Review: 'Three Thousand Years of Longing' puts Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in an intriguing but claustrophobic story

Two great actors, a director who never seems to put a foot wrong, and a story brimming with visual possibilities — so why is “Three Thousand Years of Longing” not quite the slam-dunk it should be?

The protagonist here is Alithea Binnie, played by Tilda Swinton. She’s a narratologist, a scholar of storytelling, and it’s safe to say she’s heard them all — which may be why she’s unimpressed with notions of romantic tales. She lives alone, as she tells the audience in the somewhat overdone narration, and she once had a husband. She’s content with her books and her studies, and traveling to conferences to meet academics like herself.

While attending such a conference in Istanbul, she goes shopping in one shop, and encounters an unusual glass bottle — blue and white stripes, and quite beautiful as found objects go. But when she gets to her hotel room and tries to unstick the stopper, something escapes the bottle: A djinn, or a genie, played by Idris Elba.

After sorting out the language barrier — the djinn has been in that bottle for centuries — he offers Alithea what most djinns offer to people who free them from bottles: Three wishes. There are some limits, like not wishing for extra wishes or wishing to be immortal, but otherwise the djinn’s purpose is to give Alithea whatever her heart desires.

Alithea isn’t going for it, though. She has studied all the stories about wishes, and she knows that they always are cautionary tales about wishes that go badly. (Heck, anybody who watches a season of “Fairly OddParents” knows that.) Alithea’s refusal to play along frustrates the djinn, who tries to prove his sincerity and his need to grant wishes by telling stories of his experiences as a wish-granting genie.

It’s in these stories where director George Miller — the man who made the “Mad Max” movies — really shines. After being cooped up in Alithea’s Istanbul hotel room for a fair stretch of the movie, it’s a relief to travel ancient lands with this djinn, who describes falling in love with the Queen of Sheba, trying to help another court’s concubine (Megan Gale), and other instances where his devotion sometimes overrode his good sense.

Miller and co-writer Augusta Gore (adapting a short story by A.S. Byatt) have their biggest problems balancing the claustrophobia of the scenes in Alithea’s hotel and the ornate palaces of the djinn’s stories. Even Swinton’s Alithea seems to buckle from the tight quarters, as she finally reveals a wish that upends the entire movie and guarantees a melancholy ending no matter how things work out.

Watching Swinton and Elba banter for the hour before that radical storytelling shift is worth it, no matter what the movie throws at us after the fact. Their back-and-forth — between the all-powerful begging to be of use and the story expert whose lifetime of contentment leaves little room for life-changing wishes — is delicious, and gives “Three Thousand Years of Longing” the bite it needs.

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‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 26, in various theaters. Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity and brief violence. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'The Invitation' is a horror thriller with some clever twists, as Nathalie Emmanuel shows she's not just a 'final girl.'

A haunted house horror-thriller takes an odd turn or two in “The Invitation,” a movie that’s often clever but sometimes too clever for its own good.

The main figure here is Evie Jackson, a New York-based ceramic artist who makes ends meet by working as a cater waiter. She’s played by the talented and insanely beautiful Nathalie Emmanuel, known for playing the translator Missandei on “Game of Thrones” and the ace computer hacker in the “Fast & Furious” series.

After working one corporate event for a genealogy company, Evie gets one of their DNA testing kits and takes it. When the results come back, Evie — who is a single child whose parents are dead — learns that she has a distant cousin in the U.K., Oliver Alexander (Hugh Skinner). Oliver is thrilled to find a new relative, and offers to pay to bring Evie to England for a family wedding, so she can meet the rest of the family. Impulsively, and because there’s no movie if she doesn’t, Evie agrees.

Evie enjoyed the taste of the super-rich life at the Yorkshire mansion where the wedding is to take place, and she’s intrigued when the two maids of honor — Victoria (Stephanie Corneliussen) and Lucy (Alana Boden) — befriend her. But she’s really taken by the lord of the manor, Walter DeVille (Thomas Doherty), who’s dreamy and charming.

Still, there’s something off about the place. It could be the arrogance of the manor’s butler, Mr. Fields (Sean Pertwee). Or it’s the line of newly hired maids wearing numbers on their aprons and collars. Or it’s the fact that she’s there for a couple days and doesn’t know who’s getting married at this family wedding.

If Evie had read a certain work of 19th century literature, she would have taken a hint from the name of Walter’s estate — and understood exactly what kind of horror movie she was in.

Director Jessica M. Thompson (whose debut “The Light of the Moon” won at SXSW) and screenwriter Blair Butler (whose first movie, “Polaroid,” got buried by the Harvey Weinstein scandal) create some strong atmospherics in the creepy old castle. They also play some intriguing games with the uneven gender dynamics — for most of the film, the only women present are Evie, her new friends Victoria and Lucy, her stern maid Mrs. Swift (Carol Ann Crawford) and a rapidly depleted line of short-term maids.

What makes “The Invitation” watchable is Emmanuel, in what’s essentially her first leading role in a movie. Emmanuel shows charm and romance-movie chops in the early scenes with Doherty, and gets righteously nasty when she learns what’s really going on with this wedding. If there is a sequel to “The Invitation,” and an epilogue scene sets up that possibility, let Emmanuel have anything she wants to make it.

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‘The Invitation’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violent content, some strong language, sexual content and partial nudity. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Samaritan,' starring Sylvester Stallone as a superhero in decline, is an idiotic mess of an action movie

The idiotic action movie “Samaritan” is proof that “straight to streaming” is this generation’s “direct to DVD” — an indicator that a famous face on the box art isn’t enough to guarantee anything interesting within.

The famous face here is Sylvester Stallone, who plays Joe Smith, a garbageman who tries to keep to himself in his neighborhood on the seedier side of the fictional Granite City. One person who does notice Joe is Sam Cleary (Javon “Wanna” Walton), a 13-year-old kid who spends his days trying to dodge a gang-banging weasel, Reza (Moises Arias) and his cohorts — who all work for the area crime boss, Cyrus (Pilou Asbaek, formerly of “Game of Thrones”).

When Joe finds Sam getting beaten up, and tosses Reza and his pals to the farthest walls of the alley, Sam has an epiphany: That Joe must be Samaritan, the Granite City superhero who disappeared from the scene 20 years earlier, after reportedly killing his brother and main nemesis, called Nemesis, to prevent an evil plan being launched on the city. Joe denies that he’s Samaritan, but the feats of strength and tolerance for pain are telling a different story.

Meanwhile, Cyrus is amassing big weaponry for an evil plan of his own. A key to that plan is stealing Nemesis’ old mask and his weapon, a sledgehammer that is supposed to be the only thing that can kill Samaritan.

The script, by Bragi F. Schut (who co-wrote “Escape Room”), is loaded with placeholder characters — people with a handful of traits in search of a well-rounded personality. The prime example is Sam’s mom (Dascha Polanco), who we know only as an emergency-room nurse who’s always pulling a double shift. That’s about all the script gives Polanco, or us, to work with, and it’s a credit to Polanco that she can keep from laughing at the string of cliches she’s supposed to project.

Director Julius Avery (“Overlord”) manages to string together a few solid action sequences, which is no small feat when your star is 76 years old and not moving like he did in his Rocky Balboa days. 

But any sophistication in the production side is undercut by sketchy plot mechanics and some astoundingly bad performances — namely from Asbaek, but also Arias and Martin Starr as a bookstore owner with his own red-stringed wall of Samaritan sightings. One wonders what it might have taken to bring the material up to snuff, but the answer is the difference between a streaming service and a real movie studio.

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‘Samaritan’

★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, August 26, on Prime. Rated PG-13 for strong violence and strong language. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Breaking' gives John Boyega a meaty character in a veteran at his low point, but there's too much going on around him

A strong ensemble cast — led by John Boyega, Nicole Beharie and the late Michael K. Williams — can’t quite overcome the narrative confusion of director Abi Damaris Corbin’s “Breaking,” which tries to examine a real-life hostage incident from a few too many angles.

Bodega plays Brian Brown-Easley, who walks into a Wells Fargo branch in Marietta, Ga., one summer morning in 2017 to withdraw some cash. He banters, charmingly and politely, with a teller, Rosa Diaz (Selenis Leyva) — but the banter stops when Brian hands Rosa a note with four words on it: “I have a bomb.”

Across the bank floor, manager Estel Valerie (Beharie) sees something is brewing, and starts quietly telling customers and coworkers to get out of the building. By the time Brian gets loud with his demands, only Estel and Rosa are left in the bank, and the police are on their way.

Outside the bank, the predictable scene unfolds. Squad cars, followed by SWAT teams, the police chief (Robb Derringer) talking to reporters, helicopters flying overhead, and a sniper looking for a clear shot. The officer leading the response, Maj. Riddick (Jeffrey Donovan), argues with the lead negotiator, Sgt. Eli Bernard — played by Williams in one of his last movie roles; he died in September 2021 — who eventually talks to Brian and learns they have something in common: They both served as Marines.

Brian explains to Estel and Rosa, and to anyone who will listen, that he doesn’t want the bank’s money. Rather, he wants the monthly disability check he gets from the Veterans Administration, which was unfairly diverted to pay down a debt he said he had already paid.

Through the ordeal, the phone is a lifeline for Brian. He tries to reach his ex, Cassandra (Olivia Washington), and their daughter, Kiah (London Covington). And he gets in touch with a local TV producer (played by Connie Britton), who sympathetically tries to interview Brian and hook up to Eli and the police.

Boyega gives a dynamic performance as the ex-Marine at the end of his rope, and he’s best matched with Beharie as the bank manager trying to keep her fear in check, and Williams as the negotiator trying to make sure everyone gets out alive — no sure thing when most of the people outside the bank are cops with guns.

The problem with “Breaking” is that Corbin and her co-screenwriter, playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, try to cram all those side stories into the film, and only a few of them rise above the cacophony. In the process, the movie’s message — something about how systems can crush people’s spirits, particularly when those people are of color — gets lost in the noise.

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‘Breaking’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 26, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violent content, and strong language. Running time: 102 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 23, 2022, when the movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival (under the title “892”).

Review: 'Beast' is a bloody survival tale of humans vs. a lion, where the action comes from the characters' bad decisions.

The survival drama “Beast” is, like its title creature, lean and fast and brutal — an action thriller where people tend to act because it’s the dramatically interesting thing to do, if not always the smartest.

Idris Elba stars as Dr. Nate Samuels, an American doctor who’s on vacation with his teen daughters, Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), on safari in South Africa. They’re going to a remote area, at the village where Nate’s wife was born. She and Nate divorced, and she died of cancer before a hoped-for reconciliation — a bone of contention with the daughters, particularly Meredith, who has taken up her mother’s interest in photography.

Greeted by Nate’s old friend, Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley), the Samuels family gets the VIP tour of the savanna, even encountering a pride of lions. Martin is friendly with the two male lions in the pride, and advises Meredith and Norah that in the pride, the women hunt while the men protect the pride. Martin also informs the family of another threat in the area: Poachers who have made an industry of killing lions for their teeth, claws and bones.

At a nearby village, they make a gruesome discovery: Many dead bodies, apparently killed by a large male lion. That lion — his pride having been killed by poachers — seems to seek revenge on humans, and attacks the SUV with the Samuels family inside it.

If this scenario feels like a Liam Neeson movie, know that screenwriter Ryan Engle also wrote two Neeson action vehicles, “Non-Stop” and “The Commuter.” The plot contours, particularly the climactic man-vs.-animal battle, also feel taken from “The Grey,” in which Neeson famously punched a wolf.

Director Baltasar Kormákur (“Everest,” “2 Guns”) has a knack for making action sequences that move with dynamic energy, even if they’re predicated on bad decisions. (This movie sets some kind of record for people running away from the car after being told “stay in the car.”) The movie is exciting in the moment, even if it doesn’t hold up to rational scrutiny.

The far-fetched nature of the story is worth sitting through if it means watching Elba to kick butt while showing his sensitive side as a trying-to-be-engaged divorced dad. Elba brings a needed weight to a movie that could, if left unchecked, veer into ridiculousness as the computer-animated lions attack.

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‘Beast’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 19, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for violent content, bloody images and some language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'My Old School' is a documentary that tells an odd yarn, cleverly using animation and re-enactment.

A peculiar story is told in a peculiar way in “My Old School,” a documentary in which the alumni of a Glasgow high school recall an unusual classmate.

Brandon Lee wasn’t like most of the students at Bearsden Academy when he enrolled in 1993. He seemed more mature than the others, more confident, and also a good deal smarter. He fit in well, was admired by the teachers, and wowed the class by auditioning for one of the lead roles in the school’s musical, “South Pacific.”

It took two years to reveal what was off about Brandon Lee — besides him having the same name as an  actor who had died on the set of “The Crow” earlier that year. The truth was that Brandon Lee was actually named Brian McKinnon, he was 32, and he had been a student at Bearsden Academy in the mid-‘70s, though many of the teachers who were still around 20 years later didn’t recognize him.

Director Jono McLeod interviews a fair number of Bearsden alumni, who recount their impressions of this odd but personable classmate. McLeod also interviews Lee/McKinnon, but the one-time hoaxer allowed only his voice to be recorded, not his face.

How McLeod gets around that limitation is somewhat inspired. He hired an actor to lip-sync the audio of the interview. But not just any actor — the part is performed by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming (“Cabaret,” “The Good Wife”), who in the ‘90s had been cast to play McKinnon in a movie about the incident, a movie that was never made because the subject backed out.

Two more layers of artifice McLeod adds to the mix: He interviews all the Bearsden alums on a set that resembles a school classroom (the original school was torn down in 2010), and he uses animation to re-enact scenes described by the interview subjects. (Fans of the MTV show “Daria” may find the thickly lined look of the animated characters a bit familiar.)

McLeod lets the story roll out naturally, the way it did for the other Bearsden students, letting the revelations unfold naturally. By the end of “My Old School,” all the questions a viewer might want to ask have been answered — as well as a few the viewer probably didn’t consider.

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‘My Old School’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Bodies Bodies Bodies' is a sly satire of millennials, cloaked as a tense horror thriller

Equally nasty and funny, the horror-thriller “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is the sort of smart, snarky whodunnit that works because nearly every character is so unlikeable that audiences will be satisfied no matter who the killer is, or who gets killed.

A bunch of rich 20-somethings are planning to ride out a hurricane warning by partying in a mansion. The home is owned by the parents of the perpetually sarcastic Dave (Pete Davidson), who’s accompanied by his actress girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders). Alice (Rachel Sennott), who recently started her own podcast, has brought her new boyfriend, the mellow and much older Greg (Lee Pace). Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) is flying solo for this party, without her boyfriend Max (Conner O’Malley).

A late arrival, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), Dave’s best friend since childhood, comes in with her girlfriend of six weeks, Bee (Maria Bakalova). Dave and Alice are more enthused about Sophie’s presence than Jordan and Emma, for reasons that become clearer as the night goes on.

Amid the party games, it’s Sophie who suggests they play Bodies Bodies Bodies, and — over the objections of Emma, who notes that the game always ends with people getting mad or crying — they proceed. The game goes like this: The guests draw lots, with one randomly assigned as the killer, who must “kill” another player in the dark, and then the lights come up and the players must vote on who the killer is. They play a round, and as predicted, the session ends with hurt feelings and arguments.

Not too long after that, one of the partygoers ends up dead for real, and everyone else is left trying to figure out who did it. Recriminations, accusations and suspicions start to pile up — as do the bodies, as the death count goes up and the number of suspects goes down.

Dutch director Halina Reijn, making her English-language debut, works with ruthless efficiency, using the cramped geography of the mansion to ratchet up the tension. Rookie screenwriter Sarah DeLappe’s script, adapted from a Kristen Roupenian story, plays on the modern obsession with sensitivity in language — with mentions of gaslighting, enabling and other buzzwords — to create scathing comedy and murderous tension.

The ensemble cast makes it work, playing against each other to heighten the suspense and make the jokes sting. Davidson, recently off his “Saturday Night Live” stint, and Pace engage in a sly game of toxic masculine jealousy, the real fun comes from the women — particularly Stenberg (“The Hate U Give”), Bakalova (from “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) and particularly Sennott (“Shiva Baby”), who’s the stealth comedy MVP as the friend desperate to prove she’s not a frivolous member of the group.

“Bodies Bodies Bodies” isn’t perfect; for one thing, the clockworks mechanics of the plot don’t always land right, particularly in the final reel. But as a biting satire of millennial interpersonal strife, it strikes a distinctive chord.  

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‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’

★★★

Opening Friday, August 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence, bloody images, drug use, sexual references and pervasive language. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Secret Headquarters' is a bland attempt at making a kid-friendly spy action movie

The kid-targeted action movie “Secret Headquarters” is a bland and uninteresting attempt to meld two oddball ideas — “Spy Kids” and “The Greatest American Hero” — and missing the boat entirely.

The prologue shows a typical family — Jack (Owen Wilson) and Lily (Jessie Mueller) and their 4-year-old son, Charlie (Louie Chaplin Moss) — on a camping trip. Then they witness a military plane collide with a UAP, an “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or a UFO. Jack drives the family’s VW microbus to the crash site, where he meets the downed pilot, Capt. Sean Irons (Jesse Williams). They then encounter an alien probe, which scans both men, and chooses Jack as “Guardian.”

Flash-forward 10 years. Jack and Lily have divorced, and Charlie, now 14 (and played by Walker Scobell) feels like a neglected son because of all of his dad’s emergency business trips. Charlie instead obsesses over a shadowy superhero known as The Guard, who’s constantly rescuing people and averting crisis situations around the globe. The Guard’s identity is a mystery, one that Ansel Argon (Michael Peña), a billionaire defense contractor, wants desperately to find — having hired Irons to lead the global search for The Guard’s power source.

Charlie visits Jack for his birthday, and is unsurprised when his dad has to leave at the last minute. Charlie takes advantage of the situation, and invites his buddy Berger (Kevin L. Williams) over to play video games, and Berger brings over two girls from their middle-school class: Social-media obsessive Lizzie (Abby James Witherspoon), and recent transfer student Maya (Momona Tamada), on whom Charlie had a crush when they were in fifth grade.

The kids soon discover that Jack’s house has some extra features — namely an elevator that goes to a massive underground lair loaded with tons of alien technology. The other kids figure out what Charlie can’t bring himself to believe: That this is the headquarters of The Guard, and that Jack is The Guard.

The kids start playing with The Guard’s gadgets, which Irons and his team detect. Soon, Irons and Argon’s team of mercenaries are infiltrating the headquarters, and it’s up to the kids to defend The Guard’s secrets.

The directing team of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman — who made “Catfish,” “Nerve” and “Project Power” — rewrote a much-handled script, and it’s hard to see if they improved on it. What’s on the screen are by-the-numbers fight scenes, a few lame jokes, and predictable heart-to-heart conversations between father and son. Any fan watching this on Paramount+ could, with a few days’ work, write a script of equal quality.

Viewers might recognize Scobell for a similar role — a pre-teen scarred by an absentee dad — in the time-travel Netflix action movie “The Adam Project.” (He was the young version of Ryan Reynolds character.) His chemistry here with Wilson is slightly better than what he had opposite Mark Ruffalo in that movie, but that’s probably attributable to Wilson’s laid-back charms.

The annoying part of “Secret Headquarters” is how Paramount saw it coming. The studio originally set this movie up for a theatrical run, and only in June announced it would debut on its streaming service. Consider it a blessing, that we can ignore “Secret Headquarters” in the privacy of our own homes, rather than blowing money on movie tickets for it.

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‘Secret Headquarters’

★★

Starts streaming Friday, August 12, on Paramount+. Rated PG for violence, action, language and some rude humor. Running time: 104 minutes.