Review: 'Return of Tanya Tucker' shows a country star's 'relaunch,' and a growing friendship between two generations of musicians

Tanya Tucker tells people she hates the word “comeback,” and she prefers “relaunch” to describe what’s happening with her career in 2019 and 2020, which is captured warmly in director Kathlyn Horan’s documentary “The Return of Tanya Tucker, Featuring Brandi Carlile.”

Putting Carlile’s name in the title is no mere courtesy. Carlile, the reigning folk-rock and alt-country con, is the person who launched the plan to get Tucker back in the studio to record her first album of new material in 17 years. Carlile grew up listening to Tucker’s fiery country songs on the radio, and arranges to get Tucker to sing and write some songs.

This is more than Carlile fangirling (though there are a couple of moments where Carlile does that, and they’re adorable). Carlile thinks Tucker, who influenced so many singers who followed, is due for being rediscovered — and that this album can do for Tucker what the Rick Rubin-produced “American Recordings” did for Johnny Cash late in his career.

Tucker, who’s 60 when the project begins, is a wonder. Her voice is gravelly and authentic, containing a wisdom of the ages, while her white hair is partly died hot pink, a sign that she’s still got some of the bad-girl fire that propelled and sometimes derailed her in the music business. Tucker acknowledges that she’s lived an interesting and sometimes hard life — while noting that male country artists, like Cash and Waylon Jennings, got away with a lot of things that she wasn’t.

The first half of the documentary shows Tucker working with the album’s producers, Carlile and Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s son). While going over songs, Tucker shares a snippet of a song-in-progress, that she left on the answering machine of her mentor, Loretta Lynn. The song, Tucker says, “is laying there, waiting for a pencil.” Carlile takes that as a challenge, and starts working on it, and presents it to Tucker as “Bring Me My Flowers” — in which Tucker sings her demand that people show their appreciation while she’s still alive.

Horan intercuts the studio sessions, and subsequent concert performances, with archival footage of Tucker’s tumultuous life. Home movies of her family in Texas, then moving to Arizona. Shots of Las Vegas, where Tucker recorded her first demo. Her appearance, at 13, on Johnny Carson’s show, singing “Delta Dawn” (a hit for her on the country charts, a year before Helen Reddy went No. 1 with it worldwide). Her teen stardom, her shimmering Elvis-style jumpsuits. Tabloid headlines of her romance with Glen Campbell, when she was 22 and he was 44. Her rock phase in 1980, when Nashville accused of her of betraying her country roots.

Tucker doesn’t sit down for an interview with Horan, so the filmmaker catches bits of interviews Tucker gives to promote the album — which are largely superficial and hitting all the talking points. Most of what the movie captures of Tucker’s personality is following her around, a hummingbird always moving, a bundle of nervous energy.

Carlile does have time to talk, usually when waiting for Tucker to arrive somewhere, so she provides the movie’s narrative backbone — explaining why Tucker matters, and why sometimes the star was (and is) her own worst enemy.

There are some showpiece moments scattered through the film, the best being when Tucker performs at a birthday tribute concert for Loretta Lynn — and sings “Bring Me My Flowers,” which is a perfect homage, even if Tucker is the only performer on the program not singing one of Lynn’s songs.

What’s best about “The Return of Tanya Tucker, Featuring Brandi Carlile” is watching Carlile’s appreciation of Tucker’s talent and Tucker’s admiration of this next-generation musician come together into a working partnership and a deep friendship. The film leaves a viewer wondering what each of them, together or separately, has got cooking next.

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‘The Return of Tanya Tucker, Featuring Brandi Carlile’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for language. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Causeway' is a small, intense drama that features Jennifer Lawrence at her steely, vulnerable best

The small, intense drama “Causeway” shows a Jennifer Lawrence who’s somewhat familiar to us: Tough-minded and determined, but with a vulnerability just below the surface.

What’s new is that Lawrence is charting her own course, by producing for the first time — and she uses that new clout to give us a story that’s simple in execution but complex in its emotions.

When we meet Lynsey, Lawrence’s character, we’re not immediately told what’s going on. She’s dealing with some health issues, enrolled in physical therapy, and trying to overcome some cognitive issues that have her staying — for awhile, anyway — with Sharon (Jane Houdyshell), a home-care nurse.

Some time passes, and Lynsey’s time under Sharon’s care ends, and Lynsey takes a bus home to New Orleans. Thanks to her doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson), we learn that Lynsey was in Afghanistan, a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, and suffered a traumatic brain injury when her convoy was attacked. Even so, she’s eager to show her doctor she’s OK, and ready to return to duty.

Going home, we soon find, has its own forms of trauma. She sees her mom, Gloria (Linda Emond), who’s still the hard-drinking woman Lynsey knew before she enlisted. To avoid Mom, Lynsey takes a job cleaning pools. She also takes the family’s ancient pick-up truck into a mechanic — which is how she befriends James (Bryan Tyree Henry), who owns the garage, and has some demons of his own to deal with.

The script — credited to three writers: Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel and Elizabeth Sanders — feels like a stage play, almost entirely small and contained scenes with Lynsey and one other character, whether it’s Gloria, James, Sharon or her doctor. Director Lila Neugebauer, a TV director making her feature debut, doesn’t feel the need to “expand” the story to fit the movie screen (maybe because it’s debuting on Apple TV+), and keeps the emotion at a human scale.

The emotion is sharp, though, because of the talented cast, including Russell Harvard in a role that I can’t divulge. The standouts are Lawrence, who’s never been better, and Henry, who brings a laid-back soulfulness that makes James’ story all the more powerful. They make “Causeway” a small gem worth finding.

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‘Causeway’

★★★

Starts streaming Friday, November 4, on Apple TV+. Rated R for some language, sexual references and drug use. Running time: 92 minutes.

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.