Review: 'It Lives Inside' is effective as a horror movie, but better as a peek into India's culture and creepy folklore

In the meta horror thriller “Cabin in the Woods,” scientists watch on monitors as various countries apply their traditions of horror to the shared problem of vanquishing a world-destroying demon — serving as a commentary on how cultures may take different, though parallel, approaches to the fine art of scaring the crap out of themselves. 

Indian American director Bishal Dutta, in his debut feature “It Lives Inside,” quite effectively and inventively shows how the folklore of India can give us a terrifying monster that attacks at the most vulnerable spot: A teen girl’s self-esteem.

Everyone at suburban Wooderson Grove High School (bonus points for the “Dazed and Confused” reference) has noticed that Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) hasn’t seemed well lately. She’s brooding, sullen, and hiding out during lunch hour under the bleachers. The one teacher who seems to care, Joyce (Betty Gabriel), asks another Indian American student, Samidha (Megan Suri), if she knows what’s wrong. Samidha and Tamira used to be best friends but have grown apart — and Sam, as she prefers to be called, doesn’t want to get involved.

One day, Tamira approaches Samidha, asking for help. Tamira is holding a Mason jar, and begs Samidha to help contain whatever it is that’s inside. Thoughtlessly, Samidha rejects the plea, and knocks the jar out of Tamira’s hands. When it hits the locker room floor and shatters, all hell breaks loose. Literally.

The script, by Dutta and Ashish Mehta, is better in the set-up than in the payoff. The depiction of Sam’s efforts to be American — speaking English when her first-generation mom (Neeru Bajwa) speaks Hindi, preferring to hang out with potential boyfriend Russ (Gage Marsh) than celebrating an Indian holiday with family — is painfully honest, and connects to the conflict with Tamira that leads to the nasty appearance of the movie’s monstrous evil. Once that happens, the horror-thriller formula is more cut-and-dried, though there are a few interesting surprises.

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‘It Lives Inside’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for terror, violent content, bloody images, brief strong language and teen drug use. Running time: 99 minutes; in English, and Hindi with subtitles.

Review: 'The Origin of Evil' is a twisted thriller with some sharp 'Succession'-style commentary on the super-rich

The eccentric behavior of the very rich — and the lengths some people will go to join or fleece them — is at the heart of “The Origin of Evil,” a deliciously twisted, and twisty, French/Canadian thriller.

We’re introduced to our main character, a woman who goes by the male name Stéphane (Laure Calamy), at a crisis point. She has a smelly job packaging sardines in a cannery. She’s got a girlfriend (Suzanne Clément) in prison, who sometimes doesn’t come out when she visits. And her landlady is about to kick her out, because the landlady’s daughter is moving back into her room.

With seemingly nowhere to go, she calls the one number she thinks might be able to help: Serge (Jacques Weber), the father who abandoned Stéphane as a baby. Serge is a billionaire, having built up a fortune in hospitality. Will he hospitable to a long-lost daughter?

She gets an invite to Serge’s villa on a remote island (the movie was shot in western France). Serge introduces himself as a lover of many women over his life — and everyone besides him in the villa is a woman: Louise (Dominique Blanc), Serge’s shopaholic wife; George (Doria Tillier), Serge and Louise’s daughter, who runs the family businesses; Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell), George’s teen daughter, who snaps photos and wants to go to art school far away from her family; and Agnès (Véronique Ruggia Saura), the family’s stern housekeeper.

Each of these women take a look at their new visitor and try to figure out what she wants. She observes them, and notices they each have their claws into Serge, who has been recovering from a stroke and often seems on the verge of another one. 

But as writer-director Sébastien Marnier unfolds this complex and sometimes acidly comic story, we learn everyone has some big secrets — particularly our main character.

Marnier mines humor from the oddball behavior of these rich women — like Louise’s obsession with home shopping — and the “Succession”-like maneuvering around Serge’s bouts of ill health. And when the thriller elements kick in, he handles the Agatha Christie-style reveals, the crosses and double-crosses, masterfully.

The highlights in the ensemble cast include Weber as the volatile patriarch and Ruggia Saura as the officious servant. But it’s Calamy, subtly shifting from wry observer to central mover in this sly thriller, who gives “The Origin of Evil” its sting. 

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‘The Origin of Evil’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), AMC West Jordan 12, Megaplex 20 at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi) and Megaplex at Legacy Crossing (Centerville). Rated R for language, nudity, some sexual content and violence. Running time: 123 minutes; in French with subtitles.

Review: In 'Cassandro,' Gael Garcia Bernal pins the emotional heart of an iconic Mexican wrestler

The Mexican actor and heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal gives a tour-de-force performance in “Cassandro,” an absorbing biopic of perhaps the most unlikely icon in the world of lucha libre, or Mexican wrestling.

Garcia Bernal plays Saúl Armendáriz, an American-born wrestler performing in the 1990s in the low-end circuit of lucha libre in Ciudad Juarez, just over the border from the home he shares with his mother (Perla De La Rosa) in El Paso, Texas. Because he’s small — Armendáriz is 5-foot-5-1/2, Garcia Bernal is 5-foot-7 — Saúl usually plays the runt who has to go up against the hulking brutes; his stage name, when we meet him, is “El Topo” aka The Mole.

Saúl wants to improve as a wrestler, so he get a trainer, Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), who suggests he wrestle as an exotico, a popular lucha libre figure who dresses in drag and makes exaggerated effeminate gestures. Saúl, taking the stage name Cassandro, agrees, though he plans to be different than other exoticos — one, because most exoticos are straight, where Saùl is gay; and two, that he will win his matches, which under the traditions of lucha libre, they’re not allowed to do.

In his first matches as Cassandro, Saúl endures the crowd’s jeers and the other wrestlers’ disrespect. But when he shows he can take down the bigger wrestlers, and win the crowd over to his side, he starts getting notice. And with the help of a well-connected promoter, Lorenzo (Joaquín Cosío), Saúl gets better gigs and bigger paydays.

With his success comes lots of partying, booze and cocaine. After being rejected by Lorenzo’s fixer, Felipe (Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny), he has an affair with another wrestler, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo, from “The Inspection”), though they keep it a secret from Gerardo’s wife and kids.

Director Roger Ross Williams, a documentarian making his feature debut, and his writing partner, David Teague, hit the high spots of Cassandro’s career — culminating in his biggest match, against the legend of lucha libre, El Hija del Santo (who plays himself). They take some emotional short cuts in the script, concentrating on his relationship with his supportive mother and the absence of his father, a born-again Christian who rejected his son because he’s gay.

Garcia Bernal captures the flamboyance of Cassandro’s persona in the ring — his craftiness as he takes down bigger opponents by using their size and their homophobia against them — and the battered survivor in private, taking his rejections to fuel his art. It’s a performance that makes “Cassandro” a winner.

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‘Cassandro’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City); begins streaming September 22 on Prime. Rated R for language, drug use and sexual content. Running time: 107 minutes; in English and Spanish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Sundance Short Film Tour 2023' serves up seven small gems about love, family, grief, and the economic wisdom of majoring in Viking history

One constant in the history of the Sundance Film Festival has been the dedication to screening short films — some of which are boldly experimental, or showcase an up-and-coming talent. (Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket” and Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash” were shorts at Sundance before they were features.)

The Sundance Short Film Tour 2023 features seven strong short films, all between 8 and 14 minutes long, that screened at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Two of them were award winners. All of them are intriguing, if not sometimes heartbreaking.

“Help Me Understand” • The first short in the program is the most conventional, a straight-forward comedy — with bits of pathos — in which six women in a focus group (Kate Flannery from “The Office” is the most recognizable) are asked by an unctuous marketing executive (Ken Marino) which of two flasks of detergent smells better. The deliberations break down into animosity, and eventually understanding, in writer-director Aemilia Scott’s sure-handed takedown of modern advertising.

“Parker” • In this documentary by directors Sharon Liese and Catherine Hoffman, three generations of a Black family in Kansas City, Mo., discuss the decision to change their names to match the family name of the eldest, Adolphus Parker. Within this simple, direct film springs a wealth of issues about Black identity, complicated family dynamics, enduring love, and the long shadow of American slavery.

“Take Me Home” • Korean American writer-director Liz Sargent delivers the most heart-tugging film in the batch, casting her sister, Anna Sargent, as a young woman with cognitive disabilities — who must team with her estranged sister (Jeena Yi) to deal with the aftermath when their mother (played in flashbacks by Joan Sargent, Liz and Anna’s mom) dies unexpectedly. The Sargent sisters, in front of and behind the camera, get to the raw emotions of siblings coming together in the worst of times.

“Les Liaisons Foireuses (Inglorious Liaisons)” • The uncertainties of young love play out in this animated Belgian coming-of-age comedy, my favorite of this collection. It’s set at a high school party where alcohol, hormones and a game of spin-the-bottle reveal some tender truths. Directors Chloé Alliez and Violette DeIvoye employ an engaging stop-motion animating style, with each character depicted with light switches for faces and electrical plugs for legs — a visual metaphor for the live-wire intensity of teen emotions.

“Rest Stop” • Writer-director Crystal Kayiza received the Jury Award for U.S. Fiction for this immigrant tale, of a woman and her kids arriving in New York from Uganda and taking a long bus ride to the woman’s husband in Oklahoma. Seen mostly from the P.O.V. of the older daughter, the story unfolds naturally and gracefully, showing the hardships this family endures to secure an uncertain future.

“Piscine Pro” • A broad and profane comedy from Quebec, centering on a recent college graduate (Louis Carrière) who finds his degree in Viking history is of little use in his dead-end job at a pool store. 

“When You Left Me on That Boulevard” • This year’s Grand Jury Prize winner for short films at Sundance, this slice-of-life story captures the generation gap between a Filipino woman (Melissa Arcaya), trying to look right for their family Thanksgiving gathering in San Diego circa 2006, and her daughter Ly (Kailyn Dulay), who bristles at her mom’s rigidity and would rather get stoned with her cousins. Funny, aggravating and warm-hearted — just like any encounter with your family would be.

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‘Sundance Short Film Tour 2023’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but some shorts probably R for language and some mature content. Running time: 91 minutes; two shorts are in French, another is in English and Swahili, all with subtitles.

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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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. 

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‘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.