Review: 'What Comes Around' is a cautionary thriller about dating in the internet age — until it takes a sharp turn into something creepy

It’s nearly impossible to talk about what goes wrong in “What Comes Around,” because the problem is a twist that doesn’t work — and I’m not going to give it away, even though it’s why director Amy Redford’s intimate thriller goes off the rails.

Redford and screenwriter Scott Organ, who adapts his play “The Thing With Feathers,” start with Anna (Grace Van Dien), a high-school girl who’s spending a lot of time on her computer and on FaceTime, talking to a guy she met online. That guy, Eric (Kyle Gallner), charms Anna with his appreciation of Emily Dickinson and his brooding charm. 

Anna doesn’t tell her mom, Beth (Summer Phoenix), at first. Mom’s preoccupied anyway, since she’s freshly sporting an engagement ring from her boyfriend, Tim (Jesse Garcia), who’s the town’s assistant police chief.

But when Eric tells Anna that he wants to see her in person — and Anna sees on FaceTime that he’s saying that while standing on her front porch — telling Beth becomes a necessity. And when Beth gets one look at Eric, her response is unvarnished: “Get the hell out of my house.”

Everything I’ve described so far is in the trailer. And it all happens before the sharp turn Organ’s script takes right into a ditch.

The sharp turn is, on one level, lurid and creepy. It’s also a narrative dead-end, a “check, please” moment from which the sharpest screenwriter would find hard to recover.

Redford — directing her second movie, after the 2008 cancer drama “The Guitar” — constructs a tight, claustrophobic thriller, getting strong performances from Van Dien (“Stranger Things”) and Phoenix (“SLC Punk!”) as a daughter and mother learning hard truths about each other. She also gets a lot of solid visuals on a fast timeline, filming in 16 days in Park City, Utah, with mostly local crews. 

It’s almost enough to overcome the pothole in the middle of Organ’s script — but almost doesn’t count.

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‘What Comes Around’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexual dialogue and language. Running time: 85 minutes.

Review: 'Blue Beetle' is a bumpy superhero ride, but star Xolo Maridueña is a charming pick to build a franchise on

The latest installment of the DC movie world, “Blue Beetle,” is a wild ride, if sometimes bumpy and lacking a sense that director Angel Manuel Soto is fully in control.

In Palmera City — which is to Miami what Gotham City is to New York — Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) has just returned from graduating college, and finds that the family business is faltering and his parents (Damián Alcázar and Elpidia Carrillo) may lose their house in the Edge Keys neighborhood to development from the super-greedy Kord Industries. It’s Jaime’s odd fate that the only job he can get is on the cleaning crew, along with his sister Milagro (Melissa Escobedo), in the mansion of the company’s CEO, Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon).

Jaime loses the job when he witnesses an argument between Victoria and her niece, Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), who despises how her aunt has turned the company toward weapons manufacturing — something Jenny’s long-missing father Ted hated. Jenny runs into Jaime later, and promises to get him a job with some part of Kord Industries away from Victoria’s notice.

When Jaime shows up at Kord’s HQ, a very nervous Jenny hands Jaime a box and tells him to “guard it with your life,” but don’t look inside. Once he gets home, though, the family wants to take a look — and they find a large gold-and-blue scarab. When the object comes to life, suddenly it takes over Jaime’s body, and turns him into a reluctant superhero who can fly to space, absorb bullets harmlessly, and can consult with his onboard AI, Khaji-Da (voiced by singer Becky G), to produce any weapon imaginable. 

The battle lines are quickly drawn, with Victoria and her super-soldier henchman Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) on one side, and Jaime, his family — including his nana (Adriana Barraza, from “Babel”) and conspiracy-minded inventor uncle, Rudy (George Lopez) and Jenny on the other.

Director Soto — who broke out with the 2020 Sundance hit “Charm City Kings” — keeps the action fast and the humor light. He’s found a charismatic leading may in Maridueña, who handles both the wild thrill of learning his powers and the righteous fury when the final act kicks in. If there’s a weak link in the cast, it’s Sarandon, reduced to standard-issue supervillain cliches.

There’s a moment in “Blue Beetle” where Jaime has to wait for Khaji-Da to reboot the super suit — an apt metaphor for DC fans cooling their heels waiting for producers James Gunn and Peter Safran to do what they will with the revamped DC movie universe. If there’s a second movie, and that’s a big if, there’s a lot in Maridueña’s performance and the celebration of “la familia” that can be built on. 

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‘Blue Beetle’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, language, and some suggestive references. Running time: 127 minutes.

Review: 'Strays' puts R-rated words in the mouths of talking dogs — and that's the only trick it knows

It’s clear from the beginning what “Strays” is trying to do — to spoof heartwarming animal movies, but with the human voices superimposed on dogs saying the most profane things possible. And though it sometimes succeeds in provoking laughs, that doesn’t happen often enough to compensate for all the cringing a viewer will do the rest of the time.

The hero and, for a time, the main narrator of this story is Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell), a perky little terrier mutt who thinks his human, Doug (Will Forte), is the best human a dog could have. We, as outside observers, know otherwise — that Doug is a perpetually masturbating stoner who hates dogs, and kept Reggie only because his girlfriend wanted to have the dog during their breakup. Reggie delights in playing fetch with Doug, not realizing that Doug keeps driving further and further from home to ditch Reggie.

When Reggie is left in the big, bad city, he still thinks Doug is just playing fetch with him. It takes a tenacious Boston terrier, named Bug (voiced by Jamie Foxx), to explain to Reggie that he’s been abandoned — and he’s now a stray. Bug proceeds to show Reggie the joys of living independently, like being able to claim anything you pee on. Reggie also meets Bug’s dog-park friends: Hunter (voiced by Randall Park), a Great Dane who continues to wear a cone to calm his nerves, and Maggie (voiced by Isla Fisher), an Australian Shepherd with a bloodhound’s sense of smell.

Reggie, finally realizing how poorly he was treated, resolves to find his way back home with a mission to destroy the thing Doug loves most: His willy. Bug, Hunter and Maggie agree to join Reggie on the road.

So these four dogs are on a quest, like “Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey,” if the voice actors were allowed to say words that would make Walt Disney’s ears bleed. The gags target the tropes of the talking-dog genre — like the all-wise “narrator dog” (think “The Art of Racing in the Rain” and others) — or the dog-centered view of the world. (Example: Bug offers his theory on why humans obsessively bag up their dogs’ poop.)

Many of the jokes are about poop or about humping things, and it feels like director Josh Greenbaum (who made the far superior “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”) and writer Dan Perrault came up with “an R-rated talking dog movie” and thought that was enough.

The weird thing about “Strays” is that the few really good jokes aren’t reliant on poop or penises or profanity, but good solid dog humor — like when Maggie tries to tell a knock-knock joke, but her companions instinctively start barking after the first knock. Those jokes are themselves strays, lost and in need of a good home.

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‘Strays’

★★

Opens Friday, August 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and drug use. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Aliens Abducted My Parents...," made in Utah, is a teen comedy with warmth and heart

Restoring one’s faith in family-friendly movies, the made-in-Utah teen comedy “Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out” is as funny and as charming as its very long title.

Itsy Levan (played by Emma Tremblay) is decidedly unhappy about her parents’ decision to leave the big city for the small town of Pebble Falls. While Mom (Hailey Smith) and Dad (Matt Biedel) are busy renovating their new fixer-upper house and dreaming of being the next Chip and Joanna Gaines, Itsy tries to avoid her bratty younger brother, Evan (Kenneth Cummins), and fit in at her new high school.

When the school’s queen bee, Heather (Landry Townsend), tells Itsy there’s a high school journalism contest that could send her to study in New York, Itsy jumps at the chance. The prompt for the contest is to write about the weirdest thing in one’s hometown, and Heather has the perfect candidate in mind: Calvin Kipler (Jacob Buster), who comes to school in his own homemade space suit.

Itsy soon learns that Calvin is tracking the imminent arrival of Jesper’s Comet, which passes by Earth once every 10 years. The last time the comet passed, Calvin was six (and played, in flashback, by Cummins’ little brother Thomas), and his parents disappeared — and Calvin maintains they were taken by aliens. Calvin believes that when the comet returns, he will be reunited with his parents, and possibly join them on their interstellar travels.

Director Jake Van Wagoner, a veteran of BYUtv’s sketch-comedy series “Studio C,” and screenwriter Austin Everett put Itsy and Calvin through the expected teen comedy hoops — including a sweetly chaste romance and some serious moments involving Calvin’s parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell).

What makes “Aliens Abducted My Parents…” transcend its predictable plot points is the humor level, neither dumbed down or too cynical, and the sincerely charming performances by Tremblay and Buster — two teen actors who could break out into bigger things.

——

‘Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, August 18, at the Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan) and Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi). Not rated, but probably PG for some mild peril and thematic content. Running time: 87 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this website on January 22, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Passages' delivers passion and raw sexuality, in its portrayal of a self-centered filmmaker burning through relationships

A very good movie about a very bad person, director Ira Sachs’ “Passages” is a raw portrait of two relationships and the self-destructive narcissist who’s the fulcrum for both of them.

Tomas (played by the German actor Franz Rogowski) is a film director who has just wrapped production on a movie in Paris. At the bar, Tomas tries to get his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), to dance with him, but when Martin begs off and goes home, Tomas starts dancing with Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a schoolteacher who’s friends with some of the movie’s crew. When the party moves to someone’s apartment, Tomas and Agathe have sex.

Tomas is eager to tell Martin all about it the next morning, and Martin tries to dismiss the affair as Tomas’ usual post-production dalliance — a release of sexual tension, nothing that will destroy their marriage. When Tomas insists he’s really in love with Agathe, the marriage starts its slow disintegration, even as Tomas tries to continue his life with both partners.

Sachs — who has probed the fragility of romance, gay and straight, in such movies as “Love Is Strange,” “Keep the Lights On” and “Forty Shades of Blue” — isn’t shy about showing the nitty-gritty of Tomas’ relationships with either Martin or Agathe. Tomas’ interest in both of them is primarily sexual, so it’s the sex scenes (which initially earned the movie an NC-17 rating, which Sachs’ producers returned) where Tomas’ passion is most abundant. Tomas connects with each of them best when making love; when he has to talk to them, not so much.

The performances are what cement the emotional weight Sachs and his regular writing partner Mauricio Zacharias try to convey. Whishaw (known to American audiences as Q in the Daniel Craig Bond movies and the voice of Paddington Bear) portrays Martin as a homebody but no wallflower, while Exarchopoulos (best known for “Blue Is the Warmest Color”) gives Agathe a down-to-earth quality that Tomas can’t quite fathom.

But it’s Rogowski, so compelling in Christian Petzold’s “Transit” and Terrence Malick’s “A Hidden Life,” who fascinates here. His Tomas is a rat bastard at times, self-centered and seeking pleasure at all costs, but there’s a bruised soul inside that bad behavior that makes “Passages” a must-watch. 

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‘Passages’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably NC-17 for explicit sex scenes, and language. Running time: 91 minutes; in English, and French with subtitles.

Review: 'Landscape With Invisible Hand,' a social satire hidden in an alien-invasion comedy, has more ideas than it can handle

Writer-director Cory Finley’s satire “Landscape With Invisible Hand” is so overflowing with ideas — about class and race divisions, the commodification of emotion, and the soft fascism we bring on ourselves through capitalism — that it doesn’t entirely know what to do with all of them.

It’s 2036, a few years after a race of aliens, the Vuvv, have arrived on Earth. It was an invasion, not by force but by generosity — the Vuvv, who one character describes as “gooey coffee tables,” gave humans their advanced technology, making most human jobs obsolete. The rich have moved up to the Vuvv’s floating vessels, while the rest of the humans are unemployed or underemployed, trying to live on the scraps and junk dropped on us from above.

Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, formerly of “This Is Us”) is a 17-year-old aspiring artist, living in a house with his mom, Beth (Tiffany Haddish), an unemployed lawyer, and little sister Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie), who’s growing vegetables in what used to be their pool. At least the Campbells have a house, because others don’t. The new girl in school, Chloe Marsh (Kylie Rogers), lives in the family car with her dad (Josh Hamilton) and brooding older brother Hunter (Michael Gandolfini).

Adam connects with Chloe, and soon invites the Marshes to live in their basement, as a teen romance starts to blossom. As love grows, Chloe suggests she and Adam start a livestream of their romance to the Vuvv — because they don’t have “love,” and are fascinated enough by the concept that they’ll pay money to watch humans experience it.

The livestreaming goes well for awhile, and brings money into both households. But as first love fades, the Vuvv notice the difference — and threaten to sue Chloe and Adam for a broadcast they consider “deceitful.” The Campbell and Marsh families, whose relations were already strained, splinter even further when they each try to find a solution to keep the Vuvv from suing them into generations of debt.

Finley (“Thoroughbreds”), in adapting M.T. Anderson’s novel, finds rich veins of social commentary to explore, particularly about the ways humans will divide themselves by class, and how the folks on the bottom will be as resentful of the folks just above them as toward the people at the top. There are also some intriguing threads about how everything that makes us human — our art, our emotions, our relationships — are available for someone to slap a price tag on them.

If only Finley’s command of the visual side of the material — like the comical way the Vuvv communicate by rubbing their paddle-like flippers — was matched by the emotional control. That remains elusive, even with evocative performances by Blackk, Rogers and particularly Haddish, showing the lengths a strong woman will go (and not go) for her family’s well-being.

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‘Landscape With Invisible Hand’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 18, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy) and Century 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated R for language and brief violent content. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' is a monster story with classic references and old-school suspense

Old-school tension replaces the gore in “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” an entertaining-enough take on one of literature’s most famous monsters.

The opening title cards set the time: 1897, with a sailing ship — the Russian schooner Demeter — crashing on the shores of England on dark and stormy night. No one is alive on board, but one scared young constable brings out the captain’s log, which describes a harrowing encounter with the monster, and the warning “if it finds you, God help you.”

The title cards also let us know the monster’s identity, noting that the Demeter’s log is from a chapter of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula.”

The script — by Bragi F. Schut (“Escape Room”) and Zak Olkewicz (“Bullet Train”) — jumps back four weeks, when the Demeter is getting set to leave port in the Mediterranean, bound for London. Capt. Eliot (Liam Cunningham) and his first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), hire some new crew members. The one we’re most interested in is Clemens (Corey Hawkins), who trained as a doctor at Cambridge, but has been unable to find work in a hospital because he’s Black. Clemens only gets hired because another new crew member sees the crates being loaded onto the ship and quits, saying the dragon emblem on them is a bad omen.

So with a crew of nine — 10, if we include Capt. Eliot’s 9-year-old grandson, Toby (Woody Norman) — the Demeter sets off on its voyage. But something doesn’t feel right on board, and the feeling is confirmed when the the ship’s dog and the livestock in the cargo hold suddenly die. Wojchek and the ship’s evangelical cook, Joseph (Jon Jon Briones), think there’s a curse. Clemens, a man of science and reason, looks for another explanation.

In the cargo hold, he finds one of the mysterious crates has opened, and amid the dirt there’s a young woman, Anna (Aisling Franciosi, from “The Nightingale”). Once nursed back to health, thanks to Clemens giving transfusions of his blood, Anna tells the crew that something evil from her home country has boarded the Demeter. And after the crew gets winnowed down to the monster, even Clemens comes to believe it.

Director André Øvredal knows how to deliver jump-scare horror — his previous films “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” are evidence of this. Here, though, he throttles back on the in-your-face horror, opting instead to build up tension and let it snap in measured doses. 

The movie also takes a page from the old Hammer studio horror films, which relied more on character and acting than shock value. Hawkins (from “In the Heights” and “Straight Outta Compton”) is strong in the central role, though he’s often outpaced by Franciosi’s haunted Anna, Cunningham’s soulful captain, and the working-class brusqueness of Dastmalchian — who, with his roles here and in “Oppenheimer,” “The Boogeyman” and “Boston Strangler,” is having quite a year.

Still, one can imagine how much tension might have been had if the audience didn’t know the monster’s identity from the get-go, if landmarks like “Carfax Abbey” had been placed for us to discover. It would have made “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” a more memorable ride.

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‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violence. Running time: 118 minutes.

Review: 'Afire' is a comedy-drama with a tone palette all its own — and another stellar performance from Paula Beer

German director Christian Petzold shows with his new film, “Afire,” that he’s not going to go where you think — though those of us who saw his wartime refugee drama “Transit” or his mermaid tale “Undine” already knew that.

Leon (Thomas Schubert) and his friend, Felix (Langston Uibel), are driving to a cabin near the Baltic Sea for a few days of isolation. Leon is a novelist, trying to put the last touches on his second book before showing it to his publisher, Helmut (Matthias Brandt), who’s expected to visit in a few days. Felix is trying to get into art school, and is supposed to be working on his photography portfolio for his application.

Felix is less interested in working and more interested in hanging out, and going down to the beach — though the beach does inspire his creative juices. Leon, trying to do some writing at the cabin, finds himself creatively blocked, in part because he has a sinking feeling his book isn’t very good.

There’s also the matter of Nadja, played by the extraordinary German actress Paula Beer, who worked with Petzold in both “Transit” and “Undine.” Nadja was staying in the cabin before the guys arrived (the owner, Felix’s mom, forgot that she double-booked), and so Leon is annoyed that he has to share a room with Felix, and is kept awake by Nadja’s boisterous lovemaking with Devid (Enno Trebs), a lifeguard — excuse me, “rescue swimmer” — who works on the beach.

When Devid joins the three for dinner one evening, Leon gets snippy, eye-rolling at the idea of being a professional “rescue swimmer.” Nadja, later, calls him out on his snobbery, leading Leon to apologize for his rudeness and stupidity. This becomes a pattern in their interactions, and Nadja puts up with in in part because she recognizes that Leon is using his boorishness to hide his fears about showing the book to Helmut.

While all this is happening, occasionally they talk about the forest fires that are some 30 kilometers away from the cabin — and whether they might get closer.

Petzold, as writer and director, shows a mastery of tone here, but he keeps the audience off guard by not striking the tone one would expect. Leon’s bad behavior, and his banter with Nadja, has the structure of a comedy, but Petzold plays it so low-key that you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a drama. The way you know it’s not a drama is that, at a certain point, real drama enters the room and hits your heart like a freight train.

The ensemble cast is solid, but Beer — the only woman among the main actors — is naturally a standout. A lesser actress, working with a less assured director, would turn Nadja into a “manic pixie dream girl” character, too offbeat and too perfect to be believable. Nadja has some of those qualities, but Beer makes them feel like part of a complicated, very human character. Beer’s charisma is like a wildfire, bright and hot, but she definitely knows how to control it. 

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‘Afire’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 11, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for sexual content and some intense fire images. Running time: 103 minutes; in German, with subtitles.