Review: 'Suncoast' uses a national story as backdrop for a rich coming-of-age drama about a teen girl learning about love and grief

Writer-director Laura Chinn mines her family’s tragedy in the tragicomedy “Suncoast,” and strikes dramatic gold with this heartbreaking story of a teen coping with impending grief on the outskirts of a national controversy.

Nico Parker stars as Doris, a 17-year-old girl living in Clearwater, Fla., circa 2005, with her abrasively forward mother (Laura Linney) and her older brother, Max (Cree Kawa) — who is bedridden and mostly unresponsive, after years of brain cancer. It’s reached the point where Max is near death and needs hospice care to see him comfortably to the end.

Mom, convinced that the hospice nurses aren’t doing enough for Max, decides to sleep on a cot alongside her son. This leaves Doris alone at home — which turns out to be an opportunity for her to host parties and make instant friends with the popular girls at school. It also puts Doris on the radar of Nate (Amarr), one of her school’s cutest boys.

Doris also sees what’s going on outside the hospice: Hundreds of Christian protesters, demanding that another patient in the hospice — Terri Schiavo — not have her feeding tube removed, as per her husband’s wishes. (True story: Chinn’s brother was at the same hospice as Schiavo, whose case became a cause celebre for the religious right, a political football for both George W. and Jeb Bush, and a case study of conservatives being quite happy with government meddling in private medical decisions.) 

Doris befriends one protester, a widower named Paul (played by Woody Harrelson), who’s a more empathetic character than the shorthand view of protesters might lead one to expect.

That’s one of the beauties of Chinn’s film, is that she doesn’t depict anyone as cardboard stereotypes. Mom is overbearing, but also deeply caring and wracked with self-doubt. Doris’ high school friends (Daniella Taylor, Ella Anderson and Ariel Martin) are shallow and occasionally clueless, but they’re also supportive and caring. And Doris herself is sometimes thoughtful and wise, other times self-centered and self-pitying.

Linney gives a powerhouse performance as Doris and Max’s mom, who’s been fighting for her kids for so long she has trouble accepting that she’s at the point where she has to let both of them go — one to her independence, the other to his long-expected death.

Young Parker — who five year ago made her movie debut as Colin Farrell’s daughter in Tim Burton’s “Dumbo” — gives a star-making performance. (It’s in her blood: Her mom is Thandiwe Newton, and her dad is the director Ol Parker.) She captures Doris’ anger at her mom, grief over her brother, and her first faltering steps toward adulthood. At 19, Parker shows in “Suncoast” she has a bright future ahead. 

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‘Suncoast’

★★★★

Streaming starting Friday, February 9, on Hulu. Rated R for teen drug and alcohol use, language and some sexual references. Running time: 109 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this website on January 21, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Out of Darkness' is a Stone Age horror thriller that's a smartly paced morality tale

If Rod Serling were alive today, and tasked with writing a script set in the Stone Age, he would probably deliver something like “Out of Darkness,” a tight little suspense thriller about finding the monster in the woods and within ourselves.

Director Andrew Cumming’s view rests on a small yellow dot in the middle of inky blackness. As the camera comes closer, we see that the yellow mass is a campfire, and a group of six, roughly clad in furs, is sitting around that fire, trying to stay warm. A title card tells us what we’re seeing happened 45,000 years ago.

The six people around this fire are led by Adem (Chuku Modu), the strongest of the group. With him are his son, Heron (Luna Mwezi), who’s about 12, and Adem’s mate, Ave (Iola Evans), who’s carrying his child. Also in the group: Geirr (Kit Young), Adam’s younger brother; Odal (Arno Lüning), an older man who’s Adem’s confidant; and Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), an orphaned teen girl.

There’s someone else in this story, but these travelers don’t know who or what they are. They’re unknown — and for these prehistoric hunter-gatherers, the unknown is scary.

When Adem is leading the group toward the nearby mountains, a three-day journey, they set up camp one night in an area Odal warns is too exposed. Adem doesn’t heed Odal’s advice, which he regrets when Heron is snatched away in the dark. Adem leads the others in a chase, into the deep woods — where the darkness and terrors become even more pronounced.

As first-time screenwriter Ruth Greenberg’s simple script tells it, these unknown beings are creating fear within the group — and that fear, as Serling told us in so many “Twilight Zone” episodes, is more destructive than anything going on outside. Meanwhile, Beyah must contend with another terror: Her first menstrual cycle, and how Adem as leader may now claim her to create another heir. 

Cumming establishes the harsh realities of this Stone Age life, as these creatures make arrowheads and spear points by the fire and trudge across the wind-swept fields. (The movie was filmed in a seemingly remote part of Scotland.) The actors even talk in a porto-European language, created specifically for the film.

Cumming orchestrates the tension well, with a strong assist from cinematographer Ben Fordesman, who deftly captures the menacing shadows and brooding dark. “Out of Darkness” isn’t a complicated movie, but it gets its point across smartly.

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‘Out of Darkness’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 9, in theaters. Rated R for violence and some grisly images. Running time: 88 minutes; in an invented language, Tola, with subtitles.

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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.