Review: 'The Son,' despite its strong cast, is a willfully dreary piece of pandering Oscar bait

Sometimes you have to trust the system — and the system has rightfully rejected the Oscar-season pander-monster that is “The Son,” a pedigreed sadness machine that is as phony as can be.

Reading the names in the movie’s credits would make you think this is something special. It’s directed by French playwright-turned-filmmaker Florian Zeller, based on one of his plays, adapted for the screen by Zeller and Christopher Hampton. Those are the same people, and circumstances, that in 2020 produced “The Father,” the justly acclaimed drama about Alzheimer’s that won Oscars for Anthony Hopkins’ gut-wrenching performance and for Zeller and Hampton’s adapted screenplay.

The cast is loaded with dramatic heavy-hitters: Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, for starters, along with Oscar winners Laura Dern and, again, Hopkins — playing, despite the title’s suggestions of a sequel, a markedly different role than he did in “The Father.” 

What could go wrong? Plenty, as Zeller explores some serious topics — parental abandonment, teen depression and suicide — with none of the sincerity and sensitivity that “The Father” displayed.

Jackman plays Peter Miller, a successful New York lawyer with everything going for him: A beautiful young wife, Beth (Kirby), a new baby they share, and the potential for a high-powered job in a D.C. congressional office. That perfection gets upended when Peter’s first wife, Kate (Dern), calls up with a big problem: Their teen son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), has been skipping school and showing signs of self-harm. Kate is at her wit’s end, and asks Peter to let Nicholas live with him for awhile.

Peter tries to connect with Nicholas with some old-school moves of guys hanging out and doing stuff. But Peter finds he’s ill-equipped for being father to a troubled teen — and the steps he attempts are too much in line with how his cold father (played by Hopkins) treated him.

All this might work in a stage play, but onscreen it dissolves into a hackneyed, overcooked melodrama in which the main characters each are given two emotional settings, and the audience has to guess which way the switch has been flipped. Is Peter a loving dad or a short-tempered one? Is Nicholas truly suicidal or just manipulative? Is Kate trying to be a good co-parent or is she secretly trying to win Peter back? Is Beth jealous of her stepson or rightly protective of her baby? The way Zeller leaves the options open feels like a writer playing a capricious God.

That said, the actors work to produce human-scaled performances — especially Dern and Kirby, as the mothers trying to protect their children. But there’s too much of a stacked deck in “The Son” to let the performances overcome Zeller’s shameless handling of the subject matter.

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‘The Son’

★★

Opens Friday, January 20, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving suicide, and strong language. Running time: 123 minutes.

Review: 'Women Talking' is a shattering drama about women isolated by religion and liberated by faith

Few movies tell their stories as economically and as emotionally as “Women Talking,” writer-director Sarah Polley’s quietly powerful drama about women confronting the terrors of their life, the pain of their religion and the joys of their faith.

Polley’s beautifully spare script, adapted from Miriam Toews’ novel, doesn’t tell us at first when the events in this movie happen. Among the women of this Mennonite community, cut off from the outside world, it seemingly could be any time. 

What we’re told at the outset is that many of the women have woken up over the past few years in pain, bruised all over their bodies, and frequently bleeding from their private areas. Some of them find out later that they became pregnant. When the women reported this to the menfolk, the men said the women had imagined it, or were being punished for not having sufficient faith.

Then the truth comes out, that one of the men had drugged the women and raped them. The male leaders of this community go into town to bail out the perpetrator, and give the women orders when the men get back: Forgive the rapist, or be banished from the community that has been the only life they or their children have known.

The women, clad in their neck-to-floor prairie dresses, gather in the hayloft and vote for their three options: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the community. Here’s where the “talking” of the title happens, as the women weigh their vote.

Salome (Claire Foy) is the most militantly angry of the group, while Mariche (Jessie Buckley), after years of abuse from her husband, is cynical that anything can change. Salome’s unmarried sister Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant after being raped, is more thoughtful, as she works to understand how men who are the pillars of their faith could commit such horrific acts.

Among the older women, Greta (Sheila McCarthy), Mariche’s mother, seeks to find answers from the metaphor provided by her carriage horses, Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand) boycotts the whole discussion, and Agata (Judith Ivey), Salome and Ona’s mother, advises the women to find forgiveness — if not for the men, than for themselves that they could be put in this situation.

The women’s words are taken down by the one man left behind on the compound, the shy schoolteacher August Epp (Ben Whishaw), who went away from the colony for his education but reluctantly came back. Ona, who has known August for years, asks August to transcribe the women’s meeting, so there will be a record of their thoughts — as conflicted as they are.

Polley haș transformed so gracefully from child actor to sensitive filmmaker that it feels completely proper that she should take on this difficult material. The “action” is entirely in the dialogue, as the women work to talk through the ramifications of their decision. At its heart, the discussion is about faith, which is one’s relationship with God — as opposed to religion, defined here as a construct of men, designed to maintain power and control in God’s name.

Picking a “best” performance out of this ensemble is impossible, as each of the women support each other, and it’s the accumulated power of their portrayals that makes the movie so compelling. (Perhaps this is why awards groups such as the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild — unable to choose among Mara, Foy, Buckley, Ivey or McCarthy — have not nominated any of them individually. The Screen Actors Guild did nominate the movie for best ensemble, their equivalent of a Best Picture category.)

Together, the women of “Women Talking” pull at our hearts, make us understand their pain, and allow us to marvel at their grace and stamina to carry on in spite of what they have endured. These women onscreen — and the one, Polley, behind the camera — also give us enough to think about, and talk about, long after the film is over.

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‘Women Talking’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content including sexual assault, bloody images, and some strong language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Plane' is a brawny, but often brainless, throwback to the airplane disaster dramas of old

Like most movies that have the name Gerard Butler above the title, the action thriller “Plane” is, like the characters Butler usually plays, tough and single-minded and not always that bright.

Here, Butler plays airline pilot Brodie Torrance, who’s flying a late-night run from Singapore to Tokyo. His co-pilot, Samuel Dele (Yoson An, the romantic lead in the live-action “Mulan”), is new to Brodie, giving screenwriters Charles Cumming and J.P. Davis room to lard up on backstory: How Brodie is Scottish (saving Butler the work of affecting an unconvincing accent), flew with the RAF, and is a widower with a college-age daughter, Daniella (Haleigh Hekking), waiting in Hawaii for a New Year’s Eve reunion.

The plane soon is loaded up with Brodie’s personal story, the flight crew and 14 passengers — one of them a handcuffed fugitive, Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter). Brodie and Dele put the plane in the air, and right into a storm that Brodie warned the flight officer in Singapore would be trouble. When lightning hits the plane and knocks out the computer-run flight systems, Brodie has to crash-land, and finds a remote island in the Phillippines. Only two people die before the landing: A flight attendant Brodie knew, and the air marshall chaperoning Gaspare.

On the ground, lead flight attendant, Bonnie Lane (Daniella Pineda), tries to get the passengers organized, while Brodie and Dele look at the maps and figure out where they are. They realize they’re on an island not controlled by the Philippine government, but by a group of separatist rebels whose No. 1 hobby is taking foreigners hostage and killing them when they don’t get their ransom demands. Brodie picks Gaspare — who has military training — to help find a way to contact the airline.

At the airline’s corporate offices in New York, the CEO and his crisis team is working to find the plane and minimize the public-relations fallout. At this point, the CEO (Paul Ben-Victor) says in a very important voice — and I swear I’m not making this up — “Get me David Scarsdale.”

David Scarsdale — played by Tony Goldwyn because Lloyd Bridges is no longer with us — walks in, starts ordering people around, and declares that the only way to get the passengers and crew home safe is to send in mercenaries with lots of guns and a bag of cash to pay off the rebels. This is the closest thing the suits in New York have to a plan, and because some studio executive thinks it’s time to reboot the “Airport” franchise, that’s what they do.

Of course, this being a Gerard Butler movie, Brodie has another idea: Shoot, stab or beat up every rebel he sees. Gaspare can’t talk Brodie out of this plan of attack, so he joins in the mayhem.

French director Jean-François Richet, who made the 2005 remake of “Assault on Precinct 13,” stages some passable action sequences, with a lot of handheld camera work to make the action seem more jittery and exciting. The problem is that it takes a long time to get to the meat of the action, leaving Butler in unfamiliar territory: Trying to act like a human being, rather than the one-man wrecking crew the audience paid to see. The result in “Plane” is a bloody action movie that’s as generic as its title implies.

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‘Plane’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Broker' is a tenderly rendered tale of illegal adoption, and the makeshift family brought together by desperation

The Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu hops over to Korea to make his latest film, “Broker,” but he keeps what has worked for him before: A sly intelligence and an empathy for people living on life’s margins and creating a found family.

The story begins when So-Ahn (Lee Ji Eun) leaves a baby on the sidewalk outside a church in Busan. Then another woman, Soo-jin (Doona Bae), gets out of a car, and puts the baby in a “baby box” — a sort of night depository for abandoned babies. Two volunteers inside the church, Sang-hyeon (Song Kang Ho, the poor dad from “Parasite”) and Dong-soo (Gang Dong Won), decide to take the baby, with the intent of finding a couple to adopt the kid outside legal channels.

Kore-eda, who also wrote the script, soon reveals that this isn’t the first time Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo have done this. Soo-jin knows this, because she’s a police sergeant who’s staking them out, with a junior detective, Lee (Joo Young Lee), in hopes of busting them for human trafficking.

This time, though, something’s different in the pattern. This time, the baby’s mother, So-Ahn, comes back to talk to the church workers. So-Ahn tells the men that she wants in, to get a cut of the money — 10 million won, a shade over $8,000 — that will come from selling the baby to a wealthy couple.

The three of them hop in a beat-up delivery van, from Song-hyeon’s laundry business, and drive to meet a prospective couple. Something about them, though, feels fishy about the couple’s haggling, so So-Ahn unilaterally rejects the deal. And the three reluctant business partners hit the road.

The group arrives at an orphanage, which is where Dong-soo grew up. Song-hyeon tells So-Ahn that Dong-soo aged out of the orphanage, because no one would adopt him — because his mother left a note saying she would someday come back for him. So-Ahn left a similar note with her baby boy, whom she named Woo-Song, and wonders aloud whether she really meant it.

Leaving the orphanage, the group realize they have a stowaway, the soccer-loving Hae-jin (Im Seung Soo). With the kid added to the mix, this group starts coalescing into a sort of makeshift family. But Soo-jin and Detective Lee are still staking them out — which is complicated when Soo-jin learns from HQ that a local mob boss has been murdered, the baby is the mobster’s child, and So-Ahn may be a suspect in the boss’s death.

As he did with “Shoplifters” (which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2018), Kore-eda paints a rich portrait of people living on society’s edges, trying to get by with what they can scrape together — even if those methods aren’t legal. Yes, it’s weird to have a movie where you’re supposed to empathize with black-market baby brokers, but as Kore-eda peels away the layers of the onion, we start to empathize with Dong-soo’s orphan background and So-Ahn’s desperation to save her baby from a bad life. 

In “Broker,” Kore-eda is blessed with a strong ensemble of actors, who capture the quirks of each character and manage to meld them into a powerful unit — a family, for lack of a better world.

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‘Broker’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some language.  Running time: 130 minutes; in Korean with subtitles.

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.