Review: 'Till' is a vital, tough drama about a brutal lynching and the birth of a civil-rights icon

Director Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till” is, like her 2019 breakout “Clemency,” essential viewing but not pleasant viewing — as it makes us recall one of the most notorious lynchings in American history, and reminds us that the injustice suffered then hasn’t all magically gone away.

The member of the Till family profiled in this drama isn’t, as one might suspect, Emmett Till, the smiling 14-year-old Chicago kid who went to visit his cousins in Mississippi and was beaten and killed because he — allegedly — whistled at a white woman. That teen, played by Jalyn Hall, is depicted as a gregarious, happy kid, who learns, quickly and too late, that Black people in Mississippi have to live a quieter, more subservient life than those up north.

The story being told here — with Chukwu rewriting a first draft by Michael Reilly and Kevin Beauchamp — is centered on Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, played brilliantly by Danielle Deadwyler. Mamie is a single mom, ever since Emmett’s father died while serving in World War II, except for a brief second marriage (barely mentioned here). She works in the secretarial pool of a Chicago company, the only Black woman employed there. Her future third husband, Gene Mobley (Sean Patrick Thomas), is still her boyfriend, and their relationship is conducted under the watchful eye of Mamie’s mother, Alma (Whoopi Goldberg).

Then comes word from Money, Mississippi, that Emmett has been killed. At first, Mamie isn’t given the space to properly grieve, as Emmett’s death is taken up as a rallying cry by the NAACP. In short order, though, Mamie takes charge, telling the NAACP lawyers who are handling the case that she wants to go to Mississippi to see her boy’s body and bring it back to Chicago for a proper funeral.

It’s at this point that Mamie makes a crucial, historic decision: She invites a photographer in to take pictures of Emmett’s beaten, bloated, mangled body. “I want them to see what Mississippi did to my boy,” she declares — and the photos, first in Jet magazine and then disbursed everywhere, become a wake-up call for white America about the horrors of lynching and vigilante action.

The second half of the movie focuses on the trial of the two white men accused of killing Emmett — one of them the husband of the store clerk (Haley Bennett) so offended by Emmett’s behavior. It’s made very clear that justice will not be served in this courtroom, between the racist sheriff and the all-white jury. But Mamie stands her ground, bearing witness to her son’s death and standing as a reminder of his life.

Chukwu also takes us behind the scenes, as Mamie moves from grieving mom to crusading civil-rights speaker, and here’s where the real action happens. She confers with Dr. Howard (Roger Guenveur Smith, who makes a delicious meal out of his one scene), the rich Black benefactor who gives up his house as an NAACP command center. And she has conversations with two young volunteers, Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole) and his wife, Myrlie (Jayme Lawson), who will themselves become activists and targets.

Chukwu’s sensitive direction takes care not to exploit Emmett’s death — the actual beating is in a far-off building, Emmett’s screams muted by distance — but to follow Mamie’s wishes and show the aftermath. Chukwu knows the real emotion in this story is captured by keeping the camera on Deadwyler’s Mamie.

Deadwyler (who played a Black LDS pioneer in the 2018 drama “Jane and Emma”) owns this movie, infusing her portrayal of Mamie with the appropriate amounts of pain, grief and righteous anger — all of them on display in a courtroom scene that will be excerpted on awards shows well into next year.  

Like many movies on horrific subjects, “Till” is not an easy sit — and in another time, it would be the sort of movie people will watch once, then never need to see again, because the story it tells is indelible. Considering how many people would like to pretend what happened to Emmett Till wasn’t important enough to teach in schools, seeing “Till” once may not be enough.

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‘Till’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 28, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing language and racial slurs. Running time: 130 minutes.

Review: 'Decision to Leave' is a delicious mix of romance and film noir, as a detective questions whether a widow is a lover or a killer (or both?)

Somewhere between romantic drama and film noir, director Park Chan-wook’s “Decision to Leave” is its own fascinating beast, melding the dark menace of a murder mystery with the bottled-up passion of a tragic romance.

Jang Hae-joon (played by Park Hae-il) is an inspector in the police department in Busan, Korea, and is quite good at his job, able to cut through any murder investigation in relatively short order. But the case he’s assigned to when the movie begins is a strange one: A healthy 60-year-old man, who likes to rock-climb in time to Mahler’s 5th Symphony (four movements to get to the top, the fifth to stand and gloat), is found dead at the bottom of the rock he was climbing. The signs point to a simple fall, but something to Jang feels a bit off.

Then the detective meets the dead man’s Chinese-born widow, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei), and the nagging little voice in the back of his head is drowned out by the beating of his heart. Park stages some playful scenes in which Hae-joon imagines what it would be like to act on his desires. 

He doesn’t, of course, because he’s too proper a professional, and he’s married to a nuclear engineer in Ipo, though they only see each other on the weekends. Oh, and the other reason Hae-joon is slow to make any moves on Seo-rae, is that he hasn’t eliminated her as a suspect. But, as he tells his headstrong partner, Jeong-ahn (Lee Jung-hyun), “If she’s young, beautiful and foreign, does that make her a murder suspect?”

I’m going to stop with the plot synopsis here, because part of the thrill of “Decision to Leave” is watching how Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung drop the other shoe — a succession of other shoes, really — gracefully, ratcheting up the tension imperceptibly, until the viewer notices their fingernails digging into the armrest.

This should be no surprise for fans of Park’s previous work — his best-known films to American fans are “Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden” and his English-language debut, the Southern Gothic thriller “Stoker.” But that’s the only non-surprise this movie offers, from its intricate plotting to its daring camerawork to the delicious chemistry between the leads.

Park Hae-il (“Memories of Murder,” “The Host”) and Tang Wei (“Lust, Caution”) are quite sexy together, even as they never get naked and seldom kiss. The repressed desires accumulate in “Decision to Leave,{ building on the tension until it’s unbearable, in the best way romantic dramas and crime thrillers can be.

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‘Decision to Leave’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for violence and some sensuality. Running time: 139 minutes; in Korean and Chinese with subtitles.

Review: Clooney and Roberts, as a bickering ex-couple, bring the lightness and humor that "Ticket to Paradise' needs more of

A friend of mine brought up “His Girl Friday” in conversation the other day, and it got me thinking about the lack of charismatic leading actors who would banter the way Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell back in the day.

The only names that came to mind were George Clooney and Julia Roberts, who happen to have a new movie together, the romantic comedy “Ticket to Paradise,” which intermittently gives them a chance to show off their naturally winning chemistry.

Unfortunately, their sparkle is put in the service of a by-the-numbers story. Clooney and Roberts play David and Georgia, a bickering divorced couple reluctantly teaming up to try to dissuade their adult daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), from throwing away her law school plans to marry Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a seaweed farmer she met in Bali just a month earlier.

Director Ol Parker (“Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”), who co-wrote with Daniel Pinsky, bring their feuding characters to Bali, and put them through some idiot moments — like having Georgia steal the young couple’s wedding rings before a pre-wedding ceremony, or setting up both couples in a hard-drinking beer pong game, or an expedition swimming with dolphins that ends ridiculously. 

The script also serves up a couple of offbeat supporting characters, namely Lily’s hard-living pal Wren (Billie Lourd, Dever’s co-star from “Booksmart”) and Georgia’s blandly hunky boyfriend, Paul (Lucas Bravo), an airline pilot who shows up flying their plane to Bali. (The movie was partly filmed in Bali, and the beauty of the place is, as advertised, amazing.)

The script’s deficiencies include setting up Lily as the fun-sucking serious one in the movie, scowling whenever her parents embarrass or disappoint her. That’s an especially dumb error when you consider how much the movie squanders Dever’s abundant comedic gifts (on full display in “Rosaline,” the “Romeo & Juliet”-adjacent comedy now on Hulu).

The reason to watch “Ticket to Paradise” is to watch Roberts and Clooney, old pros and old friends, working with the script — and sometimes against it — to set each other up for some good laughs. The more they’re on the screen, the more fun the rest of us have.

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‘Ticket to Paradise’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and brief suggestive material. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Triangle of Sadness' generates dark humor in a grotesque, and brilliant, takedown of the obscenely wealthy.

A biting take on conspicuous wealth and how little it can buy in a real crisis, “Triangle of Sadness” is a scathing and freakishly intense comedy from Swedish director Ruben Östlund — his second, after the 2017 art-gallery satire “The Square,” to win the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

It begins with a commentary on artiface, as a group of shirtless male models are auditioning for an ad campaign. As they stand in line, a TV presenter (Thobias Thorwid) runs them through their paces, having them smile like they’re in an H&M ad, then frown as if wearing Balenciaga — because the more expensive the label, the more unhappy one should look in it. (Flip through the ads of any fashion mag, and the formula checks out.)

In the audition, we meet Carl (Harris Dickinson), an English model whose girlfriend, Yaya (Charlbi Dean), is a model and Instagram influencer, constantly taking pictures of herself seemingly enjoying the meals she orders — but then, once the photos are taken, not eating them. It’s clear Yaya makes more at modeling than Carl does; that’s the nature of the modeling business, the movie tells us. But the argument over who picks up the check at dinner becomes a bone of contention.

Flash-forward, and Carl and Yaya are enjoying a vacation on a luxury yacht, taking in the sun and the abundant gourmet food — which, again, Yaya poses with but then doesn’t eat. (Dean is quite charming in her breakout role, which is why it’s even more sad to know that she died from an illness in August, at age 32.)

Carl and Yaya got the trip for free, because of Yaya’s Instagram fane. Others on board are there because they can afford it, like Dmitri (Zlatko Buric), a Russian oligarch who sells manure, or Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and Clementine (Amanda Walker), a sweet English couple who made their money in Winston’s business: Making hand grenades.

Things go bad for the guests due to a combination of turbulent seas and botulism, as Östlund, as writer and director, stages a cascade of vomiting that makes the Mr. Creosote sketch from “Monty Python’s Meaning of Life” look like a Disney cartoon. As the bodily fluids go flying, the inebriated captain (Woody Harrelson) engages with Dmitry, reciting quotes from Karl Marx as the Russian delivers pearls of wisdom from Ronald Reagan.

Östlund immerses the audience in the depths of his grotesquely brilliant (or brilliantly grotesque) farce, as we empathize with the people on board the yacht — from the ostentatious rich to the lowly housekeeping staff — despite our better judgment. When things flip in the third act, and a maid, Abigail (Dolly De Leon), discovers she has an edge on the rich folks, Östlund unleashes a few more cynical surprises.

“Triangle of Sadness” doesn’t always take sides here, as Östlund is as critical of the filthy rich as he is of the craven opportunists on the lower decks. But his message still is pointed: Just because we’re in the same boat doesn’t mean we’re all going in the same direction.

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‘Triangle of Sadness’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 21, in theaters. Rated R for for language and some sexual content. Running time: 147 minutes.

Review: 'Descendant' is a tough, emotional documentary about a slave ship's voyage, and the Alabama residents still caught in its wake

It’s not easy to inject nuance into a two-hour documentary, but director Margaret Brown does so carefully and beautifully in “Descendant,” a look at how one crime of the past creates echoes in our present.

The launch point for “Descendant” is the Clotilde, believed to be the last slave ship to deposit kidnapped Africans in the United States. The importing of slaves was abolished in 1808, and the Clotilde legendarily brought 105 souls from Africa (what is now the country of Benin) in 1860 — because, it’s said, of a bet that Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher made that he could violate the law and bring Africans to be sold into slavery. The ship arrived in Mobile, the Africans were taken to land, and Capt. William Foster then burned the ship to hide the evidence.

Brown, a Mobile native herself, traces the efforts, aided by the National Geographic Society, to find the Clotilde. She talks to a diver who tells of having “to listen to the ancestral voices” of those who were carried in those ships. She talks to a folklorist who keeps the tapes of descendants of the Clotilde’s captives, which kept the story alive when many in Mobile wanted to keep it quiet.

Most importantly, Brown airs the voices of the current residents of Africatown, the community near Mobile founded by those descendants. They speak, in interviews and town meetings, of their mixed response to the possible discovery of the Clotilde — which could bring tourism to the town, but also another chance for the white Mobile population to sanitize history all over again.

One of the more stirring parts of “Descendant” are the scenes where Brown asks some of those descendants to read passages from “Barracoon,” the long-lost work by author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. In 1927, Hurston interviewed the last survivor of the Clotilde, Cudjoe Lewis, and wrote his recollections down in his own dialect. The book was finished in 1931, but remained unpublished until 2018 — a sign of how incendiary the history of slavery has been and still is.

Brown addresses the current concerns of Cudjoe’s descendants — including the industrial wasteland that has grown up around Africatown, and how the Meahers (who declined to participate in the film) remains one of Mobile’s leading families. 

That’s a lot to pack into 108 minutes, and Brown does it with precision and empathy. She does it by letting Cudjoe’s kin tell the bulk of the story, letting them reclaim their shared legacy from those who might try to spruce it up and present it without rough edges or uncomfortable truths. “Descendant” becomes, then, not just a vital account of history, but an example of William Faulkner’s maxim that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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Starts streaming Friday, October 21, on Netflix. Rated PG for thematic material, brief language and smoking images. Running time: 108 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 22, 2022, when the film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Black Adam' tries to turn Dwayne Johnson into an anti-hero and jump-start the DC movie franchise — and fails at both

With “Black Adam,” the folks at Warner Bros. (and their subsidiary New Line Cinema) once again try to move the DC cinematic universe forward in one movie where its rival Marvel took a half-dozen features — and they do it by cramming in the action without giving audiences a minute to get to know their new heroes.

The movie starts with some ancient history of a nonexistent place, a Middle Eastern country called Khandaq, and slaves to a evil ruler, King Acton, being forced to mine a fictional super-mineral, eternium, to create a crown of great power. Before King Acton can wield that power, a hero is created by the same ancient wizards who gave Shazam his powers. (Djimon Hounsou reprises his “Shazam!” role in a brief cameo.)

Flash-forward nearly 5,000 years to now, and Khandaq is occupied by a nasty paramilitary force called the Intergang — proof, alongside the Legion of Doom, that DC villain groups don’t even try to hide their intentions. A lot of people are looking for the long-absent crown, including Adrianna (Sarah Shahi), an archaeologist who’s wanted by the Intergang forces. Adrianna gets into the secret cave where the crown is hidden, gets followed by Intergang commandos, and before she’s killed she lets loose the ancient champion called Teth-Adam — played by a scowling Dwayne Johnson.

Johnson, always the confident and smiling hero in his movies, is trying a new screen persona, and it’s a struggle — no matter how many people he drops out of aircraft or sends flying toward the city’s harbor. Even in his wrestling days, Johnson was more comfortable as the good guy than an anti-hero, and that limitation sabotages this movie.

Before we’re given much time to contemplate Teth-Adam’s moral problems, the rest of the superpowered world decides it’s time to step in. Cue Amanda Waller, Viola Davis’s no-nonsense character from the “Suicide Squad” movies, who sends in a team from the Justice Society: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), who has gold wings and super-strength; Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), who can see into the future; Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), who is a genius who can command the wind; and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who can become several stories tall and is the newcomer to the group.

I’m sure all of these heroes have rich, interesting backstories, but the script (credited to three writers) and director Jaume Collet-Serra (who worked with Johnson on “Jungle Cruise”) don’t have time for that. The movie is always rushing off to the next action set piece, without ever spending even a few seconds giving us anything to make us care about who these characters are or why what they’re doing matters.

“Black Adam” feels like nothing so much as the trailers for the episodes of a 12-part Zack Snyder-produced miniseries, all smashed together. The result is a two-hour visual bombardment, all movement and not enough emotional involvement.

Fans will ask where “Black Adam” will place within the broader canvas of the DC Extended Universe. The “Shazam” references early on — heck, even the lightning bolt on Johnson’s chest — connect this movie to that hero, and Waller is a direct link to “The Suicide Squad” and a couple degrees removed from the main branch of DC’s characters. I wouldn’t hold my breath for some massive DC ensemble movie, a mega-mashup of all the brand’s big names. Johnson, this movie proves, doesn’t play well with others.

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‘Black Adam’

★★

Opens Friday, October 21, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, intense action and some language. Running time: 124 minutes.

Review: 'Halloween Ends' looks at different levels of evil, before bringing Jamie Lee Curtis and her nemesis together one last time

Once again, a movie in the “Halloween” franchise promises to be the last, the final time that Michael Myers will kill the residents of Haddonfield — and with the sometimes brilliant, sometimes head-scratching “Halloween Ends,” director David Gordon Green seems to mean it.

Myers, the implacable evil killing machine played by James Jude Courtney, lies in wait for much of this movie, hiding out in a sewer culvert, gathering his strength. Instead, much of the movie centers on another character, a young man named Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who seems to have channelled Michael’s evil essence. Or maybe Green is centering on a non-Michael character in his third “Halloween” movie to pay homage to the Michael-free 1982 sequel “Halloween III: Season of the Witch.”

In the prologue, we meet Corey as a 21-year-old college student, asked to babysit a boy on Halloween, 2019, and how the boy’s prank goes horribly awry — making Corey an accidental killer and a town pariah. One person who looks kindly on Corey is Laurie Strode, the heroine of the franchise played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Laurie, like Corey, is ostracized by Haddonfield, as many of the townsfolk somehow blame her for Michael Myers’ obsession with her. Never mind that Laurie has been trying to kill Michael for four decades, and that in the last movie, 2021’s “Halloween Kills,” Laurie — spoiler alert — lost her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer, seen here in flashbacks), to Michael’s murderous evil.

That was four years ago, and both Laurie and Haddonfield seem to be returning to normal. Laurie lives with her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), who’s now a nurse in the town’s urgent-care clinic. Laurie is writing her memoir — which provides some overly wordy narration, musing about the nature of evil — and occasionally chats with Frank (Will Patton), the retired police chief, and Lindsey (Kyle Richards), kindly bartender who survived Michael because Laurie was her babysitter in John Carpenter’s 1978 original. (By the way, the maestro shares credit for the score, and his chilling original theme pops up a few times.)

Laurie finds Corey being tormented by some obnoxious high-school kids, and intervenes. Laurie is impressed with Corey, persevering in spite of the town’s reactions to him, and suggests to Allyson that they should go out sometime. They do, and a tentative romance begins.

Simultaneously, though, Corey has another encounter — with Michael Myers. When Michael doesn’t kill him, it seems like the masked monster might have found a kindred spirit, a successor to his murderous ways.

The script — a joint effort of relative newbies Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier, Green collaborator Danny McBride and Green himself — becomes a sometimes fascinating character study, comparing Michael’s special blend of evil with Corey’s more mundane form of slaughter. The killing scenes deliver the requisite horror-movie mayhem, though the deaths often are telegraphed so only a few scenes serve up any surprise.

Diehards may get impatient watching Corey kill townspeople while Michael is on the sidelines. But there’s a payoff, of sorts, when the promised final confrontation between Laurie and Michael commences, providing Curtis some solid kick-ass moments and the audience a chance to see the monster one last time. That is, if the powers that be can hold to their plan that this is the last time.

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‘Halloween Ends’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 14, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Rosaline' is a fun riff on literature's greatest romance, and a showcase for Kaitlyn Dever's sharp delivery

Lowered expectations sometimes can deliver some welcome surprises, as is the case with “Rosaline,” a direct-to-sreaming rom-com that gets its laughs by playing with the tropes of the most famous romantic drama of all.

Kaitlyn Dever, so wonderful in “Booksmart” and the only good thing in “Dear Evan Hansen,” plays the title role, a free-thinking woman in Verona, Italy, circa 1600 — when being independent and career-minded isn’t what a lady is supposed to be, as her father (Bradley Whitford) regularly reminds her. Rosaline dreams of being a cartographer, while also dreaming of finally being able to go public with her romance to a hunky young Verona man, and stop the cavalcade of old men who want to get her into an arranged marriage.

There’s a catch: The young man is Romeo Montague (Kyle Allen), whose father (Nicholas Rowe) is bitter enemies with Rosaline’s uncle, Lord Capulet (Christopher MacDonald).

And there’s another catch: When Rosaline gets stranded with another forced suitor — a handsome soldier, Dario (Sean Teale) — she misses her chance to be wooed by Romeo at the Capulet family’s masquerade ball. When she finally gets back, she finds that Romeo has suddenly fallen for someone else. What’s worse, that someone is Rosaline’s younger cousin, Juliet (played by Isabela Merced, from the live-action “Dora the Explorer” movie and this year’s “Father of the Bride” reboot).

Rosaline makes it her mission to stick close to Juliet, in a sneaky attempt to break up the new lovebirds. Rosaline gets her gay friend Paris (Spencer Stevenson) and her nurse (Minnie Driver) into the plot — and drags in Dario, who turns out not to be so awful, as grooms in a forced marriage go.

The screenplay is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, veterans of such romances as “500 Days of Summer” and “The Fault in Our Stars,” so they understand how to align story beats with heart beats. They’re adapting Rebecca Serle’s best-selling novel “When You Were Mine,” which references “Romeo & Juliet” from the setting of present-day California — and the script’s transfer to the Middle Ages lets Rosaline deliver the snarky, modern take on the 400-year-old romance.

Director Karen Maine — whose celibacy camp comedy “Yes, God, Yes,” was a bright spot during COVID-era streaming — keeps the jokes and the romance briskly paced and sprightly. Maine’s best tool is Dever, who gives a tightly wound performance as a modern woman trapped in this Verona finery. The result is a perfect slumber-party movie, and a romantic comedy that delivers on both parts of the phrase.

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‘Rosaline’

★★★

Starts streaming Friday, October 14, on Hulu. Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and brief strong language. Running time: 96 minutes.