Review: 'The Phantom of the Open' is a one-note biopic that makes a joke out of its subject

For most of its two-hour run, the comical biopic “The Phantom of the Open” has trouble deciding whether it’s laughing at its protagonist or laughing with him — which makes it difficult for we, the audience, to laugh along with the film.

The protagonist is Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator in the English port city of Barrow-in-Furness, who seemed to live an unremarkable life, except for a footnote in sports history: In 1976, Flitcroft indulged his recently acquired passion for golf by entering the British Open — and shooting 121 strokes, a 49-over-par, in a qualifying round, then and now the worst round of golf in the Open’s history.

Director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) and screenwriter Simon Farnaby (who co-wrote “Paddington 2”) re-enact what led up to that remarkable round, and what followed. Flitcroft is depicted, by Academy Award winner Mark Rylance, as an unperturbed optimist, seeing the best in every situation and urging everyone to follow their dreams. When he courts his future wife, Jean (Sally Hawkins), she surprises him with the news that she has a son, Michael — and Maurice, without a moment’s hesitation, agrees to be the boy’s stepfather.

Flash-forward a few years, and Michael (Jake Davies) has taken an office job at the same shipyard where Maurice operates a crane. Meanwhile, Maurice’s and Jean’s twin sons, James and Gene (Jonah and Christian Lees), are pursuing their teen dreams of being champion disco dancers. So it’s a perfect time, Jean tells him, to do what he wants to do for a change.

What Maurice wants to do is golf, even though he’s got no clue how — and not enough money to get the right shoes or play at the county golf course. Undaunted, he enters the British Open, and because he doesn’t know his handicap, he checks the box that says “professional.”

The infamous 1976 golf round happens midway through the film. What follows is a farcical look at Maurice’s odd 15 minutes of fame — which get stretched when the humorless British golf establishment (embodied by a character played by Rhys Ifans) has Maurice barred from every course in the country, leading Maurice to take on various pseudonyms to skirt the ban.

Rylance’s performance is oddly forced, going for sympathy and mockery at different points and never earning either in the appropriate measure. It doesn’t help that Farnaby’s script descends into family conflict without earning the Flitcroft family the emotional connection needed to make such melodrama work.

The end of “The Phantom of the Open” aims to show Maurice’s eventual triumph — attending an American golf tourney named for him, where the worst score wins — but it feels like another opportunity to mock him. I found myself feeling sorry for Maurice Flitcroft, and for Rylance for portraying him, which I’m sure wasn’t the emotion an underdog sports movie was trying to evoke.

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‘The Phantom of the Open’

★★

Opens Friday, June 24, in some Utah theaters. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: 'Cha Cha Real Smooth' gives triple threat Cooper Raiff a venue to shine, opposite Dakota Johnson at her best.

If writer-director-actor Cooper Raiff’s name wasn’t already in your mental list of up-and-coming filmmakers after his 2020 college comedy “Shithouse,” his new semi-romantic comedy “Cha Cha Real Smooth” should be your wake-up call to this guy’s extraordinary talent and big heart.

Raiff plays Andrew, 22, a recent college graduate who isn’t sure what to do next. He wants to go to Barcelona, where his college girlfriend Maya (Amara Pedroso) is studying on a Fulbright scholarship. Instead, he’s moved back home to New Jersey — living with his mom, Lisa (Leslie Mann), his 13-year-old brother David (Evan Assante), and mom’s gruff new husband, Greg (Brad Garrett) — and has a job selling hot dogs at the mall.

Since David is 13, he’s been invited to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs this summer and fall. Andrew ends up at one, having drinks with college friend Macy (Odeya Rush), when he notices a beautiful woman sitting across the room. This is Domino (Dakota Johnson), who is sitting with her autistic daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who is too nervous to join her classmates on the dance floor.

David urges Andrew to energize the boring bat mitzvah, and he’s got the natural charm and reckless energy to do it. He also manages to convince Lola to dance, which impresses Domino. By the end of the night, the other Jewish mothers are wanting to hire David to be a “party starter,” which becomes a semi-professional gig.

At the next bar mitzvah, Andrew shows his temper — getting in the face of the parents of a kid bullying Lola — and his reliance on vodka to keep himself entertaining. He also shows resourcefulness when he helps Domino with a bathroom emergency. Soon, even though Domino is engaged to a lawyer, Joseph (Raúl Castillo), who’s working on a case in Chicago, a tentative relationship starts to blossom between Andrew and Domino. (Older women are a pattern for Andrew; in a prologue, Raiff shows us a 14-year-old Andrew, played by Javien Mercado, getting his heart broken when he falls for someone in her 20s.)

When not falling for Domino, Andrew is trying to understand his mom’s attraction to the grumpy Greg, and working to impart some romantic wisdom to David, who is building up to a first kiss with his crush, Margaret (Brooklyn Ramirez).

Raiff has a knack for off-kilter dialogue, and for staging intimate conversations between characters where much is both spoken and unspoken. Raiff’s scenes with Johnson crackle with romantic possibilities, and he’s quite charming as babysitter and friend to Lola, whose guileless honesty is a refreshing change in a world where people guardedly hide their feelings. (Burghardt is making her movie debut here, and she’s a tremendous find.)

“Cha Cha Real Smooth” has a few narrative bumps along the way, but even those come through as earnest efforts to let the characters connect. The movie makes me want to look up “Shithouse,” and look forward to what Raiff does next. 

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‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 17, in theaters and streaming on Apple TV+. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 109 minutes.

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

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.