Review: 'Fallen Leaves' is a sparse and biting Finnish romance that earns its emotions

As bracing as a walk outside on a cold Helsinki night — and about as short — Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s “Fallen Leaves” is a romantic comedy stripped away of unnecessary moments, pretense and false sentimentality. It earns its flowers, and deserves them.

Like any romance, this is the story of two people. Ansa (Alma Pöysti) works in a supermarket, where the security guard (Sakari Kuosmanen) stares her down when she’s taking expired groceries to the rubbish bin, because she gives an item to a beggar before throwing it away. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works as a welder on a job site, whose employer provides a bunk in a railway car with three other men.

One night, Ansa and her coworker, Liisa (Nuppu Koivu), go to a bar for karaoke night. One of the singers that night is Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen), Holappa’s philosophical roommate, and Holappa is along for moral support. Huotari chats up Liisa after his song, but Holappa is too frozen to talk to Ansa, and vice versa.

Eventually, there is a date — the movie Holappa chooses is Jim Jarmusch’s “The Dead Don’t Die” (an inside joke between friends; Jarmusch made a cameo in Kaurismäki’s 1989 movie “Leningrad Cowboys Go America,” and Jarmusch used Kaurismäki’s actors in the Helsinki segment of his 1991 movie “Night on Earth”). She gives her his number, but he quickly drops the paper and it blows away.

That’s the first of many obstacles to Ansa and Holappa’s potential happiness, including job losses, financial struggles and Holappa’s frequent drinking — a dealbreaker for Ansa, who says she watched her father and brother die as a result of alcoholism, and won’t put herself through that again.

Kaurismäki is spare with dialogue, and allows his actors only the faintest of expressions. But within that restraint is a wealth of suppressed heartache, longing and a search to make the lonely nights more bearable. Pöysti and Vatanen fit perfectly in this world, taciturn figures who would explode if forced to express the emotions roiling within them. 

One gets the impression that Kaurismäki would have been at home in the silent movie era (there’s a hint of that idea at the very end). “Fallen Leaves” has the deadpan grace of a Buster Keaton film, and ultimately the battered hopefulness of Charlie Chaplin’s best work. 

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‘Fallen Leaves’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 82 minutes; in Finnish, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Disappearance of Shere Hite' chronicles the sex researcher's career — and how she fell down the memory hole

How exactly did a controversial, charismatic and best-selling sex expert get shoved down the memory hole, to the point where many people today don’t know who she was? That’s the intriguing question director Nicole Newnham poses in the fascinating documentary “The Disappearance of Shere Hite.” 

(Warning: This review, like the movie, uses language about human sexuality that some may find offensive.)

Hite became famous in the mid-1970s for authoring “The Hite Report,” at the time one of the most thorough studies of how women think about sex. Taking thousands of completed surveys from women around the world, Hite and her research team came up with some jaw-dropping data — with the headline being the news that women were far more likely to achieve an orgasm through masturbation than through being penetrated by a man’s penis.

The news was a bombshell. So was Hite, who had a lithe figure and gorgeous strawberry-blonde hair. She used both to get through college, working as a model for advertising and illustrations (she was the model for the buxom babes flanking Sean Connery in the poster for “Diamonds Are Forever”), as well as some tasteful nudes that would come back to haunt her. 

Hite also was politically active, and signed on early with the National Organization for Women. She enlisted her fellow activists to distribute her survey, which asked open-ended questions detailing one’s sexual experience, feelings and preferences. 

Hite also promoted the heck out of “The Hite Report,” making it a best-seller. That’s in spite of efforts by the publisher, the company’s former editor-in-chief tells the filmmakers, to deep-six the book by printing only 4,000 copies on its initial run and not providing any publicity. But Hite, deploying her striking looks and her command of her subject, made numerous TV appearances to talk up her findings.

The uproar over Hite’s first book was nothing compared to what happened with her second book, a survey asking men to talk about their sexual experiences, as well as their feelings. The biggest finding was that the vast majority of men were unhappy in their relationships — but couldn’t say so out loud because of the pressure on men not to show their feelings.

The release of the second “Hite Report” generated some of the most outlandish footage in Newnham’s film. There’s one clip where talk-show host Mike Douglas is asking Hite about her findings, and actor David Hasselhoff makes the mistake of trying to equate Hite’s thousands of survey responses to the anecdotal evidence of some of Hasselhoff’s pals. (There’s a similar clip that “Buck Rogers” star Gil Gerard won’t be happy to see circulating again.)

Newnham — who co-directed the 2020 Sundance doc “Crip Camp” — recounts, among its many stories, how the survey respondents sometimes recorded their answers on cassette tapes. Her team even found cassette tapes some respondents sent, which are now in the hands of the archives of Harvard. And actor Dakota Johnson is heard, reading from Hite’s memoirs, throughout the film.

So how did Shere Hite — who died in September 2020 — go from the most talked-about author in America to a forgotten figure? Blame the backlash against feminism in the 1980s. Blame her own consternation with the media. Or blame, appropriately, the rise of conservatism in the age of Reagan. “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” is a potent reminder that Hite was revealing truths that some didn’t want to hear then or now, truths that are resurfacing to reach a new generation.

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‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’

★★★1/2

Opening Friday, December 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for sexual material, nudity/graphic nudity and some language. Running time: 118 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 23, 2023, when the movie premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Boy and the Heron' is Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki at his impassioned, surrealist best

It’s been 10 years since Hayao Miyazaki, who at 82 remains the unparalleled master of Japanese animation, has released a feature film — and if “The Boy and the Heron” is his final masterpiece, we all should be thrilled and awed that we have it in our collective lives, creating marvel and wonder.

From the opening moments, it feels like Miyazaki is pushing himself to invent new ways to use animation. The first scenes, of the boy Mahito racing through his village to get to the hospital where his mother works because it’s on fire, are breathtaking — the images of flames seemingly radiating with their own heat.

The story — an original script written by Miyazaki — picks up a short time later, in the middle of World War II, as Mahito and his father move from Tokyo to the country. Dad is managing a factory (we learn that he’s making plane parts for the Japanese military), which is also near the ancestral home of Mahito’s late mother. Dad has moved on, having married his wife’s sister, Natsuko, who is pregnant. Mahito is still getting used to the idea of his aunt becoming his stepmom.

When he arrives at his new house, Mahito does get an unusual greeting: A friendly fly-by from a gray heron. He’s never flown into the house before, Natsuko tells Mahito.

The heron later taunts Mahito to venture out of the house, and toward a mysterious tower on the grounds nearby. The heron’s appearance subtly changes — first with teeth visible within his beak, then a gargantuan schnozz, then an entire head. 

What happens next I can’t really say — both for spoiler purposes, and because the movie’s imagery becomes so bizarre that descriptions could be chalked up as a matter of interpretation. Generally, the story takes on some of Miyazaki’s favorite themes: The permeable border between the spirit world and this one (as seen in “Spirited Away”), the supernatural forces of nature (shout-out to “Princess Mononoke”) and the possibility of transformation (as seen in “Ponyo,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and others).

However, just because Miyazaki is exploring familiar themes doesn’t mean he’s skating on his reputation. The animation here is among the best he’s ever produced, as Mahito’s quest to save Natsuko on “the other side” puts the boy on a path where nothing is exactly what it appears, but everything is strange and full of wonder.

(I saw the movie with its original Japanese voice cast and subtitles. There is an English-language version also hitting theaters, with a voice cast that includes Robert Pattinson, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Dave Bautista, Mark Hamill, Florence Pugh and Christian Bale.)

One can read “The Boy and the Heron,” with its themes of coming to terms with death, as Miyazaki’s farewell — and a last chance to show his many fans that he’s still an artist of the finest kind. If this is Miyazaki’s final film, it’s a beautiful way to go out.

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‘The Boy and the Heron’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 8, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for some violent content/bloody images and smoking. Running time: 124 minutes; dubbed in English, or in Japanese with subtitles, depending on the theater.

Review: In 'Maestro,' Bradley Cooper, as director and star, captures the contradictory loves of Leonard Bernstein

The musical biography “Maestro” is a tour de force for its director and star, Bradley Cooper — which one imagines would suit the person he’s playing, composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, down to his socks.

Cooper and his writing partner, Josh Singer (“Spotlight,” “The Post”), take the cradle-to-grave approach with Bernstein — well, nearly — introducing the audience to the young conductor in 1943, living in an apartment with other musicians. Bernstein catches his first break in 1943, as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, when a guest conductor gets the flu and Bernstein, with no rehearsal, is sent in to lead the orchestra at Carnegie Hall, making Bernstein a national sensation.

Some time later, at a party where his friends — the songwriting duo of Betty Comden (Mallory Portnoy) and Adolph Green (Nick Blaemire) — are entertaining, Bernstein meets an actress, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). There’s a connection and an attraction, based on shared passions for music and art. In short order, they’re in bed together, and not long after they’re married.

Felicia soon realizes, though, that if she’s going to be married to Leonard Bernstein, she will be forced to share him — both with a series of lovers, some women but mostly men, and with the world as his fame continues to grow.

In performance, Cooper captures so much of Bernstein’s charm and stage presence. One of the showstopping moments in the movie comes when Bernstein is conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor in Ely Cathedral in 1976 — a nearly unbroken scene in which cinematographer Matthew Libatique zeroes in on Cooper’s re-creation of Bernstein’s conducting style, capturing the precision, the exuberance and the respect for the music that he brought to every performance.

(Yes, if we must, let’s talk about the nose. Cooper deploys makeup artist Kazu Hiro — who has won Oscars for transforming Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for “Darkest Hour” and Nicole Kidman into Gretchen Carlson in “Bombshell” — to create prosthetics to give the handsome actor a schnozz like the conductor’s. Though there were initial complaints about the nose, in the context of the movie, it’s unobtrusive and seems to give Cooper something around which to ground his performance.)

For all that, though, the best thing Cooper does in “Maestro” is to make room for Mulligan’s beautiful portrayal of Felicia. It’s a complex role that takes in her shared joy for creativity, her sorrow and acceptance over her husband’s extramarital encounters, and a poignant portrayal of Felicia’s health problems. Mulligan doesn’t just touch all the bases, but she provides an emotional compliment to Cooper’s showier performance. (Kudos to Cooper for graciously giving Mulligan top billing, too.)

The other highlight of “Maestro” is, of course, the music. Except for a few needle drops (including R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” which famously name-checks Bernstein), the entire soundtrack is music composed by or conducted by Bernstein himself — including passages from “West Side Story,” “Candide,” his “Mass” and “Kaddish.” The music does as much to make “Maestro” feel like you’re watching the master at work as Cooper’s soulful performance does.

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‘Maestro’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 8, in theaters; starts streaming on Netflix on December 20. Rated R for some language and drug use. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'Eileen' is a noir thriller bolstered by strong performances by Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie

Two powerhouse actresses — Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie — are the reason to watch “Eileen,” a noir drama with a lot of atmosphere and a long fuse.

McKenzie (“Jojo Rabbit,” “Last Night in Soho”) plays Eileen Dunlop, a mousy clerk working in the offices of a Massachusetts prison in the winter of 1964. When she’s not filing papers or overseeing the mothers and girlfriends who come on visiting day, Eileen is caring for and enabling her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), the retired police chief.

Things get interesting at the prison when the staff psychologist retires and is replaced by Dr. Rebecca St. John (played by Hathaway). Rebecca quickly befriends Eileen, who starts to become quite interested in this glamorous new co-worker. Rebecca and Eileen also share an interest in the fate of one young prisoner, Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), whose mother, Ann (Marin Ireland), reacts harshly to Rebecca’s methods.

The screenplay by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh, based on Moshfegh’s novel, starts to descend into some dark places — particularly some quick daydream sequences where Eileen imagines herself killing herself or someone else — before a whopper of a twist fairly late in the game.

Director William Oldroyd (“Lady Macbeth”) steeps the story in shadows, like a dark version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama — or, if you want a more recent reference, similar to Todd Haynes’ “Carol.” The treatment gives McKenzie and Hathaway, as the young woman starting to claim her power and the older woman serving as an enigmatic role model, several opportunities to seize the screen.

“Eileen” isn’t perfect — the twist is a knockout, but takes several minutes to recover from, and the ending is a bit abrupt. But for a rare platform for two actresses of equal talent to go head-to-head, this movie is worth the effort.

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‘Eileen’

★★★

Opens Friday, December 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for violent content, sexual content and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

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

Review: 'The Oath' is an overwrought melodrama that tries — and fails — to hide its Latter-day Saint roots

The historical drama “The Oath” is quite a mess, a jumble of abbreviated action and stilted storytelling that, I’m guessing, will leave neither the movie’s built-in audience — members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who will recognize the source material — or anyone else satisfied.

As the title cards inform us, the story begins with a grudge, with two groups of people continuing an ancient war that has left one side down to a solitary survivor, called “the hunted one.” The title cards also tell us that it’s the fourth century A.D., in ancient America. And, we are told, the survivor’s name is Moroni.

OK, a quick bit of Latter-day Saint information, because it’s not said outright in the movie: Moroni was a prophet, son of Mormon — for whom the Book of Mormon is named. The movie does mention that this Moroni is named after Captain Moroni, but doesn’t mention the captain’s prominence in the book.

This movie’s Moroni — played by Darin Scott, who’s also the movie’s director and, with his wife, Michelle, the screenwriter — says he was a fearsome military commander for the Nephites, who have battled the Lamanites for centuries. But Moroni is now the last Nephite, trying to stay out of the clutches of the Lamanite leader, King Aaron (played by “Titanic” bad guy Billy Zane).

The bulk of the movie centers on Moroni finding a woman in the woods. She is Bathsheba (Nora Dale), who has recently escaped the Lamanite camp, where she was forced to be one of King Aaron’s concubines. Moroni nurses the battered Bathsheba back to health, and slowly gains her trust. Over time, she falls in love with Moroni for his gentleness, and his promise never to hurt her.

Bathsheba is curious about the strange golden plates Moroni hides in his cave, but he keeps them from her. He does show her a scroll, on which is written a log of Moroni’s ancestors.

Meanwhile, King Aaron has sent his best tracker — Bathsheba’s older sister, Mahigana (played by Karina Lombard, from “Legends of the Fall”) — to bring back the wayward Bathsheba. 

Scott’s direction can be described best as overdramatic, which nearly compensates for how underwhelming he is as an actor. That’s not to say he’s subtle, as every emotional beat is telegraphed well ahead of its landing. That said, the movie looks lush, thanks to cinematographer Brian O’Carroll’s work capturing the beautiful scenery; the movie was filmed in upstate New York, in the vicinity of where this story is said to have happened.

The confounding part of “The Oath” is that the script seems to be written in code. The name of the source material, the Book of Mormon, is referred to as “the fourth most influential book in American history” — but mentioned by name only in small type in the closing credits. It’s like Scott is trying to put something over on his audience, but he doesn’t have the confidence or skill to hide it cleverly. 

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‘The Oath’

★1/2

Opens Friday, December 8, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Renaissance' lets Beyoncé take her fans on tour with her, and shows them the work behind the magic

The magnetic force of nature that is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter — also known to the world simply as Beyoncé — is on full display in “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” a documentary that captures the performer’s high-energy stage show and the hard work behind the scenes to make it happen.

As Beyoncé says early in the film — which she directed, wrote and produced — process is as important to her as the final product, and she includes plenty of backstage and rehearsal footage to capture that process. Through those scenes, fans witness the circle of acceptance that envelops her dancers and musicians, her love for her home town of Houston, and how she recovered from knee surgery while rehearsals were underway.

Some of those moments dovetail with the songs. For example, several gay and trans dancers — veterans of the dancehall and vogue movements — talk about how they got to incorporate their styles into Beyoncé’s concert, and then we see them perform “Break My Soul” with its sampling of Madonna’s “Vogue.”

About a third of the movie’s nearly three-hour running time is taken up with interesting stuff not happening in performance. But when the cameras are aimed at the stage, Beyoncé and crew make it worth the wait with a sensual, sensational series of performances.

Beyoncé’s film crew apparently filmed every show on this year’s “Renaissance” tour, and she and her team of editors stitched them together, even when she and her dancers were wearing different costumes in different cities. There are moments when the choreography and the camera movement are so exact that it appears everyone has switched clothes in the blink of an eye.

Inevitably, comparisons will be made between “Renaissance” and “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” the concert documentary released seven weeks earlier that captured a different 2023 stadium tour. (We have Ye, and his asinine “I’ma let you finish” rant at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, to thank for the artificial and sexist feud narrative involving Beyoncé and Swift.) Both deliver the goods for the performers’ respective fans — they just do it in different, and equally fascinating, ways. 

Swift’s movie shot several shows at one location and put together a seamless document of one complete concert. With “Renaissance,” Beyoncé is going for a different effect — she doesn’t want to give us one show; she wants us to feel what it was like to be on the entire tour.

“Renaissance” is, Beyoncé says early in the film, “more than a concert. It’s a culture, it’s a state of mind, it’s a release, it’s a fantasy come true.” A concert it definitely is, in all its glory. Whether it’s everything else she promises is up for fans to decide.

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‘Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 1, in theaters everywhere. Not rated, but probably R for language and suggestive lyrics. Running time: 169 minutes.

Review: 'The Shift' mixes biblical allegory with science-fiction flash, with some interesting but not satisfying results

The Old Testament meets old-school science fiction in “The Shift,” an interesting if not entirely successful attempt at retelling the story of Job — a tale of faith tested to the limit — in a modern setting.

When we’re introduced to Kevin Garner — played by Kristoffer Polaha, who has a lot of Hallmark movies on his resumé with the word “Christmas” in the title — he’s having a bad day. He just lost his high-paying Wall Street job when his firm collapsed under him, and he’s contemplating drinking his first beer after years of sobriety. Then a young woman, Molly (Elizabeth Tabish), on a dare from her girlfriends, sits down at the bar and starts to flirt with him. They get talking, and in short order move to dating, marriage and parenthood.

Then Kevin has an encounter with an enigmatic figure (played by veteran character actor Neal McDonough), a well-dressed, suave, blue-eyed gentleman. He is identified as The Benefactor, though he comments that title is one of the nicer ones he’s been given over the millennia. We figure out pretty quickly that The Benefactor is none other than the Devil.

The Benefactor has seen that Kevin’s current reality isn’t perfect — he and Molly are in a rough place, because of a tragedy that’s explained later in the movie — so he decides to yank Kevin into a different one. The Benefactor and his minions, called “shifters,” have the ability, through a keypad device on their wrists, to shift people around the multiverse (though they never use that word). 

The Benefactor makes an offer to Kevin: Renounce his so-called God, who has been conspicuously absent during Kevin and Molly’s bad times, and The Benefactor will give Kevin a life of wealth and influence. When Kevin says no — becoming the first Kevin in the multiverse to do so — The Benefactor plunks him down in a dystopian parallel world where there’s no faith and, importantly, no sign of Molly.

Writer-director Brock Heasley, adapting his 2017 short film for his feature debut, isn’t at all subtle in presenting this biblical allegory. The ham-fisted attempts to drive the message home get in the way of some strong storytelling and solid performances by Polaha, Tabish and Sean Astin as a nonbeliever who starts to get swayed by Kevin’s remembered scripture passages.

“The Shift” is the first work of fiction to be released by Provo-based Angel Studios — unless you count their Tim Ballard biopic “Sound of Freedom,” which hasn’t aged well in the last few weeks, and their sketchy documentary “After Death.” The company is employing the same marketing gimmick those other films used, a to-the-camera appeal to viewers over the closing credits to buy tickets to future screenings, with the pitch that it will “send a message” to make more movies like this one. Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe the best way to get filmmakers to make more of one type of movie is to make a better movie.

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‘The Shift’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 1, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence and thematic elements. Running time: 115 minutes.