Review: 'Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris' is a sweet, light French bonbon, and a showcase for the great Lesley Manville

A working-class Englishwoman has a French adventure in “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a whimsical confection of cross-cultural disagreements that would fly off into a hundred directions if not for the justly acclaimed actor Lesley Manville keeping it all together.

Manville plays Ada Harris, a war widow who cleans other people’s homes in London, circa 1957. One day, she sees something in a wardrobe of one of her clients: A beautiful gown, designed by Christian Dior. The client tells Mrs. Harris the dress cost 500 pounds — and even though it’s a pipe dream for a woman of Mrs. Harris’ social standing, it becomes her dream to go to Paris and buy a dress at the House of Dior.

A few lucky coincidences later, and Mrs. Harris has the money to travel to Paris and buy a Dior dress. She arrives just as Monsieur Dior is about to show his newest line, for the company’s 10th anniversary. The house’s imperious director, Mme. Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), wants to throw Mrs. Harris — but she’s stopped by André Fauvel (Lucas Bravo), the studio’s accountant, who notices Mrs. Harris has something the upper-crust clients almost never have: Wads of cash, a commentary on the super-rich’s ability to get away without paying for things.

A kind nobleman, Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson, from the “Matrix” franchise), escorts Mrs. Harris into the exhibition. There, she becomes enraptured by the dozens of gorgeous gowns Monsieur Dior has designed. She picks her dream dress, then finds out that a snooty rich woman, Mme Avallon (Guilaine Londez), has snapped up exclusive rights to it. Undaunted, Mrs. Harris selects her second favorite — then is surprised to learn she can’t just buy a Dior off the rack, but must stay in Paris a week for fittings.

Extending her visit, Mrs. Harris finds that Paris is for lovers. For starters, that Marquis keeps buying her roses. To distract herself from that, Mrs. Harris works to pair up André with Natasha (Alba Baptista), Dior’s top model and, like Andre, a reader of Jean-Paul Sartre. 

Unlike Sartre, though, there’s nothing in director Anthony Fabian’s frothy confection to be taken too seriously. With three co-writers working with him on the screenplay, adapting Paul Gallico’s novel, Fabian presents a luminous fantasy version of Paris of a certain time, when a woman with enough pluck could cut through the class and national barriers that are keeping her from following her dreams.

The story has all the earmarks of a silly made-for-TV movie — and, in fact, it was that on CBS in 1992, as a vehicle for Angela Lansbury, cashing in her “Murder, She Wrote” chip with the network.

The casting is what puts this movie into more refined territory. Huppert is perfectly imperious as Mme. Colbert, the last bastion of Dior’s tradition of elegance. And Mrs. Harris has a strong supporting section back in London, led by Jason Isaacs as a kind-hearted bookie.

In the end, though, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is a showcase for Manville, who has earned a shot at being a leading lady after years of great supporting performances in Mike Leigh movies, as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread.” Manville radiates all the late-in-life hopes and dreams of this no-nonsense cleaning lady, turning an “invisible” person into someone everyone has to stop to admire.

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‘Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 15, in several theaters. Rated PG for suggestive material, language and smoking. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Thor: Love and Thunder' plays up the comedy of the Norse god — but why can't Marvel's standalone movies stand alone more?

In the fourth movie where the Norse god Thor is the title superhero, “Thor: Love and Thunder,” director Taika Waititi has found the genre most appropriate for our muscular hammer-thrower: A sitcom.

More overtly comical than Chris Hemsworth’s eight past appearances as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this installment lets our thunder god get introspective, considering where he fits in a universe where his father Odin and brother Loki are dead, his Asgard has relocated to Earth and is ruled benevolently by his friend Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), and he’s currently helping out beleaguered planets alongside the Guardians of the Galaxy. (The whole crew — Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, and the voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel — are on hand for brand maintenance more than actual story.)

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), feels the urge to visit New Asgard. The urge is coming from the shattered remnants of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir — which rebuilds itself and imprints on Jane. When Thor returns to New Asgard, which is under attack, he’s surprised to find Jane has taken on the powers of Mjolnir, along with a new working name: Mighty Thor.

Thor doesn’t have much time to take in his ex’s new situation — or learn what the audience knows about a secret Jane is holding — because of what’s attacking New Asgard. That would be a new villain, Gorr the God-Butcher (Christian Bale), who’s on a mission to destroy all gods. Gorr kidnaps the children of New Asgard, and Thor, Jane, Valkyrie and Asgard’s resident rock creature, Korg (voiced by Waititi) go in hot pursuit.

First, though, they head to the planet where all the different gods live, a side trip for comic relief purposes that culminates in an audience with the big kahuna of godhood, Zeus (played by Russell Crowe, who deploys an accent that’s aiming for Greek and lands near Mario and Luigi. 

And therein lies the major problem with this new “Thor” adventure: It doesn’t feel like there are any real stakes — even with the kidnapped children, or major characters facing the prospect of death in different ways. But when you’ve got a director like Waititi, who finds a humorous way to depict Hitler (as he did in “Jojo Rabbit,” for which he won a screenwriting Oscar), why should you expect a serious approach to comic-book godhood?

The movie also shows the pitfalls of relying too much on the MCU canon, or trying to pull more characters from Marvel’s deep comic-book library. There’s enough in the script, by Waititi and Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, to keep us invested in Thor’s post-Thanos spirit journey, his rekindled relationship with Jane, and his recurring dilemma of being his conflicted feelings for Mjolnir and his current axe, Stormbreaker. 

Some have complained about Marvel characters crossing over without purpose before, but “Thor: Love and Thunder” is the most clearcut case of Marvel bloat. If Thor can lose the dad bod he gained in “Avengers: Endgame,” the Marvel franchise can trim down the excess from movie to movie.

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‘Thor: Love and Thunder’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, language, some suggestive material and partial nudity. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Mr. Malcolm's List' puts pretty people into a pleasant trip through an Austen-like comedy of manners

Because Jane Austen only wrote six novels, and somebody has to feed the insatiable appetite of viewers of early 19th-century comedies of manners, we get movies like “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” a trifle of knee britches and empire-waist dresses enlivened by an engaging and ludicrously good-looking cast.

Miss Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton) is lovely, charming, and rather witty — though maybe not as smart as she thinks she is. During conversation, when someone refers to septuagenarians, she replies, “Oh, I despise foreigners.” It’s this deficit in cleverness that prompts Mr. Jeremy Malcolm (Sopé Dìrísù), the independently wealthy and most desired young bachelor in London, to pass her over after accompanying her to the opera. This slight gets noticed by the gossips around the city, and Julia feels her reputation is ruined.

Julia learns from her friend, Lord Cassidy (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), that Malcolm keeps a list of the traits he desires in a prospective wife. Julia then concocts a plot, to get her revenge on Malcolm for rejecting her: Julia will set Malcolm up with the perfect partner, and at the right moment, have her give him a list of her ideal qualities in a mate.

The key to Julia’s plot is to find someone to pretend to fall for Malcolm. Julia has a candidate in Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto), her girlhood boarding school friend, who recently has been orphaned in Kent. Julia invites Selina to stay with her in London, and enlists her in her plot, which Selina does reluctantly and out of loyalty to Julia. The wrinkle comes early, when Selina meets Malcolm before realizing who he is — and, from then on, starts falling for him for real, and he with her.

Julia keeps the pressure on Selina to stick to the plan, but Julia finds herself being distracted by Malcolm’s military friend, Capt. Henry Ossory (Theo James). Julia and the Captain have a bickering banter, the sort that anyone familiar with such period romances — or, for that matter, any romantic movies at all — will recognize as cover for feelings of true love.

Ashton (“Velvet Buzzsaw”) is delightful as the petulant Julia, justifying her actions in a steady stream of banter aimed at Cassidy, Selina and, at times, the audience. Pinto, Dìrísù and James are all lovely — but the scene-stealer is Ashley Park (“Emily in Paris,” “Girls5Eva”) as Selina’s bubble-headed acquaintance, giggling through every socially awkward encounter.

Director Emma Holly Jones deploys the multi-ethnic casting that fans of “Bridgerton” will recognize — though it could be said that Jones did it first, since she also directed the 2019 proof-of-concept short that got this movie greenlit, with Pinto, Dìrísù and Jackson-Cohen in the same roles, and Gemma Chan (“Crazy Rich Asians”) as Julia. 

Suzanne Allain, who wrote the screenplay based on her own novel, isn’t reinventing the Regency-era wheel here. The characters go through their paces — check all the boxes, as it were — and end up by and large where the viewer expects them to land. In this case, it’s the journey that’s important, with the script producing wry laughs and few surprises.

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‘Mr.Malcolm’s List’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some smoking and mild language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Minions: The Rise of Gru' is an empty space where they didn't put in jokes

There are only so many jokes one can wring out of tiny yellow blobs who talk gibberish — and that point was reached well before the new “Minions: The Rise of Gru” was a twinkle in Illumination Entertainment’s greedy little eyes.

As the second movie in which the Minions are in the titular role (not counting the three “Despicable Me” movies), “Minions: The Rise of Gru” is the bridge movie that shows how the little yellow rascals helped the budding supervillain (again voiced by Steve Carell) in his pre-teen days.There’s probably potential for solid laughs from this idea, but the directing team of Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val, and screenwriter Matthew Vogel, can’t find them.

Instead, the movie plops into 1976, and a whole lot of elbow-in-the-ribs references to disco and tacky fashion. It also introduces us to the Vicious 6, a squad of supervillains led by the Pam Grier-like Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson) and aging bad guy Wild Knuckles (voiced by Alan Arkin). The rest of the squad is quickly name-checked, though except for Nun-Chuck (a nun who uses nunchucks, get it?), they’re pretty forgettable. (They’re voiced by a gaggle of action stars — Lucy Lawless, Danny Trejo, Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme — who maybe get a line each, making you wonder why they bothered.)

When the gang tosses Wild Knuckles out of the squad while heisting the rare and mystical Zodiac Stone, Gru joins the line of would-be replacements. Belle Bottom & Co. laugh at the kid Gru, but he’s determined to prove himself — which he does by stealing the just-stolen Zodiac Stone, with help and some hindrance from his Minions. 

Wild chases ensue, but hilarity does not. What the movie serves up are references to things that were funny in past installments, such as Gru’s mom (voiced by Julie Andrews) belittling him, or Dr. Nefario (voiced by Russell Brand) talking about his love of gadgets. These moments do not offer actual jokes, just placeholders and reminders of jokes from earlier movies.

The closest thing “Minions: The Rise of Gru” offers to fresh humor is a bit where three of the Minions (all voiced by Pierre Coffin) meet a retired kung-fu master (voiced by Michelle Yeoh) who is now an acupuncturist — and can manipulate her customer’s muscles just by adjusting her needles. That’s one minute out of 87 where this rehash of a movie served something new.

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‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’

★

Opens Friday, July 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some action/violence and rude humor. Running time: 87 minutes.

Review: 'Official Competition' savagely skewers moviemaking pretensions, with Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas at their unhinged best

Mocking the act of making movies is a universal language, one that Argentine directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat speak hilariously in the made-in-Spain comedy “Official Competition.”

Pharmaceutical tycoon Humberto Suárez (José Luis Gómez) turns 80, and he wonders what his legacy will be other than a pile of money he will have to bequeath to his heirs, sooner rather than later. Maybe he can bankroll a new bridge, he tells his assistant — or, better yet, he’ll bankroll a movie. (Yes, Mr. Burns did this in “The Simpsons” ages ago, but it’s still a funny idea.)

Suárez buys the film rights to an impressive novel — one he hasn’t read — about two brothers: One who drives drunk and causes a crash that kills their parents, the other the cop who arrests him. Suárez then hires the most prestigious director he can find, the experimental filmmaker Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz), who plans to hire the best actors for the job.

Those actors are Ivan Torres (Argentine actor Oscar Martinez), a critically acclaimed thespian, and Hollywood star Felix Romero (played by Hollywood star Antonio Banderas). The two are as different as can be, the controlled stage actor who internalizes his performance vs. the status-obsessed movie star who keeps his acting all at the surface.

In Suárez’s cavernous ultra-modern mansion, Lola runs Ivan and Félix through a series of exercises that are meant to break down their performing styles but have the added effect of stressing the two actors to the breaking point. In one scene, Lola has a crane suspend a five-ton boulder over a bench, which she makes the actors sit on while rehearsing. (The payoff to this scene had me laughing a ridiculously long time.)

Cohn and Duprat, along with co-writer Andrés Duprat (Gastón’s brother), capture the pretentious atmosphere surrounding many artistic endeavors, and the wild storms that develop when titanic egos clash. Banderas is sharp as the shallow lothario, while Martinez matches with a contrasting character, the pretentious theater snob. Cruz is the woman in the middle, and with her eccentric directing and flaming red hair, she neatly skewers the mindset of director-as-god.

“Official Competition” becomes, in its twisty plotting and the three-way dynamic of its stars, a lacerating — yet, oddly, still loving — satire of how movies are made. Still, I’d be curious to see the movie Lola had in her mind’s eye as she made the movie-within-a-movie here.  

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’Official Competition’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 1, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some nudity. Running time: 114 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Princess' is a fun mix of medieval armor and martial arts, with Joey King as a feisty young fighter

The damsel in the tower of “The Princess” isn’t as distressed as is traditionally depicted, but is a feisty and fleet-footed fighter in this intermittently satisfying mix of medieval hierarchy and bloody martial arts.

Joey King plays the title character, who wakes up in a white satin wedding dress, shackles binding her wrists, and locked in the top of a tall tower. She’s also nursing a hangover, from whatever drug the deranged nobleman Julius (Dominic Cooper) forced down her throat when she refused to participate in the wedding her father, the king (Ed Stoppard), arranged so the kingdom would have a male heir.

While the princess is piecing together what happened, she also sees Julius is holding the king, the queen (Alex Reid) and the younger princess, Violet (Katelyn Rose Downey), hostage until the princess agrees to the marriage.

The princess, however, chooses to fight. First she has to get of her handcuffs and kill her guards, in methods that are surprisingly bloody and make clear why this R-rated movie is debuting on Hulu and not Disney+. From there, the princess (we never hear her name spoken) has to get down the many levels of the tower, fighting more guards as she goes — sort of like the Indonesian martial-arts masterpiece “The Raid,” except we’re going down the building, not up.

The fighting sequences aren’t nearly as imaginative as “The Raid,” either. There’s a sameness to the fight scenes, though King (who has graduated from “Ramona & Beezus” to Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth” movies) shows she’s game to learn her fight choreography and wield a medium-weight sword. The movie also has some interesting fight moments from the princess’ longtime friend and trainer, Linh (Veronica Ngo), and Julius’ nasty henchman, the whip-cracking Moira (Olga Kurylenko, from “Black Widow”).

“The Princess” isn’t a great action movie, but it’s sometimes a fun one. Besides, any medieval action movie where the princess is smashing the patriarchy along with guards’ skulls is worth a look.

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‘The Princess’

★★★

Streaming, starting Friday, July 1, on Hulu. Rated R for strong/bloody violence and some language. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: With 'Elvis,' director Baz Luhrmann finds a subject worthy of his rhinestone-studded vision

If ever a biographical movie’s subject matched its director, the life of Elvis Presley — marked with gaudy excess, musical epiphanies and buckets of rhinestones — and the carnival-like filmmaking style of Australian director Baz Luhrmann seem like an inevitable pairing.

Sure enough, the movie “Elvis” — a cradle-to-grave chronicle of the king of rock ’n’ roll’s 42 years on Earth — is much like Luhrmann’s most successful movies, “Moulin Rouge!” and “Romeo + Juliet.” It’s big and bold and brassy. It’s not perfect, and at 2 hours and 39 minutes still doesn’t deliver everything you’d expect in a telling of Elvis’s life story. But it’s always holding your attention.

The narrator of this tale could be considered the villain of the piece: Col. Tom Parker, the sideshow promoter and con man who heard a skinny white kid from Tupelo, Mississippi, and saw the dollar signs. Parker is played by Tom Hanks, who digs deep into the portrayal, with old-age makeup, a distinctive walk, and an accent of unclear origin (though, as the story unfolds, that accent makes sense). Hanks revels in the role, as he gives us a lot to take in — as most everyone and everything else here does in Luhrmann’s detail-heavy dive into Elvis’s eventful life.

Luhrmann starts with a boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay), lured by the blues music of the Tupelo gin joints, and by the gospel music of the revival tent. The movie doesn’t shy from those influences, and how Elvis’s respect for them was more homage than appropriation. In these passages, much credit goes to bluesman Gary Clark Jr. (as Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup) and the singer Yola (as Sister Rosetta Thorpe), bringing this generation’s voices to tackle the classics.

From his teen years to his death in 1977, Elvis is played by Austin Butler, and damn if the man doesn’t capture that compelling mix of small-town innocence and animal ferocity that made Presley a star. In an early scene, when Elvis first takes the stage and his gyrations start making the young women in the audience get hot and bothered, you can feel how Luhrmann has captured that sensual electricity that made him a sensation.

It also got him in trouble, with prudish officials (embodied by the segregationist Sen. James O. Eastland, played by Nicholas Bell) wanting him banned from the airwaves or arrested. Parker, fearful his meal ticket is about to be torn up, convinces Elvis to leave his parents, Gladys (Helen Thomson) and Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), to enlist in the Army. He’s stationed in Germany, where he meets an American girl: Priscilla Beaulieu (played by Olivia DeJonge), who would become his wife. (The movie omits that when they met, she was 14 and he was 24.)

Back in the States, Parker’s influence again held sway, and the “new” Elvis was a performer in a series of bad movies, his face and name emblazoned on all manner of merchandise. (Parker licensed “I Love Elvis” pins, and also licensed “I Hate Elvis” pins — on the theory that somebody would do it, and he might as well make money on it.) As the industry that had moved on to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, Elvis wanted to speak out about civil rights and other issues, particularly after the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. But Parker keeps his eyes on the money, telling Elvis that King’s death “has nothing to do with us.”

In 1968, in what might be the movie’s signature sequence, Elvis recorded his landmark comeback TV special for NBC. (Nice detail: The hallways in the studio are filled with posters from another NBC show, “Star Trek.”) What Luhrmann and his co-screenwriters depict is a secret revolt, by Elvis and TV producers Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery) and Tom Diskin (Leon Ford), against Parker’s plans for a cheesy Christmas special. Once the show became a hit, Parker claimed it was his idea.

The movie’s third act delivers Vegas Elvis, as the star was yoked to a long-term contract to the International Hotel — a deal brokered to pay off Parker’s gambling debts, the movie tells us. The movie gives us glimpses of Elvis’s declining health and his substance abuse, but gives equal attention to his work backstage creating the most entertaining show Las Vegas ever saw.

Luhrmann keeps Elvis’s story moving at a rapid pace, and layers it with a ton of music — both Elvis’s classic songs (performed well by Butler, or deploying the King’s original cuts) and updated remixes that use hip-hop, dance and other genres. The sonic assault serves as a reminder that Elvis formed the baseline for so much of the last 60-plus years of music, without forgetting that Elvis himself built his career on other people’s sounds.

Through all of the flourishes — which Presley, I think, would have appreciated — Luhrmann deftly captures the tension between Elvis and Col. Parker, the artistry that grew out of it, and the price Elvis paid for his fame. “Elvis” does something we haven’t seen since 1977: It makes the King feel alive again.

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‘Elvis’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 159 minutes.

Review: 'The Black Phone' is a lean, muscular and highly efficient horror movie, with strong work by Ethan Hawke and two young performers

A horror-thriller that works with terrifying efficiency, “The Black Phone” is a return to form for director Scott Derrickson, who reunites with two of his key collaborators on his 2012 fright-fest “Sinister”: His writing partner, C. Robert Cargill, and his star, Ethan Hawke.

Derrickson doesn’t show Hawke’s face too much in “The Black Phone,” putting him in a face-hugging mask that looks like a whitewashed version of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Hawke’s character is called The Grabber, a serial kidnapper and killer of boys in a Colorado town in the mid-1970s.

At first, The Grabber appears as a dark figure in the distance, as we meet his next potential victim. That’s Finney (played by Mason Thames), a Little League pitcher who’s small but has a cannon for an arm. He’s often picked on by the bullies in his school, but has a defender in Robin (Miguel Cazarez Mora), who learned his fighting skills from Bruce Lee movies. Finney’s other champion is his little sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose most formidable weapon is her foul mouth.

Finney and Gwen share some secrets at home. For starters, their dad (Jeremy Davies) is an alcoholic and abusive — especially when Gwen shows signs of her gift: Dreaming about things that haven’t happened yet, in chilling detail. That’s why the cops are curious when they hear Gwen talking about The Grabber and mentioning that she’s dreamed about black balloons, a crime-scene detail the police haven’t shared with the public.

It isn’t long, after some of Finney’s friends disappear, that Finney himself is kidnapped by The Grabber. He wakes in a basement room with soundproofed walls, a bare bed on the floor, and an old black telephone on the wall. The phone, Finney discovers, is not connected to an outside line. So it’s unnerving, to both Finney and The Grabber, when the phone rings.

Derrickson (who started this film when he parted with Marvel for “creative differences” on “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”) and Cargill, adapting a Joe Hill short story, devise a script that moves like clockwork. Every detail dropped early in the film is a puzzle piece that comes into play in the third act, placed precisely for maximum impact.

Hawke is frighteningly charismatic as the methodical kidnapper, running through his deadly routine and slightly upset that it’s not going the way it usually does. But the breakout talents of “The Black Phone” are young Thames and McGraw, as the siblings who are bonded by the supernatural forces helping them, in different ways, to survive and solve the mystery.

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‘The Black Phone’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, bloody images, language and some drug use. Running time: 102 minutes.