Review: 'Rustin' shines a light on a hidden figure of the civil rights movement, and gives Colman Domingo a worthy stage to perform

“Rustin” is a movie that’s almost as good as its intentions — which are in the stratosphere, thanks to its subject matter (the civil rights movement) and two of its executive producers (Barack and Michelle Obama, through their Higher Ground Productions).

The title figure is Bayard Rustin, a champion of the civil rights struggle who has not gotten his props until recently. Colman Domingo, recently stealing scenes in “Zola” and “Candyman,” plays Rustin with a cagey mix of flamboyance and world-weariness. He’s been beaten in his life — he’s missing several teeth on his right side from a cop’s nightstick after sitting in the front of a bus as a young man — but not beaten down. He remains resilient, working alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen) through the 1950s, in the battle to make segregation go away as the Supreme Court said it should.

The movie starts in 1960, when King and Rustin are on opposite sides of a dispute with the hierarchy of the NAACP — most notably the group’s executive director, Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), who finds Rustin too loud and, though he won’t say the word, too gay to be a public voice in the movement. Rustin thinks King will have his back, and when he doesn’t, there’s a falling out that lasts for three years.

We cut ahead those three years, to 1963, with Rustin floundering in an anti-war group, and seeing the younger Black activists tired of the nonviolence he and King espouse. At a party, one of those young men confronts Rustin, saying, “you’re irrelevant.” Rustin replies laconically, “It’s Friday night — I’ve been called worse.”

Then Rustin has a brainstorm: A two-day march, 100,000 people strong, in Washington, D.C., to demand of Congress and the White House movement on a comprehensive civil rights law. He gathers some eager young activists to help flesh out the idea into a plan. Rustin soon realizes that he will need the NAACP’s support, and to get that — as his old friend, the activist Ella Baker (Audra McDonald), tells him — he needs to make peace with King.

Rustin convinces King to climb on board because he knows this will be the chance, and the place, for King to secure his legacy. And he’s right — because that march in 1963, culminating at the Lincoln Memorial, is where King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech. (It’s not a spoiler if it’s history.)

Screenwriters Justin Breece and Dustin Lance Black each bring different elements to the mix. Breece, who wrote episodes of Ava DuVernay’s miniseries “When They See Us,” channels the passions of the civil rights era — particularly capturing the specific moment when Rustin’s generation was feeling like the old guard and grandstanders, like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright), were challenging that guard. Black, an Oscar winner for “Milk,” highlights the less public part of Rustin’s identity, his homosexuality, with a subplot involving a closeted minister (Johnny Ramey) and several speeches peppered through the narrative, some soaring and others sounding like Black is trying to be the next Aaron Sorkin.

Director George C. Wolfe (who put August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” on the screen) is, at heart, a theater guy — and he recognizes that the heart and soul of “Rustin” is intertwined with the theatricality and bravado of Bayard Rustin. Wolfe collaborates with Domingo to bring those qualities, like his rapid-fire wit and silver tongue, front and center. Wolfe provides the platform, and Domingo supplies the fireworks.

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‘Rustin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, in theaters; starts streaming November 17 on Netflix. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some violence, sexual material, language including racial slurs, brief drug use, and smoking. Running time: 106 minutes.

Review: 'The Persian Version' is a fresh and funny story of an Iranian American trying to reconcile her various identities with her tough-as-nails mom

Sometimes a movie takes a few minutes to settle down and find its groove — which is what happens with “The Persian Version,” writer-director Maryam Keshavarz’s warm-hearted and regularly hilarious look at a woman trying to reconcile conflicting cultures and a hard case of a mom.

“Obviously, I’ve had some issues with culture,” are the first words we hear from Leila (Layla Mohammadi) — after we see her entering a Halloween party in half a burqa with a neon-pink bikini under it. “Can you blame me? I come from two countries that used to be madly in love with each other.” Those countries are the United States and Iran, and needless to say, the breakup was epically bad.

Leila explains how her father took the family from Iran to America in the ‘60s, to be a doctor in Brooklyn, and stayed after the revolution back home. Leila was the youngest of nine children, and the only girl — and a constant disappointment to her mother (Niousha Noor). Part of that attitude comes from the fact that Leila is a lesbian, recently divorced because she wanted to pursue her filmmaking career rather than settle down and have kids.

When her father (Bijan Daneshmand) goes into the hospital for a long-awaited heart transplant, and all the brothers go to sit with him, Mom demands that Leila stay home and tend to her grandmother, Mamanjoon (Bella Warda). This turns out to be propitious, because Mamanjoon lets slip that Leila’s parents left Iran because of “the scandal.” Of course, Leila is dying to know what the scandal was — and whether it helps explain why her mother is the way she is.

Keshavarz, whose 2011 Iran-centered lesbian drama “Circumstance” won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic films at Sundance, returns with an exuberant, Technicolor celebration of family — as Leila learns her family’s hidden history and finds connections to her own chaotic life. Leila is often told, “You’re just like your mother,” and even though she denies it vociferously, even she can’t deny the parallels. The story is based on Keshavarz’s own family story, which gives the movie a lived-in authenticity.

Mohammadi is a stunning discovery, beautiful and sharp and wickedly funny, and she commands the movie. She’s nicely matched with Noor and Warda, representing three generations of fierce and loving women — embodying the family bonds that make “The Persian Version” so charming.

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‘The Persian Version’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 3, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some sexual references. Running time: 106 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.

Review: 'Five Nights at Freddy's' is mostly for the franchise's fans, but has a few scares for the rest of us

The not-too-messy horror thriller “Five Nights at Freddy’s” grapples with the same problem any movie based on a popular franchise does: How much effort will go into satisfying the fans of the property? And how far will the filmmakers go to bring the uninitiated along for the ride?

In this case, the seesaw definitely tips toward fan service, though there are some horror pleasures that anyone can appreciate.

The movie starts with Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), a guy who needs a job to keep himself and his kid sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), fed and sheltered — and to keep their scheming Aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) from taking custody of Abby. Mike has a complicated routine to get to sleep each night, which we learn has to do with a childhood incident when his little brother, Garrett (Lucas Grant), was kidnapped during a camping trip and was never seen again. 

When he sees a career counselor (Matthew Lillard), he reluctantly accepts the one job offered: Night security guard at a long-closed arcade, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. When Mike starts his first night, he he encounters the weirdness of the place, in the form of animatronic figures performing ‘80s pop music. It’s up to Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a cop patrolling the area, who fills in more of the story — of how Freddy’s was shut down after five children there disappeared.

The children soon show up in Mike’s dreams, and Mike thinks they might be able to help him figure out what happened to Garrett. But the price of finding out could involve losing Abby.

Like many people, my familiarity with the source material, the “Five Nights at Freddy’s” video game franchise started by Scott Cawthon, is through my kids. They don’t play the horror game, which is infamous for its random jump scares, but they watch YouTube game players walking through the game (and its sequels).

Director Emma Tammi (who made the unsettling 2018 frontier horror drama “The Wind”), who shares screenwriting credit with Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, squeezes out some frights in one sequence in the early part of the movie — when some hooligans try to rob Freddy’s and encounter the menacing robots. The rest of the movie is more about the psychological horror, and only succeeds fitfully at building that tension.

On a technical level, the movie is a curiosity, thanks to the animatronic work by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, which gives Freddy and his pals a tactile menace that computer-animated monsters wouldn’t be able to replicate. 

The best way to enjoy “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is to go when there’s an audience made up of the game’s fans — in part because it’s fun to hear them react at the numerous in-jokes peppered through the movie. (For example, an overly cheerful diner waiter is played by Matthew Patrick, aka MatPat, one of those YouTube stars.) It’s one of those horror movies that is more fun in a crowd.

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‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters, and streaming on Peacock. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images and language. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'The Mission' recounts, with remarkable even-handedness, a young Christian's fatal attempt to preach to an isolated people

There’s a nice sense of irony, or maybe karma, in the documentary “The Mission,” the story of a young Christian missionary whose zealous pursuit of his purpose led to his death — because, like this young man in his rowboat, the viewer also has to account for what they are bringing with them as they watch.

The facts of the case are these: In November 2018, John Chau, an American man of Chinese heritage, was killed on North Sentinel Island off the coast of India — a place where the Indigenous hunter-gatherers live without contact from outsiders, and react to intruders with bows and arrows.

Directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, a married couple whose previous movie was the 2020 documentary “Boys State,” spend the bulk of the movie showing us how Chau got there, physically and spiritually. The movie traces the origins of his evangelical fervor, and how he found mentors — particularly a mission organizer at Oral Roberts University (who was not interviewed for the film) — who encouraged him to bring Jesus’ story to all people everywhere.

McBaine and Moss interview several people who knew Chau: High school friends, college instructors, National Park Service employees he worked with, and a couple of pastors. 

There are two interviews with people who didn’t know Chau. One, Adam Goodheart, an author who wrote about the Sentinelese — and once got close enough to the island to feel an arrow fly past him. The other is Daniel Everett, a linguist who as a young missionary in 1978 lived among the Pirahã people of the Amazon, and now warns against the presumption that Westerners can give isolated groups anything that they want or need.

Two other voices are prominent, and they belong to actors speaking over animation. One reads excerpts from a letter written by Chau’s father to the filmmakers. The other reads passages from Chau’s journals, which his family allowed the filmmakers to make public.

There are many ways to think about Chau. Was he a reckless young man who ignored repeated warnings — and Indian law — by attempting to set foot on the island? Was he a selfish and arrogant Westerner who thought he knew what the Sentinelese needed better than they did? Was he brainwashed by the evangelical Christian leaders he met?

The fascinating thing about “The Mission” is that McBaine and Moss are astonishingly even-handed, allowing for all those perspectives to be given consideration. Then it’s up to the viewer to sort out which version of Chau seems most likely — and, at the same time, consider their own biases about faith, colonialism and free will.

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‘The Mission’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for full nudity, some violent content, thematic elements and sexual references. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'After Death' is a documentary about near-death experiences that's only for those who already believe

Ambiguity is the space where good documentaries thrive — that limbo where the truth is unknowable, and the filmmakers present the possibilities and let the viewer to make up their minds. Ambiguity is also something from which the makers of “After Death” flee as fast as their faith-based re-enactments can carry them.

As the title tells us, the subject here is what happens when people die — the ultimate unknowable, since people who have died don’t return their text messages. Directors Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke have to settle for talking to people who have had near-death experiences (which happens often enough, the movie tells us, that they use the abbreviation NDE).

The first person we meet is Dale Black, a former airline pilot, who describes a trip he took in a small plane with two other pilots in 1969 — and how, when the plane crashed into a pavilion, he found himself floating about the scene, looking down at three bodies, his two dead colleagues and himself. 

Gray and Radtke present several stories like this, usually with re-enactments to illustrate the moments for which there is no footage. A car is hit by a semi on a narrow bridge. A kayaker shoots the rapids and ends up under a waterfall. A man suffers from a perforated duodenum in Paris, and the hospital can’t find a doctor to perform the emergency surgery. And so on.

Three other interview subjects also speak a lot during the film. One is Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist who has compiled stories of people describing their near-death experiences. Another is John Burke, an author and a pastor, who has written a list of the common traits of near-death experiences. And the third, Michael Sabom, is a retired cardiologist who has interviewed hundreds of people who have had near-death experiences.

Sabom is the most fascinating voice here, because he’s as close to being a skeptic as the movie finds. Sabom presents himself as someone trying to apply scientific rigor to the idea that people approach the brink of death and come back — and frequently report that they saw their own bodies, and the frantic medical personnel trying to save them. When they are resuscitated, some of the interview subjects say, they recount details of the doctors and nurses that an unconscious person would not have seen. (Cue the “Twilight Zone” music.)

But the point of “After Death” isn’t scientific proof, which is why Sabom is a no-show for most of the movie’s second half. It’s here that the stories get into dark tunnels, a bright light, meetings with departed relatives and, right up to the end, the figure of God. In this movie, it’s always a Christian god. If Buddhists or Muslims or other faiths have near-death experiences, they apparently weren’t sought out for this movie.

“After Death” is being released by Angel Studios, the Provo-based distributor known for two recent successes. One is the TV series “The Chosen,” which depicts the life of Jesus in episodic form. The other is “Sound of Freedom,” the drama in which Jim Caviezel plays Tim Ballard, recounting his efforts to catch child traffickers — a highly fictionalized telling, and one that apparently gets more and more fictional as more revelations and indictments come out about its subject (who has denied all allegations).

As with “Sound of Freedom,” “After Death” ends with a to-the-camera appeal — this time by Gray — to audience members to “play it forward” by purchasing theater tickets for the next person seeking out the movie. And, as before, a helpful QR code is projected onto the screen to direct people to buy those tickets.

Ultimately, “After Death” isn’t for skeptics, but for the believers. It’s meant to comfort people who think there is a heaven, not try to sway the undecided. It’s very certain of what happens when we die — and such certainty isn’t just presumptuous, it’s not particularly interesting as a movie.

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‘After Death’

★★

Opens Friday, October 27, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including violent descriptions, some bloody images and drug references. Running time: 108 minutes.

Review: 'Killers of the Flower Moon,' a tragic saga of greed and death in Osage territory, might be Martin Scorsese's last epic masterpiece

There are several good reasons why Martin Scorsese’s latest masterpiece, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is nearly three-and-a-half hours long — but the most compelling one is that Scorsese, who at 80 could very well be making his last great film, is making so many films at once.

This true story — of Oklahoma’s Osage Indians becoming wealthy from oil and becoming the targets of the white population’s murderous greed — is, all at once, a Western, a crime drama, a horror movie, a courtroom drama (in the final hour) and a historical tragedy about the insidious power of American corruption. And it’s a movie that benefits from the breathing space that long running time allows. (If you don’t think you can sit still that long in the theater, wait until it debuts on Apple TV+, and your pause button can provide your own personal intermission.)

It’s the 1920s, and the older Osage can see their way of life is dying out on the Oklahoma land to which the white-ruled government has put them after running them out of Missouri, Arkansas and Kansas. They even perform a ceremony, burying a pipe as a symbol of the old traditions. On the spot of that burial comes a gusher of oil.

Soon, we’re told, the Osage become the richest people, per capita, in the world — and, to cite one example of their ostentatious wealth, the biggest buyers of Pierce-Arrow automobiles in the country. With that wealth come hordes of white men offering to work for the Osage, or angling for ways to cheat them out of their money. Because the whites also control the banks, the Osage are forced to have white guardianship to spend their own money.

One such guardian is a cattle baron, William “King” Hale, played by Robert De Niro. Hale speaks the Osage language, offers support to the tribe’s leaders, and spends his money freely to help those Osage who are burying their loved ones. Turns out there’s a lot of burials these days — many from the so-called “wasting disease,” and others from incidents that the sheriff (who’s white) declines to investigate. Frequently, when these Osage people die, the rights to their oil fortunes often fall to white relatives, some of them also relatives of Hale.

When Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) arrives in Fairfax, Oklahoma, he’s a former cook in a U.S. Army unit fighting in the Great War, who for health reasons can’t perform manual labor. He’s also a nephew of Hale, who sets him up as a driver-for-hire — and one of the first clients he drives is Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), the oldest of four daughters of a wealthy Osage woman, Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal). Hale suggests that Ernest might make a good husband for Mollie, though the audience soon learns to be suspicious of Hale’s motives for matchmaking.

Ernest — as depicted in the script by Eric Roth and Scorsese, based on the book by David Grann (whose fact-based writing became the basis for “The Lost City of Z” and “The Old Man and the Gun”) — is ambitious enough to want money, but not quite smart enough to see the ways Hale is manipulating him into escalating levels of evil behavior. Even as Mollie becomes ill with diabetes, and the injections he administers of a hard-to-find wonder drug (insulin) seem to be making her worse rather than better, Ernest continues to follow Hale’s counsel.

It’s only about two hours into the movie that there’s a possible challenge to Hale’s status quo. That’s when Tom White (Jesse Plemons) — a federal lawman from some new agency he calls “the Bureau of Investigation” (the letters FBI aren’t familiar yet) — comes to Fairfax, looking into the deaths of several Osage, including Mollie’s sisters.

This is the 10th feature film in which Scorsese has directed De Niro — going back 50 years to “Mean Streets,” and including such classics as “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “GoodFellas,” “Cape Fear” and “The Irishman.” So it’s not surprising that the collaboration is again a fruitful one, since Scorsese knows how to deploy De Niro’s coiled menace, and De Niro is comfortable enough to let the movie come to him. 

It’s also the sixth time Scorsese has directed DiCaprio, the most recent being “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and that pairing also has its dividends. DiCaprio doesn’t humanize Ernest’s rough, thuggish behavior, but he does show the pain as his conscience slowly awakens to the misery he and Hale have caused, all to acquire more money.

The melancholy heart of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is Gladstone. The actress (who shined in Kelly Reichert’s “Certain Women”) is introduced as a quiet presence, though her smile and indulgent laugh at Ernest’s crude attempts at charm show a wisdom and passion below the surface. Even as Mollie is relegated to bed by illness and gaslighting, Gladstone’s performance captures the pain and resilience Mollie must maintain to survive the white interlopers’ greed.

There’s a deep bench of supporting players, including some in the last hour who are quite recognizable. It’s fascinating that some of the most interesting small roles are filled by musicians — including Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Pete Yorn, Jack White and the blues legend Charlie Musselwhite — who feel just as authentic as some of the craggy character actors Scorsese has assembled.

Speaking of music, the score is a wonder, a deceptively spare and elegiac work by Scorsese’s old friend and collaborator Robbie Robertson (who died in August) that feels both modern and authentic to the 1920s setting. It’s also worth mentioning two other longtime collaborators doing stellar work here: Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (who’s worked with Scorsese since “The Wolf of Wall Street”) and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who goes back with Scorsese all the way back to “Raging Bull”).

The sadness that permeates “Killers of the Flower Moon” — the grief over the deaths of so many people for greed, and the sense that a culture was dying with them — is matched by the realization that comes to a movie lover after it’s over. Scorsese and De Niro are both 80 years old, and it’s an uncomfortable truth that neither of them likely has many more movies this good left in the tank. Thankfully, they have given us this one, and it’s something to treasure.

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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 20, in theaters everywhere; will start streaming on Apple TV+ at an undisclosed date. Rated R for violence, some grisly images, and language. Running time: 206 minutes.

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.