Review: 'Slingshot' is a space drama with a lot of good ideas but not enough of a story to pull them together

There are some intriguing ideas in the science-fiction drama “Slingshot” — about the emptiness of space and the loneliness of ambition — but too many of them are floating free, with nothing to which they can tether.

We meet John (Casey Affleck) as he awakes from drug-induced hibernation on a spaceship, the Galaxy One, journeying from Earth to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and the only object in space, besides Earth, to have stable liquid on its surface. But it’s not water, but methane.

John is one of three crew members director Mikael Håfström (who made the Stephen King adaptation “1408”) has placed on this vessel, as it prepares to slingshot past Jupiter to make the trip to Titan. The others are Capt. Franks (Laurence Fishburne), the commander, and Nash (Tomer Capone), a navigator who’s increasingly paranoid about Franks’ unflinching support for the mission.

As tension increases between Franks and Nash, John finds he can’t completely trust what he’s seeing. He starts having flashbacks to before leaving Earth — involving Zoe (Emily Beecham), one of the designers of Galaxy One, with whom John hooked up back home. As the ship gets closer to Titan, John finds he has trouble trusting what Franks and Nash are saying, or knowing who’s actually on board.

Håfström and writers R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker create a claustrophobic little space opera — aside from those four actors, the only significant speaking role belongs to David Morrissey as the Mission Control leader back on Earth — that delves into the dangers of space travel, the side effects of hibernation drugs, the survival instincts of moths and the tug-of-war between love and ambition. The biggest struggle, as the Galaxy One zooms past Jupiter, comes from John trying to understand what’s real and what’s in his head.

Affleck gives a gripping performance, capturing John’s confrontation of his own weaknesses and his descent into possible madness in measured doses. He’s well matched by Fishburne, whose usual paternal presence masks something more menacing.

The script’s smart ideas don’t come together into a satisfying whole — particularly in the movie’s final scene, which presents two possible outcomes for John, and doesn’t give viewers enough to build empathy for or make sense of his final choice. In the end, “Slingshot” may make viewers feel whipsawed by the missed opportunity here.

——

‘Slingshot’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some violence/bloody images. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: "The Crow" is a dark, downbeat supernatural revenge thriller that takes way too long to get moving

Director Rupert Sanders’ adaptation of James O’Barr’s comic book “The Crow” is a slow slog through some dark territory — a movie that’s narratively, cinematically and morally murky. 

In an unnamed and regularly rain-soaked city, Shelly (played by the English musician-actor FKA twigs) is in fear for her life, after a friend sends her a video clip that features the tycoon Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston) doing something gruesome and illegal. Roeg — who makes vague comments about having been alive for centuries — sends his goons, led by the icy killer Marion (played by Finnish actor Laura Birn), on her scent. 

To evade Marion’s minions, Shelly gets herself arrested for drug possession and lands in a rehab facility. It’s there that Shelly meets Eric (Bill Skarsgård), and the two outcasts quickly fall in love. When Marion and her goons show up at the rehab center, Shelly and Eric slip off their ankle monitors and jump the razor-wire fence to escape. But Marion and her minions quickly track the pair and kill them.

It tells you a lot about this movie’s supernatural inklings that the is not the end of the movie. Instead, Eric wakes up in a train station overwhelmed by plant life and a mysterious man (Sami Bouajila) who informs Eric that both he and Shelly are dead — but, because Eric’s soul is unsettled, he has the chance to hang around and seek revenge on the people responsible for Shelly’s death.

It takes Sanders and screenwriters Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider about 45 minutes to get to that point, something the trailers — and the advance knowledge provided to anyone who saw director Alex Proyas’ infamous 1994 version, in which star Brandon Lee was killed during filming by a badly handled prop weapon — could have told them in far less time. 

Around the midpoint, shortly after Eric’s arrival in purgatory, the movie shifts gears and delivers some of the bloody action sequences that viewers were promised. The highlight is a balletic and blood-drenched set piece where the seemingly undying Eric takes a samurai sword and slices and dices a bunch of armed gunmen. The splashes of red are the only real color that cuts through the dark grays shown in every frame.

Getting to that point takes a ridiculously long time, though that’s filled nicely with some artfully staged romantic scenes between Skarsgård and twigs. The mythology, of the undead but undying, is never adequately explained, and the moral conundrum presented by Roeg’s evil wizardry is presented as a crucial turning point but it never gets its full airing. “The Crow” flies unsteadily, and with a dismaying lack of speed, toward a destination that’s all too familiar.

——

‘The Crow’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, language, sexuality/nudity, and drug use. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Good One' brilliantly captures the discomfort of a teen daughter learning hard truths about her father

When I first reviewed the father-daughter drama “Good One” at the Sundance Film Festival in January, I complained that the plot didn’t have enough meat to it. But over the months since, what does happen in this beautiful and observant drama has stuck with me like few other movies have.

Sam (played by Lily Collias) is a 17-year-old girl packing for a weekend hiking trip with her dad (James LeGros). The plan is to hike three days in the Catskills, with Dad’s old friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) and Matt’s son Dylan. At the last minute, though, Dylan cancels, leaving Sam alone to deal with the bruised egos of two divorced dads.

The early scenes set the differences between the two men. Dad is much more serious about hiking than Matt, and chastises him for the extraneous items in his backpack and for eating in his tent — which, as Dad notes, is practically inviting bears to enter their camp. “You can be as reckless as you want with your kid, but not when it’s my daughter,” Dad tells Matt.

Generally, though, the trip is pretty laid back, as writer-director India Donaldson zeroes in on the small details of these three people on their hike and the beautiful scenery of the Catskills where it’s filmed.

It turns out to be a small detail — almost a throwaway line of dialogue, really — that turns this low-stress hiking trip into something more sinister, and forces Sam to reconsider what she knows about Matt and what she thinks about her dad. There’s a later scene between Sam and Dad where the dialogue is pivotal, which puts the onus on Sam to decide what to do next.

LeGros and McCarthy give solid performances, but Collias is the breakout star here. In only her second movie (she had a supporting role in the disturbing 2022 Sundance drama “Palm Trees and Power Lines”), Collias subtly captures Sam’s shifting attitudes and her determination to take action when the men disappoint her. Collias must carry a lot on her shoulders, but her eyes and manner are captivating.

——

‘Good One’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 23, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language. Running time: 90 minutes.

——

This review ran originally on this site on January 21, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Between the Temples' is a cringe-inducing comedy of discomfort, with sharp performances by Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane

A crisis in faith spirals out of control in director Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples,” and the movie’s narrative comes close to doing the same.

Ben Gottlieb, played by Jason Schwartzman, is a cantor in a synagogue in upstate New York who has been on sabbatical for nearly a year — because, we find out as the movie goes, of his wife’s accidental death just over a year earlier. He tries to sing at a temple service, but his voice won’t cooperate, and goes to hide in his room, in the house of his moms, Mira (Caroline Aaron) and Judith (Dolly de Leon). 

Ben’s boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel), is generous and lets Ben continue to teach the bar and bat mitzvah kids to prepare them for their big event. One day, the class is interrupted by a non-traditional student: Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), whom Ben recognizes as his grade-school music teacher. She’s retired and widowed, and tells Ben she wants to reconnect with her Jewish roots and take her bat mitzvah — and Ben, after some prodding, agrees to take her on.

The relationship between Ben and Carla takes some off-putting turns (aided in one scene by the hallucinogens in the tea her housemate makes for them). Further complications come from Carla’s adult son (Matthew Shear), and from Rabbi Bruce’s adult daughter, Gabby (Madeline Weinstein), who becomes a wee bit obsessed by the novel Ben’s late wife wrote. 

Silver, who co-wrote the script with C. Mason Wells, thrives in the chaos of throwing these slightly off-kilter characters together to see the sparks fly. There are fun comic bits of business — a door in Mira and Judith’s house that noisily doesn’t stay shut, or Rabbi Bruce’s penchant for cheating at golf — that add some depth to this story of grief, love and other uncomfortable feelings.

The high-wire act Silver and Wells perform ultimately can’t sustain itself — though there’s an epic dinner scene where everyone talks over each other in a symphony of anxieties. What holds “Between the Temples” together are the performances, particularly of Schwartzman as the morose cantor and Kane as the free-spirited older woman who learns that she’s still teaching him important lessons.

 ——

‘Between the Temples’

★★★

Opens Friday, August 23, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language and some sexual references. Running time: 111 minutes.

——

This review ran originally on this site on January 19, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'My Penguin Friend' is an animal adventure that's lightweight, light-hearted and light on the facts

There may not be a more sinister phrase to start a movie than “inspired by a true story” — because it’s a con, one employed in the timid adventure drama “My Penguin Friend,” that seduces the audience with a kernel of truth into ignoring how fanciful the rest of the popcorn bucket is.

The story is set in Ilha Grande, a fishing village on an island off the coast of Brazil. We meet Joao (Pedro Urizzi), a fisherman happily married to Maria (Amanda Magalhães), with a smiling young son, Miguel (Juan José Garnica). One day, Joao and Miguel are out on their small rowboat, a storm comes, and Miguel is thrown overboard and drowns.

After that tragic prologue, director David Schurmann picks up decades later, with Joao — now played by the French actor Jean Reno — hanging out near his old fishing buddies, or at home with Maria (played by Adriana Barraza, from “Babel”). Miguel’s death still weighs heavily on him.

At the same time, we’re shown a Magellanic penguin nesting in Patagonia, some 5,000 miles south in Argentina. The penguin joins his colony for their long migratory swim, but gets separated and caught in an oil slick. He’s nearly dead when Joao pulls him from the water and starts nursing him back to health. After a few weeks, the penguin heads to the water and swims away — and Joao and Maria think that’s the end.

Meanwhile, back in Patagonia, a trio of marine biologists (Alexia Moyano, Nicolás Francella and Rochi Hernández) are studying the rookery of penguins, and they spot one who’s a little different — because he’s seemingly not put off by human contact. They put a tag on his flipper and send him on his way.

Sure enough, the penguin returns to Ilha Grande, and to Joao and Maria, who are less surprised by his return than by the red plastic tag on his flipper. This being a family-friendly movie, the penguin — named DinDim (which is a type of ice pop in Brazil) — goes on wacky misadventures, like having the penguin waddle away from Joao and Maria’s beachside home into town, where someone shoots video on their phone that quickly goes viral. The video attracts both a TV reporter (Ravel Cabral) and those marine biologists.

Here’s where Schurmann and screenwriters Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi let that “inspired by a true story” label go to their heads. Seemingly unsatisfied with a gentle story of an elderly man who finds a penguin entering his life, the filmmakers inject artificial drama that’s laughably manipulative as it turns its human characters into idiots for the sake of its plot devices.

Generally, though, “My Penguin Friend” is a harmless enough diversion for kids, a throwback to the cheaply produced live-action “Wonderful World of Disney” entries of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Just don’t believe half of what’s in it, even after the movie shows footage of the real Joao and DinDim. 

——

‘My Penguin Friend’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 16, in theaters. Rated PG for thematic content. Running time; 97 minutes.

Review: 'Alien: Romulus' puts a young cast through a nail-biting encounter with familiar xenomorphs for a thrilling extension of the franchise

The newest movie in the “Alien” franchise — “Alien: Romulus” — is a three-course meal of science-fiction horror: A tantalizing appetizer, a meat-and-potatoes main course, and the most outrageous cinematic dessert.

The set-up places the new movie in the franchise’s timeline, shortly after the events of the 1979 original “Alien” — as a dark spaceship recovers something from the wreckage of the Nostromo, the freighter that was destroyed in an effort to battle back against the H.R. Giger-designed xenomorphic creature. What they’ve recovered, we see before the opening credits are over, is that xenomorph. 

Cut to a forever-dark mining colony, where a group of young indentured laborers are trying to escape the company — Weyland-Yutani Corp., the mega-corporation that is the franchise’s true villains — and get to a free planet nine years away. To survive the trip in their rickety space cruiser, they need cryogenic chambers, and think they can steal some off of an abandoned ship that’s hovering close to the colony. 

The ringleader, Tyler (Archie Renaux), says they can get in and out in short order, before the ship — really a floating space lab — in an hour. Tyler needs help from a friend, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), because she has a “brother,” Andy (David Johnson), who’s a synthetic and therefore can talk to the space lab’s computer and get them through locked doors onboard.

The crew of the cruiser — besides Rain, Tyler and Andy, there’s the foul-mouthed Bjorn (Spike Fearn), optimistic Kay (Isabela Merced) and hotshot pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu) — get to the space lab, and discover it wasn’t abandoned, but attacked. 

This is where director Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe,” the “Evil Dead” reboot) and his writing partner, Rodo Sayagues, shift into the movie’s second act. Here’s where the terror starts, as the creepy-crawly face huggers start going after our crew. There’s also another surprise in the lab: A half-destroyed synthetic, Rook, who — spoiler alert! — strongly resembles someone familiar to fans of the original movie. 

Then, after the cast thins out some, comes the third act, which I will not describe other than with one word: Whoa.

Among the solid ensemble, Jonsson gives a nicely calibrated performance as the synthetic Andy, navigating the character’s plot-driven personality shifts. And Spaeny — who’s having a good year after “Priscilla” and “Civil War” — is the strongest protagonist in the franchise since Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley.

Alvarez creates some nail-biting tension, though with more jump-scare tricks than Ridley Scott did in the original. (Scott remains an executive producer here.) He also proves himself a master of effects work, particularly in some clever zero-gravity sequences and the motion-capture work for that messed-up synthetic character. Alvarez is clearly a fan of the franchise (and includes a couple Easter eggs in the dialogue to prove it), and he makes “Alien: Romulus” a thrilling addition to it.

——

‘Alien: Romulus’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violent content and language. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Borderlands' a by-the-numbers videogame adaptation without a trace of creative energy, even from Oscar winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis

It’s become a cliché to say that movies based on video games are terrible, but director-writer Eli Roth seems determined to go out of his way to make “Borderlands,” an adaptation of a popular first-person-shooter franchise, as bad as he can.

In some ill-defined future where corporations have taken over planets, as Roth’s jumbled opening scene-setting tells us, there are hordes of ragtag mercenaries going to a place called Pandora to find a mysterious vault that legend says a race of aliens called the Elyrians left behind, holding untold treasure and technology. (Note: the first “Borderlands” game hit store shelves a couple months before James Cameron’s “Avatar” was released, so the claim on the name “Pandora” for a planet is a complicated one.)

The first action we see is in a space station orbiting Pandora, where an ex-soldier named Roland Greaves (played by Kevin Hart) is attempting a prison break, to spring a young woman, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, from “Barbie”), out of custody and return her to her father, a mega-industrialist named Atlas (Edgar Ramírez). During the breakout, Tina also releases her protector, the hulking Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and the three hide out on Pandora.

Atlas enlists Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a tough-as-nails bounty hunter with dynamically angled red hair. I don’t mean to reduce the two-time Oscar winner’s performance here to her hairstyling, but Roth and co-writer Joe Crombie don’t leave me — or the actors — much to work with. Lilith, she tells us in a voiceover that approaches “Blade Runner” levels of superfluousness, regards Pandora as a “s- - - hole,” and hates the idea of going there again. Anyone who’s ever seen a movie can soon guess that Pandora is also her homeworld.

Lilith constantly tells people on Pandora that she’s not a “vault hunter” — one of the hordes of fortune seekers trying to locate and ransack the lost Elyrian treasure. But after a few shootouts and chases with Atlas’ private army, the Crimson Lance, Lilith finds Roland, Krieg and a not-so-helpless Tina and ends up joining them on their quest to find the lost keys to the legendary vault. Along the way, they also pick up an eccentric xenoarchaeologist, Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and a wisecracking robot who goes by the name Claptrap (and is voiced by Jack Black).

The movie’s producers wouldn’t mind if you compared “Borderlands” to another franchise about ragtag treasure hunters, Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy,” which Roth & Co. are blatantly ripping off. The difference is that Marvel is drawing upon years of comic book narrative that has helped flesh out its oddball characters, where “Borderlands” only has a few video games — a genre where character development is usually sketchy, so each game player can treat the character they’re playing as themselves. 

It’s hard to say whether Roth is delivering underwritten characters to emulate the video game style, or because he just doesn’t care. Judging by the underdeveloped world-building — the sets look like someone dumped the leftovers from “Furiosa” in a canyon and told the crew to make do — and the cheap special effects, I’m opting for “just doesn’t care.”

“Borderlands” isn’t just one of the worst movies of the year. It’s something even more discouraging — it’s a movie completely devoid of creative energy, and without a reason to exist.

——

‘Borderlands’

★

Opens Friday, August 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, language and some suggestive material. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'It Ends With Us' leans into its passionate romance, while softening the depiction of domestic violence

In a previous Hollywood era, movies like “It Ends With Us” were more common — dreamily registered romantic dramas about weighty topics featuring impossibly gorgeous leading ladies being put through hell, eventually triumphing before the closing credits.

Director Justin Baldoni and screenwriter Christy Hall have adapted Colleen Hoover’s novel, published in 2016 and revived on BookTok during the COVID-19 pandemic, into a love triangle among beautiful actors — with the ravishing Blake Lively as the focal point — whose romantic moments have the unfortunate effect of blunting the story’s depiction of domestic violence. 

Lively’s character, Lily Bloom, acknowledges upon first meeting neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by Baldoni), that her name is a bit ridiculous — a situation compounded by her pursuit of her lifelong dream of opening a flower shop in Boston. After some flirting, Lily tells Ryle she wants a commitment, while Ryle is merely interested in casual sex.

As Lily starts creating her flower shop, she gets her first employee, Allysa (Jenny Slate), who’s married to a finance guy, Marshall (Hasan Minhaj), and decides to work for Lily out of boredom. Allysa introduces Lily to her brother — who turns out to be Ryle, and the sparks start flying again.

As Lily and Ryle get closer, Hall (whose directing debut “Daddio” debuted earlier this year) writes up a flashback, to when a high-school Lily (newcomer Isabela Ferrer) had her first romance, with classmate Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter), who at the time was homeless, thrown out by his mom for getting between her and an abusive boyfriend. Lily, whose father (Kevin McKidd) hit her mother (Amy Morton), can relate.

Back in the present, Lily and Ryle are taking Lily’s mother out to dinner, and Lily recognizes their server is Atlas (now played by Brandon Sklenar), who’s a chef and restaurant owner. Almost immediately after that, an incident at home, in which an enraged Ryle strikes Lily and gives her a shiner, gets Lily considering whether she’s going down the same path as her mother.

Baldoni, as director, captures the romantic moments between Lily and Ryle as passionately as a PG-13 rating will allow. But the moments of domestic abuse are deferred, shown either fleetingly or discreetly off-camera, dulling the power those scenes might have had to propel Lily’s transformation from victim to fierce survivor. (It’s not exaggerating to say that Lively probably takes more punches onscreen in her cameo appearance in “Deadpool & Wolverine,” administered by real-life husband Ryan Reynolds in one of that movie’s spasms of comedic violence, than she does here.)

Lively gives a fully inhabited performance as Lily, demonstrating that even someone with movie-star beauty and the grit to launch a small business can fall prey to violence from a mercurial figure in her own home. Even when the story beats are at their most predictable — several shots are devoted to Lively’s Lily looking in a mirror and applying concealer to an injury to her face — Lively brings her enormous empathy to them.

One might wish Baldoni and Hall would tackle the topic of domestic violence as forcefully as Hoover’s novel, with its rallying cry of a title, apparently did. The filmmakers hedge their bets, guessing that moviegoers don’t want to pay $15 to seek Lively get hit realistically by her co-star, and deprive their star of the chance to show her acting chops and deliver a stinging message about domestic abuse.

——

‘It Ends With Us’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, August 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for domestic violence, sexual content and some strong language. Running time: 130 minutes.