Review: 'Saint Omer' is a dense courtroom drama about mothers and daughters, but the emotional payoff is immense.

Director Alice Diop demands a lot from the audience in her courtroom drama “Saint Omer” — and for those willing to meet the movie head-on, there is an emotional payoff.

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a literature professor and novelist, and her latest project is hitting close to home. She travels to Saint-Omer, in the far northern corner of France, which is where she grew up. She’s there to witness the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant on trial for killing her 15-month-old baby by leaving her on the shore and letting the waves drown her.

Rama’s idea is to use Laurence’s trial as the basis for a modern-day take on “Medea,” the ancient Greek tragedy of a woman who killed her children. But as the court testimony goes on, Rama notices the parallels between Laurence’s story and her own. Both are from Senegal, both are in relationships with Caucasian Frenchmen, and Rama is four months’ pregnant and having doubts about what kind of mother she will be.

Diop, writing with frequent collaborator Amrita David (who also edited the film), takes the audience on an uncomfortable trip into the mind of Black immigrants living in a predominantly white country — a life, no matter one’s class status, that involves constantly being questioned about your place. Diop sets up a fascinating contrast between Rama and Laurence, two women who aren’t as far apart as Rama initially believes.

The story plays out mostly in courtroom scenes, and I have to admit my unfamiliarity with the way French court testimony works had me confused for part of my viewing. (One moment, when Laurence’s white attorney, played by Aurélia Petit, gives the summation, reminded me too much of Matthew McConaughey’s character in “A Time to Kill.”)

Watching the two lead performances, by Kagame and Malanda, as two women with common situations but different outcomes, makes for compelling drama — and gives “Saint Omer” the tension Diop is seeking to create. 

——

‘Saint Omer’

★★★

Opening Friday, February 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and brief strong language. Running time: 124 minutes; in French with subtitles.

Review: 'Baby Ruby' is an unsettling thriller about new motherhood, bolstered by French star Noémie Merlant's passionate performance.

The psychological thriller “Baby Ruby” does some fascinating things with a familiar idea: That one of the most terrifying things a woman can face is new motherhood.

Joséphine, played by French actor Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), has built a small business out of her personal brand as a social-media influencer and blogger — sharing her picture-perfect life with the world. She and her husband, Spencer (Kit Harington), an artisanal butcher, have built a beautiful home upstate, and are getting ready to greet their baby daughter, Ruby.

After Ruby’s birth — a rather blood-filled experience — Jo finds caring for her new baby a tougher battle than she thought. Jo is up at all hours, either trying to get Ruby to stop crying or strapping on the breast pumps to express milk for later. Sleep deprivation sets in, and Jo begins to think something’s horribly wrong with her baby.

Seeing the other moms in her town — in particular Shelly (Meredith Hagner) — all smiling and serene with their babies, just sets Jo spiraling even further. She starts to think she can’t trust her pediatrician (Reed Birney), her mother-in-law (Jayne Atkinson) or even Spencer.

Playwright Bess Wohl (whose play “Grand Horizons” was nominated for two Tonys in 2020) makes a sure-footed directing debut, squeezing Jo’s postpartum fears into the shape of a horror thriller. Her smartest move in “Baby Ruby,” though, was casting Merlant, who captures Jo’s journey from confident influencer to terrified new mom with convincing levels of panic and horror. 

——

‘Baby Ruby’

★★★

Opening Friday, February 3, in theaters. Not rated, but probably R for bloody violence, some nudity and sexual content, and language. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'The Amazing Maurice,' adapting Terry Pratchett's children's story, is a funny attempt at a fractured fairytale

Loaded with clever animation and droll British wit, the animated “The Amazing Maurice” is a charming sendup of the fairytale genre that revels in the act of storytelling itself.

Adapted from the late Terry Pratchett’s “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,” part of Pratchett’s expansive “Discworld” series, the story starts with a talking cat, Maurice (voiced by Hugh Laurie). 

Maurice works a clever scam alongside a human, Keith (voiced by Himesh Patel), and a group of talking rats — where the rats “infest” a town, the cat urges the townsfolk to hire a piper, Keith, who lures the rats away while Maurice collects the money. Then they go to the next town and do the whole thing again.

The scam works until they reach the market town of Bad Blintz, which already has its problems: There are no rats visible, but something is stealing all the food. The town rat catchers seem to be doing too good a job, under the command of the mysterious Boss Man (voiced by David Thewlis), who has a dark secret up his sleeves.

It also doesn’t help that Maurice’s cover is blown when he’s found out by Malicia (voiced by Emilia Clarke), the daughter of the mayor (voiced by Hugh Bonneville). Malicia loves telling stories so much that she’s telling this one — she’s the narrator, and explains to the younger viewers such concepts as “framing device” and “backstory.” 

The plot boils down to whether the rats can solve the mystery and thwart Boss Man’s nefarious, and whether Maurice can overcome his cat instincts — to be selfish and run away from danger — to help his rat friends find their sanctuary, described by the wise rat called Dangerous Beans (voiced by David Tennant) as a place where animals and humans co-exist peacefully, without poisons or traps.

Directors Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann keep the pace lively, and mount some clever action set pieces that are exciting without being too violent. The screenplay, by “Shrek” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” co-writer Terry Rossio, captures a lot of Pratchett’s dry humor as the story deconstructs its tropes and rebuilds them in interesting ways — and gives “The Amazing Maurice” more bite than the average kids’ movie.

——

‘The Amazing Maurice’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 3, in theaters. Rated PG for action/peril and some rude material. Running time: 92 minutes.

——

This review originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2023, when the movie appeared at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Knock at the Cabin' is a solid thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, but Dave Bautista is the reason to watch

As he has done so often in his career, director M. Night Shyamalan deploys his abundant skills as a film craftsman to uncertain ends in “Knock at the Cabin” — a tough-minded horror thriller that keeps the audience clenched in anticipation all the way to a finale that will have as many interpretations as it has viewers.

(I’ll try to keep the synopsis out of spoiler territory — other than what Universal has already divulged in the movie’s trailer. But If you want to go in cold, read this after you’ve seen it and we can compare experiences.)

The story begins with Wen (Kristen Cui), almost 8 years old, out in the woods catching grasshoppers in a jar and diligently cataloging them in her notebook. Then she notices a man some distance away in the woods — and, before long, the man is walking right up to talk to her.

The man, played by Dave Bautista, is large and, at first, intimidating. He talks in a quiet, reassuring voice. Wen is wary, telling the man that she’s not supposed to talk to strangers — and the man agrees that is a wise policy. He tells Wen that “I’m here to be your friend,” and introduces himself as Leonard. Then he says his heart is broken, “because of what I have to do today.”

This scares Wen, as it should, and she runs back to the rental cabin she’s sharing with her two dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge). They lock the doors and windows, and wait until Leonard pounds on the front door.

Leonard’s not alone. He has three people with them, all carrying makeshift weapons — clubs with large blades attached, mostly. They fight their way into the house, and in the short battle Eric is knocked out and given a concussion. Both dads are tied to chairs, which is when Leonard and the others explain themselves.

Leonard insists that he and the others are ordinary folks — Leonard’s a schoolteacher from Chicago; Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird) identifies herself as a post-op nurse from California; Adriana (Abby Quinn) says she works as a line cook in a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C.; and Redmond (Rupert Grint) works for a utility in Boston. 

The four say they all have seen visions of the apocalypse, and are convinced that the only way to prevent the end of the world is for Eric, Andrew and Wen to choose for one of them to be sacrificed, killed by someone in their family. The longer they wait to make that choice, Leonard tells them, more people on Earth will die.

The script — written by Shyamalan and the rookie writing team of Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, adapting Paul Tremblay’s novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” — moves to a fairly familiar rhythm, as the four invaders plead with the two dads, who don’t believe their talk of apocalypse. There also are some well-placed flashbacks that establish the dads’ relationship and how they adopted Wen as a baby from China to become this loving family.

The remarkable moments in the film belong to Bautista, who’s become more of a true actor than one would expect from a 6-foot-4 ex-wrestler. Bautista has previously shown he’s got action and comic chops, in his role as Drax in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. Here, though, he brings a soulfulness and a quiet intensity to the pre-apocalyptic proceedings.

The question mark, as with most Shyamalan movies, is how he sticks the landing. In his masterpieces, “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable,” the ending is where all the pieces fall perfectly into place, and you see the clockwork precision of his design. More recently, though, in movies like “Split,” “Glass” and “Old,” the ending is where everything goes haywire, and the springs of the clockwork fly out of the mechanism.

With the ending to “Knock at the Cabin,” the ending just  … happens. There’s no brilliant summation, and no disaster. It ends like a solid thriller is supposed to end, as if Shyamalan’s biggest twist is to deliver a movie that is well-constructed and goes pretty much where you expect it to go.

——

‘Knock at the Cabin’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violence and language. Running time: 100 minutes.

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.

——

‘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.

——

‘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.

——

‘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.

——

‘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.