Review: 'Living' is quietly emotional, and a Oscar-nominated showcase for Bill Nighy

Like the main character that has given Bill Nighy his long-deserved Academy Award nomination, director Oliver Hermanus’ “Living” is elegant and emotionally restrained — but with a massive heart beating underneath that placid surface.

Nighy plays Rodney Williams, a civil servant who has worked for decades in the public works department in London. The movie starts somewhere around 1950, after World War II, and Williams — having received a diagnosis that he has a terminal cancer — is realizing that his life of filing away papers and wrapping proposals in red tape isn’t fulfilling.

First, he decides to flee London, his work, and his son Michael (Barney Fishwick) and his daughter-in-law Fiona (Patsy Ferran), for the seaside, with half of his life’s savings with him. In a coastal town, he is befriended by a garrulous playwright (Tom Burke), who gives him a tour of the arcades and burlesques of the town. That turns out to be unsatisfying, too.

Back in London, he continues to play hooky from work, and spends a pleasant afternoon with a young woman, Miss Harris (Aimee Lee Wood), who recently left Williams’ office for another job. She ultimately cajoles him to return to the public works department — but he’s a changed man, his colleagues notice, suddenly eager to push forward projects he used to bury.

If this story sounds familiar, then you’re a fan of classic arthouse movies. It’s a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama “Ikiru,” adapted with precisely controlled emotions by novelist Kazoo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), who also got an Academy Award nomination this week.

Hermanus and Ishiguro establish with a few light brushstrokes the stifling conformity in which Williams has lived much of his life — riding the same train every morning that his junior staffers do, sitting at the same desks and forming what Miss Harris calls “skyscrapers” of bureaucratic files. It’s all painstakingly realized, and the perfect cage from which Williams so desperately wants to escape.

Nighy does give a career-high performance here, going from quiet acceptance to melancholy to a resolve to make something of his life, no matter how short that life will be. Nighy makes “Living” a story that will move the viewer to tears — and to examining what one is doing with their life.

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‘Living’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 27, in select theaters. Rated PG-13 for some suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Missing' is a tight cyber thriller, where some big ideas play out on small screens

The cyber thriller “Missing” works — as its predecessor, “Searching,” did — because it keeps all its action on a computer screen, and finds an endless supply of tricks to make that visual premise work on our nerves for nearly two hours.

At 17, June (Storm Reid) barely lifts ahead above her laptop to acknowledge her mom, Grace (Nia Long), who’s getting ready to leave on a week’s vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung). June doesn’t think she has to look up, because everything she needs is on her screen, or on her phone. She’s got video to remember her late father (Tim Griffin), FaceTime to keep in touch with Grace’s longtime friend Heather (Amy Landecker), chat platforms to converse with her friends, and Google to research ways to get booze for a party she and her friends are going to throw as soon as Grace’s plane is airborne.

When June goes to LAX a week later to pick up her mother, Mom is a no-show. June learns, from the FBI’s man at the Bogota embassy, Agent Park (Daniel Henney) that Grace and Kevin’s luggage is still at their hotel in Cartagena, but no one knows what happens to them.

June is worried, but not without resources. She hacks into Kevin’s Google account to dig up information from his emails. Remotely, she hires Javi (Joaquim de Almeida), a day laborer in Cartagena, to go to Grace’s hotel to follow her trail. And she monitors surveillance cameras at Cartagena landmarks, in hopes her mom suddenly shows up.

June’s computer savvy uncovers some bombshells of information, which the story drops at steady intervals, creating some white-knuckle tension and some hairpin turns in the narrative.

Directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick — who were editors on “Searching” — and co-screenwriter Sev Ohanian (who also co-wrote “Searching”) — create a cleverly rendered thriller, loaded with red herrings, switchback narratives, and some effective plot twists that keep June, and the audience, on their toes.

“Missing,” like “Searching” was before it, is an eye-opening commentary about the ubiquity of surveillance cameras, smartphones and easily hackable data — and a reminder that one’s personal data doesn’t necessarily remain personal for long. Wrapping that message up in a slick, fast-paced thriller just makes the message go down faster.

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‘Missing’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, language, teen drinking, and thematic material. Running time: 111 minutes.

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.