Review: 'White Noise' is a quietly devastating portrait of a family caught in a consumerist nightmare

It may take a second, or even third, viewing to nail down exactly what writer-director Noah Baumbach is doing in “White Noise,” but whatever it is in this story of fracturing institutions — in the family, in academia, in society — it’s working.

Adapting Don DeLillo’s acclaimed novel, Baumbach introduces us to the Gladney family: The father, Jack (Adam Driver); the mother, Babette (Greta Gerwig); and their children, Denise (Raffey Cassidy), Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and Wilder (Henry Moore). It’s the early ‘80s, when the opening of a new A&P supermarket is a huge deal in a college town.

Jack is a professor at the college in this town, delivering lectures that intersect popular culture and the formal structure of storytelling intersect with his chosen field of study: Adolf Hitler. His colleagues, like his buddy Murray (Don Cheadle), treat him as big man on campus, while his students adore him.

In Act II, something happens that upends the natural order of this town’s life. A freight train derails in a fiery crash that releases dangerous chemicals skyward — in what’s referred to as “the airborne toxic event.”

The town is evacuated, and the Gladney family tries to hang together through the fear and chaos going on around them.

In Act III, the toxic event is over and people move back into their homes. But something has irrevocably changed. Uncertainty and paranoia are everywhere — and nowhere more pronounced than in Babette, who is sneaking doses of a mysterious pharmaceutical, called Dylar, when she thinks no one is looking. But Denise, the product of Jack’s first marriage, is looking. 

Baumbach has taken DeLillo’s story — the first time he’s written and directed an adaptation (unless you count co-writing the script for Wes Anderson’s animated “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) — and dug into the dark heart of American consumerism and excess in the Reagan years. The candy-colored production design, by Jess Gonchor, dances around the Gladneys in the supermarket aisles, with products meant to improve our lives but instead making them more complicated.

“My life is either/or,” Babette confesses to Jack one night. “Either I chew regular gum or I chew sugarless gum. Either I chew gum or I smoke. Either I smoke or I gain weight. Either I gain weight or I run up the stadium steps. … I hope it lasts forever.”

Gerwig’s performance is a marvel, depicting Babette as an energized ball of anxiety, her hope overwhelmed by her doubts. She’s nicely matched by Driver, a master of his universe who is faced with the frightening prospect that the uncaring world is bigger than that universe.

“White Noise” is set to stream on Netflix after a theatrical run, but there’s nothing Netflix-and-chill about it. It’s a movie that challenges the viewer’s assumptions that things will go where you think they do. Baumbach means to provoke, to agitate the audience into thinking about our consumer culture and whether it’s making us as happy as the advertising promises.

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‘White Noise’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters; starts streaming December 30 on Netflix. Rated R for brief violence and language. Running time: 136 minutes.

Review: 'Spoiler Alert' is a heartfelt and tear-producing romance about love, grief and cancer

If “Bros” was supposed to be the pioneering raunchy relationship comedy for the LGBTQ+ community, then director Michael Showalter’s “Spoiler Alert” does the same for the poignant romantic drama — with a great deal of help from its charming stars, Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge.

In the first shot of the movie, we see those actors lying on a hospital bed. Aldridge’s character, Kit Cowan, is clearly sick and about to die. Parsons’ character, Michael Ausiello, is with him for those final moments. 

What follows takes us back to the beginning of Michael and Kit’s relationship, as told by Michael. The movie is based on Ausiello’s memoir, “Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies,” which tells you exactly what that opening scene was about — and what the rest of the movie will capture.

Michael, a journalist writing about television for TV Guide, is goaded into going to a gay bar to flirt with the guys there. That’s where he meets Kit, a photographer. Flirting commences, when Kit tells Michael, “You’re a good dancer,” and Michael replies, “You’re a terrible liar.”

The script — by actor and “A Million Little Things” writer David Marshall Grant and activist and sex columnist Dan Savage — follows the steps of Michael and Kit’s relationship. There’s the awkward first time going to Michael’s apartment, which has an alarming amount of Smurf memorabilia in it. There’s the even more awkward moment when Kit has to tell his parents, Marilyn (Sally Field) and Bob (Bill Irwin), that he’s gay and that Michael is his boyfriend. (After the initial surprise, Marilyn and Bob take the news quite well.) And there’s when Michael and Kit buy a house together — and, years later, go to couples’ therapy to save their relationship.

Then there’s the moment you knew was coming from that first scene, when they learn that Kit has colorectal cancer.

Credit Showalter, the writers and the actors for not sugar-coating this part of the story. The movie presents the struggles of a cancer patient — the chemotherapy, the depressing news from doctors, and the fear that wells up in a cancer patient’s friends and family — with tenderness and authenticity.

When the movie is dealing with Michael’s emotions, and how he’s prepping his heart for the inevitable, Showalter goes for a more allegorical approach. The movie depicts Michael’s flashbacks to childhood — and losing his mother to cancer — in the format of an ‘80s family sitcom, where young Mikey (played by Brody Caines) and his mom (Tara Summers) are the central characters. The scenes make a rough kind of sense, based on Michael’s personal identification with TV, but they can be jarring in the context of a tearjerker.

The tears do come, in large part because of the strong performances by Parsons and Aldridge, who find sensational chemistry as the mismatched couple — the nerdy Michael and the adventurous Kit — work to overcome the obstacles the universe puts in their path. The paired performances make “Spoiler Alert” a deeply effective and powerful romance.

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‘Spoiler Alert’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 9, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use and thematic elements. Running time: 112 minutes.

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.