Review: 'A Haunting in Venice' lets Kenneth Branagh put Poirot into a ghost story, with mixed results

Speaking as a non-reader of Agatha Christie, I thought director-actor Kenneth Branagh’s third excursion into Christie’s world, “A Haunting in Venice,” was a serviceable and occasionally engaging mix of detective thriller and ghost story — though it ends with a reminder of why those two things don’t go together.

My favorite Christie aficionado, to whom I am married, disliked parts of the movie, for reasons I will get into as we go.

This time out, Branagh is not remaking one of Christie’s much-filmed popular works — like his previous efforts, “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile,” with which most people are familiar and probably knew whodunnit before they set foot in the theater. This movie is loosely based (and, according to my wife, the word “loosely” is doing a lot of work here) on Christie’s more obscure “Hallowe’en Party,” so Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green (who also wrote the last two) have some room to color outside the lines.

It’s 1947, and the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (played again by Branagh) has retired to Venice. (The book was set in the English countryside, but Venice is a more apt locale for a scary story.) He’s no longer taking cases, and his bodyguard, Vitale Portfoglio (Riccardo Scamarcio), keeps supplicants at bay, sometimes by dumping them into a canal. One old acquaintance does get through the door: Mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey), who claims to possess an even sharper mind than Poirot.

(As my wife has explained to me, Christie wrote Ariadne into the Poirot novels — eight of them, I learned — essentially to create a version of herself who could match wits with Poirot and talk inside baseball about the pitfalls of writing detective fiction. As my wife also explains it, Ariadne is a gray-haired English woman who works more on intuition than logic. Turning her into Fey’s spunky American, my wife said, isn’t the worst sin committed against her here, but to say more would be giving away too much.)

Ariadne presents Poirot with a challenge: To attend a seance on Halloween night, being held in the crumbling canal-side mansion of retired opera singer Rowena Drake (played by “Yellowstone’s” Kelly Reilly). Rowena’s daughter, Alicia (played by Rowan Robinson in flashbacks) died a year earlier, and Rowena is hoping a famous medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), can summon Alicia’s spirit.

Others attending the seance: Portfoglio; Rowena’s superstitious housekeeper, Olga Seminoff (Camille Cottin); Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), who treated Alicia and is suffering PTSD from the war; Dr. Ferrier’s young son, Leopold (Jude Hill, who played Dornan’s son in Branagh’s “Belfast”); Mrs. Reynolds’ assistant, Desdemona Holland (Emma Laird); and a late arrival, Alicia’s one-time fiancé, hotheaded Maxime Gerard (Kyle Allen). (Desdemona’s brother, Nicholas, played by Ali Khan, also factors into all this.)

Branagh, as director, has a lot of creepy fun setting the Hallowe’en mood — hearkening back to his second movie as director, the noir thriller “Dead Again.” Branagh may be sporting a Belgian accent for Poirot, but his camera preference is Dutch angles, which give everything a sinister, spooky slant.

Of course, there’s a murder. Just before that, though, there’s almost another murder, of Poirot himself. This seems to throw the detective off his game. He starts seeing shadows and spirits and things that go bump in the night. 

This is where I, as a repeat viewer of Christie-based movies, started to lose my faith in Branagh’s plan. The whole point of Hercule Poirot is that he’s the guy who cuts through the humbug and the hocus pocus, applying logic and intelligence to find the killer — who is not a phantom or a monster, but an ordinary human being with very human motives and methods. Suggesting otherwise, though fun for a storyteller, is another red herring in the way of Poirot’s solution of the case, and I got impatient waiting for the movie to realize that, too.

Where “A Haunting in Venice” is at its best is when Poirot is working the case, talking one-by-one to the potential suspects, making lists and eliminating blind alleys. Branagh revels in these scenes, and his pairing with Fey — sharp and acerbic, even when the character inexplicably shifts gears from skeptic to believer — adds a dose of wit and prickly charm. If Branagh portrays Poirot again, here’s hoping he gives Fey’s Ariadne another case on which to collaborate.

———

‘A Haunting in Venice’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images and thematic elements. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3' recycles the same jokes, but star/director Nia Vardalos can't bring back the old charm

Oh, to be blessed with the confidence of Nia Vardalos — confidence to squeeze a third screenplay, for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” out of the same set of jokes about the loud behavior and boisterousness of Greek people, without betraying any hint of how hackneyed it’s all become.

Vardalos directs this third comedy centered around the Portokalos family of Chicago. Vardalos’ character, Toula, is now the head of the family — though she doesn’t admit it — since the death of her father, the Windex-spraying Gus (played in the first two films by Michael Constantine, who died in 2021). 

Toula and her non-Greek husband Ian (John Corbett) are dealing with generational issues at both ends. Toula’s mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan, who appears briefly), is in the middle stages of dementia. Meanwhile, Toula and Ian’s daughter, Paris (Elena Kampouris), is away at college at NYU, and Toula suspects something’s amiss — but Paris won’t say what.

The family, Toula says in an opening voiceover, is scattered these days, and needs something to bring them all together. That something, conveniently, is an invitation to a massive reunion in Gus’ hometown in Greece. Toula, Ian, Paris, Toula’s boorish brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), and favorite aunts Voula (Andrea Martin) and Frieda (Maria Vacratsis) are all on the plane to Athens — as is Aristotle (Elias Kacavas), a hunky young man Paris briefly dated and rejected, whom Voula, true to her meddling ways, has hired as an assistant.

Toula’s goal on this trip is to fulfill one of her father’s last wishes: To deliver his journal to his three friends from the old village. Toula’s counting on the reunion to bring everyone together, so she’s dismayed when she learns that the village’s young and ridiculously optimistic mayor, Victory (Melina Kotselou, in her first movie role), hasn’t gathered all the village’s former residents as expected.

As Toula searches for her father’s childhood friends, a village of sitcom-level subplots plays out. Paris tries to avoid Aristotle, and avoid telling her parents what’s happening at college. Alexandra (Anthi Andreopoulou), the village’s oldest resident, reveals a family secret to Toula, while Qamar (Stephanie Nur), the Syrian refugee who’s “like a daughter” to Alexandra, has a secret of her own. Nick is, for reasons that become painfully obvious, is looking for the oldest tree in the area. Ian befriends a monk (Dimos Filippas) living on the beach. And, eventually, Toula’s cousins Nikki (Gia Carides) and Angelo (Joey Fatone) get pulled back into the mix.

Mostly, it’s all a flimsy excuse for the characters — and the actors — to take a vacation in picturesque Greece on Focus Features’ dime. Of all of the disappointments in Vardalos’ clumsy directing, the worst may be how she rushes through the travelogue portions of the movie, so that the audience can’t enjoy the sights.

Vardalos’ script tells the same jokes from the first two films, including the Windex and every Greek’s inability to accept Ian’s vegetarian diet. Even a reliable laugh-getter like Martin is left with little to work with. The one bright spot in the movie is the newcomer Kotselou, playing the perpetually sunny (and, it’s suggested, nonbinary) mayor with an energy and exuberance the rest of this recycled sequel is lacking.

——

‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3’

★1/2

Opens Friday, September 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for suggestive material and some nudity. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Scrapper' is a quietly intense story of a resourceful girl and her wayward dad, coming to grips with grief and learning to trust each other

Like the whip-smart pre-teen at its center, the British drama “Scrapper” makes magic out of limited resources — as writer-director Charlotte Regan, in a stunning feature debut, balances a little girl’s hopeful fantasies and harsh realities with tenderness and heart.

Newcomer Lola Campbell plays Georgie, who at 12 has her world largely figured out. She keeps her row house, in a lower-income part of Essex, neat and tidy. She partners with a neighbor boy, Ali (Alin Uzun), to steal bicycles and sell them to make spare cash. She gets the stoner clerk at the local mini-mart to record messages for her, which she uses to fool her school’s officials and social workers into thinking an adult lives with her. In fact, Georgie’s been living alone since the death of her mother (Laura Aikman) — who we see in flashbacks and video snippets.

Georgie’s precarious routine is interrupted with the arrival of Jason (Harris Dickinson, from “Triangle of Sadness” and “Where the Crawdads Sing”). Jason is Georgie’s father, though he’s been absent ever since she was born. Now, he’s grieving for his former love, same as Georgie, and wants to get to know his daughter, though she’s wary of his intentions.

What Regan depicts, in bold yet subtle strokes, is two people growing up in a hurry — one to the reality of life without her mother, the other to the parenthood he wasn’t ready to accept a dozen years earlier. The emotional beats are precise to these characters, but so intense that they can be felt like a punch to the gut. Regan also throws in clever moments of fantasy, like when Georgie and Ali imagine the conversations the spiders in the apartment are having. (The movie won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.)

Regan’s captivating storytelling is made whole by the two lead performances. Dickinson has been growing as an actor for years (it’s only been six years since his movie debut, as an aimless teen in Eliza Hittman’s drama “Beach Rats”) and is effective here as the adult finally figuring things out. And Campbell is an amazing find, capturing that blend of childlike innocence and street savvy that the best kid actors possess. Together, they make “Scrapper” a thoroughly alive story of restored connection.

——

‘Scrapper’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and some mature situations. Running time: 84 minutes.

Review: 'Bottoms' is a smart, absurd lesbian comedy that spoofs high-school movies with humor and blood

In the bitingly funny “Bottoms,” director Emma Seligman and actor Rachel Sennott — along with their former NYU classmate, the suddenly everywhere Ayo Edibiri — pay irreverent homage to the ‘90s high school movie, examining the genre’s cliches and beating the crap out of them.

Seligman and Sennott — who collaborated on Seligman’s assured directing debut, the Jewish funeral comedy “Shiva Baby” — co-wrote “Bottoms,” taking inspiration from such neo-classics as “Heathers,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” and “Superbad.” The key difference is the lenses of violence and lesbianism through which those movies are viewed.

PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edibiri) are going into senior year at Rockbridge Falls High School with the reputation of being those two “gay, untalented and ugly” girls in school. In a school that idolizes the football team — so much so that the players walk around school in their game uniforms, pads and all, and nobody bats an eye. 

PJ pines for head cheerleader Brittany (Kaia Gerber). Meanwhile, Josie has an unrequited crush on Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), Brittany’s cheer co-captain and longtime boyfriend of the preening star quarterback, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine, who played the prince in Camila Cabello’s girl boss “Cinderella” and the super-gay rom-com “Red, White and Royal Blue”).

A run-in with Jeff leads their principal (Wayne Pére) to threaten expulsion, which prompts Josie to blurt out a lie that she and PJ are starting self-defense classes for the girls at school. PJ runs with the idea, arguing that starting an after-hours fight club for girls could be the way to get Brittany and Isabel to start “kissing us on the mouths.” With some help from a fellow outcast, Hazel (Ruby Cruz) and a sign-off from their laid-back social studies teacher, Mr. G (former Seattle Seahawks star Marshawn Lynch, who’s really funny), the club is a go.

Seligman and Sennott’s script is bracingly funny, skewering the high-school-as-life intensity and the baked-in misogyny of that generation of teen comedies. Add another layer of humor in the in-the-room riffing between Sennott and Edibiri (who’s now starring in both “The Bear” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem”), who have the bantering skills of two people who have been friends for years (which they have). 

“Bottoms” may not be everyone’s cup of tea — the humor can get raunchy and the action comically bloody and violent particularly in the finale, when Rockbridge Falls faces their evil arch rivals. As a swing-for-the-fences send-up of high school movies that finds depth in its absurdity, “Bottoms” comes out on top. 

——

‘Bottoms’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 1, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some violence. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'Mutt' is an eye-opening, gut-wrenching look at a day in the life of a trans man, sensitively played by newcomer Lio Mehiel

The New York drama “Mutt,” writer-director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s strong and tender feature debut, shows us an intensely busy 24 hours in the life of a young trans man — and it’s the actor in the center, newcomer Lio Mehiel, who makes you want to stay through the night.

Mehiel plays Feña, who on this day is stressed that his father, Pablo (Alejandro Goic), is flying up from Chile for a visit. Feña hasn’t seen his father in two years — and Pablo has never seen his son, because he hasn’t seen Feña since he transitioned.

As if that weren’t stressful enough, Feña learns that the person from whom he was going to borrow a car, to go pick his dad at the Newark airport, has flaked. At the same time, Feña learns that his ex-boyfriend, John (Cole Doman), is back in town — and, yes, the last time John saw Feña, it was before his transition. Also during the day, Feña’s 14-year-old half-sister, Zoe (MiMi Ryder), shows up, trying to avoid their mom, whose abuse forced the pre-transition Feña to move out.

Through this day, Lungulov-Klotz (a trans man himself) shows the daily frustrations Feña must deal with as a recently transitioned person, such as a bank teller who calls him “ma’am” or a pharmacist who calls him “sir” but doesn’t understand why a guy needs to buy a Plan B pill.

Feña brushes back the indignities with a resigned air, though he will put someone in their place if necessary — like the woman (Sarah Herrman) who is fascinated by Feña’s top surgery and then blurts out the rude question of whether he’s had surgery below the belt. “No, and don’t ever ask that,” Feña replies. Jenny counters, “Don’t you want to be a full man?,” to which Feña responds, “I don’t need a dick for that.” (Considering the number of men in the world with functional penises who aren’t full men, Feña makes a good point.)

Mehiel was given a special jury prize for acting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and damn if they didn’t earn it. Mehiel plays with a wealth of complicated emotions — confronting three figures from Feña’s past in his new body — across their expressive face, holding it all the pain and defiance within their tense jawline. It’s an impressive performance in a tightly wound and unexpectedly deep movie.

——

’Mutt’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 1, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for sexual content and language. Running time: 87 minutes.

Review: 'Between Two Worlds' finds strong drama in the hardships of French women laboring at minimum wage

Director Emmanuel Carrére’s gritty drama “Between Two Worlds” is on the same mission as Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” — to let viewers catch a glimpse of a struggling working class on whose labor, and invisibility, an entire economy is built.

If Carrére doesn’t succeed to the degree that Zhao did, it’s largely because of how differently the movies go about what they do.

In “Nomadland,” the lives of people living in their vehicles and traveling from one seasonal job to another — harvesting sweet potatoes one month, routing Amazon packages the next — worked in large part because star Frances McDormand portrayed and embodied someone on the inside of this system.

In “Between Two Worlds” — which, like “Nomadland,” is based on a nonfiction book (in this case, Florence Aubenas’ 2011 book “Le Quai de Ouistreham”) — this world of French laborers is seen from the outside. Juliette Binoche plays Marianne Winckler, who we first meet as just another person looking for work in Caen, the city on France’s north coast. She follows some other would-be workers, and quickly tags along with some women working on cleaning crews. 

The hardest gig, but also the most lucrative, is on the team that cleans the passenger ferry that goes between Caen’s port, Ouistreham, to Portsmouth, England. The team must clean bathrooms and make beds in 230 rooms during the ferry’s 90-mintue stopover, before passengers board to cross the English Channel.

Before landing the job, though, a caseworker at the employment office takes Marianne aside and asks what she’s doing there. The caseworker, Lucie (Aude Ruyter), recognizes Marianne, not as a day laborer but as a successful author. Marianne tells the caseworker that she’s gone undercover, so she can understand the “employment crisis” by living it. Lucie doesn’t rat her out, but admonishes her that “the people who come here can’t stop when they’re bored.”

That fear of being found out, and the guilt that she’s doing some kind of “poverty chic” act, is what drives Marianne and the movie’s narrative for much of the way. Fortunately, that less-than-interesting plot is pushed aside for the more intriguing stories of the women Marianne meets — including Marilou (Léa Carne), who dreams of leaving Caen with her boyfriend someday; Cédric (Didier Pupin), an older man who’s a hopeless romantic; and most especially Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert), a foul-mouthed single mom who soon becomes Marianne’s best friend on the job.

Carrére, co-writing the script with Hélène Devynck, spends too much time and attention concerned about whether Marianne’s cover will be blown. But when the focus is on the women she works with — all played by nonprofessional actors — the movie rises to another level, focusing on the daily struggles and momentary triumphs of these workers who don’t have the luxury of zipping back to Paris when the job is done.

——

‘Between Two Worlds’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 1, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language. Running time: 106 minutes; in French, with subtitles.

Review: 'Gran Turismo' is a sports drama filled with glitz and advertising, with David Harbour as its emotional engine

Somewhere amid the automobile-shaped billboards whizzing around in “Gran Turismo,” burning the Nissan and PlayStation logos into the viewer’s retinas, there’s a well-constructed inspirational sports drama and a half-decent video game movie.

Director Neill Blomkamp (“District 9,” “Chappie”) starts by informing us that the Japanese game designer Kazunori Yamauchi had a dream to create the most realistic racing simulator ever made — and the result was “Gran Turismo.” Millions, we’re told, play the simulator around the world.

It’s that market that Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), a marketing executive at Nissan’s UK division, wants to tap into. His proposal to the suits from Tokyo: Find the best “Gran Turismo” players from around the world, and train them to race with real cars on real tracks for Nissan’s racing team. Improbably, the bosses give Danny’s pitch the green light.

An online competition helps Danny find the best GT racers around the world. The one the movie focuses on is Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a teen in Cardiff, Wales, whose dreams of becoming a race driver are laughed off by his father, Steve (Djimon Hounsou), an ex-footballer who is focused on his older son Coby (Daniel Puig), an up-and-coming soccer player. (Jann’s mum is played by Geri Halliwell Horner, if case you’re wondering what happens to ex-Spice Girls: They are saddled with thankless roles in male-dominated movies.)

While Danny assembles the 10 best GT racers and brings them to Nissan’s training camp, he has to find a coach who can turn these chair-bound gamers into real drivers. The reluctant coach is Jack Salter (David Harbour), who pours cold water on Danny’s and the young racers’ hopes. 

Of course, what comes next is the requisite training montage, somewhere between “Remember the Titans” and “An Officer and a Gentleman,” with the field of 10 winnowed down to five in short order. Jann barely makes the cut, but is more determined to show Jack, his dad, and the world that he’s got what it takes to race.

Blomkamp takes the tag-teamed script — written by Jason Hall (“American Sniper”) and Zach Baylin (“King Richard”), with story credit to Hall and Alex Tse — and creates a lucid, fast-paced story that hits all the right buttons of the underdog sports story. He also incorporates the mechanics of the Gran Turismo game, like the way the graphics hover over Jann’s car to show us his position in the race.

The chief joy derived in “Gran Turismo,” — aside from the delight Blomkamp shows in editing together tight racing sequences — is watching Harbour tear through all the gruff-but-lovable coaching cliches and find the battered, vulnerable heart within. For all the forced product placement and corporate sucking up, Harbour gives the movie a few dollops of genuine humanity.

——

‘Gran Turismo’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense action and some strong language. Running time: 135 minutes.

Review: 'The Hill' is an inspirational sports movie at its most shamelessly manipulative, but still emotionally effective

The sports drama “The Hill” tells the true story of a baseball phenom who could hit the ball harder than anything — and the movie handles its emotional beats the same way, swinging for the fences and landing with the subtlety of a baseball hitting a windshield.

The hero of our story is Rickey Hill, who we encounter as a headstrong teenage prospect (played by Colin Ford) before flashing back to his childhood in east Texas, sometime in the early ‘60s. Little Rickey (Jesse Berry) can hit a rock with a stick very far — and, when given the chance to swing a real bat, knocks the ball into the next field over.

However, Rickey has two impediments that make his baseball prospects limited. One is that he wears braces on his legs, because of a degenerative spine disorder he suffered since birth. The other is his father, James Hill (Dennis Quaid), a Baptist minister who has determined that his younger son’s destiny is to preach the Lord’s word, not play a game. 

Rickey’s mother, Helen (Joelle Carter), and Helen’s crotchety mom, Lillian (Bonnie Bedelia), believe in Rickey. So does his older brother, Robby (Mason Gillett). So does Gracie (Mile Harris), a girl his age who calls Rickey “my boyfriend” — and whose heart is broken when the Hill family is forced to move when the congregants throw James out of their church.

Flash-forward to the ‘70s, and Ford’s Rickey is a star player for his high-school team, and attracting interest from scouts and sportswriters. One such writer brings along his intern – a now-grown Gracie (Siena Bjornerud), who has continued to love Rickey from afar.

Rickey seems on a trajectory toward fulfilling his baseball dreams, until a freak injury tears up his ankle. The doctor looks at the ankle, but also sees Rickey has “the spine of a 60-year-old man,” and tells him he may recover enough to walk, but not play baseball again. Rickey is determined to beat those odds, and be fit enough to try out for an assembly of baseball scouts, led by the legendary scout Red Murff (played by Scott Glenn, giving us a reunion of “The Right Stuff,” 40 years later).

The screenwriters here are Angelo Pizzo, who wrote the sports dramas “Rudy” and “Hoosiers,” and the late Scott Marshall Smith, who wrote the biographical dramas “Men of Honor” and “When the Game Stands Tall.” With that much inspirational DNA, the story here can’t help but elicit an emotional response. The tears are not so much jerked as forcibly yanked from the audience’s eyes.

The shameless manipulation director Jeff Celentano builds up hits its apex in the final scene, a pivotal baseball game where Rickey must prove his skills or forever kiss his baseball dreams goodbye — all while the announcer (played by Hall of Fame pitcher and analyst John Smoltz) drums the importance of every swing into the audience’s heads. “The Hill,” ultimately hits with power, but without finesse.

——

‘The Hill’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 25, in theaters. Rated PG for thematic content, language, and smoking throughout. Running time: 126 minutes.