Review: 'Brian and Charles' is a charmingly deadpan comedy about a lonely man and his robot

Like the robot who is one-half of the titular duo, “Brian and Charles” is a whimsical and winning blend of a lot of spare parts — including the low-key charm of the Ealing Studios comedies, the absurdist wit of Monty Python, the deadpan timing of “The Office,” and the stout heart of “The Wizard of Oz’s” Tin Woodsman.

Brian (played by David Earl) lives a lonely existence near a small Welsh village, where he’s left alone through a gloomy winter with his mind, which is always coming up with odd inventions. He goes into the village, where he runs into the painfully shy Hazel (Louise Brealey, known to Americans as coroner Molly Hooper on “Sherlock”), on whom he’s rather sweet.

One day, Brian comes up with an invention that he’s sure will cure his loneliness: A robot companion. With a washing machine for a body, a mannequin’s head, and a spare pair of legs, Brian builds his robot — and is rather surprised, after a few false starts, to see it’s actually functioning. Brian tries a few names for his new robot, and the one to which he responds most positively is Charles.

Charles is played by Chris Hayward, and Earl and Hayward are the film’s screenwriters — though it’s apparent that a fair chunk of that writing is happening in front of the camera, as the two performers throw off seemingly ad-libbed lines at each other. 

There is a progression in Brian and Charles’ relationship, as Charles goes from childlike wonder at everything in Brian’s world to teenage rebellion when he realizes there’s more outside the gate — namely, an exotic paradise he sees on TV, called Honolulu. But what’s outside the gate is also dangerous, particularly Brian’s neighbors, town bully Eddie (Jamie Michie), his hard-ass wife Pam (Nina Sosanya), and their bratty teen twins (Lowri and Mari Izzard). 

Jim Archer, a TV guy making his feature directing debut, and the movie’s writer/performers begin with a mock-documentary format, the jokes gently muted by the deadpan delivery but still hilarious. There’s also a strong emotional current, as Brian feels both parental and fraternal bonds with Charles — as the robot also inspires Brian to stand up to Eddie and show his feelings for Hazel. “Brian and Charles” is that rare comedy that carries the spark of something wonderful.

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‘Brian and Charles’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 17, in theaters. Rated PG for language, mild violence and smoking. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Lightyear,' taking inspiration from 'Toy Story,' gives us a hero any kid would want to play with

I’ve got no problem with Pixar Animation Studios digging through its intellectual property, as long as the filmmakers there can create something as well-constructed and outright fun as “Lightyear.”

The title cards at the beginning of the movie set up the premise perfectly: In 1995, the cards say, a boy named Andy got a toy for his birthday that was based on his favorite movie. “This is that movie,” the last card says.

No, the movie is not the further adventures of the plastic toy that got over his ego and learned how to be a good toy. Instead, director Angus MacLane (a 25-year Pixar veteran) and the team are highlighting the character on which that toy was based — and, being “real” rather than a toy, is rather more complex.

Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Chris Evans) is one of the best pilots in the Space Ranger corps. He knows it, too, which prompts his patrol partner and best friend, Alisha Hawthorne (voiced by Uzo Aruba), to note that Buzz needs to learn not to take on the galaxy all by himself.

The Rangers’ ship lands on a planet they soon learn is quite hostile — and in trying to lift off, Buzz takes the controls, but can’t get the ship into orbit. Instead, the crew has dodge the carnivorous vines to create a colony on the planet, until they can concoct an energy source to get the ship off the planet and back on course. 

Buzz volunteers to be the test pilot for the new “crystalic fusion” (one of the many “Toy Story” references embedded in the script, by Jason Headley and MacLane), accompanied by a robot cat named Sox (voiced by “The Good Dinosaur” director Peter Soho). When Buzz and Sox take off on a four-minute mission, they learn that four years have passed on the planet. Buzz is determined to try again and again, as decades pass by.

Finally, Buzz and Sox find the human colony fending off not only the vines but a new enemy: A ship hovering overhead, led by a mysterious character called Zurg. Buzz must rely on a small squad of misfits — including Izzy Hawthorne (voiced by Keke Palmer), Alisha’s grand-daughter — to defeat Zurg.

MacLane and crew have devised exactly the kind of movie a kid like Andy would have loved when he was a kid. Kids will eat this up, but I think the adults who were kids back in 1995 or earlier — and grew up on the science-fiction themes this movie understands like a second language — will enjoy it even more. 

“Lightyear” is loaded with exciting moments and charming characters — like Buzz’s new crewmates, nervous Mo (voiced by Taika Waititi) and gruff Darby (voiced by Dale Soules from “Orange Is the New Black”), and especially the scene-stealing Sox. Best of all, the movie gives us a worthy Buzz Lightyear, someone who’s both heroic and human, and the sort of character a kid would want to take on imaginary adventures to infinity and beyond.

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‘Lightyear’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril. Running time: 100 minutes.

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.