Review: In 'Nyad,' Annette Bening, with help from Jodie Foster, captures a personality as salty as the water she swims in

The accomplishment depicted in “Nyad,” a largely straightforward biographical drama of long-distance swimmer and sportscaster Diana Nyad, is remarkable. It’s the accomplishment that directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin pull off — to center a Hollywood movie around someone as brittle and hard to like as Nyad appears to be — that’s really surprising.

The movie starts with Nyad, played by Annette Bening, in 2009, approaching her 60th birthday and dreading the surprise party that she knows her best friend, Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster), is planning. After 30 years as a sportscaster and journalist, Nyad is bored and looking for a new challenge — and she hits upon it by deciding to go back to an old challenge from her days as a long-distance swimmer: Swimming the 110 miles from Havana, Cuba, to Key West, Florida.

It’s a swim she attempted in her youth, in 1979, but couldn’t complete. Now, she’s determined to do it again. She convinces Stoll to be her coach, and starts retraining her body for the hours she will have to spend in the water, propelling herself one stroke at a time.

Nyad knows the risks of a swim in open water: Cold, storms, fatigue, hallucinations, sharks and jellyfish stings among them. She and Stoll start assembling a crew, starting with a crusty Caribbean boat pilot, John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans), who knows the variable currents better than anyone. He’s doubtful Nyad can finish the swim — and it’s only Nyad’s stubborn, self-centered persistence that keeps the team going, until her ego starts to drive everyone away, including Stoll.

Bening gives an outstanding performance that’s as uncompromising as Nyad herself. A lesser actor would have asked first-time feature screenwriter Julia Cox to whittle down the character’s sharp corners, to make her more sympathetic, maybe give her a puppy or something. Bening charges straight ahead, showing that the qualities that allowed Nyad to attempt such a long swim also made her rather hard to live with.

Matching Bening, practically stroke for stroke, is Foster, who portrays Stoll — a former racquetball player who, she says at one point, briefly dated Nyad “like, 200 years ago” — as Nyad’s friend, coach, protector and conscience, spurring her to continue her quest and calling her out on her crap when necessary. It’s a warm, lively performance that balances Bening’s cool quite well.

If there’s a weakness in “Nyad,” its that Vasarhelyi and Chin, husband-and-wife filmmakers, can’t pull themselves away enough from their documentary roots. (They share an Oscar for the 2019 climbing doc “Free Solo.”) Too much of this movie relies on archival footage, and a somewhat rigid recounting of Nyad’s failed attempts — a level of detail that may appeal to the swimming purists, but cuts into the tension of her pursuit. Still, Bening and Foster make that pursuit a worthy one to follow.

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‘Nyad’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and will start streaming November 3 on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving sexual abuse, some strong language and brief partial nudity. Running time: 121 minutes.

Review: 'Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour' captures the spectacle and sweat of the star's stadium extravaganza

In the concert movie “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” the (arguably) most famous woman in the world plays guitar and sometimes piano. But the instrument she plays with the most skill, finesse and delight is the audience — nearly 100,000 delirious Swifties filling SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and the countless fans who will fill movie theaters to see this souvenir of her blockbuster tour.

Swift closed out her spring/summer stadium tour at SoFi Stadium in August — and she and director Sam Wrench seem to have cherry-picked the performances from the six shows she performed there. (The two “surprise” songs in her acoustic set come from different nights.) The show is organized by album, though not in chronological order.

Wrench presents the show in much the same way a fan in the stadium would see it — no backstage costume changes, no behind-the-scenes warmups, no interviews with fans before the show. The camera comes in from above, hones in on the stadium, and just like that, Swift and her backup band, vocalists and dancers are launching into “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince,” the first of six cuts from her 2019 album, “Lover.” 

The production design is off-the-charts in the “Lover’ section, with a three-story office set for her feminist anthem “The Man,” which morphs into a rainbow-colored house interior for the whimsical pro-LGBTQ song “You Need to Calm Down.”

After “Lover,” Swift — looking athletic in a sequined body suit, the first of many costumes she wears through the show — shifts gears to the “Fearless” section, taking on the title track of that 2008 album and two of her early pop hits, “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story.” Then she jumps to 2020’s “Evermore,” where the staging goes from the simple (“Champagne Problems” has just her at a moss-covered piano, with the band quietly hidden) to the theatrical, enacting a dinner-table breakup for “Tolerate It.”

The light-industrial grind of 2017’s “Reputation” and the girls-night-out jams of 2012’s “Red”— with the hits “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” — are somewhat awkwardly separated by the swoony “Enchanted”, the one song from her 2010 album “Speak Now” (“Enchanted”). The “Red” segment ends with what’s easily Swift’s most powerful solo piece, her 10-minute bad-boyfriend masterpiece “All Too Well.” 

The back end of the show luxuriates through several tracks from her semi-experimental 2020 album “Folklore,” four chart-toppers from her 2014 album “1989” (the staging on “Blank Space” is hilarious), a two-song acoustic set (where Swift liked to mix it up every night) before launching into the grand finale — seven songs from her most recent album, “Midnights.”

The movie clocks in at two hours and 48 minutes — including a song over the closing credits. That’s a bit shorter than the concert itself, I’m told, and based on setlists I’ve seen online, I could tell you the songs that got cut. (Wrench also cuts out some of the costume-change transitions.) Those songs aren’t particularly missed, because Swift & Co. are giving so much through the show that any fan will be satisfied.

That’s the point of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” movie, isn’t it? This is a keepsake, a memento of a tour that entertained a few million people across the country — the equivalent of a selfie and a T-shirt to remember the moment, or a bit of tour merchandise ordered online by those not fortunate enough to live near an NFL-sized stadium or wealthy enough to make the trip and secure the tickets.

There are other venues if you want to hear Swift being introspective behind the scenes. (I recommend director Lana Wilson’s 2020 documentary “Taylor Swift: Miss Americana,” streaming on Netflix.) Here, you get precisely what it says on the box: Taylor Swift in concert, dressed in glittering glory, singing the songs her fans love in a spectacularly staged production. As Swift sings in “Mastermind,” one of the last numbers of the night, “It was all my design” — and a brilliant one at that.

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‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’

★★★1/2

Opens Thursday, October 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language and suggestive material. Running time: 168 minutes.

Review: 'Joan Baez: I Am a Noise" shows the folk legend in her final tour, and contemplating an adventurous life and her personal pain

The documentary “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise” seems to have both the easiest and hardest jobs in documentary filmmaking: Capturing the spirit and passion of Joan Baez, one of the most dynamic and important musicians of the 20th (and now 21st) century.

It’s easy because Baez — both in current interview and performance footage, and in a wealth of archival material — is a force of nature, and just pointing a camera in her direction will yield nuggets of truth, beauty and truth. But it’s hard because she has lived such a life, seemingly being at the major points of American history and being with many of the great names of the era.

Co-directors Miri Nagasaki, Maeve O’Boyle and Karen O’Connor get all that, but they also get something else: Access to Baez’ private writings — letters to her family, journal entries and drawings (which are the foundation for some haunting animation) that chronicle a lifetime of struggling with depression, anxiety and possibly abuse.

The story starts at the end, with Baez at home in California, preparing to go out on her 2018 concert tour — her last, she says, though she’s reluctant to call it a farewell tour. (That reluctance doesn’t last long, since the name of the tour is “Fare Thee Well,” the title of the song with which she ends each concert.) The tour becomes the documentary’s through line, with the filmmakers backstage and on the tour bus, hanging out with Baez and her musicians (including her son, drummer Gabriel Harris).

Threading through the tour are the memories Baez shares about her childhood in California, the racism she endured because of her Mexican heritage (on her mother’s side), and the early performances with her younger sister, Mimi, that gained the attention of the music industry — launching her career in the New York folk scene.

Memories of her activism also spring forth: Of performing at the March on Washington and hearing Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; of going on the second Selma-to-Montgomery march, again with Dr. King; of protesting the Vietnam War, marrying activist David Harris, and being pregnant (with Gabriel) when Harris was jailed for resisting the draft. 

Harris isn’t the first romance in Baez’s mentioned here. She talks about a relationship with a woman, identified only as Kimmie. And she talks about her time with Bob Dylan, though she doesn’t talk so much about their romantic times as she does the end of the relationship — when she left him during his 1965 U.K. tour. “I couldn’t do the drugs, or the boys’ club,” she said of her departure. “I was this weird little folkie. I just didn’t belong.”

The filmmakers don’t linger on the gossipy stuff, though. The film is more interested in exploring how Baez coped, or didn’t, with her years of anxiety and depression. Baez fared better there than her younger sister, Mimi — a musician in her own right, whose musical and romantic partnership with Richard Fariña ended tragically in 1966, when he was killed in a motorcycle accident. Mimi, then 21, never really recovered from that, Baez says in the film. (Mimi died of cancer in 2001, at age 56.)

Baez is forthright about her late-fame problems — including an addiction to Quaaludes in the ‘70s, and an experience with a hypnotherapist that unearthed memories, possibly false ones, that her father abused her and her two sisters. That experience, she said, put a strain on her relationship with her older sister, Pauline. 

Through the stories, the pain, the history of Baez’s life, the constant was that crystal-pure voice, which we hear often — both in old footage and on her 2018 tour. Baez sometimes talks on camera about how time has slightly withered her voice, but the movie shows that the years have compensated by giving her the wisdom to make the songs resonate on a deeper level.

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‘Joan Baez: I Am a Noise’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language, descriptions of sexual assault and sexual content, and some drug references. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: Almodóvar's 30-minute 'Strange Way of Life' is movie passion stripped to its essence

Pedro Almodóvar’s second English-language film, “Strange Way of Life,” is a romantic drama and a Western, both distilled to their essence and concentrated into a 31-minute mini-masterpiece.

(The short film will screen with another Almodóvar short, his 2020 drama “The Human Voice,” a solo showcase for Tilda Swinton that was not screened for critics with the new film. Rounding out the program is a recorded interview with Almodóvar.)

“Strange Way of Life” centers on two characters, a sheriff, Jake (Ethan Hawke), and a cowboy, Silva (Pedro Pascal), who rides into Jake’s town. We pick up, from their responses to each other, that these two have a history — and when they end up in bed together shortly Silva’s arrival, that it’s a complicated and passionate one. The complication, we learn later, is that Jake soon has to arrest Silva’s son, Joe (George Steane), who’s wanted for murder.

Almodóvar also shows us a quick, sexually charged flashback, as the young Silva (José Condessa) and Jake (Jason Fernández), first fell for each other. The scenes, of Jake and Silva then and now, are perfectly composed and white hot — and the actors, particularly Hawke and Pascal, bring out all the intensity of emotion that anyone familiar with Almodóvar’s work would expect to see.

Watching this play out over just 30 minutes doesn’t make a viewer wish Almodóvar had expanded the story to feature length. One can extrapolate what’s unsaid or not shown. It’s like tuning into an old movie on TV in the last half hour — and even if you’ve never seen it, you use the context clues and one’s familiarity with storytelling conventions to fill in the gaps. Almodóvar delivers in “Strange Way of Life” everything the story needs and nothing it doesn’t.

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‘Strange Way of Life’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexual content, language and bloody images. Running time: 31 minutes; will screen with another 30-minute short by director Pedro Almodóvar, “The Human Voice” (2020), and a recorded interview with Almodóvar.

Review: 'Invisible Beauty' profiles pioneering model Bethann Hardison, and her headstrong fight to make the fashion world more diverse.

Bethann Hardison has been educating, and sometimes fighting, the fashion world for decades — to get designers, critics and others to recognize that they are setting the standards for beauty around the world, and that those standards long have been limiting and even racist.

Hardison’s latest vehicle for making this point is the documentary “Invisible Beauty,” which she co-directs with French fashion filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng to ell her life story in all its glory and power.

For those who don’t know, Hardison, now 81, was one of the first Black fashion models to work the runways for prominent designers. She was working as a saleswoman in New York’s Garment District when designer Willi Smith discovered her, first as a fitting model and later on the catwalk and in print. Her angular cheekbones were striking, and her dark skin a rarity among the thin white models that dominate (and still dominate) the industry.

Hardison was part of a movement in the 1970s — along with such models of color as Iman and Pat Cleveland (who are interviewed here) — to add some diversity to the modeling world. Not content to just model, Hardison moved into the management side, first as a booking agent for a modeling agency, and later with an agency of her own. In those roles, she created a stable of models who looked interesting in their own right (Naomi Campbell was one of them), rather than interchangeable clothes hangers in human form.

When Hardison stepped away from her agency, the industry didn’t keep up the progress in diversifying itself. Instead, fashion went backward, fueled in part by an influx of Russian and Eastern European models — emaciated white women fleeing the end of the Cold War. Hardison co-founded the Black Girls Coalition, using the collective power of the models’ stardom to call attention to the nonsense excuses designers gave for the industry’s systemic racism.

Though Hardison is co-director on this documentary, she doesn’t shy away from some criticism. Most of this comes in the film’s discussions about her stormy relationship with her son, the actor Kadeem Hardison. There were good times — like when he became famous in the sitcom “A Different World,” and gave Bethann an SUV with his first paycheck — but also some hard ones, because Bethann was a demanding mother who apparently didn’t believe in participation trophies.

Tcheng, whose resume includes documentaries on fashion icons Diana Vreeland, Raf Simons and Halston, marshals all the appropriate interview subjects to talk about Bethann Hardison’s legacy as a pioneer and an advocate. But it’s the personal touch, of Bethann trying to sort out the eight decades of her admittedly messy life for an upcoming memoir, that gives “Invisible Beauty” its quite visible power.

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‘Invisible Beauty’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and sexual content. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'She Came to Me' has stars Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei and Anne Hathaway, and the plot of a screwball comedy, but with a weirdly muted tone

If you played a screwball comedy like the most serious drama, you’d get something much like what writer-director Rebecca Miller concocts in “She Came to Me,” a frenetically plotted but morosely staged look at love, opera and obsessions.

Opera composer Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage) is in a rut, creatively and in his marriage to Patricia Jessup-Lauddem (Anne Hathaway), his wife and former therapist. Steven is trying to write his newest opera, but can’t come up with an idea. When he asks Patricia to consider deviating from their normal routine of only having sex on Thursdays, she declines. Patricia is busy with her patients, cleaning their already spotless apartment, and worrying about her 18-year-old son, Julian (Evan A. Ellison). 

One day, Patricia pushes Steven out of their Brooklyn home to walk the dog. He walks into a dockside bar, where he meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a tugboat captain. He accepts her invitation to check out her boat, where she tells of being addicted to romance — and promptly seduces Steven. Not long after, Steven has a brainstorm, to adapt Katrina’s story, with some murderous adjustments, into his next opera.

Meanwhile, the movie also introduces us to Tereza Szyskowski (Harlow Jane), the 16-year-old daughter of Magdalena (Joanna Kulig) and step-daughter to Magdalena’s hyper-controlling boyfriend, Trey Ruffa (Brian D’Arcy James), a court reporter and Civil War reenactor. How do these characters connect to Steven and Patricia? Tereza and Julian are in love, and Magdalena has just gotten a job as Patricia’s maid.

Miller’s characters are driven by their obsessions — Steven’s for his music, Katrina’s for stalking men she falls for, Patricia for the spartan existence of Catholic nuns, and Trey’s for justice and the knowledge that his underage stepdaughter is having sex with an 18-year-old boy. Bringing all of these together into one story has the potential to be explosive and funny, though Miller’s approach is more deadpan quirky than riotously funny.

Miller — who has made such heavy Sundance dramas as “Personal Velocity” and “The Ballad of Jack and Rose”— is capable of comedy. Her last movie, “Maggie’s Plan,” was a warmly witty romance, bolstered by the smartly funny central performance of Greta Gerwig.

Here, Miller gets some unexpected laughs from staging Steven’s offbeat operas, with music by composer Bryce Dessner, known for his work with The National (and for co-writing the songs for the Dinklage vehicle “Cyrano”). Otherwise, the performances, particularly  Dinklage’s and Tomei’s, are muted, like they’re afraid of leaning into the absurdity of the scenario. (Hathaway, surprisingly, does find the silliness in this straitlaced comedy of manners.) If “She Came to Me” was just a hair less clever, and a bit more manic, it might be a great modern romantic comedy, instead of a curious oddity.

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‘She Came to Me’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 6, at several theaters. Rated R for some language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'PAW Patrol' sequel, 'The Mighty Movie,' gives our dogs superpowers, but doesn't give them anything interesting to do with them

One of the most insulting things you can do to a kid — and I know I’ve done it a few times in my life — is to talk over their heads, speaking to other grown-ups as if the little ones can’t hear you. It’s something the makers of the kid-targeted “PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie” do repeatedly, and it makes for one annoying little movie.

It starts when the seven heroic dogs of the PAW Patrol are called to rescue the owners of a junkyard, who have been locked in their office trailer as a fire rages amid the wrecked cars. One of the junkyard operators, Janet (voiced by Kristen Bell), describes the PAW Patrol in one line of dialogue: “They’re dogs who drive cars. Just go with it.”

Isn’t that funny? It’s like the filmmakers are saying, “Hey, we know this is stupid crap — but it’s OK because your little monsters like the pretty colors and think dogs are cute.” Not thinking about the fact that those kids are listening, and can feel the derision oozing from every frame.

The culprit in the fire is an evil genius, Victoria Vance (voiced by Taraji P. Henson), who needed the junkyard’s electromagnet to complete her tractor beam, which she aims to use to pull a passing asteroid to Earth, so she can use its power for — well, that part’s kind of vague, as if Victoria, or the screenwriters, haven’t thought things through that far.

When the asteroid lands, the PAW Patrol gets there first, and seven power crystals emerge to latch onto the pups’ dog tags. The dogs discover that the crystals give each of them superpowers. For example, the resident pilot, Skye (voiced by Mckenna Grace) gains super-strength — a big boost to her self-esteem, which is rather battered because she’s the smallest of the group.

Director Cal Brunker and co-screenwriter Bob Barlen, who collaborated on the first “PAW Patrol” movie in 2021, set up a series of confrontations with the dogs on one side and the scheming Victoria — aided by the returning Mayor Humdinger (voiced by ) — on the other. Our heroes face some adversity, as well as a flashback sequence practically stolen from “Toy Story 2” (with Christina Aguilera providing the sad ballad instead of Sarah McLachlan), on the way to a happy ending.

Adults in the audience will wonder why some actual famous people — Bell, James Marsden, Chris Rock, Lil Rey Howery, Serena Williams and Kim Kardashian — signed on to supply voices here, sometimes just for one line of dialogue. The answer’s simple: What better way to make your kindergarten-aged kid think their parents are cool than to snag tickets to the premiere, or (in the case of Kardashian) spots in the voice cast?

Everyone in the audience, adults and kids alike, will be wondering how something this slight and inconsequential became a franchise capable of producing a TV series and two (soon to be three) theatrical films. Adults and all but the most polite kids will be squirming in their seats, wishing some cute dogs could rescue them from boredom.

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‘PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie’

★★

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild action/peril. Running time: 85 minutes, plus a 7-minute short, “Dora and the Fantastical Creatures.” 

Review: 'Fair Play' is a trashy sexual drama in Wall Street trappings, hiding a thin plot behind rough sex scenes

Except for one strong performance, there’s little to find appealing in “Fair Play,” a lurid exercise in corporate backstabbing that disguises its thin plot with extravagantly nasty sex scenes.

Emily (Phoebe Dynevor, from “Bridgerton”) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich, from “Solo”) are young, prosperous and very much in love — so much so that Luke proposes to Emily in the most awkward way possible (after sex in a bathroom at a relative’s wedding). Aside from family, though, they can’t tell anyone, because they work at the same high-stress New York financial firm, where the employees aren’t supposed to fraternize.

It’s the sort of place where millions can be made or lost with a single decision, and analysts like Emily and Luke are taking apart the data and making pitches to their managers — called PM’s — to inform those decisions. When one PM implodes after a stock purchase gone wrong, the big boss, Campbell (Eddie Marsan), has to promote a new one. And, despite a rumor that Luke will be the new PM, instead Campbell gives the job to Emily.

At first, Luke is congratulatory and supportive. But it’s not long before the late nights, the confabs with Campbell, and the pressures of answering to Emily as his boss start to grind on Luke’s masculinity.

Writer-director Chloe Domont — whose work directing episodes of “Ballers” and “Billions” prepared her for such fragile manhood — seems to argue that love, like Wall Street, is a place where there are no winners without losers. Whether this is true or not, it’s a depressing way to think about life, and this movie wallows in that depression, turning its lead characters more repulsive by the minute.

It doesn’t help that the mismatch of the lead actors is even wider than that of their characters. Dynevor is a stellar actress, and she finds gradations of rage and desire that poor Ehrenreich can’t begin to achieve. In “Fair Play,” it’s an unfair comparison between them.

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‘Fair Play’

★★

Opens Friday, September 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City); starts streaming October 6 on Netflix. Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, some nudity, and sexual violence. Running time: 113 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 26, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.