Review: 'A Quiet Place: Day One' takes viewers to the beginning of an alien invasion, with Lupita Nyong'o putting a thoughtful twist on the survival narrative

The sci-fi/horror franchise “A Quiet Place,” started brilliantly by director/actor John Krasinski in 2018 and continued by him two years later, proves itself to be durable enough to survive the dreaded prequel treatment in the effective and sometimes touching “A Quiet Place: Day One.”

The entire movie happens in the same time frame as the flashback prologue of “A Quiet Place Part II” — the day the aliens the hyper-sensitive hearing landed, and started tearing humans limb from limb. Here, though, we aren’t reintroduced to the Abbott family from the first two films, but are given a whole new location and characters.

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski (“Pig”) starts by introducing us to Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a bitterly sarcastic writer living in a cancer hospice outside of New York City. She’s surly to her nurse, Ruben (Alex Wolff), even after she’s put her pain-management patch on. She’s almost grateful when Ruben arranges a day trip for the hospice residents into the city — with a promise to Sam that they’ll get real New York pizza while they’re there. 

Sam — who takes her well-behaved cat, Frodo, everywhere she goes — almost doesn’t notice what her fellow hospice residents see and hear when they’re in the city: Air-raid sirens, and many contrails in the sky, all heading to Earth. There’s little time to wonder what’s approaching, because soon there are explosions and flying debris everywhere. Amid the dust and confusion, it becomes clear that the horrific, spindly aliens attack anything that makes a loud noise. To survive, Sam quickly learns, she must be silent.

(Point of personal privilege: I’m bummed that a question I had from the first movie remains unanswered — how the hell did a major newspaper print an edition with the headline warning “It’s Sound!”, when there wasn’t enough reaction time to put out a newspaper, and the presses would have probably made enough noise to attract the beasties before they’d get a copy printed. OK, digression over. Back to the review.)

Sarnoski devises some powerful action pieces that carry Sam through the narrative. There’s the father (Dijon Hounsou) protecting a group of survivors in an old theater, at a terrible cost to his conscience. Later, and for more than half the movie, Sam encounters Eric (Joseph Quinn, from “Stranger Things”), a young Englishman who becomes the traveling companion Sam doesn’t want but desperately needs.

Nyong’o, an Oscar winner for “12 Years a Slave,” may seem a bit overequipped for an action movie like this (and, yes, I’m remembering her appearance in two “Black Panther” movies and as a voice in the “Star Wars” sequels). But then, as Sarnoski’s story and hidden motive comes clearer, the audience understands the game. Sarnoski and Nyong’o are exploring an intriguing idea for a movie like this: How do you play a survival scenario when your character, who’s already in hospice for cancer, knows they’re not going to survive?

It’s an emotional high-wire act, and it’s not surprising that there are a few times when it feels as if the movie will lose its balance. (The cat gets just a little too much screen time, for one thing.) But Nyong’o holds everything steady, giving us an action heroine guided solely by the desire to experience a moment of normal life before it all comes crashing down.

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‘A Quiet Place: Day One”

★★★

Opens Friday, June 28, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for terror and violent content/bloody images. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Janet Planet' is a warmly offbeat look at an 11-year-old girl and her fascination with her mother's free spirit

I’m willing to predict that there will be two schools of thought among critics considering playwright Annie Baker’s movie debut, the mother-daughter drama “Janet Planet” — impatience with the preciousness of the characters, or utter joy at being able to spend time inhabiting the filmmaker’s precisely rendered and emotionally rich memory play.

As you can likely tell, I’m in the second camp. This movie is delightful.

It’s 1991 in the rural part of western Massachusetts — though it could be upstate New York or Oregon or anywhere rustic and hippie-friendly. Lacy (played by newcomer Zoe Ziegler) is a mousy 11-year-old who calls her mom to pull her out of summer camp. Mom, Janet (played by Julianne Nicholson), obliges, and they spend the rest of the summer together in their home in the Massachusetts woods, where Janet also runs her practice as a licensed acupuncturist.

During this summer, though, Janet and Lacy welcome three people in succession into their home. First is Wayne (Will Patton), a live-in boyfriend of sorts. Lacy makes fast friends with Wayne’s daughter, Sequoia (Edie Moon Kearns), but Wayne is more difficult to know.

After Wayne leaves (Baker throws up a title card that reads “End Wayne” at the conclusion of this chapter), Janet and Lacy go to an avant-garde performance outdoors, and Janet recognizes an old friend in the troupe. That’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who’s trying to escape from the troupe and its charismatic, possibly cult-like leader, Avi (Elias Koteas), and ends up staying with Janet and Lacy while she tries to sort out her future. 

When Regina’s time runs its course, Janet finds that Avi is trying to charm her with picnics and Rainer Maria Rilke poems.

The constant, among all of Janet’s interpersonal entanglements, is Lacy’s quiet acceptance of her mother’s tumultuous life. Mother and daughter spend a lot of time together this particular summer, and Lacy observes a lot more than she can process — and the viewer intuits that Baker, through this warm and offbeat character study, is still processing a lot of it.

Baker handles those scenes, as Lacy learns about adulthood from the less-than-reliable role model she has at hand, with delicacy and poignant humor. She lets the emotional bond between Lacy and Janet unfold on its own terms, sometimes allowing herself as the storyteller to be a bit surprised by where it’s all going — because she’s trusting of her script and her actors to let them run with it.

The showstopper in “Janet Planet” is Nicholson, a veteran movie and TV actor (recently seen in “Marr of Easttown,” “I, Tonya” and “August: Osage County”) who brings both a world-weary resignation and a reservoir of eternal hope to Janet’s quest to understand the world and her place in it. Ultimately, that place seems to be as the most fascinating character in Lacy’s life — as both work to discover how much of each person should be rubbing off on the other.

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‘Janet Planet’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 28, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language, some drug use and thematic elements. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'The Bikeriders' is a glossy but shallow look at '60s motorcycle gangs, with Austin Butler's charisma giving the movie its fuel

Because it’s based on a book of photography, perhaps it’s inevitable that “The Bikeriders” is all enigmatic images on the surface and not much going on beneath.

It’s surprising, though, because the film’s writer-director, Jeff Nichols, has proved with such movies as “Take Shelter,” “Mud,” “Midnight Special” and “Loving” that he’s very good at drilling down to find something deeply human in his subject matter.

“The Bikeriders” is about the birth of a motorcycle gang in the Midwest, shown here from the mid-1960s to 1973. (The book, by photojournalist Danny Lyon, spanned 1963 to 1967.) The leader, Johnny (Tom Hardy), isn’t your rebel stereotype — he’s a dirt-bike racer with a wife and daughters, and is inspired by seeing Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” to starting the Vandals, a Chicago motorcycle club.

Johnny gathers a group of like-minded motorcycle riders, and the most hardcore of his group is Benny, played by Austin Butler. Benny is one of the few in the club who wears his Vandals colors when he’s not with the group — which, in the movie’s prologue, leads to him getting severely beaten by the regulars in a local bar. However, when Johnny finds out, the Vandals show up en masse, a show of strength that terrifies the bar owner and even the local cops.

Benny’s mysterious vibe and, let’s face it, smoking hot looks soon attract the attention of Kathy (Jodie Comer), whose interviews with the movie’s Danny Lyon (Mike Faist) form the movie’s constant and somewhat grating narration. (Nichols, or somebody, should have told the English-born Comer to ease off on the Midwestern accent.) 

Nichols’ script captures the motorcycle life in episodes, whether it’s the Vandals getting drunk and getting in fights, or Johnny answering a challenge to his leadership with the question “fists or knives?” One of the ironies Kathy notes of the Vandals’ existence is that a group formed to break all the rules sets up so many rules for itself, and violating even one of them leads to harsh consequences.

Hardy, as always, gives a compelling performance as Johnny, a man seemingly so enraptured by his Brando inspiration that he’s built a life around it. He’s bolstered by a strong ensemble cast playing members of the group, namely Boyd Holbrook as their top mechanic, Damon Herriman as Johnny’s right-hand man, and Michael Shannon (a Nichols regular) as one of the club’s more unhinged members.

And in a movie where inscrutable beauty is the point, Austin Butler is a gift from the gods. That mix of sex appeal and menace that Butler displayed as Elvis or in “Dune: Part Two” coalesces to perfection in Benny, a man so effortlessly cool that it’s a given that a woman like Comer’s Kathy would end up with him. In the film’s final moments, as an older Benny looks up and contemplates what once was, Butler’s sly look says more than the previous 100 minutes of “The Bikeriders” tried to get across about the motorcycle life. 

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‘The Bikeriders’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, violence, some drug use and brief sexuality. Running time: 116 minutes.

Review: 'Thelma' is a gently funny spoof of action movies, with 94-year-old June Squibb making the most of her star turn

What a drag it is getting old, as a famous now-octogenarian once said — but sometimes there are benefits, like being an unlikely but charming movie star, the way June Squibb, all 94 years of her, is in the gently funny comedy “Thelma.”

Squibb — an Oscar nominee for “Nebraska” back in 2013 — plays the title role, Thelma Post, a woman living alone in Southern California, two years after her husband’s death. Her grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), who’s 24, checks in on her regularly, and nags her into wearing her medical-alert bracelet, which she hates. 

One day, Thelma gets a frantic call from Daniel — or someone she thinks is Daniel — saying he’s been in an accident and is now in jail, and that someone will call needing her to send him $10,000 in cash immediately. She mails the cash before realizing it’s a scam, causing Daniel and his parents, Gail (Parker Posey) and Alan (Clark Gregg), to start talking about putting Thelma in assisted living.

Thelma, inspired by watching Tom Cruise in a “Mission: Impossible” movie, has a plan to track down the scammers and get her money back. She goes to visit her last surviving old friend, Ben (Richard Roundtree, in his final feature film), who’s living in a nursing home — and, important to Thelma’s plan, has a scooter.

What follows in writer-director Josh Margolin’s feature debut (inspired by the story of his own grandmother, also named Thelma) is a warm-hearted spoof of the action-movie genre, with the 93-year-old Thelma as Tom Cruise with a replaced hip. Margolin cleverly sets up moments to approximate a car chase, technological trickery, a little gunplay, a cat-and-mouse thriller and other tropes of action movies — and getting the original John Shaft in on the fun is a delightful bonus.

Squibb gives a solid performance here, leaning into the comic possibilities of being a woman of action while also tapping into some heartfelt emotional moments where Thelma reflects on the small annoyances and occasional joys of living as long as she has. Squibb proves it’s never too late to get your star-making role, and to make the most of it.

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‘Thelma’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 21, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong language. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Ghostlight' is a deeply felt drama about a family working through grief, with art and Shakespeare as their guides

Family drama takes a Shakespearean turn in “Ghostlight,” an emotionally raw drama about a family on the verge of falling apart — and finding a connection through grief and the Bard.

Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) is a construction worker who’s barely making it through his day on a street crew in a Chicago suburb. All we know is that things are hard at home for Dan and his wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen), in part because their daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), is lashing out at school again and could face expulsion. (By the way, Kupferer and Mallen are married in real life, and young Katherine, who also played a supporting role in “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” is their daughter.)

The script — by Kelly O’Sullivan, who co-directed with her significant other, Alex Thompson — gives details in measured doses. We figure out fairly early that Daisy had an older brother, who is no longer in the picture, and that nobody, least of all Dan, wants to talk about it. Hence the family tension that’s hitting a boiling point.

Almost by accident, Dan finds a release valve. There’s an old playhouse near the street construction site, and he walks in to find a group of community-theater actors in a read-through of their next production: Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” Dan’s not familiar with the play — he asks Daisy about it, and she recites the “in fair Verona” opening from memory — but he’s intrigued with the group dynamics of the actors and their no-nonsense director, Lenora (Hanna Dworkin). 

Dan keeps coming to rehearsals, befriending the other actors — particularly Rita (played by Dolly De Leon, from “Triangle of Sadness”), a former New York professional actor who teaches Dan the joys of letting go and pretending to be someone else for a couple of hours. Dan starts to like that feeling, though as he learns more about the fate of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, the play starts hitting close to home.

Once you get past the plot mechanics of O’Sullivan’s script, which can be a little too on-the-nose, the strength of the story’s emotional pull cannot be denied. Following Dan’s path to understanding his grief and his guilt — at his family’s tragic loss and how that hole continues to gnaw at Dan, Sharon and Daisy — leads to a deeply felt and quietly powerful catharsis. “Ghostlight” captures the unique way that art can lead to healing and connection, both for a man’s family and the created “family” of a theater troupe.

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‘Ghostlight’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 21, in theaters. Rated R for language. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Tuesday' is a hauntingly beautiful and darkly absurd story of a mother and daughter facing death, with a heartbreaking performance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Profoundly touching, darkly comic and sometimes just weird, writer-director Diana O. Pusic’s debut feature “Tuesday” is a sharply realized and heartbreaking story of humankind’s inability to accept the one thing that is coming for each of us: Death.

In Pusic’s mad vision, Death is depicted as a bird — a mangy parrot, its orange feathers turned black by the muck and mire through which it moves through its existence. It hears the cacophony of voices of the creatures around it, and zeroes in on those who are close to death. Sometimes the bird grows to massive size, sometimes it shrinks to where it fits in the corner of a person’s eye. A person who sees it may plead for their life, but when it passes its wing over the person, that person dies and the bird moves on.

Except that’s not what happens when the Death bird comes to call on Tuesday (Lola Petticrew), a paraplegic 15-year-old girl living in London. Tuesday, left in her garden by her nurse, Billie (Leah Harvey), doesn’t cry out or plead for her life, and instead calms herself and does something unexpected: She tells Death a joke. (A pretty good one, actually.)

Then she takes the bird inside to take a bath, to wash off all the grime. In return, Death reveals that it can speak (with the guttural voice of Arziné Kene), and offers Tuesday enough time to break the news of her imminent death to her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) — who has been walking around London, not suspecting that the weird behavior she’s witnessing may connect back to Tuesday’s afternoon with Death.

For the sake of spoilers, I will not describe what happens when Zora gets home, or the aftermath — except to say that it’s bizarre, funny in an offbeat way, absurdist, gut-wrenching and, even with the fantastical elements previously described, completely relatable. Zora, like any parent, would do anything to keep her daughter from what she sees as harm — and in this movie, “anything” turns out to be a wider range of actions than most stories would allow to unfold.

Pusic, a Croatian-born director based in London, launches this odd scenario and follows its many permutations to their logical, whimsical and tragic conclusions. Her visuals are charmingly inventive, particularly in the computer animation and puppetry that brings the shabby and terrifying old bird to life.

Louis-Dreyfus’ performance is a revelation, which is a weird thing to say about a 63-year-old actor who has been on our screens for nearly 40 years and has 11 Emmys to her name. Because of the story’s fantastical and absurd elements, the role requires someone with Louis-Dreyfus’ comic timing and ability to keep a straight face through the oddest moments. But while she’s doing that, Louis-Dreyfus is also finding a new gear, tapping into Zora’s fierce protectiveness and the awareness that preventing Zora’s death will be impossible — and the attempt ends up putting mother and daughter through hell.

The highest praise I can give “Tuesday” is this: For the first time in I can’t remember when, I could not at any moment predict what would happen next — and anything I might have imagined was outdone by what Pusic did instead. 

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‘Tuesday’

★★★★

Opens Friday, June 14, at theaters around Utah. Rated R for language. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Inside Out 2' takes us back inside the mind of a girl, this time dealing — through humor and heart — with the anxiety and other emotions of being a teenager.

It’s been nine years since Pixar released “Inside Out,” one of the studio’s most intelligent and heartwarming titles — and it’s an achievement that the sequel, “Inside Out 2,” manages to come even close to the original’s wit and insight into the mind of a girl.

The first movie was set inside the mind of Riley, a generally happy adolescent girl from Minnesota who has to deal with the culture shock of her family’s move to San Francisco. The five major emotions in Riley’s mind — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust — navigate these changes, explore the different aspects of Riley’s imagination and dreamscape, and share the realization that memories can be more than one emotion at a time.

Fans of the first movie that in the final reel, a new button was installed on the console in Riley’s brain — an alarm for something called “puberty.” In the new movie, that alarm goes off.

Riley has turned 13, and is still generally happy — a condition guarded over by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), who is sort of in charge in the headquarters of Riley’s mind. But when work crews come through HQ making adjustments, something seems to be off with the controls, because Riley is overemotional, no matter which of the quintet is at the helm. (The other voices here are Lewis Black and Phyllis Smith returning as Anger and Sadness, and new cast members Tony Hale as Fear and Liza Lapira as Disgust.)

The five are surprised to learn that there are more emotions moving in: Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), Envy (voiced by Ayo Edibiri), Embarrassment (voiced by Pruitt Taylor Vince) and Ennui (voiced by Adele Exarchopoulos). And they’re ready to take over operating Riley’s emotional reactions just as she’s heading to a three-day hockey training camp that she thinks will decide her high-school future.

I don’t want to say much more about what happens after that — in part because Disney asked critics not to, but mainly because director Kelsey Mann (a veteran Pixar story artist) and writers Dave Holstein and Meg LeFauve create some clever takes on the many changes happening in this teen girl’s mind. And those ideas are visualized with humor and sublime animation.

The most fascinating part of “Inside Out 2” is the observation that Riley’s mind is too complex to be easily categorized, and that having one emotion — whether it’s anxiety or even joy — dominate over the others isn’t healthy in the long run. That may be a heady message to convey to the kids that Disney is targeting, but it’s one that their parents might find handy to remember later.

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‘Inside Out 2’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some thematic elements. Running time: 96 minutes.

Review: 'Kidnapped' is a harrowing historical drama, putting a human face to the cruelty of religious bigotry

Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s “Kidnapped” (“Rapito”) depicts a gut-wrenching piece of history that some consider pivotal in the creation of modern Italy, though mostly forgotten — but it’s power comes from how it centers nation-shaking events around the plight of a little boy.

Late one night in 1858, a marshal and two gendarmes arrive at the home of the Mortara family in Bologna, Italy. The marshal (Bruno Cariello) informs the family’s patriarch, Salomone Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi), and his wife, Marianna (Barbara Ronchi), who are Jewish, that their 6-year-old son Edgardo (played at this age by Enea Sala) is to be taken away from his family. 

Little Edgardo has committed no crime. The marshal is doing this under the authority of the Catholic Church — which is the law in this part of Italy — because the Grand Inquistitor, Monsignor Feletti (Fabrizio Gifuni), has been told that Edgardo was baptized as a baby, and therefore must be raised as a Christian. Salomone tries to plead his case to Feletti, but the priest is unmoved. 

Feletti tells Salomone that little Edgardo will likely stay in Bologna, and that his family can occasionally visit him. This is a lie — the first of many told by various priests — as Edgardo is immediately put on a boat for Rome, where he is put in a Catholic orphanage and made to attend Mass every morning and learn Christian prayers in Latin. 

Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon) takes personal interest in Edgardo’s case, which becomes an international incident — as Jewish advocates across Europe and even in America decry the cruel taking of a boy away from his parents over a dubious claim of baptism. (In Boston, the Pope is told, a theater group performed a skit in which His Holiness is held down and forcibly circumcised —  a thought that shows up in the Pope’s nightmare.) Pius remains unmoved, even when told that one of the Church’s biggest supporters, France’s Napoleon III, is displeased with Edgardo’s kidnapping. Pius’ reply: “I am the Pope. I answer only to God.”

Though Bellocchio (who directed the 2019 Mafia drama “The Traitor”) and co-screenwriter Susanna Nicchiarelli dig into the political furor caused by Edgardo’s case. Among other things, depicting Edgardo’s older brother Riccardo (Samuele Teneggi) as one of the rebels who represent the unified Italy that aims to break the Pope’s stranglehold on the country’s laws. Riccardo soon encounters the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) as he embarks on his career as a priest.

The movie’s more resonant moments come when Bellocchio depicts how this Jewish family — separated by bigotry and rigid adherence to Catholic doctrine — is made to suffer as part of this religious power grab. “Kidnapped” illustrates, with the emotional force of grand opera, the cruelty inflicted by people claiming in God’s name that they know what’s best.

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‘Kidnapped” (“Rapito”)

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and situations with a child in peril. Running time: 133 minutes; in Italian, Hebrew and Latin, with subtitles.