Review: 'La Chimera' is a vibrant, messy story of a haunted man seeking something amid the tombs of Tuscany

The past is ever-present for the characters in director Alice Rohrwacher’s “La Chimera,” a grandly raucous and sometimes melancholy drama about life and death and the regrets and joys in between.

Some of what we learn about our haunted protagonist, an Englishman named Arthur (played by Josh O’Connor), comes out in small doses — but to summarize, he’s just returning from prison, for reasons that eventually become apparent, to Tuscany. He finds refuge with a former benefactor, Signora Flora (Isabella Rossellini), an opera tutor who rambles around in a rundown mansion that her gaggle of busybody daughters who visit occasionally would like her to sell. 

Arthur soon reunites with his old friends, a boisterous bunch who drink, smoke and sing songs about their crimes. They are “tombaroli,” finding and breaking into Etruscan tombs and plundering the pottery and other items hidden within.

Arthur is the key to the operation, because he has the gift for finding such tombs — using a divining rod and a sixth sense that overcomes him when he’s on top of one. And, unlike his pals, he’s not really in it for the money. Arthur is on a quest for … well, that’s not immediately clear, though it somehow involves the woman who got away, Beniamina (Tile Yara Vianello), who Rohrwacher shows us in flashbacks and symbolizes with a length of red yarn — a metaphor for a lost connection.

Someone starts to get past Arthur’s wall of heartbreak. She’s Italia (played by Carol Duarte), a would-be opera student who’s living in Flora’s home and — as part of the old woman’s rather manipulative agreement — gets singing lessons in exchange for cleaning and ironing. Italia is keeping a secret from Flora, and when it’s discovered it threatens to disrupt their already disordered lives.

O’Connor, known to fans of “The Crown” as the young Prince Charles, plays Arthur like a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead yet — wafting through these Tuscan vistas and Etruscan tombs, until Italia’s exuberant spirit comes close to pulling him back into life. He’s a necessary anchor that keeps what could be an overabundance of Italian whimsy from carrying the movie away like a hot-air balloon.

Rohrwacher, with her writing collaborators Carmela Covino and Marco Pettenello, places in a Tuscany that seems built on ruins. The cars, the houses and certainly the characters seem to be held together by spit, baling wire, hopeful thoughts and forward momentum. At one point, Italia remarks about a living arrangement: “It’s a temporary situation. Life is temporary.” That’s the guiding force behind “La Chimera,” a sense that we’re all making this life up as we go, and it’s the people we choose to be with who make it worth living.

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‘La Chimera’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 12, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some violence and language. Running time: 130 minutes; in English and Italian with subtitles.

Review: 'Escape From Germany' finds faith-supporting lessons in a story of Latter-day Saint missionaries far from home at the brink of war

Few artists have expressed their faith through their work the way Utah filmmaker T.C. Christensen does — and the Latter-day Saint themes of such movies as “The Fighting Preacher,” “Love, Kennedy,” “The Cokeville Miracle,” “Ephraim’s Rescue” and “17 Miracles” are strong and heartfelt.

The same is true for Christensen’s latest, “Escape From Germany,” in which Christensen — as director, screenwriter and cinematographer — recounts a little-known moment of pre-World War II history as a story of faith and perseverance. As with many of Christensen’s movies, the faithful will enjoy it more than the rest of us.

It’s late August 1939, and Heber J. Grant, then president and prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has a missionary, Elder Barnes (Landon Henneman), deliver a message to the U.S. consul in Stuttgart: Get out of Germany, because Hitler is about to order the invasion of Poland. The consul says the military experts at the U.S. embassy in Berlin don’t see that happening, and Barnes points out that Grant is a prophet, so his intel may be better than the military’s.

From this point, the word goes out from the mission headquarters across Germany to evacuate all missionaries to Belgium or Denmark quickly, before the Nazis close the borders and the war begins. Mission President Wood (David McConnell) in Stuttgart has a risky assignment for one missionary, Elder Norman Seibold (Paul Wuthrich) — travel alone across Germany to round up the 20 or so stray missionaries who have been abandoned in towns and train stations, and get them tickets out of the country. 

While Seibold takes on this difficult and dangerous mission, President Wood and Elder Barnes pack up their bags and their families to get to a safe harbor. This becomes an unlikely adventure, particularly when Wood has to take some drastic and not particularly legal actions along the way.

Adapting a historical novel, “Mine Angels Round About,” by Terry Bohle Montague, Christensen generates some satisfying tension in Seibold’s seemingly impossible search and the Wood family’s breakneck rush to get out of the country. Along the way, there are nods to the bigger story going on around them — such as the recurring encounters with a Jewish family desperately trying to leave Germany. 

Not all the references are so welcome, like how one missionary regularly references to Hitler’s admiration of the church’s dietary restrictions and genealogical studies — which are true, but they’re not the flex the character thinks they are. 

The standouts among the ensemble cast are McConnell as the down-to-earth mission president and Wuthrich as the stalwart Seibold, a rugged hero in a surprisingly well-tailored missionary suit. (Wuthrich is familiar to fans of Latter-day Saint movies, having played the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, in the 2021 drama “Witnesses.”) 

The movie was shot in Budapest and in the Salt Lake City area, and it’s a tribute to Christensen’s ability to stretch his budget that his team dresses up the Heber Valley Railroad to look convincingly like a 1939-era European train.

Unfortunately, Christensen’s habit of turning every plot turn into a Sunday school lesson is also on display here — with every twist of fate or fortunate coincidence taken as a sign of God’s hand at work. Miracles are good for sermons, but they make for unsubtle screenwriting.

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‘Escape From Germany’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 12, at theaters across Utah. Rated PG for thematic material and brief violence. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Monkey Man' stars Dev Patel as a man on a mission of revenge — but it's his work in his directing debut that's most powerful

At some point in actor Dev Patel’s incendiary directorial debut, the supercharged revenge thriller “Monkey Man,” we meet a gun dealer, who makes an appealing offer: “You like John Wick? I have the same gun from the movie.”

Certainly there can be comparisons made between Patel’s man-with-no-name character (identified in the credit crawl only as “Kid”) and Keanu Reeves’ unstoppable black-suited killing machine. That, though, sells Patel’s smartly conceived action movie short — because Patel, as director and co-writer as well as star, has more on his mind than simply stomping, kicking and shooting people.

When we meet Kid, he’s making money as an MMA fighter in a sleazy boxing club in a fictional city in India. Kid always wears a monkey mask, and the scumball promoter, Tiger (Sharlto Copley), introduces him to the crowd as “Kong.” The Kid’s job as Kong is to put up a good fight for the spectators, but always to take a dive in the third round. Tiger pays him for this, and Kid is saving up for something important, which becomes clearer as the story progresses.

Kid insinuates himself into a fancy nightclub — first by impressing the owner, Queen (Ashwini Kalsekar), then ingraining himself with the hotel’s in-house drug connection, Alphonso (played by the one-named Pitobash). Kid’s ultimate goal is to get within striking distance of a corrupt police captain, Rana (Sikandar Kher) — for reasons involving revenge for what happened to Kid’s mother (Adithe Kalkunte), which we see in flashbacks.

Now, because all of the above happens in the first 45 minutes, we savvy moviegoers know there’s more to Kid’s revenge spree than that. There’s a deeper story, one that includes crazy chases, ferocious fight scenes, lessons in Indian mythology and modern politics, and an impressive training montage before the ferociously entertaining final boss battle. 

There’s also a powerful message in the script — which Patel wrote with Paul Angunawela and John Collee (the latter co-wrote Patel’s terrorist drama “Hotel Mumbai”) — about the need for heroes to represent more than themselves. As Kid learns from Alpha (Vipin Sharma), a guru who takes him under his wing, “You’ve fought for pain. Now you must fight for a purpose.”

Patel builds the action up in measured doses, steeping us in the theology of the heroic monkey god Hanuman and the disparity of extreme poverty and extreme avarice in modern India. But the action does come, in fierce and bloody fights that are brilliantly choreographed and shot (by “Whiplash” cinematographer Sharone Meir). This culminates in an 18-minute finale, a boss battle that’s inventive and intense.

For some action fans, though, it’s enough to know that Dev Patel kicks butt and looks really good doing it. It’s a tribute to Patel’s talents as a filmmaker that it’s not enough for him — and he delivers that much more.

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‘Monkey Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, rape, language throughout, sexual content/nudity and drug use. Running time: 121 minutes.

Review: 'Wicked Little Letters' is a foul-mouthed comedy with engaging performances by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley

As a lover of the old Ealing Studios comedies, those dry-humored English comedies of the ‘50s and ‘60s, I never thought to imagine what one would be like with long streams of curse words — but that’s what director Thea Sharrock’s subversively amusing “Wicked Little Letters” provides.

Based on a true story, Sharrock and screenwriter Jonny Sweet start with the feud — in 1920, in a Sussex town called Littlehampton — between two neighbors, the pious spinster Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and a rambunctious Irish single mom, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). Edith, a Bible-toting woman concerned with propriety, can barely tolerate all she hears through the thin walls of their adjoining houses, including the guitar music and occasional sex sounds.

The movie starts with the arrival of what is labeled “the 19th letter” — a perfectly inked piece of mail with foul-mouthed phrases about the recipient’s most private parts. This time, Edith’s overbearing father (Timothy Spall), tells her, they can have Rose locked up — since Dad is sure that Rose is the source of these obscenity-filled letters. A dimwitted constable, Papperwick (Hugh Skinner), agrees, and soon Rose is locked up, accused of disturbing the peace.

Rose proclaims her innocence, making the valid point that she would never be shy about swearing to Edith’s face, so why would she write such things in a letter? The town’s lone female constable, Gladys Ross (Anjana Vasan), tends to believe Rose, and takes it upon herself to investigate the case, dealing with the sexism and stupidity of her chief (Paul Chahidi) and the patriarchy within the police force. (One example of the sexism at play: Ross is required to identify herself as “Woman Police Officer Ross,” no matter how obvious both parts of that title may be.)

Sharrock and Sweet don’t draw out the mystery — the reveal is about midway through the movie — and are more interested in the circumstances of Edith’s and Rose’s lives that led to this confrontation. For Rose, there are hints of abuse back in Ireland that prompted her to emigrate to England. For Edith, it’s the constant belittling and dehumanizing behavior of her father, and the meek acceptance that she and her mother (Gemma Jones) have demonstrated in the face of his wrath.

Mostly, “Wicked Little Letters” is a good reason to watch and appreciate the lead performers, Colman and Buckley, who bring different types of intensity to the disparate roles — Colman’s Edith as the repressed do-gooder, and Buckley as the unfiltered survivor. (Fun fact: Colman and Buckley played the same character at different ages in 2021’s “The Lost Daughter” and each got Oscar nominations for it.) Together and separately, Colman and Buckley add some space to this whimsical story.

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‘Wicked Little Letters’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 5, in theaters. Rated R for language and a flash of nudity. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'The First Omen' creates a brooding tone and some effective scares, but the ending shows the limits of being both a prequel and a franchise launch

It’s an intriguing movie-watching exercise to try to figure out why the people behind “The First Omen” wanted to create a prequel for a movie that otherwise would have disappeared down the memory hole.

Richard Donner’s 1976 horror thriller “The Omen,” coming just two years after the success of “The Exorcist,” wasn’t all that remarkable — other than the fact that big-name stars like Gregory Peck and Lee Remick could be persuaded into playing the parents of a five-year-old antichrist in training named Damien. Still, it was a hit, and spawned two sequels (the latter starring a young Sam Neill as the adult Damien) and a 2006 remake with Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles. 

The new movie is set in Rome, 1971, and centers on an American woman, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), who’s planning to take her vows as a nun at an ancient abbey there. Margaret is the protege of the kindly Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), and instructed by the Abbess, Sister Silva (Sônia Braga). Margaret tries to teach the girls in the orphanage the order operates — but she’s warned to stay away from a moody teen girl living there, Carlita (Nicole Sorace).

Outside the orphanage, Margaret is troubled by conflicting messages. Her roommate, Luz (Maria Caballero), another nun-in-training, urges Margaret to live a little before taking the vows — and loans her a low-cut dress and takes her to a disco. Then there’s Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson, from “The Witch”), who gives Margaret a dire warning about the order and about Carlita.

Director Arkasha Stevenson, a rookie, creates a dark foreboding tone, as the innocent Margaret loses her sense of self amid the withering frescoes and candle-lit menace of the abbey. And there are enough shocking images to make all but the most jaded of horror fans recoil in their seats. 

It’s hard to sustain that kind of shock and brooding for nearly two hours, and Stevenson can’t quite get all the way through without things sometimes looking silly. That’s particularly true toward the finale, when the producers try to have things both ways — tying the ending to the events of Donner’s 1976 movie, while also suggesting a franchise starter on another track. The problem like a title like “The First Omen” is that it’s a promise, or a threat, not to be the last.

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‘The First Omen’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Godzilla x Kong' brings back the monsters to fight off new creatures, but it's more ridiculous than actually fun

The latest smash-up mash-up, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” is as nonsensical and ungainly as that Frankenstein’s monster of a title. (What is that “x” supposed to signify? A multiplication lesson? Product placement paid for by Elon Musk? Godzilla writing Kong a love note with a kiss at the end?)

Director Adam Wingard picks up where his 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong” left off. Godzilla roaming the Earth and, in the words of lead Godzilla expert Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), “fighting the battles we can’t” with rogue skyscraper-bashing monsters — and napping between battles in Rome’s Colosseum. Kong is in Hollow Earth, the land that time forgot inside the planet, keeping the peace with the various critters there. 

Andrews’ job is to shepherd the resources of the mysterious megacorporation Monarch — which had its own series on Apple TV+, because Marvel doesn’t have a monopoly on overextending franchises — to keep Godzilla and Kong separated. Andrews is also trying to be a good mom to Jia (Kaylee Hottle), her adopted deaf pre-teen daughter, the sole survivor of the Iwi tribe on Kong’s old home of Skull Island. (Yeah, I forgot about all this stuff from the last movie, too. It’s not like that stuff really matters, though.)

The Monarch outpost on Hollow Earth starts getting strange radio interference, in a pattern that Andrews realizes (well after the audience does) matches the drawings Jia has been making at school. Jia figures out it’s a distress signal, coming from someone or something down below. Andrews leads a mission to find out what it is, taking along Trapper (Dan Stevens), a ludicrously daredevil veterinarian; Harris (Ron Smyck), a no-nonsense pilot and soldier; paranormal blogger Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), left over from the last movie; and Jia, who convinces her mom that she can help them deal with Kong.

Down in Hollow Earth, the party finds plenty of dangers and wonders — and, in conveniently parallel story construction, a chance for both Jia and Kong to discover that they aren’t the last of their kind. Much of the plot exposition, in a script credited to three writers (with Wingard sharing story credit with two of them), falls on Hall, who’s a better actor than this movie deserves, and enough of a trooper to make the silly explanations sound scientifically plausible. 

Besides Hall and Hottle, an engaging young performer, the human stuff is boring filler in between the monster action. Those scenes are somewhat engaging, though seeing a hyper-realistic Kong tearing apart some pig-dog beast over his head so that its guts spill on him like green Jell-O isn’t as fun as it sounds. Seeing Godzilla consuming radiation to make himself Barbie pink is an interesting choice, if not a callous bit of cross-branding from the movie’s distributor, Warner Bros. These are the things that go through a critic’s head when there’s not enough in the movie to keep him engaged.

The most annoying part of “Godzilla x Kong” is that there’s no sense of stakes, for the monsters or the humans who try to stay out of their way. Compare this movie to last year’s “Godzilla Minus One,” and it’s clear that the character’s Japanese originators still have a better handle on what makes Godzilla fearsome and tragic — and more than the sum of its computer-generated parts.

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‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’

★★

Opens Friday, March 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for creature violence and action. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Ennio' captures the music and passion of composer Ennio Morricone, through his words, his admirers and his movies

There are few people who have worked in movies who deserved the title “maestro” more fully than the composer Ennio Morricone, who is credited with hundreds of film and TV scores over six decades, right up to his death in 2020 at age 91.

Giuseppe Tornatore — who worked with Morricone on 13 films, starting with “Cinema Paradiso” in 1988 — turns out to be the right person to capture the composer’s exhaustive history and restless musical spirit, as he does in the documentary “Ennio.”

Morricone’s training was as varied as his film scores. His first music teacher was his father, a trumpet player who instilled the lesson that music could put bread on his family’s table. After playing in a military band, Morricone made his way to the academy, where he was considered a lower-class hayseed by the snooty elites. He mentored under the modern classical composer Goffredo Petrassi, though the teacher and the other students looked down their nose at Morricone’s work on film scores, which they considered not “real” music (though Petrassi wrote a few film scores himself). Morricone also was inspired by the avant-garde work of people like John Cage, who famously knocked over radios and did other offbeat things to make music.

With those disparate influences, it’s no surprise that Morricone’s early scores had an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality to them. He liked to experiment, sometimes throwing in oddball instrumentation or playing two themes in counterpoint. (I have to admit that I’ve never seen most of the ‘60s Italian movies Tornatore samples here, which makes the movies a great checklist of movies to seek out later.)

His breakthrough was his collaboration with director Sergio Leone on a series of low-budget American-style Westerns, filmed in Italy with a just a few American actors — including one, Clint Eastwood, who became a star because of them. Eastwood is one of dozens of people interviewed here, a mix of filmmakers and musicians who worked with Morricone, as well as a few familiar faces who admired or were inspired by his music. (For example, Bruce Springsteen talks about how he uses one of Morricone’s themes when he and the E Street band take the stage at every concert.)

Tornatore takes us through Morricone’s disappointments, too — like his six Oscar nominations, for which he finally won for his last one, Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” in 2015. Morricone, in an expansive interview, gets a little salty about losing in 1987 for Roland Joffe’s “The Mission,” to Herbie Hancock’s jazz score for “‘Round Midnight,” not because of Hancock’s work, but because many of Dexter Gordon’s solos were of existing jazz numbers. (In an amusing irony, Morricone’s 1987 score for Brian de Palma’s “The Untouchables” lost out to “The Last Emperor,” directed by another Italian director with whom Morricone had worked, Bernardo Bertolucci.)

The most fascinating parts of Tornatore’s interviews with Morricone and the other composers is when they talk about the work of making music. Morricone is self-effacing and analytical about his process and his product, and could hum themes and melodies (though he hated melodies as a concept) that he wrote decades earlier. And the other composers, even the ones who belittled him when they were growing up together, marvel about the depth and breadth of his career, and the endless inventiveness of his scores.

“Ennio” captures Morricone’s wit, his humility, his striving for perfection. Most importantly, though, it captures his music, in the context of some spectacular movies, and allows us to consider a lifetime of music in one engrossing sitting.

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‘Ennio’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some scenes of sexuality and nudity, violence and language. Running time: 157 minutes; in English and Italian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Remembering Gene Wilder' is a documentary that's not half as inventive as the man himself

Gene Wilder probably wouldn’t complain about the shabbiness of the documentary made about him, “Remembering Gene Wilder,” because — as everyone in the movie tells us — he was a wonderfully kind and gentle soul. 

But Wilder is also, as the clips director Ron Frank assembles show us, one of the funniest and most manic performers the movies have ever produced — and he deserves a better tribute than this Wikipedia entry of a documentary.

Frank starts with the coincidence that launched his career, when he was, in his words, miscast in a 1963 revival of Bertolt Brecht’s play “Mother Courage and Her Children.” The show’s star was Anne Bancroft, fresh off her Oscar win for “The Miracle Worker” — but that didn’t keep the show from closing within three months of opening. Bancroft liked Wilder, though, and thought he would be perfect for a part in a screenplay her then-boyfriend was writing.

The boyfriend was, and is, Mel Brooks. The screenplay had the working title “Springtime for Hitler,” which was eventually changed to “The Producers.” The part was Leo Bloom, the naive accountant who has the brainstorm that a flop could make more money than a hit play — an idea that inspires the unscrupulous Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) to stage a musical glorifying the Nazis.

The casting was genius — Wilder was a perfect mix of innocence and hysteria — but it didn’t happen right away. Wiider was in another play three years later, when Brooks visited him backstage and said, “You didn’t think I forgot about you, did you?” They started filming “The Producers” a few weeks later, but not before Wilder flew down to Texas to film a small part in what would be his first movie, “Bonnie & Clyde.”

As Wilder himself says (in the audiobook of his 2005 memoir, which is deployed frequently here), director Arthur Penn said he never would have thought of having Wilder’s character, the nervous kidnap victim Eugene, laugh — but Wilder did, adding a layer to a side performance that elevated the movie.

The people interviewed here include Brooks, Carol Kane (the female lead in the Wilder-directed “The World’s Greatest Lover”), Burton Gilliam (who was Slim Pickens’ henchman in “Blazing Saddles”), Peter Ostrom (who played Charlie Bucket in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”), Eric McCormack (recalling Wilder’s guest spot on “Will & Grace”), Rain Pryor (recalling her father Richard Pryor’s partnership with Wilder), as well as friends Harry Connick Jr. and Alan Alda. All give fond remembrances of Wilder, both for his onscreen talents and his offscreen charm.

(My favorite anecdote here, and there are plenty of good ones, is that Wilder was a last-minute replacement to play The Waco Kid, the alcoholic gunslinger in “Blazing Saddles,” after the original choice, Gig Young, dropped out for a pretty tragic reason.)

What’s missing is any serious appraisal of Wilder’s work as a performer, writer and director. The closest thing to a critic here is Ben Mankiewicz, but he’s allowed less time to talk about Wilder than he does introducing a movie on TCM.

There’s lots one could discuss critically about Wilder’s comedy. It would have been fascinating to have someone dissect the balance of quiet and loud Wilder could bring to a character like Victor Frankenstein in “Young Frankenstein,” or the choices he made to bring Willy Wonka to life — or how he could be a part of such a perfect satire of racism in “Blazing Saddles” and, just two years later, perform a blackface scene (alongside Pryor, no less) in “Silver Streak.”

“Remembering Gene Wilder” feels like the sort of safe, sanitized accounting of Wilder’s life and work that one would see playing in a museum exhibit of the man’s work. It leaves the impression that Wilder himself would be a little embarrassed by the adulation, and would want something with a little more edge.

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‘Remembering Gene Wilder’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 29, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some mature content and language. Running time: 93 minutes.