Review: 'Holy Spider' is a solid crime procedural, and a moving story of injustice against women in Iran.

One could imagine the American version of “Holy Spider” — an intriguing true-crime procedural, in which a tough reporter tries to solve a serial killer’s crime spree — and it would be solid, if unremarkable, entertainment.

However, because “Holy Spider” is based on a true story set in Iran, and the serial killer is motivated by God and his Muslim faith, director Ali Abbasi’s film takes on a whole new level of fascination.

In the holy city of Mashhad, a killer roams the streets after dark. He picks up sex workers on the street, takes them somewhere quiet, strangles them with their own headscarves, leaves their bodies, and then calls a local reporter, Sharifi (Arash Ashatiani), who’s been covering the case.

The Mashhad police are under pressure, from city leaders and the ruling clerics, to solve the case. The pressure grows when a female reporter from Tehran, Arezoo Rahimi (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi), arrives on assignment. The vibe is reminiscent of “In the Heat of the Night,” another story of a person from the big city trying to get a job done in the face of a repressive local culture.

Abbasi, who co-wrote with Afshin Kamran Bahrami, doesn’t hide the identity of the killer. No, the film introduces him, a construction worker named Saeed (Mehdi Bajestani), early on — and captures in sometimes disturbing detail how Saeed carries out his killings, and how his workload is escalating. 

The structure of the story is like “Columbo,” where the mystery isn’t who the killer is, but how Rahimi, helped by Sharifi and hindered by the sexist cops, is going to prove he did the crimes. Along the way, Abbasi plants some biting commentary about the misogyny and injustice baked into Iranian’s law enforcement system — and how many regular folks aren’t particularly bothered by the horrific deaths of numerous prostitutes. (The movie was shot in Jordan, because it’s highly unlikely the restrictive Iranian government would have allowed a film so critical of the culture to be made there.)

The prime reason to watch “Holy Spider” is the performance of Ebrahimi, who perfectly captures Rahimi’s weariness and anger at the injustice Iranian women face, and the casual acceptance of violence against women forced by circumstance into sex work. (Interesting fact: Ebrahimi was hired as Abbasi’s casting director, and only took the movie’s lead role when the actress she picked dropped out. Ebrahimi went on to win the best-actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — and, with it, many death threats after the Iranian government condemned the film. Ebrahimi is starring in the Australian film “Shadya,” which will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, which starts next week.)

“Holy Spider” is an absorbing true-crime procedural and a sharp commentary on Iranian society, but first and foremost it’s an elegantly crafted cat-and-mouse game between a murderer and a journalist trying to stop him. It’s a movie that creates the kind of tension that doesn’t need translation.

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‘Holy Spider’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for bloody violence and strong sexual content. Running time: 116 minutes; in Farsi with subtitles.

Review: 'EO' is a simple, yet richly detailed, story of a donkey's life with and away from humans.

Sometimes the movies that are the easiest to synopsize are the hardest to explain — and that’s the case with “EO,” a beautiful and brutal movie that shows us the world through the soulful eyes of a much-abused donkey. 

When we first meet the donkey named EO, his life seems to be chaotic — he’s part of an animal act in a circus, with flashing lights and screaming crowds all around. But, in reality, he’s well taken care of, and loved, by his human performing partner, Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska). That apparently comfortable life is short-lived, as a group of animal-rights activists picket the circus, and a tax official confiscates the circus’ animals over unpaid debts. 

This is how EO’s journey begins. He is first sent to a horse breeder’s ranch, assigned to pull a hay wagon and to be a calming influence on the ranch’s star stallion. That situation is short-lived, and EO soon ends up somewhere else. Over the course of the movie, he ends up pulling carts, entertaining petting-zoo tours, put onto trucks headed to the butcher’s, lionized as a soccer team’s lucky charm, and rescued by a young man (Lorenzo Zurzolo) with an odd relationship with an older woman (Isabelle Huppert).

Those human dramas, when they come late in the film, feel more like distractions — which is a credit to how veteran director Jerzy Skolimowski as rewired his audience to take things at the donkey’s pace. It doesn’t take long for the audience to become attuned to the rhythms of a donkey’s life, and seeing things from his point of view.

It’s not all bucolic settings and an endless supply of carrots, though. EO witnesses a fair amount of violence, sometimes aimed at him and sometimes doled out by humans on each other. EO doesn’t seem to try to make sense of it — and it’s a credit to Skolimowski and co-writer Ewa Piaskowska that they refrain from being anthropomorphic about it. We come to care for this donkey’s thoughts and feelings because he is a donkey, and somewhat unknowable because of that.

Fans of classic movies may recognize “EO,” as an updated version of Robert Bresson’s 1966 classic “Au hazard Balthazar,” also a story of a donkey taken from the girl who raised him and put on a road trip encountering good people and bad ones. Watching that classic isn’t a requirement before seeing “EO,” because its quiet charms and minimal dialogue don’t require any preliminaries. Just look into those big eyes, and follow that scraggly beast through his complicated life.

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‘EO’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some violence and sexual references. Running time: 88 minutes; in Polish, Italian, English, French and Spanish, with English subtitles.

Review: "M3gan" — a tale of a creepy robot doll — delivers some solid shocks, as well as drama and dark humor

Every few years we get a new variation on “Frankenstein,” a creepy cautionary tale about using technology to create a human-like being that can’t be controlled — and this year, that’s “M3gan,” a smart and slightly unhinged horror thriller about a woman, a girl and a doll who’s not to be trusted.

The girl is Cady (Violet McGraw), who at age 8 is orphaned when her parents are killed in a car crash in snowy Oregon. Cady is sent to live with her aunt, Gemma (Allison Williams), a workaholic robotics engineer for a major toy company in Seattle. Gemma is unprepared for instant guardian status, but tries to juggle caring for Cady with delivering an upgrade of her company’s Furby-like monstrosity for her demanding boss, David (played by comedian Ronny Chieng).

Behind David’s back, Gemma and her programming team, Tess (Jen Van Epps) and Cole (Brian Jordan Alvarez), have been developing a new product — a super-smart robot in the form of a little girl. Gemma has named it the Model 3 Generative Android, or M3GAN for short. Gemma brings Cady to work one day, and finds that her niece has bonded with the robot, which soon becomes the girl’s new best friend.

M3gan also becomes Cady’s protector — a job she starts taking a little too seriously, which is where the mayhem and murder start.

Director Gerard Johnstone deploys the technical wizards of New Zealand’s Weta Workshop, to create a robot in M3gan who doesn’t leap over the Uncanny Valley — the zone where computerized characters become so lifelike that they’re creepy — so much as set up camp there. It’s a group effort, with child actor Amie Donald, voice actor Jenna Davis and a fair amount of puppetry combining to make M3gan a scarily precise depiction of a robot.

Williams (“Get Out”) gives a strong performance as the scientist who realizes she’s created a monster, and she has some moving moments with McGraw (who played the young version of Florence Pugh in “Black Widow”), navigating shared grief in between the action set pieces.

The stealth MVP here is screenwriter Akela Cooper, riding the high after writing the bat-crap crazy horror movie “Malignant” for director James Wan. Cooper (who shares story credit here with Wan) ratchets up the tension, while also delivering some genuine emotion between Gemma and Cady, as well as some spiky humor at the expense of Gemma’s boss and her annoying neighbor (Lori Dungey). Cooper makes “M3gan” more fun than a new toy.

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‘M3gan’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violent content and terror, some strong language and a suggestive reference. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Corsage' doesn't hold together as a feminist update on a 19th century costume drama, but Vicky Krieps' dynamic performance demands attention

While watching the 19th century royal story “Corsage,” one can admire the attempt writer-director Marie Kreutzer makes at pumping some fresh air into the stodgy period costume drama, but at the same time acknowledge that there are moments where the effort falls short. 

But one also must acknowledge that Vicky Krieps, who plays the central figure in this story of a royal trying to break out of her gilded cage, is out-and-out brilliant.

Krieps (familiar to Americans from “Old” and “Phantom Thread”) plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who in 1877 is hitting her 40th birthday — a time when royal women are officially deemed old. Her relationship with her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister), are strained; their once-vigorous sex life has cooled, with both finding their bedroom comforts elsewhere. For Elisabeth, that means a barely concealed affair with her British-born riding instructor, Bay Middleton (Colin Morgan) — but soon she tires of his moony advances.

What Elisabeth wants is something to do, to be treated seriously by Franz Joseph and her royal entourage. But in the royal court in Vienna, roles are rigidly set. As Franz Joseph tells her at one point, “it is my duty to control the fate of our empire. Your duty is merely to represent.”

Elisabeth bristles at such duty, and finds little ways to dodge them. Her favorite, which she demonstrates early, is to fake a fainting spell — thus getting her out of boring tours of other royal families’ castles.

Kreutzer’s aim is to show Elisabeth as a woman apart from her time, a modern royal for decidedly unmodern times. Kreutzer gets a little anachronistic in making that point, like when Elisabeth is visiting her cousin, King Ludwig of Bavaria (Manuel Rubey), and they’re slow-dancing to the troubadour’s song, “Help Me Make It Through the Night” — which was apparently a passionate number some 90-odd years before Kris Kristofferson wrote it. (Later, a harpist sings The Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By.”)

But where Kreutzer’s attempts to enliven a stodgy historical drama — more drama than historical, by the looks of things — don’t play out perfectly, Krieps’ performance is a gem. The actress depicts Elisabeth as a ball of conflicting emotions, whether trying to play with her overly serious daughter Valerie (Rosa Hajjaj) or rebuffing the efforts of her adult son, Rudolf (Aaron Friesz), to make her behave more “appropriately” as an aging royal. Krieps maintains that balance, of old-world beauty and modern feminism, even when “Corsage” has trouble juggling those contradictory feelings.

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‘Corsage’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for graphic nudity, some sexual content, and language. Running time: 112 minutes; in German, mostly, with English subtitles.

Review: 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' covers Whitney Houston's tumultuous career without adding much about her life or her death.

The musical biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” isn’t a bad movie, really — not to say that it’s good — but it’s a fundamentally pointless one.

There’s no earthly reason we need to see an actor, even a talented one like Naomi Ackie, imitate the singer Whitney Houston through re-enactments of her music videos and noteworthy live performances, lip-synching “The Voice” (a moniker that the movie beats into the audience’s head). Nor do we need to watch Ackie go through the beats of Houston’s life, from singing in her mom’s church choir in 1983 to preparing the cocaine that would hasten her death in a hotel bathtub in 2012. 

Those of us of a certain age watched it all happen in real time. Plus, it was only four years ago that director Kevin Macdonald made “Whitney,” a documentary that covered the same ground and in less time. (This movie runs an inexcusably slow two hours and 26 minutes.)

The story starts in Houston’s New Jersey church, where her mother — the R&B singer Cissy Houston — (Tamara Tunie) is choir director. Whitney also sings backup for Cissy’s nightclub act, and on one night Cissy fakes that her voice has given out, so Whitney must go on in her place, singing “The Greatest Love of All.” What Whitney doesn’t know, and Cissy and the audience do, is that Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci), the influential head of Arista Records, is in the audience.

After declaring Whitney, after one listen, to be “the greatest voice of her generation,” Davis signs Whitney to a record contract. Then they start talking music, and Whitney declares she wants to sing “great songs” that demonstrate her vocal range — and she’s agnostic about what genre those songs come in.

A montage later, and Whitney and Clive have found some of the songs for her first album, “Whitney Houston” — songs like “Saving All My Love for You” and “How Do I Know,” which become No. 1 hits and cement her stardom.

Intercut with Whitney’s rise are scenes where she meets Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), who becomes the singer’s sometime girlfriend and full-time paid creative advisor — a move that rankles her manager, who’s also her father, John Houston (Clarke Peters). Daddy wants to protect Whitney’s image, so he tells his daughter to start being seen in public dating men.

Whitney resists this order at first, but then she meets R&B singer Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders) at the Soul Train Awards. Dating Bobby satisfies her father, and it helps fend off criticism that Whitney’s music is too white. (One scene where Whitney defiantly puts a radio interviewer in his place may be the only authentic moment in the movie.) As we know, marrying Brown leads to its own problems — though, as Whitney herself says at one point, the drugs were there before he was.

Director Kasi Lemmons — who scored with a different biopic, “Harriet,” in 2019 — gets the most out of her actors, with Tunie, Tucci, Peters, Williams and Sanders all giving solid support to Ackie’s dynamic central turn as Whitney. Lemmons also deploys all the special effects wizardry at her disposal to re-create some of Whitney’s most famous performance moments, from her debut on “The Merv Griffin Show” through her Super Bowl rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to her “comeback” performance on “Oprah.”

The weak link is the screenplay, and the culprit is writer Anthony McCarten, whose resumé includes fictionalized life stories of Freddie Mercury (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), Winston Churchill (“Darkest Hour”) and Stephen Hawking (“The Theory of Everything”). The fact that all three of those movies earned Oscars for their lead actors doesn’t dispel the fact that McCarten’s approach is tediously narrow, as creative as a paint-by-numbers set. It traffics in the same cliches “Bohemian Rhapsody” did (including a discomfort with discussing the main figure’s homosexuality), cliches that parodies like “Walk Hard; The Dewey Cox Story” exploded years ago.

(It’s worth mentioning that Davis and Pat Houston, Whitney’s sister-in-law and her manager late in life, are among the many producers on the film, so there’s a limit to how much tea is being spilled.)

“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” delivers a stinging criticism of Houston’s career, and I don’t think the filmmakers meant to do so. Her greatest moments — her Super Bowl rendition of the national anthem, her cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” (for “The Bodyguard”) and her 1994 American Music Awards performance (a showstopper medley that included cuts from “Porgy and Bess” and “Dreamgirls”) — all highlight Houston’s vocal chops on other people’s songs. Houston may have been “The Voice,” but the movie’s inadvertent message is that she didn’t have anything to say.

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‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’

★★

Opens Friday, December 23, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong drug content, some strong language, suggestive references and smoking. Running time: 146 minutes.

Review: 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' puts the 'Shrek'-adjacent feline in a frisky and funny adventure

Oh, the joy of walking into a movie with no expectations, as I did for “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” and coming away with a big goofy grin, because of the abundant humor and attention to the animation detail that combine for a surprisingly delightful gem.

For those who don’t remember, Puss — as charmingly voiced by Antonio Banderas — was a supporting player in the second “Shrek” movie, the adventuresome cat repurposed as a Zorro-like swashbuckler. He got his own movie in 2011, and apparently the minds at DreamWorks thought he should get another one.

I don’t really care how it happened, but it’s wonderful that it did, because “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’ may be the best movie in the “Shrek” franchise.

The movie starts with Puss doing what he does best: Battling bad guys, saving townsfolk, and looking debonair doing it. At the end of this particular adventure — rendered with full action-movie adrenaline by directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado — Puss gets crushed by the town’s massive church bell.

Well, no problem for a cat with nine lives, right? Well, maybe not, when Puss counts up his past lives (a clever montage of mishaps and misplaced bravado), and realizes that he’s down to his last life.

Puss decides to retire his sword, and enter a nursing home for cats — but there’s only so much soft living a cat of adventure can take. Then he hears there’s a map that can show him the location of the legendary wishing star, and Puss is back in action.

But he’s not the only one looking for the map — which was purchased at great expense by the evil head of a pie-baking conglomerate, Big Jack Horner (voiced by comedian John Mullaney). Puss goes to Jack’s lair to steal it, and finds he’s competing for the map with his nemesis and ex-girlfriend, Kitty Softpaws (again voiced by Salma Hayek Pinault, giving us the “Desperado” reunion we always wanted).

Puss and Kitty reluctantly join forces, accompanied by an overeager chihuahua they call Perro (and voiced by Harvey Guillen from “What We Do in the Shadows”). Also on the scent of the map is one of the area’s toughest crime families: The Three Bears (voiced by Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman and Samson Kayo), with their adopted daughter, Goldilocks (voiced by Florence Pugh). And Jack has assembled his goon squad, the Baker’s Dozen, go get his map back.

Puss also has to worry about someone who’s chasing him: The Big Bad Wolf (voiced by Wagner Moura, Pablo Escobar from “Narcos”), who’s both a bounty hunter and the embodiment of Death. 

There’s a tactile roughness to the computer animation that’s surprisingly energizing, as if the filmmakers decided the action was moving too fast to render too many details. The look matches the pacing, which is usually as fast as Puss’ swordplay and his verbal quips. (Puss’ defiant catchphrase, “Fear me, if you dare!,” will never cease being funny to me.)

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is one of those split-level animated movie that serves up a fun story for the kids, and jokes that will sail over the children’s heads and land with the grown-ups. That approach doesn’t always work on both levels, but when it delights the way this one does, it’s pretty special.

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‘Puss in Boots: The Last Wish’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, December 21, in theaters. Rated PG for action/violence, rude humor/language, and some scary moments. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'The Whale,' Brendan Fraser's comeback movie, has good performances in an atrocious story

There are few things more depressing to a movie critic that watching good performers trying to hack their way through a garbage screenplay — which is the fate assigned to Brendan Fraser and the supporting performers in director Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” an insufferable wallow of one character’s self-loathing.

Fraser, in what’s been positioned as his comeback role and a likely Oscar win, plays Charlie, a community college English instructor who conducts his classes virtually — and always telling his students his laptop camera is busted. The truth is something different: Charlie weighs around 600 pounds, and doesn’t want his students to see him in his bloated condition.

Aronofsky — who has depicted heroin addiction in “Requiem for a Dream,” madness in “Black Swan,” and Biblical catastrophe in “Noah” and “mother!” — isn’t so shy about showing Charlie as he is. Or, more rather, how Fraser portrays Charlie through movement and a prosthetic fat suit. He gets around his Idaho apartment with a walker, he picks things off the floor with a grabber stick, and he strains to wash himself in the shower.

Charlie has been told by his nurse, and only friend, Liz (Hong Chau), that he has congestive heart failure, and will die within days if he doesn’t do something. But Charlie — like Nicolas Cage’s alcoholic character in “Leaving Las Vegas” — seems to be ready to die. His eating habits, which include double-stacking his pizza slices and shotgunning a meatball sub, indicate that he is not-so-slowly killing himself with food.

Two other visitors to Charlie’s apartment may persuade him whether to stick around. One is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary from the nearby evangelical megachurch — whose pastor happens to be Liz’s adoptive father, and the father of Charlie’s now-departed boyfriend. The other is Ellie (Sadie Sink), Charlie’s estranged and super-angry teen daughter, who wants nothing out of Charlie except some term-paper advice so she can graduate from high school and escape this town.

Unfortunately, for all the powerhouse acting from Fraser, Chau and Sink (a veteran of both “Stranger Things” and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” short film), it’s in service to a cliche-ridden script by Samuel D. Hunter, who adapted it from his own play. The script feels like a play, both because the action is confined to Charlie’s apartment, and because the emotions are being thrown to the upper balcony.

Fraser’s performance does nail the mannerisms, the slowness of movement and gravity-pulling defeat of Charlie’s morbidly obese character — with a touch of melancholy about how he got this way. His performance in “The Whale” deserves to be talked about in the annual award conversation, even if the movie doesn’t.

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‘The Whale’

★★

Opens Wednesday, December 21, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: Historical mystery 'The Pale Blue Eye' is awash in melancholy, but in need of more tension

A brooding melancholy hangs over the historical murder mystery “The Pale Blue Eye,” and there’s nothing writer-director Scott Cooper can do to break through the fog and deliver something other than a somber, pedestrian costume drama.

The setting is New York’s Hudson Valley in 1830 — specifically, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. One dark night, a cadet is found hanging from a tree. The death could be counted as a suicide, another casualty of the rigors of cadet training, except for one thing: The next day, the officers discover the heart has been surgically removed from the dead cadet’s body.

The superintendent, Col Thayer — who was a real person (and is played here with cartoonish gruffness by Timothy Spall) — summons a nearby civilian, a retired New York City detective named Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), to investigate the case. Landor consults with the academy’s physician, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), about the method of the cadet’s death and dissection, but has trouble getting much from the cadets.

The one cadet not committed to the code of silence is an oddball student, who volunteers his opinion to Landor that the killer must be a poet — which this cadet should know, since he’s a poet himself. The cadet introduces himself as Edgar A. Poe. Yes, that Edgar Allan Poe, the future writer of “The Raven” and other macabre tales. (Poe is played by Harry Melling, who has developed since his days as the bratty Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” films.)

Encouraged by Landor, Poe talks his way into a group of cadets with an interest in the supernatural. This group includes Dr. Marquis’ son, Artemus (Harry Lawtey), who invites Poe to dinner with the family, including Dr. Marquis’ wife Julia (Gillian Anderson) and their fragile daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) — on whom Poe develops a strong attraction, which irks another cadet, Ballinger (Fred Hechinger).

That’s a lot of characters, era setting and plot development, and Cooper (“Antlers,” “Hostiles,” “Out of the Furnace”), in adapting Louis Bayard’s novel doesn’t take shortcuts — though there are moments when a viewer might believe he should. The dramatic tension is bogged down in overly long exposition and oppressive camerawork.

It’s good that the movie doesn’t scrimp on space for Bale to give a lived-in, haunted performance as Landor, a man battling his demons and beset by memories of his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson). Her absence is unexplained (to us), but has left a hole in Landor’s heart.

Melling’s performance as Poe seems cut from a different movie than what Bale is working. Rabbity and given great swaths of dialogue to deliver, Melling’s portrayal takes Poe’s eccentricities as a given, rather than treating his short West Point stint as the origin story a character like this needs.

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 23, in some theaters; starts streaming January 6 on Netflix. Rated R for some violent content and bloody images. Running time: 128 minutes.