Review: 'Abigail' is a loopy, goopy mix of horror and humor

A down-and-dirty horror movie with a surprisingly upscale cast, “Abigail” delivers a fair share of shocks, gross-out moments and enough humor to make it digestible.

We’re given just as much information as we need to start: Six criminals, none of whom know each other, have been assembled for a particular job — to kidnap the ballet-loving 12-year-old daughter (Alisha Weir) of a rich man, and hold her for 24 hours while daddy pays a $50 million ransom. The organizer, who identifies himself as Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito), has found a secluded hunting lodge where they can keep the girl while they wait.

The six are, initially, assigned fake names — the leader, Frank (Dan Stevens); the driver, Dean (Angus Cloud); the hacker, Sammy (Kathryn Newton); the muscle, Peter (Kevin Durant); the medic, Joey (Melissa Barrera); and the sniper, Rickles (Will Catlett). The girl, Abigail, is tucked away in one room, and the only one of the six who’s supposed to talk to her is Joey.

It doesn’t take long for the six to start getting squirrelly with each other — Joey helps this by accurately describing each of her cohort’s personality traits and likely past occupations. But when they figure out that Abigail’s father is a notorious crime lord with a habit of dismembering those who irritate him, Frank reconsiders whether they should keep holding the girl. 

Then — and it’s aggravating that the movie’s marketing gives away this plot twist — we all learn what Abigail’s real game is, and that suddenly the criminals are in more peril than she is.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett — they made the wickedly clever “Ready or Not” and the last two “Scream” movies, which starred Barrera — deploy a ghoulish sense of humor throughout the mayhem and blood spray. The funniest, most wicked moment comes when the surviving criminals realize what they’re dealing with, and run through everything they’ve learned from movies about killing such a monster.

Most of the cast is better than the material provided by writers Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, and seem to relish digging into the over-the-top aspects of the horror story. Barrera has proven her final-girl bonafides with the “Scream” movies, and carries the movie’s emotional weight. Among the rest of the ensemb.e, Stevens and Newton, in particular, lock in on the darkly comic and terrifying vibe being pursued.

Certainly “Abigail” could have been tighter — it takes nearly an hour to get to the big reveal on which the story pivots. But when it’s cooking, “Abigail” is bloody entertaining.

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‘Abigail’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong blood violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare' is a roisterous, but somewhat slow-moving, World War II spy action movie

It’s clear watching the rollicking World War II spy adventure “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” that director Guy Ritchie and his actors, led by Henry Cavill, were having a fun time. I just wish we, in the audience, were having as much fun.

It’s 1942, and the United States has just entered the war. Unfortunately for Britain, they have been delayed in helping out in the European theater because the Germans are roaming the North Atlantic with their U-boats, making shipments of armaments impossible. Britain’s top spymaster, Brigadier Gubbins (Cary Elwes), orders one of his junior officers, named Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) — yes, the guy who later created the character James Bond — to come up with a plan to handle the U-boat problem. 

The answer comes in the form of an unconventional officer, Gus March-Phillips (played by Cavill), whom they find in an English prison. March-Phillips is recruited to an off-the-books mission — to sail down to an island off the coast of Equatorial Guinea and destroy an Italian supply ship that carries gear for the U-boat fleet. March-Phillips agrees, on the condition he can assemble his own team.

The team, of course, is as rough-and-tumble as he is: A Swedish assassin (Alan Ritchson), an explosives expert (Henry Golding), an Irish navigator (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and a master planner (Alex Pettyfer) who they have to spring from a Nazi POW camp. They have two more accomplices on the island, British agents — one (Babs Olusanmokun) has a cover as a club owner who caters to the criminal element, and the other a very motivated weapons expert (Eiza González) whose main assignment is to seduce and distract the island’s top-ranking Nazi (Til Schweiger).

In the hands of Ritchie, this should be a fun wartime romp, in the vein of “The Dirty Dozen” by way of “Inglourious Basterds.” For some reason – maybe the “based on a true story” label, or the distaste for making comical villains out of Nazis — the action sequences feel labored and listless.

Cavill seems happy to be unshackled from the constraints of Superman, and leans into March-Phillips’ rugged bravado. The other outstanding player here is González, who exudes charm as the deceptively lethal secret agent. Even when the rest of “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is shaky, González is stirring up a lot of trouble. 

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‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence throughout and some language. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'The Beast" is a beautiful, if sometimes obtuse, examination at love and fear across lifetimes

Technology meets reincarnation meets predestination in “The Beast,” a strange and oddly seductive dive into eccentric science fiction from French writer-director Bertrand Bonello.

The movie introduces us to Gabrielle Monnier (played by the great French actor Léa Seydoux), who in 2044 is exploring the possibility of having her DNA “purified” — a process that will, she’s told, allow her to live without feeling intense emotions, which in the future are considered a danger to society. Outside the lab, she runs into a man, Louis Lewanski (George MacKay, from “1917”), who’s contemplating the same procedure.

There’s a connection between Gabrielle and Louis, and soon the movie shows us what it is. They met in a past life, in 1910 — where Gabrielle was a pianist married to an industrialist (Martin Scali), but finding herself attracted to a visiting Londoner, Louis. And they met again in 2014, when Gabrielle was a struggling actress housesitting in L.A. and Louis is a sad loser recording videos about his virginal existence, which he blames on all the blonde women around him — including Gabrielle.

The common factor — and this comes from Henry James’ 1903 novella “The Beast in the Jungle,” which Bonello and co-writers Guillaume Bréaud and Benjamin Charbit loosely adapt — is how Gabrielle, in every era, becomes paralyzed by fear and unable to act in moments of crisis. Gabrielle tries to tackle her anxieties in 2044, confiding in a comfort android, Kelly (played by Guslagie Malanda, who brilliantly played the defendant in “Saint Omer”). And, in a couple of timelines, she meets a psychic (played by Elina Löwensohn, from “Schindler’s List”) whose predictions are both oblique and to the point.

The same might be said of Bonello’s approach to the story, which handles its time jumps with deliberation, but otherwise sets its own strange rhythm as Gabrielle and Louis encounter each other not only in 1910 and 2014 but in several different years recaptured in a retro nightclub in 2024.

Seydoux is always alluring, but her attempt to unravel Gabrielle’s many lives brings out new layers of her repertoire. She’s nicely matched with MacKay (a late replacement for Bonello’s frequent collaborator Gaspard Ulliel, who died in a skiing accident before filming started), an actor whose babyface features hide a depth of intense feeling.

“The Beast” will not work for every viewer — the narrative is dense enough that there were moments where I’m still not sure what was happening. But I was fascinated to watch Bonello, Seydoux and MacKay trying to work it all out.

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‘The Beast’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violent images and some sexual content. Running time: 146 minutes; in English and French with subtitles.

Review: 'Civil War' is a harrowing and thought-provoking story of a divided America, seen through the brave and flawed journalists in the middle

A viewer is immediately drawn into witer-director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” by the terrifying and all-too plausible premise — that the United States is cleaving apart, and armed conflict is upon us, neighbor against neighbor, but with helicopters and tanks rather than the rifles and cannons of 160 years ago.

But what sticks in the memory, long after this smart and intense movie is over, is the way Garland denies us the simple dichotomy of choosing sides — our current tug-of-war of red states vs. blue states is out the window here — by making us ride along with the people in the middle: The war reporters and photographers trying to capture what’s happening on the battlefield.

Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, is a combat photographer who’s brought home the images of war around the world — so capturing those pictures in New York isn’t that much of a stretch. She notices before anyone else what looks like a suicide bomber running up to a tanker truck, and ducks behind an overturned car just before the blast hits. The dust has barely settled before she’s back to taking pictures of the carnage.

Lee and her reporting partner, Joel (Wagner Moura), go back to the hotel where the war journalists are staying. There she again sees Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young cub photographer who was at the bomb scene Lee was shooting. Jessie looks at Lee as a hero and a role model. Lee’s advice is more practical: Get some Kevlar and a helmet if you’re going to take up this line of work.

Lee and Joel have a plan to get to the heavily barricaded Washington, D.C., to get an interview and photo shoot with the President (seen and heard in pre-recorded speeches, and played by Nick Offerman) before the secessionist Western Forces, now massing in Charlottesville, Va., overrun the capital and take the White House. 

The pair load up Joel’s SUV, with “press” stenciled on the doors, with the gear they’ll need to make it through war-ravaged New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia. Reluctantly, they agree to take two other journalists as far as Charlottesville. One is Sam (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old war horse who’s seen even more action than Lee. The other is Jessie, who quickly learns the horrific truth about covering a war — the addictive combination of revulsion, fear and adrenaline. 

Garland’s script, like the one he wrote for the zombie apocalypse “28 Days Later,” is episodic, capturing moments the four journalists experience on the road. They see war refugees in a football stadium, firefights in the distance, and awful encounters that I’m not going to spoil here. Those moments gradually have their effect on the four characters: Jessie finds her squeamishness at blood and death melting away as she channels her reactions through her viewfinder, while the others find the emotional callouses they’ve developed over the years sanded away when the battle zone is actually their home country. 

And Garland, a Brit, doesn’t take sides in our current American conflict, and doesn’t give us the false comfort of doing so, either. The secessionists are identified as an alliance of Texas and California — one conservative state, one liberal one. (Florida, being Florida, is also a breakaway combatant, but discussed more as a punchline.) Offerman could be read as channeling either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, depending on which man the viewer dislikes more. And there’s no discussion of how the war started or what principles the rival sides are defending. The war is the war, and the people, the combatants and the civilians, are too occupied with surviving it to think about the why of it.

If there is something all sides should be able to agree on, though, is that Kirsten Dunst delivers a career-defining performance. Her Lee is rough, flinty and unsmiling — someone who has done this job for years, and is determined not to be affected that the combat zone doesn’t have signs in a foreign language. Her scenes with Spaeny (who, between this and “Priscilla,” is having a great year), encountering a 20-year-old version of herself, are heartbreaking.

“Civil War” is that rare movie that works as a tense thriller and heart-pumping acton movie while watching it, while leaving the viewer with a lot to chew over on the ride home. Whether it’s a preview of America’s future seems beside the point — because it works so effectively as a fractured mirror of our unsettled present.

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‘Civil War’

★★★★

Opens Friday, April 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disgusting images, and language throughout. Running time: 109 minutes.

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.