Review: In 'Bardo,' director Alejandro G. Iñárritu takes us on a tour of Mexico and his demons.

In his latest movie, “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” director Alejandro G. Iñárritu returns to his native Mexico to tell an apparently personal story about family, friends and the overwhelming desire to pick up a camera and capture the world.

Iñárritu’s emotional stand-in here is Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a former journalist who has become an acclaimed documentarian, one who uses re-enactment and other narrative techniques to crystalize his take on history and other topics. He lives in Los Angeles, but is returning to Mexico to receive a prestigious award — the first Mexican ever to receive the honor.

The award comes not long after his wife, Lucia (Griselda Siciliani), gives birth to their son. While still in the birthing room, though, the baby declares it doesn’t like this broken world and wants to go back into the womb — so the medical staff obligingly stuffs the kid back into Lucia. (We later learn the baby died a day after being born, and Iñárritu’s symbolism comes to represent the dead child as recurring memory.)

Iñárritu and cinematographer Darius Khondji bounce from vignette to vignette, sometimes critiquing Mexico’s history and its relations to the United States, from the Mexican-American war to current migrant crossings. At other times, Silverio encounters the ghost of his own father, who imparts the advice to “Take a swig of success, swish it around and spit it out, otherwise it will poison you.”

Silverio’s journey through his life has some familiar strains — it’s clear that Iñárritu has watched Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz” and Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2,” both famous movies about filmmakers mining their pasts for fodder. It doesn’t always work here, but watching Iñárritu and his “Birdman” collaborator Nicolás Giacobone try to figure it all out over nearly three hours is intriguing.

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‘Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 18, in some theaters, and streaming on Netflix. Rated R for language throughout, strong sexual content and graphic nudity. Running time: 159 minutes; in Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Spirited' wastes a good 'Christmas Carol' twist and the comic talents of Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell

The holiday comedy “Spirited” offers a promising twist on “A Christmas Carol,” featuring two really funny leading actors who riff well against each other — and, yet, it’s a damp squib of a Christmas cracker.

The story starts at what looks like the end of the story, as a neighborhood busybody (Rose Byrne, leading the parade of cameos) gets shown her sad, lonely death, and then comes out of her house on Christmas morning a changed person. It’s another triumph for the four ghosts — Jacob Marley (Patrick Page), and the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), Present (Will Ferrell) and Yet-to-Come (Loren G. Woods in the suit, voiced by Tracy Morgan) — and their massive magical support crew.

There’s not much time to celebrate — though they do break for a musical number, because (as we’re told early) the afterlife is a musical — before they start planning for next year’s awful person to turn good. Christmas Present finds a particularly nasty target, a publicity consultant, Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds), whose a one-man controversy-generating industry. When we first see him in action, he’s advising a trade group of Christmas tree farmers how to start whisper campaigns to make buying plastic trees un-American.

Marley objects to the choice, because Clint is labeled “unredeemable” — and only one other “unredeemable” case was ever turned good. But Christmas Present is adamant, so the effort to re-create parts of Clint’s past, present and future gets underway.

When Christmas Eve rolls around, the spirits discover something they haven’t encountered before: Clint doesn’t want to change his life, and starts needling Christmas Present about why he took this job in the first place. 

What follows are some intriguing twists, including putting Clint’s assistant, Kimberly (Octavia Spencer), as his reluctant accomplice and a potential love interest for Christmas Present. Unfortunately, the plot is either heavily reliant or stopped dead in its tracks by the musical numbers, with songs written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the team who wrote more memorable numbers for “La La Land,” “The Greatest Showman” and “Dear Evan Hansen.”

The most consistent pleasures in this uneven movie are when Ferrell and Reynolds are onscreen together, comically insulting each other. Reynolds’ wise-acre verbal delivery turns out to be a good counterweight to Ferrell’s blustering goofball, and their friction does generate a few comedic sparks. So does Mani (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) as a very funny Christmas Past, her usual ethereal calm thrown for a loop when she starts lusting after Clint.

Director Sean Anders (“Instant Family,” “Daddy’s Home”), working with regular co-writer John Morris, can’t keep the premise afloat long enough to make it work, and he lets Reynolds’ and Ferrell’s refreshingly sour chemistry melt away into maudlin bro-love. It’s too bad, because “Spirited” had a chance to be the next great off-the-wall Christmas comedy.

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‘Spirited’

★★

Opens Friday, November 18, at some Megaplex theaters, and streaming on Apple TV+. Rated PG-13 for language, some suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Aftersun' is an intense slow-burn drama about a daughter's realization of her father's imperfection

When most movies lay out their purpose in rough, impatient strokes that feel like a frontal assault, writer-director Charlotte Wells’ astonishing debut “Aftersun” sneaks stealthily around your defenses, and penetrates your emotional shell with its quietly heartbreaking tale of a daughter starting to understand her father for the first time.

Wells first shows us Sophie at age 11, played by newcomer Frankie Corio, in grainy video footage, waving goodbye at an airport. Holding the camera, we are soon informed, is her father, Calum, played by the Irish actor Paul Mescal. 

As Wells unfolds the story, gradually, we learn a few things. We learn that Calum and Sophie, who live in Scotland, are taking a sunny vacation in Turkey. We learn that it’s sometime in the 1980s or 1990s. We learn that the hotel Calum booked isn’t as nice as advertised, and he’s forced to sleep on a rollaway bed while Sophie takes the room’s nice bed. We see that they spend more of their time at the nicer resort hotel across the street, where there’s a pool, a nice bar, and video games.

We also see that Calum has a cast on his arm, from a broken wrist — and that the details of his injury are murky. We are told, early, that Calum and Sophie’s mom are divorced, but are civil enough to each other, particularly where their daughter is concerned.

The other thing that Wells shows us early in the film: A darkened dance floor, where an adult woman (Celia Rowlson-Hall) is seen when the strobe lights flash. We sense, without being told, that this is Sophie, somewhere around age 30 — and that what we’re seeing of this Turkish vacation is a memory.

Specifically, it’s a memory of when Sophie came to understand that her dad was a human being, flawed and vulnerable — not the superhero that small children usually believe their fathers to be.

What’s incredible is that Wells doesn’t set up some single moment where the switch gets flipped. There’s not a big dramatic scene where everything is suddenly different than it was before. It’s a gradual dawning, an accumulation of evidence, that leads to this realization.

Each viewer who sees “Aftersun” will have a moment where it all clicks into place. And that moment won’t be the same moment for the person sitting next to you. When that moment happens may depend on the viewer’s memory of their own childhood, when they realized their dad (or their mom) was imperfect.

Wells assembles these moments, interspersed with gorgeous images of a lazy summer vacation, into a beautiful whole. She also has found, in Mescal and young Corio, two perfectly paired actors, who are so precisely interlocked and dialed into Wells’ father-daughter dynamic that it’s impossible to assess one performance without considering the other.

“Aftersun” is a movie that seems so contained when it starts, that you may not notice how gradually and thoroughly it’s burrowing into your heart. But once it’s there, you won’t shake it for awhile.

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‘Aftersun’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 11, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language and brief sexual material. 102 minutes.

Review: 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' lets the audience and the characters grieve for Chadwick Boseman, and deal with the aftermath of loss.

The latest movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, director Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” must, by circumstance, try to answer a question not posed before in the franchise: Can the MCU overcome death itself?

Not just the arbitrary killing off of a movie character, because the MCU’s phase 4 has been loaded with that. So far — spoiler alert! — phase 4 has seen the cinematic deaths of Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster in “Thor: Love and Thunder.”

No, here it’s the real thing, because of the untimely death of the actor who portrayed Black Panther/King T’Challa — Chadwick Boseman, gone at age 43 from cancer. How are at the folks at Marvel going to handle that?

The answer is: With a substantial amount of grace and sensitivity. T’Challa is not in the room when we experience his death at the movie’s outset. Instead, we’re nearby, in the lab of T’Challa’s sister, Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright), who’s frantically trying to find a cure for the unnamed disease that’s killing her brother. It’s not enough, and soon Shuri’s mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) comes in with the news, “Your brother is with the ancestors.”

Most of what follows is concerned with the void left by T’Challa’s death — and, in some ways, by Boseman’s. (Even the Marvel Studios logo is turned into an homage to the actor and character, with every snippet showing Black Panther in action.) An early funeral scene isn’t just for the characters onscreen to mourn T’Challa, it’s the audience’s chance to say their goodbyes to the actor who played him.

In story terms, T’Challa’s absence leaves a void other countries aim to fill. Early on, Queen Ramonda attends a UN meeting where she confronts other ambassadors (Richard Schiff represents the United States) about efforts to take Wakanda’s rare and powerful natural resource, vibranium, by force.

The Americans also detect another source of vibranium, deep in the Atlantic Ocean. But, they find too late, it has protectors: An army of undersea soldiers, led by a powerful warrior who can breathe on land or in water — and, we learn shortly, goes by the name Namor. (He’s played by Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta Mejía, who gets an “introducing” credit on his name, even though he has film credits going back 16 years, including a leading role in last year’s “The Forever Purge.”)

Namor approaches Ramonda and Shuri, suggesting an alliance between the two peoples who own stockpiles of vibranium, against the “surface people” who would seek to take them. Namor also wants Wakanda’s help in capturing and killing the scientist who created the vibranium detector — who, it turns out, is a precocious 19-year-old MIT student named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne). If you read Marvel comic books, you already know who Riri is, to which I say: Good for you, and keep it to yourself.

Somehow, the CIA gets wind of this, which is how Maj. Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) — whom Shuri calls “my favorite colonizer” — enters the picture, along with the CIA director, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The CIA doesn’t know about Namor’s undersea people, so they think the attack on the vibranium detector was done by the Wakandans.

Meanwhile, there’s a power vacuum back in Wakanda, with Ramonda reclaiming the throne, though the massive warrior M’Baku (Winston Duke) still lurks on the edges. And there’s the question of whether the Black Panther mantle will be passed down to someone after T’Challa — which will be difficult, since the heart-shaped herb that bestow the Black Panther’s powers was destroyed by the nasty Killmonger.

Director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole return for a second round with the Black Panther characters, and they remind us how alive and self-contained the world of Wakanda is. Introducing a new world, the one ruled by Namor, isn’t as exciting as the first time (how could it be?) — but the imagery, evoking Mexican culture of centuries ago, is beautifully rendered by production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E. Carter (both of whom won Oscars for their work in the same jobs on “Black Panther”).

Some things don’t flow as smoothly, like some of the scattershot fight scenes, or the awkward way T’Challa’s former lover, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) returns to the picture. 

Overall, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” doesn’t try to make us forget the noble T’Challa and his portrayer, Chadwick Boseman. But, by the end, you’re at least assured that his legacy is secure.

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‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action and some language. Running time: 161 minutes.

Review: 'The Banshees of Inisherin' is equal parts sardonic and shocking, with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson at their best

Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s fourth feature film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” shares aspects of his first three — notably the sharp humor and intense tragedy that made such a volatile mix in his 2017 drama “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

It also reunites the stars of his first feature, “In Bruges” — Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson — to add more fuel to the fire.

Farrell plays Pádraic Súilleabhain, who lives in Inisherin, a small island village off the coast of Ireland in 1923, with his sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon) and a small assortment of farm animals — including a donkey, Jenny, who wanders into the house, to Siobhan’s consternation. When not tending his animals, Pádraic goes down to the pub nearly every day with his best friend, Colm Doherty (that’s Gleeson), because what else is there to do?

When the movie starts, though, Pádraic arrives at Colm’s house along the shore, and Colm’s not there. Pádraic goes ahead to the pub, and soon Colm arrives as well. But Colm has something to tell Pádraic: He doesn’t want them to be friends any more.

Colm doesn’t give a reason, and Pádraic scrambles to figure out what he might have done to set Colm off like that. Even when a reason is given, Pádraic can’t accept it and asks for another chance. Colm says no, and tells his now-former friend that Pádraic persists in trying to engage with him, Colm will do something drastic. The Irish civil war is raging over on the mainland, but a personal version of it seems to be starting in Inisherin.

Pádraic continues to try to work out what went wrong between him and Colm, talking about it with Siobhan and with Dominic Kearney (Barry Keoghan), who’s identified as a “gom,” which is Irish for a village idiot. Dominic is sweet on Siobhan — maybe because it’s a small island, and Siobhan is the only woman within shouting distance of Dominic’s age — and it’s everything Siobhan can do to get rid of him.

McDonagh lets the scenario he created become a vehicle for a scathingly wry examination of small-town life, the claustrophobia of a place where the ancient Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton) makes dire predictions about residents’ lives, the storekeeper Mrs O’Riordan reads everyone’s mail in search of gossip, and the town cop (Gary Lydon) — who’s also Dominic’s abusive father — gloats that he gets to go to the mainland to help with the executions.

As the story progresses, or devolves into more harsh realities, it turns out it’s about love — and what happens when a longtime love fades, hardens or becomes more of a burden than a pleasure. Farrell and Gleeson portray many facets of that affection and irritation, and the directions they take the relationship is heart-wrenching. Condon also turns in a beautiful performance, playing the one exasperated sane voice in the village.

And, like McDonagh’s past films (“Billboards,” “Seven Psychopaths” and “In Bruges”), there’s a strong chance people won’t agree with me about it. It’s a demanding watch, because people who learn to like early in the movie start doing some pretty nasty stuff, to others and to themselves, as the story goes on. But it’s a rewarding one, especially as a viewer follows the emotional highs and lows McDonagh creates here.

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‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, some violent content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Armageddon Time' is a well-observed and unsentimental look into a childhood facing prejudice and privilege.

As one might expect from director James Gray — the man who made “Ad Astra,” “The Lost City of Z” and other precisely calibrated dramas — his semi-autobiographical memory play “Armageddon Time” is astringent, a mostly unsentimental look back in time at prejudice and privilege.

The movie introduces us to the Graffs, a middle-class Jewish family living in Queens, New York, in 1980. The father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), is an appliance repairman; the mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), is head of the PTA and worries about her boys, particularly the younger one, Paul (played by Banks Repeta), who seems to be having trouble fitting in at school. 

Paul confides in his grandpa, Aaron Rabinowitz, who narrowly escaped Ukraine before the Nazis arrived. Grandpa is played by Anthony Hopkins, who portrays the character as such a centering presence in Paul’s life that it doesn’t matter that the actor doesn’t even attempt any sort of European accent.

Paul makes a new friend at school, a Black classmate named Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) — who lives with his grandma and carries stickers of Apollo missions, which he says are from his brother in the Air Force. Johnny and Paul share some interests, such as making fun of their 6th grade teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk). It doesn’t take long for Paul to notice that when Mr. Turkeltaub catches them, Johnny’s punishments are much harsher than Paul’s, so when Johnny gets expelled, Paul makes a point of getting expelled, too.

Paul catches hell for that from his dad, who shows an explosive, abusive side. Mom has to pick up the pieces, and enroll Paul in the private school where his older brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), already attends. Here, Paul sees discrimination on an industrial scale, from the taunting rich kids who use the n-word when Paul spots Johnny walking by. 

To punctuate the school’s overwhelming air of entitlement, Gray includes an encounter between Paul and one of the school’s wealthy donors: real-estate tycoon Fred Trump (John Diehl). Paul doesn’t meet Fred’s son, the orange-hued jackass who still can’t accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election, but he does attend a school assembly headlined by Fred’s daughter, Maryanne (Jessica Chastain), who delivers a speech about self-reliance that is breathtaking in its hypocrisy. (This is three years before Ronald Reagan, who hovers over the Graffs’ conversations like a boogeyman, appointed Maryanne to the federal bench.)

Gray depicts this era — when he, like Paul, would have been 11 years old — with little nostalgia, save perhaps the deep and mutual affection Paul and his grandpa share. Mostly, 1980 and 1981 are depicted here as a rough, angry time in America, as Paul’s father tells him in a shattering late scene.

In “Armageddon Time,” Gray doesn’t have to shout out how the callous attitudes of the early Reagan years are echoed in today’s divided nation. By being quiet, and letting Paul’s pre-teen life take it all in, the message is delivered. 

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‘Armageddon Time’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some drug use involving minors. Running time: 115 minutes.

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.