Review: 'Fly Me to the Moon' is part bubbly rom-com, part workplace comedy, and not engaging enough to make either work

Laboring to be both workplace comedy and old-fashioned rom-com, director Greg Berlanti’s comedy “Fly Me to the Moon” never manages to be enough of either to be as fun as it wants or promises to be.

It’s 1969, and the United States has been — as the prologue shows us — gripped in the space race with the Soviets for a dozen years. NASA is eight years into its effort, sparked by John Kennedy’s rousing speech, to get a human being on the moon. However, the American public has lost interest, preoccupied with problems at home, such as civil rights struggles and the war in Vietnam. Still, they plug away at Cape Kennedy, months from the planned launch of Apollo 11.

What NASA needs, according to a shadowy figure from the White House who calls himself Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), is good marketing. Moe drafts Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), a New York advertising wizard with a talent for exaggerating the truth to make a sale. (When we meet Kelly, she sports a fake baby bump to sweet-talk some auto executives.) Moe’s persuasion techniques are more direct: A dossier that suggests he knows some unsavory details about Kelly’s past.

Kelly and her assistant, Ruby (Anna Garcia), fly down to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to set up NASA’s new public relations department. Kelly’s biggest hurdle: Charming NASA’s no-nonsense launch director, Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), who sees Kelly’s publicity tricks as a distraction from the serious business of rocket science. The reason for Cole’s seriousness, we’re told by his deputy, Henry Smalls (Ray Romano), is that Cole was the man in charge when Apollo 1 ended in a launchpad fire that killed three astronauts.

If you’ve ever seen a movie, you may take it for granted that Cole’s animosity against Kelly, and Kelly’s dismissal of Cole’s earnestness, will both melt away toward mutual respect and eventually romance. Certainly Berlanti (directing a feature for the first time since 2018’s “Love, Simon”) takes it for granted, running through the rom-com markers that first-time screenwriter Rose Gilroy lays down like it’s a chore. 

Berlanti seems more interested in the farce potential of the movie’s second half — when Moe, hedging the White House’s bets on the success of Apollo 11, forces Kelly to stage a faked version of the moon landing in a secured hangar at the far end of the Kennedy Space Center. There are some funny moments here, mostly provided by Jim Rash as the Tab-swigging artiste Kelly picks to direct the phony landing. But the comic overload never successfully meshes with the romantic storyline.

The romance might have worked, if Berlanti or his leads had leaned into the rapid-fire patter of classic screwball comedies. Tatum is adequate as the poster boy for emotionally repressed ‘60s heartthrobs. Johansson could have used a little more Rosalind Russell or Barbara Stanwyck, some fast-talking wit to match her smile. (When casting about for someone who might have been better as Kelly, I thought of a young Rene Russo — who, as it happens, is the screenwriter’s mom; Rose Gilroy’s father, Dan Gilroy, wrote and directed “Nightcrawler’ and “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”)

There’s enough that works with “Fly Me to the Moon” that one gets annoyed that more of it misfires. It’s one vehicle that could have spent more time being re-engineered before being sent out to the launchpad.

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‘Fly Me to the Moon’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 12, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, and smoking. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'The Convert' undercuts the stranger-among-the-natives trope by providing a sharp view of 19th century Maori tribes at war

The New Zealand drama “The Convert” works with a familiar movie scenario — experiencing the culture of Indigenous people through the eyes of a colonial outsider — but it expends a fair amount of energy exploring that culture on its own terms.

Guy Pearce stars as Thomas Munro, a lay minister being transported by ship from England to New Zealand in 1830. The leaders of the colony of Epworth have hired Munro, and paid for his passage, to be their new preacher. But before he arrives, he encounters members of the two warring Maori tribes in the vicinity — and ends up caring for a young woman, Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne), whose husband was brutally killed by one of the warlords, Akatarewa (Lawrence Makoare). 

The other warlord, Maianui (Antonio Te Maioha), who is Rangimai’s father, allows her to go with Munro to Epworth to be tutored, accompanied by one of his young warriors. Munro soon learns that the Epworth elders, who rent the town’s land from Maianui’s tribe, dislike their Maori neighbors and don’t think much of Munro for befriending them. The one friend Munro encounters is Charlotte (Jacqueline McKenzie), the European-born widow of a Maori tribesman, who acts as translator for Munro and Rangimai.

When Rangimai’s guard is killed one night, Munro defies the town leaders by accompanying Rangimai to take the body back to his people. Charlotte goes with them, so she can speak to Maianui — and, eventually, help Munro when he tries to negotiate a truce between Maianui and Akatarewa, who are equally resistant of ending their violent traditions.

Director Lee Tamahori — whose career has ranged from the Maori domestic drama “Once Were Warriors” to the terrible James Bond entry “Die Another Day” — doesn’t shy away from that violence, either. There are battle scenes here, split between imported muskets and native blades and clubs, that are staged with ferocious energy. And the script, which Tamahori wrote with Michael Bennett and Shane Danielsen — doesn’t cast Pearce’s Munro as a white savior in the midst of these Indigenous characters, but a human as flawed (if not more so) than anyone else here.

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‘The Convert’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 12, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence, bloodshed, some language and sensuality. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'MaXXXine' finishes off Ti West's 'X' trilogy with a scathing, blood-drenched commentary on Hollywood ambition

The horror thriller “MaXXXine” is as drenched in ‘80s camp and film references as it is in blood, as writer-director Ti West concludes the trilogy that started with “X” and “Pearl” with a sharp satire of Hollywood ruthlessness.

The trilogy’s star, Mia Goth, returns as Maxine Minx, who was an innocent first-time porn actress who barely survived the massacre at a Texas farm in “X.” That was in 1979; now it’s 1985, and Maxine is an established porn star in Tinseltown, but has designs on something bigger. When we first see Maxine here, she’s auditioning for a real Hollywood movie.

The movie for which Maxine is auditioning is “The Puritan II,” a controversy-courting horror thriller about Satan worship. Its director, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki) calls herself an artist, making “a B-movie with A-ideas,” and sees in Maxine a spark — a determination to do “whatever it takes” to become a movie star. But Bender and Maxine must contend with nervous producers, as well as the many protesters outside the studio gates decrying the “Satanic” influences on Hollywood.

Of course, since we saw “X,” we know what Maxine is capable of doing to stay alive. Somebody else seems to know, as well, and is leaving threatening messages for her. That someone, we quickly learn, is a sleazy private detective, John Labat (Kevin Bacon, reveling in his character’s low-life status). 

But what we don’t know is who Labat’s client is — and what connection, if any, that client has to the string of murders happening around Hollywood, attributed to someone called “The Night Stalker.” Within a few minutes of the movie’s opening, two of Maxine’s sex-worker colleagues (played by Chloe Farnsworth and the singer Halsey), disappear, and two LAPD detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale) are coming around to ask Maxine about them.

West — who directed, wrote and edited the movie — sets up scenes to evoke both ‘80s history (such as the infamous “satanic panic” scares) and old movies, particularly in the suspense genre. (When Bender takes Maxine on a tour of the backlot, the last stop is the Bates Motel, and later there’s a callback to Hitchcock’s shot of a shower drain in “Psycho.”) And, when called upon, he delivers the blood and gore that a horror movie requires, sometimes quite cleverly.

If there’s a weakness, it’s the ending that West settles on after all the buildup — which manages to be both out of left field and utterly predictable all at once.

The supporting cast boasts some sharp, brief performances by Giancarlo Esposito as Maxine’s fiercely loyal agent, Sophie Thatcher (“Yellowjackers”) as a special-effects artist, Moses Sumney as Maxine’s video-store best pal and Lily Collins as a seasoned horror actress. 

First and foremost, though, “MaXXXine” belongs to Goth, who channels every California hard-luck story and hand-wringing warning about Hollywood’s bad influences into a searing portrait of show business ambition run wild. It’s as intense a performance as Goth gave in “Pearl,” and just as compelling.

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“MaXXXine”

★★★

Opens Friday, July 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity and drug use. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Despicable Me 4' is a painfully humorless exercise in franchise extension, and proof that some hits can only produce sequels for so long

“Despicable Me 4” is the 14-year-old franchise’s sixth movie (four with that name, two with “Minions” in the title), and it’s also the least of them — a perfunctory collection of not-very-funny gags barely strung together into a coherent plot. 

As the new movie starts, we find our reformed supervillain, Gru (voiced, as always, by Steve Carell), returning to his class reunion at Lycée Pas Bon, the school for villainy. There he encounters his old school rival, Maxime de Mal — voiced by Will Ferrell in a vaguely French accent that’s almost as bad as whatever country’s accent Carell’s Gru uses. Gru is there to capture Maxime for his current bosses, the Anti-Villainy League. 

When that mission is done, Gru returns to his happy home — where his wife, Lucy (voiced by Kristen Wiig), and their three adopted daughters, Margo (voiced by Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (voiced by Dana Gaier) and Agnes (voiced by Madison Skye Polan), live. There’s also a new resident: Junior, Gru and Lucy’s new baby, who is happy except when Gru is holding or looking at him.

Domestic bliss is short-lived, though, when the AVL’s chief, Silas Ramsbottom (voiced by Steve Coogan), reports that Maxime has escaped from his maximum-security prison cell — and, with his girlfriend Valentina (voiced by Sofía Vergara), is seeking revenge on Gru. Silas orders Gru to pack up the family, and three of Gru’s little yellow Minions, to a safe house in the idyllic town of Mayflower.

Mayflower’s main industry, it seems, is producing subplots. The script — by Mike White (“The White Lotus”) and Ken Dario (who’s been with the franchise since the start) — riffs through a long series of sitcom-ready situations, from Margo adjusting to a new school to Gru being blackmailed when his teen neighbor Poppy (voiced by Joey King) figures out his true identity. Meanwhile, back at AVL headquarters, five Minions are injected with super-serum and become superheroes, as well as lame parodies of Marvel characters.

Director Chris Renaud, who’s also been making this franchise’s films since the first one, and co-director Patrick Delage keep the animation moving briskly — there’s an inventive tracking shot of the hundreds of Minions in cubicles in AVL’s offices — to hide how dated the jokes and references are. (A “honey badger don’t care” joke? Seriously?)

There’s one moment, at the very end, that I actually found funny — and it’s Carell and Ferrell doing a duet of the go-to supervillain theme, Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” It made me feel that there could be a funny movie to be made out of “Despicable Me 4,” by playing the video of Carell and Ferrell ad-libbing in the recording booth.

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‘Despicable Me 4’

★

Opens Wednesday, July 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action and rude humor. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Kinds of Kindness' is three twisted tales of human love, with brilliant triple performances by Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe

Like most movies by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos — like “The Favourite” or “Poor Things” — I don’t know if I can adequately explain how or why his trilogy of stories “Kinds of Kindness” works. I just know that, if you’re like me, it will pervade your dreams and make you think about the world differently.

Lanthimos and his writing partner, Efthimis Filippou, tell three strange tales somewhere in America. In the order we see them, they are briefly synopsized like this:

• An accountant works hard to meet the exacting demands of his boss, until the boss orders him to do one thing he can’t make himself do.

• A cop is happy when his marine biologist wife is rescued after going missing at sea, but when they’re reunited, he senses something is off.

• Two people are searching for a particular person — someone who could fulfill the prophesy of a pair of cult leaders.

The three stories have some elements in common. In each, a character goes to extremes to prove their love to another person. Water is a key element in all three, as is blood. Something is broken that can’t be repaired. And there is a minor character (Yorgos Stefanakos) — identified only as R.M.F., the monogram on his shirt — who is pivotal in all three stories.

The other common factor is the cast, with the major actors playing roles in each of the stories. Jesse Plemons (who won a Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for this film) plays the attentive accountant, the worried cop and half of the searching couple. Emma Stone plays a woman the accountant meets, the cop’s wife and the other half of the searching couple. Willem Dafoe plays the accountant’s boss, Stone’s father and one of the cult leaders. Others who appear multiple times are Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudzou Athie and Joe Alwyn. 

By using these actors as an ensemble, shifting roles and attitudes from story to story, Lanthimos deepens the common threads that tie these stories to each other, while also giving the actors room to explore several characters in the context of the same movie. It’s a fascinating high-wire act, and his stars are eager to get up there and risk breaking their necks as they experiment.

The stories are sometimes a bit confounding, and perhaps a bit mean-spirited. Anyone familiar with Lanthimos’ past movies — not just “The Favourite” and my favorite movie of 2023, “Poor Things,” but also “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” — knows that those feelings are routine for him, and it’s in the dark spaces that he works best, shining an uncomfortable light on the people we’d like to think we are and the people we really are.

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‘Kinds of Kindness’

★★★1/2

Opened Friday, June 21, in select cities; opened Friday, June 28, in more cities. Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, strong sexual content, full nudity and language. Running time: 164 minutes.

Review: The first part of Kevin Costner's 'Horizon' is an overstuffed Western epic, but gorgeously captures Utah's natural beauty and gives room for a couple dozen characters

It’s a bit weird to critique director-star Kevin Costner’s Western epic “Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter I,” because, as the last two words of the title suggest, we’re only getting a piece of it.

This sprawling three-hour movie, featuring more than two dozen significant speaking roles, is the first of two that Costner filmed across large parts of southern Utah last year — and he plans to make two more this year to finish the story. (Whether his distributor, Warner Bros./New Line Cinema, will pay for those two movies is a question that likely will be settled by this weekend’s box office.) So buckle in and saddle up, people, because we could be riding the range with Costner & Co. for a while.

Read the full review at sltrib.com.

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.