Review: 'Argylle' is a spy comedy that's loud, sometimes fun but often exhausting

If you’re familiar with director Matthew Vaughn’s work — in particular, his spy-driven action comedy “Kingsman” and its less-inspired sequels — you know everything that “Argylle” is or ever hopes to be: Loud, fast, sometimes audacious in its stylized violence, but also a little exhausting.

The opening is a stunner, introducing the super-suave spy Argylle (Henry Cavill), on his latest mission. He is infiltrating a den of villains to apprehend the villain Lagrange (Dua Lipa) — but, first, some hot dancing and some gunplay. Then Argylle and his tech-savvy sidekick, Wyatt (John Cena), capture Lagrange and get a clue on information that will bring down Argylle’s compromised agency and its director (Richard E. Grant).

And then… we find out all of the above was the latest installment in a series of spy novels written by Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a reclusive author who lives in a house in the Colorado woods with her pet cat Alfie. (Alfie, who becomes a significant character here, is played by Chip, the pet of Vaughn’s wife, Claudia Vaughn — who went by her maiden name, Schiffer, when she worked as an internationally recognized supermodel.) 

Elly calls her mom (Catherine O’Hara) for her notes on her next installment in the Argylle series, and Mom thinks Elly needs one more chapter to finish the story. Elly decides to take the train (she hates to fly) to meet Mom in Chicago, and it’s on the train that she meets Aidan Wilde (Sam Rockwell), a scraggly guy who says he’s a big fan of Elly’s books. Aidan also tells Elly that he’s works in espionage — and, to prove it, he beats up the trainload of men trying to kill Elly.

Aidan fills Elly in on a big secret: Her books are closer to reality than she knows. The shadowy agency does exist, and the director, Ritter (Bryan Cranston), has been compromised. Aidan needs Elly’s help to find a missing thumb drive that will help take down Ritter — if Aidan can get Elly to overcome her squeamishness and get the drive to Ritter’s nemesis, the former CIA director Alfred Solomon (Samuel L. Jackson). 

The biggest secret in Jason Fuchs’ script — the one the studio is begging critics and early moviegoers not to divulge — is the identity of the “real” spy on which Argylle is modeled. I’m not planning to give anything away, though it doesn’t take a lot of mental agility to figure it out.

The action sequences are expertly handled and loaded with almost comical levels of violence. They feel, after a few of them, like a “Kingsman” greatest hits reel. If you liked Colin Firth’s dispatching of ruffians in that movie, there’s a sequence of Rockwell doing something similar here. If you liked the cartoonishly choreographed heads exploding there, you’ll like the colorful ballet through tear gas here. And so on.

The plot manages to be both convoluted and simplistic at the same time — with a lot of moving parts, but all of them pointing in the same inevitable direction. 

The cast provides some pleasures along the way. Cavill is having fun as the debonair fictional spy (and possibly auditioning for James Bond), while O’Hara makes the most of a surprising role, and Rockwell adds his own scruffy charms as Aidan. But the most delight in the uneven “Argylle” is watching Bryce Dallas Howard revel in the sort of action-packed leading lady role she’s never been given — and, it turns out, she’s better at it than some of the male leads to whom she’s had to play second fiddle.

——

‘Argylle’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violence and action and some strong language. Running time: 139 minutes.

Review: 'Origin' blends biography and political theory into a potent story of a writer digging into the common thread of oppression

History lessons, let alone political science treatises, don’t often make for good drama — which makes the work writer-director Ava DuVernay pulls off in the intensely emotional and forcefully relevant “Origin” something of a miracle.

DuVernay attempts to adapt author Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which details how different forms of oppression throughout history — including the racism against African Americans in the United States, the systematic subjugation and murder of Jews by the Nazis, and the generations of stratified society in India — all had a common root: The idea of caste, that one group of people could set themselves above another group, and then manipulate laws and society to keep those groups unequal.

To describe this, though, DuVernay does not make a documentary. (She has before, and brilliantly, in “The 13th,” which showed how the carceral system was slavery codified in the constitutional amendment that otherwise outlawed slavery.) DuVernay instead imparts the lessons of “Caste” by showing us how the book came to be.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson, who is introduced as a journalist who has left behind a career in short-form writing — newspaper articles and magazine essays — for writing books. But her friends and former editors often try to entice her to come back and comment on current events. In 2012, the current event people want Wilkerson to write about is the death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black kid who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, who reportedly thought Martin shouldn’t have been in that Florida subdivision.

Thinking about Trayvon — and the fact that Zimmerman was Hispanic, not white — gets Wilkerson considering that something is at work that’s deeper than simply racism. What about societies where the oppressed group was the same “race” as their oppressors, such as Jews in Germany, or the Dalits in India?

Wilkerson’s research takes her — and DuVernay takes her crew — to Germany and India, meeting scholars and advocates who help illuminate the thesis she’s forming. She also learns the stories, like the Harvard-trained researchers, a Black couple and a white couple, who embedded themselves in 1950s Alabama to document the insidious ways racism poisoned all facets of life. 

Her research is intercut with the tragedies in Wilkerson’s own life, including the decision to put her mother (Emily Yancy) in a nursing home, and the sudden death of her husband, Brett Hamilton (Jon Bernthal). Wilkerson carries on, understanding on a gut level that this thesis is important, and can perhaps explain something true and underlying about so much of what’s wrong in the world.

DuVernay also drops little truth bombs along the way, like how her German friend Sabine (Connie Nielsen), living in a country that has banned Nazi symbolism, can’t fathom why Americans still glorify the losers of the Confederacy — or, more harrowingly, how Nazi lawyers looked at America’s Jim Crow laws as a template for using laws to dehumanize Jews.

Carrying us through the story is Ellis-Taylor’s soulful, lived-in performance. She captures Wilkerson’s heartache at the loss of her loved ones and her determination to see the project through.

It would be easy for “Origin” to become a dry, pedantic dissertation. But DuVernay illuminates the narrative with historic examples of heroism, deploying a cast that includes Finn Wittrock as a German dissenter and Jasmine Cephas Jones as a witness to atrocities on both sides of the Atlantic. Not every moment works perfectly — there’s a scene with Nick Offerman in a MAGA hat that lands with a thud — but the bulk of the film resonates with equal measures of pain, grief and resilience.

——

‘Origin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, violence, some disturbing images, language and smoking. Running time: 141 minutes.

Review: 'The Promised Land' is a gritty tale of perseverance, against the elements and cruel nobles, in 18th century Denmark

As historical dramas go, “The Promised Land” is as austere and hard as the rough Jutland heath where it takes place — a story of perseverance, determination and class warfare that cuts deep.

The story starts in 1755, as a penniless Danish army captain, Ludvig Kahlen (played by the great Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen), seeks permission from the king for his plan to tame the harsh heath of Jutland and make it fit for settlers. The king has long desired settlements in Jutland, but his advisers know it’s impossible — the land is too barren, all sand and heather, to sustain crops and homesteads. But if letting Kahlen make a fool of himself will keep the king happy, the advisers will let him try.

Kahlen gets out to the windy, cold heath, with some lumber to build a house, some tools for planting, and boxes of something he keeps hidden from prying eyes. When the local minister, Anton (Gustav Lindh), brings a couple, Johannes (Morten Her Andersen) and Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), who are runaway tenant farmers, Kahlen defies the law and harbors them in his farm house, in exchange for labor. And when Kahlen can’t get the locals to work for him, he goes to the camp where the nomadic outlaws live and makes a bargain with them.

All of Kahlen’s effort gets the attention of the local nobleman, Frederik De Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), an arrogant cad who rules over his tenant farmers like a petty dictator. De Schinkel — the “De” is an affectation he added to the family name, to appear more high-born than he is — makes Kahlen an offer of cash in exchange for signing over the rights to the heath, which De Schinkel claims are his already. De Schinkel is also the landowner from whom Johannes and Ann Barbara escaped, so Kahlen has no great interest in cooperating with him. Also, he’s rather sweet on De Schinkel’s cousin, Edel Helene (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who’s resisting all requests to marry De Schinkel, and is finding this determined farmer more desirable.

Director Nikolaj Arcel, reuniting with Mikkelsen after their 2012 costume drama “A Royal Affair,” and his co-writer, Anders Thomas Jensen (“After the Wedding,” “In a Better World”), find plenty of melodrama in adapting Ida Jessen’s historical novel. There’s Kahlen’s struggle against the land, his battle with De Schinkel, some romance, and the inclusion of a nomad girl (Laura Bilgrau Eskild-Jensen) who tests the limits of what Kahlen will do to make his plan a reality.

Mikkelsen carries “The Promised Land” on his rugged shoulders and through his craggy, resolute face. He embodies the grit needed to tame the heath, the integrity to stand up to rich jerk like De Schinkel, and the tenderness to adapt to what becomes a makeshift farm family. It’s a performance perfectly suited to the land around him, both tenacious and steadfast.

——

‘The Promised Land’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for bloody violence, language, some sexuality and brief nudity. Running time: 128 minutes; in Danish, with subtitles.

Review: 'Scrambled' is a funny, warm look at one woman's effort to freeze her eggs — and a declaration of Leah McKendrick as a talent to watch

The comedy “Scrambled” is an impressive tour de force for its writer, director and star, Leah McKendrick, who brashly and unapologetically tells a funny and warm-hearted story of one woman’s pursuit of her own child-bearing journey.

McKendrick plays Nellie, a Los Angeles jewelry designer and Etsy seller who’s been a bridesmaid and baby-shower guest a good number of times, and is watching most of her women friends procreating. After a conversation with one of them, Monroe (June Diane Raphael), Nellie realizes that, at age 34, her window to have children is closing rapidly. And, with no romantic prospects in her life — she’s a year past a bad breakup with Sean (Harry Shum Jr.) — Nellie decides to have her eggs frozen.

Her family is skeptical of her decision. Her abrasive brother, Jesse (Andrew Santino), reluctantly loans her the money to get the hormone treatments. Her grumpy father (Clancy Brown, the movie’s stealth MVP) thinks it’s all medical nonsense. But her mother (Laura Céron) is supportive, as is her best friend, Sheila (“Saturday Night Live’s” Ego Nwodim), whose wedding — and announcement that she’s pregnant — kicks off the movie.

McKendrick’s script takes Nellie through the painful, and sometimes comical, details of egg harvesting — the hormone shots, the tiny bruises on her midriff, and so on. It also has Nellie revisiting her romantic history, in some cringe-worthy montages of her meeting past dates to see if any of them deserve a second chance.

Amid observations about California baby names and the whole maternal-industrial complex, McKendrick — through her sharp script and charming performance — shows us a woman struggling to keep it together as she goes through one of the hardest, and oddly most rewarding, parts of her life.

——

‘Scrambled’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 2, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, nudity, language throughout and some drug use. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'The Zone of Interest' is a chilling look at the Holocaust, looking at a family's peaceful complicity outside the walls

It’s been said that fiction can only look obliquely at the Holocaust — that, like an eclipse, the Nazis’ mechanized genocide of 6 million Jews cannot be viewed full-on, because the pain is too intense to witness.

To examine the Holocaust without being overwhelmed by that pain, storytellers have had to find ways to speak around it. Art Spiegelman’s landmark graphic novel “Maus,” which depicted the Jews as mice and the Germans as cats, allowed us to set aside, momentarily, the faces of the slaughtered and the survivors.

Likewise, director Jonathan Glazer’s devastating film “The Zone of Interest” doesn’t show us the death, doesn’t take us into the camps. Instead, and this is the movie’s insidious masterstroke, it shows the people just outside the walls, complicit in what’s happening inside.

The movie is based on Martin Amis’ novel, which fictionalized the story of the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. Glazer restores the real names to these characters, so we meet Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), an ambitious Nazi officer, being a good father to the children he and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), are raising just outside Auschwitz.

Hedwig works to care for her kids, including their baby, and tend to the house and garden. But any illusion that she doesn’t know what’s happening where her husband works is shattered early on, when a soldier brings a bundle of clothes and a fur coat. The servants go through the clothes, looking for a nice set of underwear, while Hedwig tries on the fur coat and looks at herself in the mirror. Then she puts her hand in a pocket, and finds a tube of lipstick — which she tries on to check the shade, then wipes off. In that brief moment, the audience sees clearly that she knows what happened to the former owner of this coat and lipstick.

When Rudolf is given a promotion, to be in charge of organizing all of Hitler’s death camps, Hedwig’s biggest concern is that she be allowed to keep the house by Auschwitz, on which she has worked so hard. The narrative then splits, with Hedwig working to ignore the smoke overhead while Rudolf is in Berlin, having meetings with other SS officers to put Auschwitz’ tactics in motion elsewhere.

Glazer’s script, and his antiseptic presentation of the Hösses’ deceptively tranquil home life, shows how easy it can be to put unpleasant thoughts out of one’s head if one’s comfort is at risk. The people shown here don’t think about the murders over the wall, because their way of life is conditioned on them not thinking about such things.

The one time Glazer’s camera enters the camp is the most chilling scene in “The Zone of Interest,” but not for the reasons one might suspect. Those scenes are a flash-forward, to the Auschwitz of today, preserved as a museum and historical monument — a reminder of what happened and can’t be allowed to happen again. Even here, though, Glazer shows it in the most mundane way possible, giving the audience the choice to consider the minor details to keep from facing the horrific whole truth.

——

‘The Zone of Interest’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 26, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 105 minutes; in German, with subtitles.

Review: 'All of Us Strangers' looks at how memory comforts and cocoons, in a tender drama led by Andrew Scott's riveting performance

The strength of memory, and the fragility of it, are on display in “All of Us Strangers,” writer-director Andrew Haigh’s hauntingly tender drama about a writer stuck between his past and his potential future.

Adam, played beautifully by Andrew Scott (“Fleabag,” “Sherlock”), is a screenwriter living alone in a sparsely populated London apartment block. When there’s a fire alarm, he dutifully heads down the stairs and outside — and notices one of the few other tenants, still with his light on, upstairs. That neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), ventures down sometime later, rather drunk, offering Adam to join him in a drink. Adam declines in the moment, but leaves open the possibility to meet up another time.

Adam, seeking inspiration for his screenplay, takes the train out to the suburbs, to his childhood home. When he knocks on the door, he’s surprised when his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, answer and welcome him in. It’s surprising because they look just as they did 30 years ago, when Adam was 12 — and they died in a car crash.

The chance to get a hug from Mum or talk with Dad is so appealing that Adam, for the moment, doesn’t think about the impossibility of it all. He returns to the house a few more times, but the visits get more awkward — particularly when Mum reacts badly to the news that Adam doesn’t have any girlfriends and is, in fact, gay.

Meanwhile, Adam and Harry start seeing more of each other — and things get serious enough that Adam considers taking Harry to meet his parents, as odd as that may seem.

Haigh, adapting the novel “Strangers” by the Japanese author Taichi Yamada (who died in November), gently shows Adam trying to reconcile his childhood memory of his parents with his now-adult viewpoint of who they were and who they might have become had they lived. Haigh also forces Adam to consider whether he can live in a comfortable past or face an uncertain future, possibly with Harry in it.

The movie gathers together a quartet of fine acting. Mescal’s turn as an unsteady paramour is touching, and Foy and Bell are compelling as the mid-‘90s young parents who learn on the fly as they reckon with the fact of their little boy being a grown man. And Scott gives a stirring performance, as Adam balances between childhood memories and the reality of his life. The combination of these four actors, and Haigh’s careful handling of Adam’s journey, gives “All of Us Strangers” an emotional punch that a viewer will find hard to shake.

——

‘All of Us Strangers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 26, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, language and some drug use. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'I.S.S.' is a chillingly authentic about zero gravity, but a dramatically inert thriller

The space-based “I.S.S.” is a thriller with few thrills, putting six characters in a very confined space with very few places to go — literally and narratively.

The setting is in the title: The International Space Station, described in the opening title cards as a haven for peaceful scientific exploration with Americans and Russians working harmoniously. Two Americans arrive on the I.S.S. as the movie starts — newbie biologist Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose, cashing in her Oscar chip) and veteran Christian Campbell (John Gallagher Jr.). They join the American commander, Gordon Barrett (Chris Messina), and three Russian scientists, Alexey Pull (“Game of Thrones’” Pilou Asbaek), Nicholai Pulov (Costa Ronin) and Weronika Vetrov (Masha Mashkova).

In the early scenes, screenwriter Nick Shafir and director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (“Megan Leavey”) show the easy camaraderie among the Americans and Russians. Gordon banters good-naturedly with Alexey over a beloved Scorpions song, while we also see that Gordon and Weronika are failing miserably at keeping their romantic relationship a secret. The other astronauts also show Kira, the newcomer, the view of earth from the cupola — an image, she’s told, that has sometimes prompted spiritual awakenings. Kira, a buttoned-down scientist who says she distrusts anyone but herself (which she ascribes to a bad breakup), doesn’t seem to feel anything special when looking at the peaceful planet.

Later, though, Earth isn’t so peaceful. Kira sees explosions on the planet’s surface — and Gordon soon gets a message that the U.S. and the Russians are at war. Gordon is also given orders to take control of the I.S.S. “by any means necessary.” In short order, Christian comments that it’s very likely that Nicholai and the Russians have received the same message from their superiors.

What follows is a cat-and-mouse game where Kira must figure out where her loyalties stand — with her fellow Americans, or with the scientists she trusts, like Weronika and Alexey. And while that might sound good on paper, in execution it’s a snooze. The action is muted, and the motivations are telegraphed well in advance of the payoff.

The upsides for “I.S.S.” is that the cast — particularly DeBose, Asbaek and Mashkova — are engaging, and Cowperthwaite’s attention to authenticity, of how blood spurts in zero-gravity and so on, gives the movie a unique feel. It doesn’t necessarily pay off dramatically, but it’s cool to look at.

——

‘I.S.S.’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some violence and language. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Freud's Last Session' promises an intellectual prizefight, but its stars barely get to lace up their gloves

If you’re going to stage a false meeting of minds, as the turgid drama “Freud’s Last Session” does, the least a filmmaker can do is deliver on the premise and really let two famous intellectual figures — in this case, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the author C.S. Lewis — go at it with their philosophical A-game.

The script — adapted from Mark St. Germain’s play by director Matthew Brown and St. Germain — imagines a probably fictitious meeting in London between Freud and Lewis, set on Sept. 3, 1939. This date is important for several reasons: It’s two days after the Nazis invaded Poland, it’s the night when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that a state of war existed between Germany and the United Kingdom, and it’s three weeks before Freud, suffering from oral cancer, would die (it’s suggested by physician-assisted suicide). 

Why would Lewis, an Oxford don and Christian apologist, visit Freud at the London home where he’s lived for 16 months, ever since escaping Vienna with his daughter, child psychologist Anna Freud (Liv Lisa Fries)? The script tells us Freud invited Lewis, because Lewis had spoofed Freud with a character in a book, a satire of John Bunyan’s “A Pilgrim’s Progress.” 

Beyond that, they would seem to have little in common. Freud, raised Jewish, was an atheist who talked freely about human sexuality, while Lewis (though atheist in his younger days) was a converted Christian who wrote about the existence of God — and, unlike Freud, didn’t care to discuss bedroom matters in casual conversation. 

So Brown and St. Germain are setting us up for a historical version of “My Dinner With Andre,” a no-holds-barred conversation in which these two mental powerhouses debate the existence or nonexistence of God, right? That might have been more interesting that what we get.

Certainly the actors — Anthony Hopkins as the irascible Freud and Matthew Goode as the thoughtful but restrained Lewis — seem game. There are moments where they start digging in, talking about whether the Bible is accurate history or just amassed folklore. But those moments are brief bursts within the sluggish melodrama that’s structured around the two men.

An air raid siren, and an emergency visit to a bomb shelter, trigger Lewis’ PTSD (they’d call it “shell shock” in that era) from his experience in the trenches during World War I. A prosthetic in Freud’s mouth causes the old man pain, and he’s running low on the morphine he’s taking to function. And there’s the backstory of Freud’s complicated relationship with Anna — and her equally complicated relationship with another psychologist, Dorothy Burlingham, who lived with the Freuds in Vienna and moved to London with them. (The script is more sure of Anna and Dorothy’s personal status than many historians are.)

Brown tries to make the story look broader than its stage-based roots, and after a few flashbacks and dream sequences — yes, putting a dream in a movie about Freud is asking for trouble — the viewer wishes the movie would quit trying so hard to be dimly lit and dramatic, and just let the main characters talk. There are some arresting intellects in “Freud’s Last Session,” but they’re left stranded by a story that’s unworthy of their eloquence and brainpower.

——

‘Freud’s Last Session’

★★

Opens Friday, January 19, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some bloody/violent images, sexual material and smoking. Running time: 108 minutes.