Review: 'Ordinary Angels' is a story of grief and grace that feels contrived even though it's based on a true story

A title card in the opening moments of “Ordinary Angels” informs audiences that it’s based on a true story — which turns out to be unnecessary, and beside the point. 

In a movie like this — a four-hankie story of a taciturn widower, his medically imperiled daughter, and the stranger who takes up their cause — you expect it to be a true story, because the narrative is too implausible to be anything else. That still doesn’t make the drama any easier to swallow.

The story starts with that stranger, Sharon Stevens (Hilary Swank), a hair stylist in Louisville, Kentucky, whose main extracurricular activity is being a lively drunk at the bar — and then relying on her best friend and business partner, Rose (Tamala Jones), getting her home. When we see this happen for what must be the umpteenth time, judging from Rose’s exasperation, the morning after includes Rose dragging Sharon to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

It’s when Sharon leaves that meeting, and buys some beer, that she sees a newspaper story about the Schmitt family. Ed Schmitt (Alan Ritchson, the star of “Reacher”) is a roofer dealing with a double tragedy: His wife, Theresa (Amy Acker), recently died, leaving Ed to care for his daughters Ashley (Skywalker Hughes), age 8, and Michelle (Emily Mitchell), who’s 5 and needs a liver transplant. Sharon thinks she can be helpful, so she passes around the tip jar at the hair salon, and gives a few hundred dollars to Ed and his mom, Barbara (Nancy Travis).

But Sharon, a brash woman who never takes “no” for an answer, isn’t done. She applies her business smarts to getting Ed’s finances organized — and working to drive down the hundreds of thousands of debts accrued by Theresa’s long illness. Ed, while appreciative, starts to feel both overwhelmed by Sharon’s bigger-than-life personality and a little angry that this stranger has inserted herself into his life.

Director Jon Gunn cut his teeth in the faith-centered films of the Irwin brothers (his screenwriting credits include “I Still Believe,” the Kurt Warner biopic “American Underdog” and “Jesus Revolution”). This movie isn’t as overtly religious — there are discussions of God and faith, and the Schmitt family minister (Drew Powell) is featured — and more centered on the power of community to come together in a crisis.

The script, credited to Meg Tilly (yes, the actor from “The Big Chill”) and Kelly Fremon Craig (“Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.”), stays largely free of treacly sentimentality for a surprising amount of time. The focus is on the human drama, of Ed struggling to accept help and Sharon realizing that her campaign to assist the Schmitts is deflecting from working on her own problems. 

In the big finale, all the restraint goes out the window. It’s an all-hands-on-deck effort to get Michelle to her transplant during a massive snowstorm — and even though it all happened (as evidenced by the obligatory real footage during the closing credits), it feels phony and contrived. “Ordinary Angels” is proof that events that are real don’t necessarily feel real when put up on screen, and that can make all the difference.

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‘Ordinary Angels’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for thematic content, brief bloody images and smoking. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: The 15 short films up for Oscar are, as always, a wildly diverse collection of stories with some genuine standouts.

The all-you-can-eat buffet of the short films nominated for Academy Awards — five each in three categories: Live-action, animated and documentary — gives moviegoers a reminder that not all stories take 90 minutes or three hours to tell.

The live-action program is dominated by one 40-minute film: Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which may deliver the most Anderson-style whimsy in the shortest amount of time possible. (If you want more of the same, Anderson made three other shorts based on Dahl stories, and all four of them are streaming on Netflix, though you have to dig for them.) 

The story goes through narrators like Russian nesting dolls: First Ralph Fiennes as Dahl, recounting the life of idle rich man Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who tells of a story he learned of a doctor (Dev Patel), and the doctor’s account of a man in India (Ben Kingsley) who trained himself to see without his eyes. It’s charming, with rapid-fire narration, deadpan performances and Anderson’s gift for perfectly composed tableaux.

And although “Henry Sugar” is the favorite to win the category, that’s not the film in this category that tugs hardest at the heart strings. That race is a dead heat between two stories about the after-effects of violence: Director Misan Harriman’s “The After,” starring David Oyelowo as a London man who loses everything dear to him in a random attack, and director Nazrin Chadhoury’s “Red, White and Blue,” with Brittany Snow as a single mom dealing with the reality of trying to obtain an abortion in red-state America.

The other two live-action nominees, also worthwhile, are: “Knight of Fortune,” a droll comedy from Denmark about grief, and “Invincible,” a dark drama from Quebec about a troubled teen in juvenile detention. 

Among the animated films in competition, I have to admit a personal bias toward “Ninety-Five Senses,” because I know the filmmakers, Jared and Jerusha Hess, the Utah husband-and-wife team behind “Napoleon Dynamite.” The movie, produced by the Salt Lake Film Society’s MAST filmmakers’ incubator program, depicts an old man (voiced by Tim Blake Nelson) describing the five senses. The story has a brutal twist in the middle, and goes down some dark and fascinating roads.

Also quite effective is director Tal Kantor’s “Letter to a Pig,” a French/Israeli production in which a Holocaust survivor tells his story to a high-school class, where one girl’s imagination gets swept up in his horrific tale. 

The remainder of the animated program, all good: The Iranian “Our Uniform,” which uses fabric to reminisce about the filmmaker’s hijab-wearing school years; the French “Pachyderme,” a remembrance of a girl’s childhood visits to her grandparents’ lakeside cottage; and “War Is Over!,” a World War I allegory featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over).”

(Shorts International, the company that distributes the Oscar shorts programs, has added two more animated shorts to fill out the program — since the five nominees run about an hour in total.)

The documentary program isn’t quite as good as the other two compilations, but there are some gems.

My favorite is “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” in which director Sean Wang interviews his Taiwan-born grandmothers — ages 94 and 83 — who live together in the Bay Area. (Wang cast one of them as his fictional grandmother in his narrative film “Di Di,” which won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.)

For filmmaking prowess, the best may be “The Last Repair Shop,” directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers, which tells the stories of the people who work for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s music department — lovingly fixing instruments used by students who otherwise couldn’t afford them. The camerawork is lush, and the movie ends with a musical interlude that’s simply beautiful.

Nearly as compelling is “The Barber of Little Rock,” in which directors John Hoffman and Christine Turner follow Arlo Washington, a financier and activist working to bring economic opportunity — and economic justice — to the underserved parts of Arkansas’ state capital.

S. Leo Chiang’s fascinating “Island In Between” makes the political personal and vice versa, as he goes back to his native Taiwan — and, in particular, the island of Kinmen, which is physically closer to mainland China but politically and emotionally linked to Taiwan. 

The favorite to win the category is also, to me, the weakest of the five. In “The ABC’s of Book Banning,”director Sheila Nevins (the longtime head of HBO’s documentary department) talks to Florida school kids about the books that have been banned, restricted or challenged across the country. Nevins also talks to some of the authors whose works have been targeted, including poets Amanda Gorman and Nikki Giovanni. The urgency of the topic, and the fury audiences will surely feel about it, far outweighs the pedestrian filmmaking. 

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Academy Award-nominated live-action short films

★★★1/2

Academy Award-nominated animated short films

★★★1/2

Academy Award-nominated documentary short films

★★★

The animated and live-action programs open Friday, February 16, and the documentary program opens Friday, February 23, all at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated; the live-action program is probably R for scenes of violence; the animated is probably PG-13 for stylized depictions of violence; the documentary program is probably PG-13 for thematic content. Running time: The live-action program is 140 minutes, with one short in Danish and one in French, both with subtitles; the animated program is 80 minutes, with one short in French and Hebrew, one in Farsi, and one in French, all with subtitles; and the documentary program is 140 minutes, with two shorts in Chinese, both with subtitles.

Review: 'The Taste of Things' is a multi-course meal for the senses, capturing the beauty of food and Juliette Binoche

Food and film are love languages in “The Taste of Things,” a French romance expressed most passionately and sensually when its lead actors strap on their aprons and start literally cooking.

Dodin Bouffant (played by Benoit Magimel) is a famed restaurateur in France, circa 1885. His secret weapon is his chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), who may be the finest cook in the country.

Eugénie, for reasons known only to herself, never chose to exploit those gifts by going to Paris and becoming famous cooking for the crowned heads of Europe. She has enjoyed applying her gifts in Dodin’s kitchen, working with him on exquisite dishes and gently rebuffing his occasional marriage proposals. Sure, they would sometimes share nights of passion (this is France, after all), but their real romance was by the stove.

Writer-director Tran Anh Hung — a Vietnamese-born filmmaker who explored similar foodie pleasures in his 1993 film “The Scent of Green Papaya” — captures Eugénie at work one summer day, preparing a multi-course meal for Dodin and his gourmet colleagues. The colleagues are important, because it’s through their rapturous descriptions we understand how good Eugénie’s dishes are when we can’t taste them ourselves. They are so captivating to the eye, thanks to Tran’s direction and Jonathan Ricquebourg’s sumptuous cinematography, that we would be surprised if they didn’t hit the nose and tongue just as pleasingly.

The real action, though, is watching Eugénie working her magic. She knows exactly which pot to put on the stove, what vegetables should be chopped, and when to put in the roast. Sometimes, Dodin comes in to assist, and they move together like well-choreographed figure skaters, each one anticipating the other’s moves and matching them adeptly. When they speak, it’s usually to pass on information to Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), a 14-year-old girl who’s in training to be Eugénie’s assistant.

The chemistry between Binoche and Magimel is delicious. This is in part because Binoche could look lovingly and generously at a potted plant and you’d believe it to be true love. It may be also that the two actors were lovers a quarter-century ago — their relationship lasted five years, and produced a daughter, now 24. Whatever the formula, it works because the actors play characters who don’t talk about love as much as they show it, with every turning of the spatula and flick of the whisk. 

“The Taste of Things” is a movie meant to make you fall in love — with the food, with the stars, with the French countryside — and it succeeds beautifully.

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‘The Taste of Things’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, February 14, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Century 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated PG-13 for some sensuality, partial nudity and smoking. Running time: 135 minutes.

Review: 'Bob Marley: One Love' barely scratches the surface of the reggae legend's fascinating life

If you know nothing about Bob Marley, the legendary reggae musician and Jamaican activist, the biographical drama “Bob Marley: One Love” will teach you that much and maybe a few timeline details — but anyone with knowledge of Marley’s complicated life will feel like major sections are glossed over.

The movie primarily centers on the last five years of Marley’s life, from 1976 to 1981 — with abundant flashbacks to his childhood. The main story starts with Marley (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) planning a concert, called “Smile Jamaica,” designed to be a respite from the bitter and often political campaign at the time. Both sides viewed Marley and the concert with suspicion, each thinking Marley supports the other.

Two days before the show, gunmen — to this day, it’s never been determined whose side they were on — snuck into Marley’s Kingston home and started shooting. Marley was grazed by a couple of bullets, his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) was shot in the head but survived (a doctor explains that her dreadlocks kept the bullet from reaching her brain), and his manager, Don Taylor (), took six bullets and survived. Bob and Rita performed at “Smile Jamaica” as scheduled.

The violence, however, left its mark on the Marley family, and they fled Jamaica. Rita took the kids to stay with family in Delaware, while Bob and some of his band, The Wailers, relocated to London, where the head of Island Records, Chris Blackwell (James Norton), set them up in a studio. It’s there that Marley experimented with British rock, blues and soul, bending them to accompany his reggae sounds to create what some consider his greatest album, “Exodus.”

Four writers are credited with the screenplay — Terence Winter (“The Wolf of Wall Street”) and Frank E. Flowers (“Metro Manila”) in one pairing, Zach Baylin and director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who collaborated on “King Richard”) in another. The script drops little trivia bombs along the way, with such minutiae as the Island Records marketing guy (Michael Gandolfini) objecting to the album cover of “Exodus,” because Marley’s face wasn’t on it. 

The deep stuff about Marley’s relationship with Rita? Even in the one major argument we’re shown, we barely scratch the surface of the tensions within the marriage. (A salient fact not mentioned in the film: Of the Marleys’ 11 children, six of them were born to women outside the marriage.) Before the movie gets too close to anything uncomfortable or less than legendary about Marley, someone notices the bloody mess in his toe — the first hint of the melanoma that took his life in 1981.

This is the third straight biopic Green has directed — “King Richard,” with Will Smith as Venus and Serena Williams’ dad, and “Joe Bell,” starring Mark Wahlberg as a guilt-ridden dad walking across the country, were the others — and maybe he should stop for awhile. He certainly should, before making another biography of a musician, watch the 2007 spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” as a reminder not to step into every cliche in the genre as he does here.

Whatever is worth preserving in “Bob Marley: One Love” comes from the performances, both acting and musical. Ben-Adir, whose resume includes playing Malcolm X (in “One Night in Miami…”) and a Ken (in “Barbie”), finds Bob Marley’s questing spirit, and Lynch (“Captain Marvel,” “The Woman King”) shows Rita to be his rock and consigliere. And the music — sometimes sung by Ben-Adir, but usually Marley’s originals — is untouchable.

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‘Bob Marley: One Love’

★★

Opens Wednesday, February 14, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for marijuana use and smoking throughout, some violence and brief strong language. Running time: 104 minutes.

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.