Review: 'Pearl' has its moments of gore, but it's more about the drama that sets up the exploitation of 'X'

Calling director Ti West’s “Pearl” a horror movie is a bit of a misnomer, because though it may have ample bloodshed and gore, they are secondary factors in this prequel to West’s “X.”

If you remember “X” (it was released only six months ago), it depicted a group of young people in 1979, renting space on a remote farm to make a porno film — and, after an hour of set-up, getting killed one by one for running afoul of the old couple who lived on the farm, Howard and Pearl. In “Pearl,” which was shot in secret during the filming of “X,” we get her origin story.

It’s 1918, and teen-age Pearl — played by Mia Goth, who played the wannabe porn star Maxine in “X,” and co-wrote this script with West — dreams of a better life than feeding the farm animals, cleaning up her immobile father (Matthew Sunderland), and enduring the harsh criticisms of her German-speaking mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright). She hasn’t heard from Howard, her husband, who’s away in Europe, fighting in the Great War, but sometimes gets visits from Howard’s perky sister, Misty (Emma Jenkins-Purro). 

Pearl’s dream, paralleling Maxine’s in “X,” is to be a famous star of the screen. When she can slip away from her mother’s gaze, she likes to go into town and watch the pictures and imagine herself as one of the dancing girls. She makes time with the handsome projectionist (David Corenswet), who shows her something they don’t usually play in the theaters: Stag films, where young men and women get naked and have sex with each other.

In the opening of the movie, West shows Pearl being kind to the farm animals — until a goose wanders into the barn, which she skewers with a pitchfork and then feeds to the alligator in the nearby pond. (She later finds alligator eggs, which likely explains why there’s still a hungry alligator in the same pond in “X,” 61 years later.) The goose’s demise hints at Pearl’s dark side, and the gore that West takes his sweet time delivering.

In contrast to “X,” which leaned hard into its exploitation roots, “Pearl” is more about the drama. What is most memorable when it’s all over is Goth’s gonzo yet earnest performance, throwing herself into the role whether Pearl is dry-humping a scarecrow or confessing her wicked ways to a horrified Misty.

Goth isn’t done with this franchise — a teaser after the end credits promises “MaXXXine,” set in Los Angeles in 1985. After giving it her all in “Pearl,” one can only imagine where Goth and West will take the story next, though one presumes it will be bloody.

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‘Pearl’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some strong violence, gore, strong sexual content and graphic nudity. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'See How They Run' is a mystery farce where only Saoirse Ronan is running at the right speed

On paper, the murder-mystery comedy “See How They Run” should work: Clever premise, strong cast, and the juicy target of the grande dame of mysteries, Agatha Christie.

In execution, though, director Tom George — helming his first feature — never sets the proper rhythm for what should be a fast and funny send-up of the mystery genre and Christie’s seemingly indestructible play, “The Mousetrap.”

It’s 1953, and the cast of “The Mousetrap” — led by a young Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson) as Christie’s detective, Sgt. Trotter — is celebrating its 100th performance on London’s West End. But not everyone is celebrating. The movie producer, John Woolf (Reece Shearsmith), would rather see the show’s run end soon, so he can start making the movie, directed by a boorish American filmmaker, Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody).

It’s Kopernick’s voice we hear in the opening narration, as he ticks off everything he hates about mystery stories — from the predictable patter to the fact that the least likable character is the one who gets offed. Sure enough, at the cast party, Leo is particularly obnoxious, and pretty soon he’s found dead on the stage.

Enter Scotland Yard, in the form of the lazy and semi-alcoholic Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his overly excitable young constable, Officer Stalker (Saoirse Ronan). Stoppard has to temper Stalker’s impulsive desire to declare the last person they’ve interviewed to be the murderer. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” Stoppard tells Stalker, who dutifully writes that — along with everything else — in her notebook.

Soon Stoppard and Stalker are confronted with an array of suspects: Woolf, for one, as well as the theater’s profit-minded producer, Petula Spencer (Ruth Wilson); Melvyn Cocker-Norris (David Oyelowo), a prim playwright who’s been hired to write the screenplay for “The Mousetrap” and was arguing with Leo about how to do it; or maybe Mervyn’s hot-tempered Italian “roommate,” Rio (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). 

Throw in Woolf’s jittery wife, Edana (Sian Clifford), and Woolf’s assistant — and hidden lover — Ann Seville (Pippa Bennett-Warner), and you should have the makings of a strong whodunnit.

Screenwriter Mark Chappell, a British TV writer also on his first feature, injects some wry commentary about the mystery genre — and how formulaic Christie’s work sometimes was — in with the densely plotted story.  There’s also a jab at violent and dumbed-down American filmmaking, one that pays off well in the final reel.

The problem is that George’s pacing pokes along when it should gallop. Farces like this need to speed past, so we don’t have time to examine the flaws.

The one performer who understood the assignment is Ronan. Her take on Constable Stalker, as a tightly wound and eager-to-please junior officer who understands the law and can break out a dead-solid Katharine Hepburn impersonation, delivers the screwball energy “See How They Run” could use a lot more of.

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‘See How They Run’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some violence/bloody images and a sexual reference. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Barbarian' is an effectively creepy and terrifying addition to the horror canon

With horror movies, we don’t always need genius-level disturbances to our psyche, like in a Jordan Peele movie. Sometimes, a good old-fashioned story that creeps you out and jumps out from behind a bush and yells “boo!” Is enough — and, by that measure, writer-director Zach Cregger’s debut “Barbarian” more than fills the bill.

It all starts on a rainy night in a sketchy neighborhood in Detroit, where a woman, Tess (Georgina Campbell), can’t get into her housing rental for the night. Turns out someone is already there: Keith (Bill Skarsgård) — and after a few minutes of confusion and suspicion (would you want to be alone with the guy who played Pennywise in the “It” movies?), Tess and Keith figure out they’ve been double-booked, and agree to share the house for the night.

Then Tess hears some noises, and … nope, not going to give away anything more.

After a few more reveals, the movie abruptly cuts to the California coast, where self-absorbed actor A.J. (Justin Long) learns in a phone call that his life is about to implode. And just as you’re wondering why we’ve taken this side trip, we soon get our answer: To raise some quick cash, he has to liquidate some  unused assets — including a house in Detroit. After following that thread for a while longer, Cregger diverts us again, to fill in some more pieces of the puzzle.

Cregger, like Jordan Peele, got his start in comedy. He co-directed, co-wrote and co-starred in the 2009 sex comedy “Miss March,” and he’s one of the co-creators of the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U Know. And many of the same rhythms of set-up and pay-off used in comedy also work well in horror.

“Barbarian” delivers some first-rate shocks, and enough bat-crap craziness — mostly delivered by a character played by Matthew Patrick Davis — to keep audiences guessing, cringing and screaming. If you’re looking for an effectively chilling horror movie, you don’t need much more.

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‘Barbarian’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some strong violence and gore, disturbing material, language throughout and nudity. Running time: 102 minutes

Review: Disney's live-action 'Pinocchio' gets tied down by corporate and technological limitations

The wooden almost-boy Pinocchio sings “I got no strings to hold me down” in the 1940 Disney animated classic movie “Pinocchio” — and here, too, in a live-action/computer-animated hybrid that’s tied down, unfortunately, by Disney’s vault-raiding corporate strategy and director Robert Zemeckis’ addiction to technological whiz-bang spectacle over everything else.

The story, based on Carlo Collodi’s classic novel, is familiar to everyone by now, particularly the Disney variation. The kindly woodcarver Geppetto, lonely for companionship, carves a wooden boy that he names Pinocchio. The Blue Fairy hears the wish of Geppetto’s lonely heart, and brings Pinocchio to life — with the advice that if he’s brave, honest and unselfish, he will turn from wood into a real boy. Since Pinocchio doesn’t have a conscience to tell him right from wrong, the fairy assigns him one: Jiminy Cricket, a vagabond insect who becomes Pinocchio’s traveling companion and voice of wisdom.

What do Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Chris Weitz (“About a Boy”) add to this mix? A lot of surface details, and some familiar casting. Tom Hanks — Zemeckis’ stalwart collaborator in “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away” and “The Polar Express” — is cast at Geppetto, apparently continuing the weird-accent run he started in  “Elvis.” Jiminy Cricket is voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who starred in Zemeckis’ “The Walk.” The Blue Fairy is portrayed by Cynthia Erivo, who brings some elegance and hits the high notes on “When You Wish Upon a Star.”

Other than that, the only new wrinkle so far is the winking references to the Disney catalog in Geppetto’s collection of cuckoo clocks — which re-enact such classics as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and Zemeckis’ own “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” among others.

The story continues down the familiar path, as Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) enters the big world and discovers its dangers. On his way to school, Pinocchio is distracted by Honest John, a fox (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key), and his silent cat companion, Gideon, with promises of fame and fortune — if Pinocchio joins the traveling puppet show put on by the nasty promoter Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston). Pinocchio becomes star of Stromboli’s show, but also Stromboli’s prisoner. From that mess, Pinocchio lands in another, thanks to the Coachman (Luke Evans), on his way to Pleasure Island with a new caravan of wayward boys and girls (yup, Pleasure Island is now an equal-opportunity trap). 

The computer animation that Zemeckis loves to play with (see “The Polar Express,” “Welcome to Marwen” and other motion-capture monstrosities on his filmography) becomes a trap in itself. It produces lifelike visuals that approximate the animated wonders we remember from the 1940 version. But relying on them denies the audience the experience of seeing the happy ending we wait for, to see Pinocchio finally become a real boy — because it’s impossible to hire a young actor who’s going to look enough like the Disney-copyrighted puppet we’ve been watching for the previous 90-plus minutes. 

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‘Pinocchio’

★1/2

Starts streaming Thursday, September 8, on Disney+. Rated PG for peril/scary moments, rude material and some language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.' takes on evangelical hypocrisy, with strong performances by Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown

The mock-documentary satire “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” — a punctuation-heavy title — takes some hard swings at hypocrisy and selfishness in a Southern Baptist megachurch, and get in a few good licks thanks to their talented stars, Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown.

Brown and Hall portray Lee-Curtis Childs and his wife, Trinitie, the pastor and “first lady” of a prominent Baptist church in a Georgia city. A documentary crew has been hired to chronicle the preparations for the church’s reopening on Easter Sunday, to return to Lee-Curtis’ suave, charismatic sermons extolling the virtues of following Jesus and warning against temptation — mostly against the “sin,” in Lee-Curtis’ view, of homosexuality.

Lee-Curtis and Trinitie don’t want to discuss with the documentarian about the circumstances that prompted their church to close and their flock to abandon them for other preachers, notably the up-and-coming Shakura and Keon Sumpter (played by Nicole Beharie and the one-named actor Conphidance). But a few clues emerge, slowly at first, that Lee-Curtis was involved in a sex scandal involving young men.

As the opening approaches, both pastor and first lady start to unravel, shifting from passive-aggressive — like when Trinitie re-baptizes Lee-Curtis in the church’s baptismal pool and holds him under a few seconds longer than necessary — into just plain aggressive. The documentarian’s camera (as well as some moments that seem like a documentary crew wouldn’t have been privy to) show how Lee-Childs is out to prove all the doubters wrong, while Trinitie is determined to regain the status that her husband’s misbehavior has cost her.

Writer-director Adamma Ebo (her sister, Adenne, is first among the many producers) captures the telling details of the megachurch life — all the conspicuous spending justified in the name of shipping souls to Jesus, the thinly veiled contempt for other pastors, and the quietly accepted misogyny and hypocrisy that undergirds it all. The observations generate laughs, though with a sting to them that occasionally feels a little too much like shooting fish in a barrel.

The actors playing the not-so-holy Childses make the movie work. Brown’s slick portrayal captures the confidence, bordering on arrogance, that Lee-Curtis can reclaim his spot in the pulpit without ever truly facing up to his sins. And Hall goes even further, showing the lengths to which Trinitie will go — the indignities she will endure — for a chance to get back on top. It’s Brown’s and Hall’s perfectly paired instincts to find the humor and heart in this absurd situation that gives “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” Its power.

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‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 2, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'The Good Boss' is a dark comedy with a bite, and a showpiece for Javier Bardem's acting skills

Is it possible that Javier Bardem — like his talented wife, Penelope Cruz — does his best work in their native language? That’s one takeaway from the dark comedy “The Good Boss,” in which Bardem plays a CEO slowly unraveling.

Bardem plays Blanco, the CEO of Blanco Scales, and running a well-oiled factory that produces equipment to weigh and balance anything from people to cattle. Blanco tells his employees they’re all his family, and that the loyalty and camaraderie of his employees is one reason the company is a finalist for a major award. But with the inspection committee coming to visit the factory in the next few days, problems emerge to tarnish Blanca’s sterling reputation.

There’s José (Óscar de la Fuente), an accountant recently fired by the company, who sets up a one-man protest outside the front gate. There’s Miralles (Manolo Soto), the factory’s floor manager, whose marriage is falling apart — because his wife, Aurora (Mara Guil), is sleeping with the company’s head of logistics, Khaled (Tarik Rmili). And there’s a new intern, Liliana (Almudena Amor), whose beauty becomes a distraction for Blanco.

Blanco is the sort of boss who thinks he can solve any problem. When one of his machinists, Fortuna (Celso Bugalio), comes to him because his son, Salva (Martin Páez), gets arrested, Blanco arranges to have the lad work for Blanca’s wife, Adela (Sonia Almarcha), in her dress shop. But as the awards committee’s visit looms nearer, Blanco gets the hard lesson that he can’t fix everything.

Writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa — who worked with Bardem previously on the unemployment drama “Mondays in the Sun” and the Pablo Escobar biopic “Loving Pablo” — builds up the tension, and the wry humor, gradually, which just heightens the discomfort at Blanca’s expense. 

The key to that tension is Bardem’s slow-burn of a performance. His Blanco starts off as avuncular and easygoing, but when the going gets tough, his teeth ultimately come out. It’s a strong, nuanced performance, and gives “The Good Boss” its ferocity.

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‘The Good Boss’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for strong sexuality, some violence and language. Running time: 116 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Breathless' is back, a fascinating landmark of the French New Wave that feels as fresh as ever

How can a movie be more than 60 years old and look so fresh, cool and timely? See "Breathless," Jean-Luc Godard's landmark 1960 debut now refreshed in a new print, and you'll be asking the same thing.

"Breathless" -- along with François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and Alain Resnais' "Hiroshima Mon Amour" -- heralded the start of the French New Wave, which shook up stodgy European filmmaking (and later the U.S. movie world) with bold visuals, taboo-shattering subject matter and rule-breaking camera movement and editing.

Godard centers "Breathless" (the French title, "Á bout de souffle," means literally "at breath's end") around Michel Poiccard (played by the hunky Jean-Paul Belmondo), a none-too-bright petty criminal who's obsessed with Humphrey Bogart and other American gangster icons. He graduates to the top of the most-wanted list when he steals a car in Marseilles and kills a motorcycle cop.

Michel drives to Paris with two goals: Retrieve money owed him by a gangster, and hook up again with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American journalism student he romanced a few weeks earlier in Nice. He finds her in the street as she's selling newspapers and tries to persuade her to run away with him to Italy — not knowing that he's on the run from the law.

In "Breathless," Godard revealed the obsession with Hollywood iconography — the cigarette dangling from Bogie's lips, the fast cars and cool guns — that fueled the French New Wave. In transferring those icons, Godard made some of his own, from Belmondo's smoldering stare to the alluring sight of the pixie-haired Seberg in her New York Herald Tribune T-shirt.

And while emulating Hollywood cool, Godard also invented a much-copied form of filmmaking. Relying on hand-held camerawork, shooting guerrilla style on the Paris streets, and moving the action with impatient jump-cuts, Godard rewrote the rules of cinema -- rules that sparked the visions of generations of maverick filmmakers.

Minus the French subtitles and the credits (what little there are, besides the title, a distribution visa number and a dedication to Monogram Pictures), you could thread "Breathless" through a projector during any given day of the Sundance Film Festival and half the audience would think it was the work of some new 20-something filmmaker — rather than a film made by a guy who's now in his 90s. Even now, with its rough-and-tumble feel, "Breathless" can still take your breath away.

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‘Breathless (Á bout de souffle)’

★★★★

Opens Friday, September 2, for a one-week run at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for sensuality, violence and language. Running time: 90 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

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This review originally appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on November 11, 2010, to mark the film’s 50th anniversary.

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.