Review: 'Widow Clicquot' is a beautifully rendered, but narratively skimpy, telling of how a woman alone created one of the world's great champagne labels

The historical drama “Widow Clicquot” demonstrates that there are few pursuits more laborious than making the perfect champagne — except, perhaps, making a historical drama about the making of the perfect champagne.

English director Thomas Napper starts with a romance, but at the end, with the death in 1805 of winemaker François Clicquot (Tom Sturridge), leaving behind his young widow, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (played by Haley Bennett). François, his widow tells people regularly, was a visionary experimenting in growing grapes and transforming them into champagne — the real stuff, as we are in the Champagne region of France. Barbe-Nicole tearfully pleads with François’ father, Philippe (Ben Miles), to let her try to run the vineyards and fulfill her husband’s dream, rather than sell the land to their neighbor, the Moët family.

Napper and the script, by Erin Dignam (who wrote the Robin Wright drama “Land”), runs on two parallel tracks. One shows us Barbe-Nicole persevering through bad weather, a mountain of debts and a group of vineyard managers who doubt her abilities to lead. The other flashes back to Barbe-Nicole and François’ passionate love, their time with their daughter Clementine (Cecily Cleave), and François’ slow decline before his death.

After François’ death, the one person in Barbe-Nicole’s corner is Louis Bohne (Sam Riley), the vineyard’s sales agent, tasked with trying to sell an uncompleted product to foreign buyers in the middle of Napoleon’s military misadventures. The partnership — the movie suggests something more — culminates with Bohne smuggling Barbe-Nicole’s creation, an 1811 vintage of Veuve Clicquot (“veuve” means “widow” in French) known as “the year of the comet,” to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Napper captures the excessive beauty of the French countryside and stars Bennett and Sturridge, even as he loses the narrative thread holding the story together. One suspects Barbe-Nicole’s motivations for making what became a groundbreaking champagne went well beyond trying to finish what her husband started — and it’s a shame that Bennett (“Cyrano,” “The Girl on the Train”) isn’t given more to work with.

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‘Widow Clicquot’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexuality and nudity. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'Longlegs' is an unsettling serial-killer thriller, brilliantly acted by Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage

Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” is a horror movie that’s more creepily disturbing than jump-scare shocking — but its unsettling images will stick in the mind long after it’s over.

There’s a serial killer at work in Oregon, in the mid-1990s, and the FBI is on the case. A young special agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is out with her partner, knocking on doors — and she senses immediately which house the killer is in. Her partner doesn’t believe her, and ends up dead.

Lee’s commander, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), suspects the young agent has some psychic talent, though she chalks it up to just being observant. She also finds patterns in the evidence Carter gives her, taken from 10 killings over the last 30 years. In each, the father of the house brutally murdered his family and then killed himself. And in each, the authorities found a cryptic note, signed by someone who calls themself “Longlegs.”

But there’s something else in Lee’s history that may be at play. Maybe her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), has memories of when Lee was 9 (played in flashbacks by Lauren Acala). And maybe the mysterious figure who left a note in her home, written in the same cryptic code as the killer’s writing.

Part of the mystery is clear to the audience from the movie’s first scene, when 9-year-old Lee encounters a strange old man. Perkins shoots the man from a child’s point of view, so we barely glimpse his face, until he leans down to engage the girl — and we see he’s played by Nicolas Cage. The effect is similar to what happened when audiences first saw Kevin Spacey in “Seven”: However disturbing you thought things were going to be, they just became much worse.

Cage’s performance is, once again, proof that when the guy really puts his back into it, he’s the most arresting actor around. (The last time, in my estimation, was three years ago in “Pig.”) Cage’s collaboration here with Perkins creates a truly terrifying horror character, who could be a psychopath or something far more sinister.

The reason Perkins’ pervasive emotional darkness is so striking, though, is that Monroe is the light around which it tries to coalesce. Monroe, so adept at playing against the “scream queen” stereotypes in “It Follows” and “Watcher,” plays the young FBI agent with understated intelligence and a core of iron. Monroe makes “Longlegs” something deeper and more resonant than your typical psycho killer thriller.

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‘Longlegs’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 12, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violence, disturbing images and some language. Running time: 101 minutes.

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.