but it’s hardly comforting.

In the mean time, Chiara starts skipping school and acting rashly — so much so that the school and the authorities want to take her from her family and live with a foster family in the north, under an Italian law designed to give teens a chance break free from Mafia ties.

“A Chiara” is the third movie Carpignano has made set in Calabria, but it stands alone as an engrossing story of a young woman having to grow up in a big hurry. That said, I want to find and watch “Mediterranea,” his 2015 movie about African migrants making the trek to Italy, and his 2017 follow-up “A Ciambra,” which centers on Calabria’s Roma community — both of which center on characters that we see on the fringes of “A Chiara.”

Carpignano’s pacing is a slow-burn at first; we spend an awfully long time at Giulia’s birthday party. But once the movie revs up, the story really takes off — mostly on the strength of Swamy Rotolo’s intense performance as Chiara, her long thoughtful stares showing a mind piecing together what she must do to survive and sever her family’s criminal ties. “A Chiara” is a gut-punch of a movie, one that holds your attention from the start and doesn’t let go.

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‘A Chiara’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language and drug content. Running time: 121 minutes; in Italian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Benediction' tells a poet's life story, with moments of graceful beauty and a lot of downtime

Like most movies directed by the British filmmaker Terence Davies, “Benediction” is a perfectly beautiful, graceful and heartbreaking depiction of a life — in this case, the poet and peace activist Siegfried Sassoon — and it also can be, depending on your mood and patience, something of a slog.

Sassoon — played in his younger days by Jack Lowden (“Slow Horses”) and in his old age by Peter Capaldi — is best remembered, where he is remembered, for his candid and stirring poetry based on his experiences as a lieutenant in World War I. Davies doesn’t show Sassoon directly in wartime, perhaps because there’s no budget for it, but uses documentary footage of the era and Sassoon’s words to convey the horrors of that war.

After writing a letter to protest the war, Sassoon is sent to a military psychiatric hospital — thanks to some backroom maneuvers by an old friend, Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), to keep Sassoon from facing a court martial and a firing squad. There, he confides in a psychiatrist (Ben Daniels), and finds companionship with a younger officer, Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), who writes a poem that Sassoon declares to be “magnificent.”

Davies’ narrative bounces around a bit, merging young Sassoon’s grief over his younger brother’s death in the war with his older self’s late-in-life conversion to Roman Catholicism. After that, Sassoon’s story travels mostly in chronological order. 

At the end of the war and for years after, Davies’ script tells us, Sassoon engaged on a string of affairs with men — most notably the English actor and vaudeville singer Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), who is as gorgeous as he is self-centered. Years later, he meets Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips), and they marry and have a son, but Sassoon’s hopes for a happy life are regularly thwarted by his memories of the war.

Davies (whose last movie, “A Quiet Passion,” featured Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson), is incapable of making a movie that doesn’t feature some transcendent beauty, and some of Sassoon’s moments thinking back on his past — with Lowden reciting Sassoon’s poems in voice-over — hit that mark. But there’s a lot of downtime, and catty bickering among Sassoon and several of his boyfriends, in between those moments of graceful wonder.

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‘Benediction’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for disturbing war images, some sexual material and thematic elements. Running time: 137 minutes.

Review: 'Jurassic World: Dominion' is proof that the franchise should go the way of the dinosaurs

With an inevitability that thuds like the footsteps that announce a dinosaur’s arrival, “Jurassic World: Dominion” hits its action beats with the steady rhythm of a metronome, one that’s likely to lull an audience to sleep. 

This is the sixth movie in the franchise that started with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 action masterpiece “Jurassic Park” — and, if we’re to believe the marketing, the grand finale. If the box office receipts are good, though, I’m sure Universal Pictures could extend the story, though it’s pretty thin and patchy as it is.

The continuation of the last story has publicist-turned-activist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) as an eco-warrior, sneaking into an illegal breeding facility in Nevada that feeds a growing black market in the dinosaur trade. Meanwhile, her significant other, former dino trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is in the Sierras rounding up free-range dinosaurs like they’re wild mustangs.

Mostly, Claire and Owen are hiding in a mountain cabin with Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the teen they rescued from an evil billionaire in the last movie, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.” Maisie believes she’s a clone of her deceased mother, and enough other people believe it that they go to great lengths to kidnap her and a baby raptor — the child of Owen’s former specimen, Blue.

Those kidnappers work, the movie quickly reveals, for a nasty biotech CEO, Lewis Dodgson, played by Campbell Scott as an awkward combination of Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. (His name, I’m guessing, is some sly reference to the real name and nom de plume of the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” It’s more thought than went into many other parts of the movie.)

Meanwhile, in the Midwest, farmers are dealing with locusts the size of house cats, and a scientist suspects they’re linked to Dodgson’s nefarious plans, too. That scientist is Dr. Ellie Sattler, still played gloriously by Laura Dern, and she enlists the only other scientist she trusts — yup, Dr. Alan Grant, again played by Sam Neill — to get the goods on Dodgson’s misdeeds by getting into his high-tech research facility in Italy.

It’s only a matter of time before Ellie and Alan cross paths with Claire and Owen. So much time. The movie clocks in just shy of two-and-a-half hours, and a lot of it is action-movie filler. Take, for example, when Claire and Owen try to infiltrate an underground dinosaur bazaar, which leads to a chase scene through Malta that feels so out of place that I kept expecting a “Mission: Impossible” movie to crash into it at the next intersection.

When Ellie/Alan and Claire/Owen do meet up, they also have in their group two more characters, one new and one old. The new one is Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), a mercenary pilot who grows a heart after seeing Maisie in mid-kidnapping. The old one is Dodgson’s “resident philosopher”: Our chaos-theorizing friend, Dr. Ian Malcolm, again played by Jeff Goldblum.

Director Colin Trevorrow, who directed the first “Jurassic World,” tries to navigate this sprawling, overstuffed story through a world where dinosaurs live everywhere. Trevorrow manages this with a ton of computer animation and some funky animatronic creatures. Some of the effects look sharp, but there’s one sequence that’s so poorly lit and shot that it feels like the characters were walking through an attraction at Universal Studios that’s still going through beta testing.

There is, I will admit, an electric thrill seeing Dern and Neill, the stars of the original “Jurassic Park,” reunite for the first time in two decades. (They appeared in “Jurassic Park III” back in 2001, but Dern’s scene was essentially a cameo.) Most of that is because Dern, who was 26 when the original hit theaters, remains one of the most fascinating actors to watch — even when she’s trying to avoid giant locusts or a clinch with Neill’s Grant. Dern’s best chemistry is with Howard, making manifest Dern’s “woman inherits the earth” line from the original.

Annoyingly, Trevorrow and co-screenwriter Emily Carmichael get bogged down by pumping the fan service into every corner of the story. Both B.D. Wong’s geneticist and the infamous Barbasol can makes a comeback, among other moments that will make undemanding fans go “oh, I get it.” But, at the same time, they take the only truly interesting development of the last three movies — the truth of Maisie’s existence — and lose their nerve.

The moment that solidifies how bereft of ideas “Jurassic World: Dominion” is comes when Goldblum’s Ian finally meets Pratt’s Owen and realizes that Owen worked at that expanded amusement park. “Jurassic World? Not a fan,” Ian says, as if to beat the audience from saying the same thing about this movie.

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‘Jurassic World: Dominion’

★★

Opens Friday, June 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language. Running time: 146 minutes.

Review: 'Watcher' takes a page out of Hitchcock, and serves up a stylish thriller all its own

In her feature debut, “Watcher,” director Chloe Okuno delivers a straight-up suspense thriller that is all killer and no filler.

When Francis (Karl Glusman) gets a promotion and a transfer to Bucharest, his fiancee Julia (Maika Monroe) moves there with him. She doesn’t understand Romanian, but listens to language lessons to try to pick up a few phrases. She is a bit at loose ends, trying to figure out how to spend her days while Francis at work — and how not to freak out when the TV news talks about a serial killer in the area.

One night, Julia notices a man in the building across the street, apparently looking at her. (Julia and Francis’ apartment has ridiculously large windows and inadequate drapes, by the way.) The next night, it happens again. She tries to call Francis’ attention to this, but he’s sure there’s an innocent explanation. When Julia thinks the same guy (Burn Gorman) is following her in a grocery store, Francis suggests he looks creepy because Julia’s been acting creepy toward the stranger.

That’s as simple a thriller premise as you can get, and even Okuno acknowledges her debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” (Hey, if you’re going to steal, steal the good stuff.) And while Hitchcock’s influence, along with that of a few other filmmakers, can be felt throughout, Okuno (who co-wrote the script with Zack Ford) adds enough of her own touches to make the suspenseful moments realistically chilling.

Okuno’s ace in the hole is Monroe, who made her horror-thriller rep starring in “It Follows” in 2014. Monroe has to carry Julia’s swirling emotions — loneliness, apprehension, paranoia, and anger that Francis doesn’t believe her — and does so with grace and fury. Monroe’s perfectly dialed into Julia’s character, which lets us feel the gaze of “Watcher” like lasers to our skull. 

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‘Watcher’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 3, at several Megaplex theaters. Rated R for some bloody violence, language, and some sexual material/nudity. Running time: 91 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 22, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

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.