Review: 'Nanny' is an emotional thriller about an undocumented worker dealing with demons from her past

Mythology and motherhood collide in “Nanny,” a gorgeously rendered and chilling psychological thriller that asks “Who’s watching the children?”

The title character is Aisha (played by Anna Diop, from DC’s “Titans”), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant who takes a job as nanny for a well-off Manhattan couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). Their little girl, Rose (Rose Decker), hits it off with Aisha immediately — Aisha’s Senegalese food is tastier than the bland stuff Amy orders from Whole Foods or wherever. But Aisha witnesses that the marriage is fractured, with Adam away covering uprisings around the world and Amy trying to get promoted in her company.

Aisha doesn’t have time to worry about her bosses’ problems, though. She’s trying to earn as much money as she can to send to Dakar, so she can bring her 6-year-old son to America. Aisha also starts up a romance with Malik (Sinqua Walls), the doorman in the family’s building.

While Aisha is occupied with thoughts of Malik and making sure Amy pays her properly, she also starts having nightmares — visions of water and evil mermaids and the spider trickster Ananzi. She tries talking these out with Malik’s grandmother Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), who’s rather attuned to the spirit world. The spirits, Kathleen says, “bless us with resilience. But the spirits’ tools are not always kind.”

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu neatly blurs the lines of reality and myth for Aisha, until she’s not entirely sure what’s up or down. Employing a rich color palette and disorienting set design for Amy and Adam’s apartment — big props to cinematographer Rina Yang and production designer Jonathan Guggenheim — Jusu makes space for Diop to take the character to the edge of madness and back.

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‘Nanny’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity. Running time: 97 minutes.

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

Review: 'Empire of Light' aims to celebrate the magic of movies, but wallows too much in their worst cliches

In contrast to recent movies that celebrate the making of movies — a broad category, encompassing the family story of “The Fabelmans” to the wretched success of the upcoming “Babylon” — director Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” celebrates the serene joy of being in the audience to watch a movie.

Too bad the movie we’re watching isn’t as magical as what Norman (Toby Jones), the philosophical projectionist, puts on the screen of the Empire, a movie house in a seaside English town. It’s 1981, and the old theater has seen better days — when the ballroom upstairs was the site of lively dances, not a nesting ground for the pigeons.

The theater’s manager, Hilary (Olivia Colman), sometimes goes upstairs to the ballroom to have a smoke and get away from the theater’s staff. She also goes up there so she doesn’t have to think about the theater’s owner, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), who makes a regular habit of shagging Hilary over his desk. Hilary is generally quiet and a little distracted — which may be the result of her current medications, which are monitored by her doctor.

Enter Stephen, played by Michael Ward, who needs a job — and gets one as a ticket-taker. He becomes quite comfortable at the Empire, a home away from home, and a refuge from the anti-Black thugs in the streets in the age of Thatcherism.

Stephen befriends Hilary, who finds in the young man a bit of the spark she once had — before she had to “go away” a few months earlier. Hilary becomes so convinced that Stephen is the spark she needs in life that she decides to stop taking her pills, and when’s the last time you saw a movie where someone goes off their meds and nothing bad happens to them?

Mendes (“Skyfall,” “1917”), who wrote and directed, stages some moments of sublime beauty, where Hilary and Stephen’s relationship creates the kind of magic only seen in movies. Unfortunately, those scenes are intercut with some of the the most hackneyed excesses of the movies — and Mendes doesn’t seem able to reconcile the two.

The performances are wonderful, even if they’re yoked to these cliche-ridden characters. Ward is a promising young actor, who carries more weight than one expects, and carries it well. Jones delivers Norman’s monologues about film as an illusion — 24 still images flashing by one’s eyes every second, tricking the eye into thinking there is movement — with gravity, but still a bemused twinkle in his eye. And Colman manages to make even Hilary’s most manic moments feel grounded in the character’s pain and loss.

“Empire of Light” is the sort of movie where it’s expected that critics will swoon at the mere mention of “the magic of the cinema.” Makers of such movies forget that we critics have seen such stories many times — and it takes more than a shared film love to bowl us over. 

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‘Empire of Light’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, language and brief violence. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Violent Night' is the blood-soaked action-comedy — centered on Santa Claus — that you never knew you needed

How do you settle the argument about whether “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie? Apparently, by making a “Die Hard”-style movie that is unmistakably a Christmas movie — because the Bruce Willis character is none other than Santa Claus himself.

That’s the wonderfully wackadoo premise of “Violent Night,” a blood-thirsty action comedy that messes around with the holiday themes in ways that are both clever and brutal.

We meet our Kris Kringle, played with jaded grumpiness by David Harbour, in a British pub — and he’s definitely not feeling like a jolly old elf. Santa is murmuring into his pint glass that this may be his last Christmas, because the kids don’t seem to believe any more. He semi-drunkenly moves from house to house, and is dismayed that all the children want in their stockings are video games and cash.

Cash is in ample supply at the Lightstone mansion in Connecticut, where Jason Lightstone (Alex Hassell) and his estranged wife Linda (Alexis Louder) are taking their 8-year-old daughter Trudy (Leah Brady) for another holiday where everyone tries to ingratiate themselves to the matriarch, Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo). Gertrude loves busting the chops of her progeny, especially her suck-up daughter Alva (Edi Patterson, from “Lights Out”) and Alva’s B-list action-star boyfriend Morgan Steel (Cam Gigandet, who is, yes, a B-list action star). (Yes, this movie is joining “The Menu,” “Glass Onion” and “Triangle of Sadness” in this year’s ever-growing “rich people suck” film festival.)

The not-so-happy Christmas Eve gathering takes a turn for the worse, when a cadre of gun-toting thieves crashes the party, killing the hired help and threatening to do the same to all the Lightstones. All the villains have Christmas-themed code names, with the mastermind (John Leguizamo) going by Scrooge. His target is the $300 million in cash Gertrude keeps in a basement vault.

Of course, Scrooge & Co. aren’t the only home invaders in the Lightstone house this night. Santa has landed upstairs, enjoying Trudy’s cookies and the family brandy, when he runs into one of the thieves, and dispatches him quite messily. (Writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller — who also penned the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies — devise a backstory showing Santa’s earlier life as a merciless hammer-swinging 11th century warrior.)

Santa tries to leave, but when he sees Trudy — and checks that she’s on his nice list — he vows to rescue her and take down Scrooge’s team. Trudy plays a role, too, setting up booby traps in the attic, just like in “Home Alone” (though with more lethal outcomes).

Director Tommy Wirkola — who gave us Nazi zombies in the “Dead Snow” movies — stages the mayhem creatively, with acrobatic moves and maximum bloodshed, and with a gleeful abandon that confirms the movie is on the comedy side of the action-comedy divide.

Mostly, though, “Violent Night” is a chance to watch Harbour — much loved as Police Chief Jim Hopper on “Stranger Things” — go to town as another gruff but lovable character. Even when Santa’s white beard starts getting as red as his suit, from the bloody nose he gets early on, Harbour is having a (jingle) ball. 

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‘Violent Night’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'The Inspection' is a standard boot-camp movie, elevated by strong performances

Writer-director Elegance Bratton tells his own life’s story in “The Inspection,” and the result is a thoughtful variation on one of the sturdiest genres in movies: The boot-camp drama.

Bratton’s stand-in in this semi-fictionalized story is Ellis French — played by Jeremy Pope — a 25-year-old man who has been living on his own since he was 16. Living on the street, Ellis has decided his last chance to make something of himself is to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps. 

First, though, he must get his birth certificate from his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union). When they meet, we soon learn why Ellis has been estranged: Inez kicked him out when she found out that her son was gay.

Ellis lands at boot camp — the time, we quickly learn, is 2005, while the U.S. is still embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan — and immediately is run through the routines meant to strip away a recruit’s individuality and make him (it’s all men in this group) into part of a fighting force.

Camaraderie is hard to come by, though, when some of the other recruits start suspecting that Ellis is gay — and beat the crap out of him in the shower, with the tacit approval of the commanding drill sergeant, Laws (Bokeem Woodbine). Another sergeant, Rosales (Raúl Castillo), seems more sympathetic to Ellis’ situation, and gives him a chance to prove himself in training.

Bratton — whose documentary “Pier Kids” played the LGBTQ+ festival circuit in 2019 and 2020 (including at Damn These Heels in Salt Lake City) — mostly tells his boot-camp story in vignettes, the sort of incidents one might recount to non-Marines at the bar one night. The only sort of story structure is the schedule of the boot-camp program; the only tension comes from whether Ellis’ homosexuality will get him kicked out, and whether his mother will learn to accept him.

Pope (who has appeared on “Pose,” and received an Emmy nomination for the miniseries “Hollywood”) finds the steel underneath Ellis’ babyface facade, as the troubled young man becomes a confident Marine. And Woodbine captures the disgust Laws feels for having a gay recruit in his midst and the paternal gruffness of a man responsible for turning recruits into fighters. As with other boot-camp classics — “An Officer and a Gentleman” springs most readily to mind — it’s the performances that raise “The Inspection” to a higher level. 

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‘The Inspection’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 2, in theaters. Rated R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and violence. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: With documentary 'Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams,' director Luca Guadagnino applies his artist's eye to a fashion legend

Appropriately for a movie about a fashion icon, director Luca Guadagnino’s documentary “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” is loaded with style and a bit lacking in substance.

The shoemaker in question is Salvatore Ferragamo, who made his first pairs of high heels when he was 9, for his sisters’ confirmation. He quickly progressed from being a cobbler’s apprentice in Naples to opening a store in his parents’ home — before immigrating to America, first in Boston (in a factory set-up he hated) and soon to California.

Ferragamo opened a shop in Santa Barbara, right around the time the burgeoning film industry was being established there. He started designing footwear for the movies, from cowboy boots to delicate heels. He studied anatomy at the University of Southern California, because he was convinced that shoes could be beautiful and comfortable at the same time.

When the movie industry left Santa Barbara for Hollywood, Ferragamo went with it — starting a shop that became a destination for such stars as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish and Gloria Swanson. In 1927, Ferragamo moved back to Italy, and established his namesake company in Florence — where his descendants still run things. His clientele grew to include royalty and such luminaries as Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren. 

Guadagnino — known for “Call Me By Your Name,” the “Suspiria” remake and last month’s “Bones and All” — lavishes attention on Ferragamo’s shoes that human actors would envy. The film highlights many of Ferragamo’s most stylish innovations, including the “invisible” shoe (made from clear nylon filaments), the “cage” heel, the wedge (made from cork, as other materials were scarce during World War II) and the “rainbow” platform shoe.

The film is loaded with interviews with the Ferragamo family (captured mostly at a 2018 reunion), as well as designers like Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin, fashion writers Suzy Menkes and Grace Coddington, and filmmaker Martin Scorsese — who, as always, knows the best stories. Michael Stuhlbarg, one of Guadagnino’s regular actors, narrates the film, reading from Ferragamo’s memoirs.

The result is a fond look at the intersection where fashion and filmmaking meet, and how innovation and inspiration can strike anywhere — but only someone with ambition and determination can make something out of those attributes.

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‘Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for smoking and a suggestive reference. Running time: 121 minutes; in English and Italian, with subtitles.

Review: Teen comedy 'Darby and the Dead' has a fun premise, but doesn't know how to give it life

With rare exceptions (such as the “Predator” prequel “Prey”), movie studios usually call it right when they debut a movie on streaming instead of theaters — and that’s the case with “Darby and the Dead,” a teen comedy that’s not quite as fun as its premise.

Darby Harper (Riele Downs) calls herself a “hermit crab” in the social ecosystem of her high school, mostly keeping to herself — except for her lunchtime chess games with the school’s groundskeeper, Gary (Tony Danza). There’s just one small problem: Gary has been dead for the last three years, and Darby is the only person in school who can see him.

Ever since a swimming accident when she was 7 — the same accident that took her mother’s life — Darby has been able to see and talk to dead people. She has used that gift for her side hustle, helping souls finish up their unsettled business so they can “cross over” to the afterlife. (Darby’s other gift is being able to see the audience, so she narrates to the camera throughout the film.)

Darby’s status as an outcast at Frederick Douglass High School is suiting her well — until she has a run-in with the school’s most popular girl, Capri (played by Auli’i Cravalho, the voice of Moana), in the locker room. After bullying Darby, Capri lands in a pool of water and is electrocuted by a malfunctioning hair straightener.

The now-deceased Capri now won’t leave Darby alone, refusing to “cross over” unless Darby encourages the school’s surviving popular girls to carry on with Capri’s planned birthday bash. To make that happen, Capri gives Darby a crash course in becoming a Mean Girl, so she’ll fit in with Capri’s old clique.

That all sounds fun — a John Hughes movie with a little M. Night Shyamalan thrown in — the execution is lackluster. Director Silas Howard makes school life and the afterlife a little too candy-colored, and not very distinguishable from each other. And the rules of Capri’s post-life powers, as compiled in writer Becca Greene’s screenplay, are too arbitrary to be any real fun.

When “Darby and the Dead” is working, it’s when Downs and Cravalho square off, their sweet-and-salty chemistry providing laughs that the script misses out on. They give this teen trifle a little bite. 

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‘Darby and the Dead’

★★1/2

Starts streaming Friday, December 2, on Hulu. Rated PG-13 for strong language, suggestive material and some teen partying. Running time: 100 minutes. 

Review: Steven Spielberg digs into his roots in 'The Fabelmans,' a brilliant love letter to family and filmmaking

It takes Judd Hirsch, who only appears for a couple of minutes, to summarize the beauty and brilliance of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical drama “The Fabelmans” — when, as bombastic old Uncle Boris meets the teen Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), he pinpoints the kid’s future: “Family. Art. They’ll tear you apart.”

Sammy is the stand-in for Spielberg himself, as written by Spielberg and his “Lincoln” and “West Side Story” screenwriter Tony Kushner in a deeply touching, sometimes funny, script. 

We see Sammy first as an 5-year-old (played by Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) in 1952, scared about sitting in the dark to see a movie for the first time. His father, Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer back when that was a new thing, describes scientifically how movies are still photos flashing by at 24 frames per second, and our mind translates that into motion. His mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), a one-time concert pianist, gives the more soulful explanation: “Movies are dreams that you never forget.”

This Venn diagram, between technical genius and yearning artist, is where Spielberg has been his entire career — and meeting his parents, or a reasonable facsimile, explains a lot. But it doesn’t explain everything, and “The Fabelmans” shows an artist’s influences aren’t always so cut and dried.

The train wreck he sees in his first movie, Cecil B. deMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth,” so fascinates and terrifies little Sammy that he asks for a model train set for Hanukkah — so he can re-enact the crash and demystify it. When Dad objects to damaging his toys that way, Mom has an idea: Take Dad’s 8mm Keystone camera and film the crash, so he can watch it again and again until it’s no longer scary. And thus Sammy Fabelman makes his first movie.

As Sammy gets older, he keeps making movies with his friends and his Boy Scout troop (with sequences that seem to foreshadow “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Saving Private Ryan” and other future classics). Meanwhile, the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona to Northern California, as Burt’s talent for computer programming becomes more in demand. But the moves reveal the strains in Burt and Mitzi’s marriage — which the teen Sammy notices when he’s going through footage of a family camping trip and finds footage of Mitzi getting oddly close to Burt’s colleague and friend Bennie (Seth Rogen). 

Filmmaking, then, becomes a refuge for Sammy, a place to hide from the hard adult emotions that grip his family. In school, it becomes a defense mechanism, against harassment by his antisemitic classmates, and a way to impress girls.

LaBelle is a terrific discovery, as his Sammy matures from a wide-eyed movie lover into a thoughtful artist. Dano, as Burt, shows the exasperation of a father who tries to support his son’s passion even when he doesn’t understand it. And Williams, giving one of the most touching performances in a career full of them, drills deep into Mitzi’s longing for artistic fulfillment and true love.

Though “The Fabelmans is deeply inspired by Spielberg’s childhood, Spielberg keeps his own emotions at arm’s length. He doesn’t need to wear his heart on his sleeve to show what shaped him in his early years, and by showing that reserve he lets us to find for ourselves the universal chords of how family can both nurture and confound one’s passion. After a half-century of rewiring the world to watch movies differently, Spielberg knows he can trust us to follow his breadcrumbs to the movie’s emotional core.

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‘The Fabelmans’

★★★★

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use. Running time: 151 minutes.

Review: 'Glass Onion' brings back Daniel Craig's Southern-fried detective for more murderous adventures with the super-rich

There is a hard limit to what I’ll be able to write about “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” because much of the fun and thrill of director Rian Johnson’s murder mystery — a follow-up to his wildly inventive 2019 movie “Knives Out” — comes in not knowing too much at the outset.

Here’s what I can tell you about the set-up: Once again, the renowned detective Benoit Blanc — played with self-deprecating charm by Daniel Craig — finds himself amid a group of very rich people who eye each other with a mix of suspicion and scorn. In this case, he travels to Greece, where tech billionaire Miles Bron (played by Edward Norton) has summoned his old friends and frenemies for a weekend at his secluded island mansion.

The guest list is as follows:

• Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson), movie star and party animal.

• Peg (Jessica Henwick), Birdie’s frazzled assistant.

• Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), a rising political candidate.

• Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), men’s-rights activist and YouTube influencer.

• Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), Duke’s girlfriend and social-media co-star.

• Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), scientist employed by Miles.

• Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), Miles’ former business partner.

Andi’s arrival surprises the others, for reasons that become clear early in the story. And Benoit Blanc’s arrival surprises the host, who rolls with it. Miles has promised a murder for his guests to solve this weekend, and a murder does indeed happen — though not the way anyone anticipates.

That’s about as much as the movie’s trailer reveals, and as much plot information as I’m willing to divulge. Suffice it to say that Johnson, as writer and director, provides plenty of twists to keep everyone — on the screen and in the audience — guessing about how it’s all going to play out.

Johnson’s plotting, and the dispensing of information about the characters and the crime, is as intricate and as clever as in “Knives Out.” What’s different is an added layer of comedy, mostly provided by the continued exploration of Blanc, who has been moody and out of sorts during the COVID-19 pandemic without a good mystery to test his wits. (His circle of Zoom friends is just the first course of the movie’s jaw-dropping cameos.)

Craig is delightfully droll here, whether observing his fellow guests or declaring his disdain for the board game Clue. (Again, it’s in the trailer.) And the ensemble cast of suspects — particularly Hudson and Monáe — generate plenty of sparks leading up to a remarkable ending.

And, as “Knives Out” did, “Glass Onion” allows Johnson to deliver some sharp commentary on the petty motivations of the disgustingly wealthy — and does so more entertainingly and less arrogantly than “The Menu” or “Triangle of Sadness,” two recent dark comedies that mock the stinking rich. Class warfare has seldom been so fun.

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‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters for one week, then streaming starting Dec. 23 on Netflix. Rated R for strong language, some violence, sexual material and drug content. Running time: 139 minutes.