Review: 'Never Let Go' aims to be a taut post-apocalyptic thriller, but there's too much slack in the narrative to be worthy of Halle Berry's scary-good performance

If one good performance was enough to carry a labored horror premise, “Never Let Go” could be a masterpiece. Instead, it’s a curiosity, notable for Halle Berry doing good work in spite of what’s happening around her.

Berry plays a mother, living in a cabin in the woods with her twin sons, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). We’re told that something horrible has happened in the outside world, a malevolent presence (voiced by Stephanie Lavigne) that has infected nearly everyone. 

The only way to keep the evil from getting in, Mama tells her boys, is to respect the protection of the cabin — and, when venturing outside, always stay connected to the long rope that is tied to the cabin’s foundation.

The question that writers Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby pose here is simple: Is it true that the world is falling apart and evil has overtaken everything but this cabin? Or is Mama crazy, and has been lying to her boys while they starve because they’re running out of provisions?

The twins soon find themselves on opposite sides of that binary question — and the search for the answer is what will upend this family in ways they don’t see coming.

Unfortunately, we see it all coming, even with all the jump scares and brooding theatrics that director Alexandre Aja (“Crawl”) throws on the screen to distract us. 

Thankfully, Berry understands how to make this either/or story work — and that’s to not take sides. Berry gets that a mom going nuts and a mom fending off a world gone mad aren’t that different in their reactions, and plays this Mama in such a way that either outcome makes sense. Or, at least, more sense than this frustratingly ambivalent movie chooses to be.

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“Never Let Go’

★★

Opens Friday, September 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Speak No Evil' is a chilling tale of vacationing couples with dark secrets, and a showcase for James McAvoy's particular brand of mayhem

There may be no actor working today who inhabits the mind and well-toned body of a psychopath as effectively as James McAvoy — and his performance in “Speak No Evil,” a chilling remake of a 2022 Danish psychological thriller, is proof of that genuinely scary talent.

The Daltons, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis), are an American couple living in London with their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler). They’re on vacation in Italy when they encounter another family: McAvoy’s character, Paddy, along with his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi, from “The Last Voyage of the Demeter”), and Ant (Dan Hough), a boy about Agnes’ age. Ant is mute, a result of being born with an underdeveloped tongue, claims Paddy, who tells our family that he’s a doctor.

The adults in the two families hit it off, so much so that Paddy invites the Daltons to visit them in the West Country of England sometime. The Daltons are in a rocky point in their marriage — Ben saw his dream job in London evaporate, and they’re living off the severance package — so a trip to the country sounds like a perfect way to rewind and reset.

The visit seems to go well at first, but soon Louise notices small things that irritate her — starting with Paddy’s insistence on serving meat to Louise, who has proclaimed that she’s a vegetarian. What particularly upsets Louise is the harsh way Paddy treats Ant. Meanwhile, when Ant is alone with any of the Daltons, he tries to communicate with them, but struggles to make himself understood as the mood grows increasingly tense.

Viewers of the bleak 2022 Danish version will either be irritated or relieved by the changes made in the script by British writer-director James Watkins (who helmed “The Woman in Black,” Daniel Radcliffe’s first major post-“Harry Potter” film). Watkins builds the tension between the two couples in measured doses, while also serving up some salty commentary on masculinity in the comparison between McNairy’s emasculated Ben and McAvoy’s rugged alpha Paddy. The juxtaposition of Davis’ tightly wound Louise and Franciosi’s earth-mother Ciara provides some intriguing contrasts as well.

But when the plot of “Speak No Evil” kicks into high gear, and the secret behind this overly friendly country couple is revealed, the thrills and horror go into overdrive. It’s here where McAvoy lets it rip, a payoff for 90 minutes of coiled anticipation.

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‘Speak No Evil’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some strong violence, language, some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Seeking Mavis Beacon' goes in search of an early software icon, in a documentary full of ideas and side trips

There are so many interesting ideas bouncing around the documentary “Seeking Mavis Beacon” that you may find yourself wishing you could take director Jazmin Jones out for coffee, so you could pick her brain for a few hours.

It would take a few hours to unspool the things Jones and her onscreen collaborator, Olivia McKayla Ross, deliver here — about technology, race, representation, artificial intelligence and the unreliable nature of shifting narrative. Packing it all into 102 minutes is as exhausting as it is fascinating.

What animates Jones is a simple question that, of course, doesn’t have a simple answer: Who was Mavis Beacon? In the strictest terms, Mavis didn’t exist. She was a fictional character, created for the ‘80s educational software “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.”

Jones describes, speaking on-camera with Ross and anyone they’re interviewing, how inspirational seeing the Mavis Beacon character was. Here was a young, successful Black woman — a woman by which Jones as a girl could see herself represented — on the cover of one of the most successful software products of the early days of home computers.

With the help of Ross, a college student who’s a whiz at spelunking the hidden corners of the Internet, Jones finds two of the three people who developed the Mavis Beacon typing tutorials. They tell the story of how the software came to be, and how the main programmer’s girlfriend found the perfect woman to embody the title character working in a Saks 5th Avenue near L.A.

Much of the movie centers on Jones and Ross going all over — even to Haiti — to seek an audience with the model who posed for the cover of the original software. Unfortunately, that search, from which the movie gets its title, isn’t as intriguing as Jones seems to think.

What’s more interesting is how Jones and Reed launch into robust conversations about the intersection of race, sex and the Internet. For example, Jones points out that Mavis Beacon could be the progenitor of safe, nonthreatening female-appearing A.I. avatars — and Siri and Alexa are Mavis’ great-granddaughters in technology.

With those kind of provocative thoughts stirring around “Seeking Mavis Beacon,” it’s too bad Jones squanders that time with distractions, like an argument about the rental property where she and Ross set up their office space.

I appreciate, and sometimes am entertained by, the way Jones rafts down the stream of consciousness through “Seeking Mavis Beacon.” But just as often I’m wishing she would get to the point faster. 

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‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' has a lot of the juice of Tim Burton's 1988 original, but clutters up the comedy with disappointing distractions

I’m old enough, and have been watching movies long enough, that the words “directed by Tim Burton” still evokes a Pavlovian reaction of hope — a hope that this time, he’ll finally figure out how to recapture the magic he showed in his early career, with such absurdist, even surrealist masterpieces as “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Edward Scissorhands” and “Beetlejuice.”

Surely, this time, the stars would align, I thought watching “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a sequel that’s been percolating for 36 years — where Burton reunites with a spectacular cast (Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara) on very familiar territory. This time for sure, I thought, like Charlie Brown running toward that football.

And while, this time, Burton gets more right than he gets wrong, there remains something just a bit off about this follow-up to the anarchic 1988 comedy about people coming to terms with becoming “recently deceased.”

The movie starts with Ryder’s character, Lydia Deetz, turning her experience with the afterlife into a lucrative career as host of a paranormal talk show — one produced by her simpering boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia’s artist stepmom, Delia (O’Hara), is using performance art to cope with the recent death of her husband and Lydia’s father, Charles, who met a nasty death on the ocean. (The events of Charles’ death are depicted in stop-motion animation, sparing audiences the sight of actor Jeffrey Jones, who’s not getting much work these days for reasons you can Google for yourself if you like.)

Meanwhile, Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is bullied at her boarding school for being considered strange — too much like her mother, though neither would ever admit it. Astrid is mourning the death of her father, killed in the Amazon, and questions why of all the ghosts Lydia encounters, she never sees Dad.

Charles’ death forces the three generations of Deetz women to return to Winter River, Conn., to the house where the family first encountered the netherworld and the mischievous ghost known as Betelgeuse — played again by Keaton, who’s oddly grown into the role. Because of what happens after that, Lydia is forced to do the one thing she most feared: Saying that spirit’s name three times and seeking his help.

When Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (who most recently co-created “Wednesday,” the “Addams Family” spinoff starring Ortega) focus on Astrid, Lydia and Delia, and their strained mother-daughter relations, the movie generates a lot of sharp, knowing laughs. Keaton’s addition to that mix generates some of the funniest moments, particularly when sparking against Ryder’s acerbic Lydia.

That nexus of talent is so engaging that it’s annoying when Burton & Co. get distracted with an overflow of subplots and side characters. The biggest misfire, of many, is Monica Bellucci’s turn as Delores, a soul-sucking demon who wants revenge on her former husband, Betelgeuse. (On the other hand, Willem Dafoe as an afterlife detective — really, an action-movie actor playing a cop — is worthy of his own sequel.)

Still, there’s enough that’s enjoyable — and sometimes sidesplittingly funny — about “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” that it’s hard to get mad at it. It’s a dark ride, but a fun one.

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‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use. Running time: 104 minutes. 

Review: Documentary 'Lover of Men' raises the question of whether Abraham Lincoln was gay, and is most interesting in examini why the question matters

When the documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln” is following its stated assignment — recounting the life of our 16th president, and the evidence that he had romantic and possibly sexual relationships with male companions — it’s satisfactory, but not compelling.

Where director and co-writer Shaun Peterson delivers a riveting message is in dissecting the ways this idea — that the guy on Mount Rushmore, the penny and the $5 bill was queer — has been dismissed or suppressed by generations of historians, and what that erasure says about what history means for marginalized communities in America.

The historians interviewed here discuss four significant relationships with male companions Lincoln had over his life.

• Bill Greene, whom Lincoln hired to work at his store in New Salem, Illinois in 1831 — and with whom Lincoln shared a tiny cot.

• Joshua Speed, who sublet his apartment in Springfield, Ill., to Lincoln in 1837, when Lincoln arrived as a new lawyer — and the two shared a bed for four years.

• Elmer Ellsworth, a dashing officer in the Union Army — and the first Union officer to die in the Civil War, which reportedly left Lincoln disconsolate.

• Capt. David Derickson, who was Lincoln’s bodyguard and companion from September 1862 to April 1863 — and reportedly shared Lincoln’s bed when the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, was away.

Historians have argued for decades about whether these relationships were sexual or romantic, or whether men sharing a bed was just the habit of the time. The historians Peterson has assembled here clearly are in the first camp — and argue that those who dismiss such discussions of Lincoln’s sexual identity are missing a larger point about what happens when all the history books are written by straight white males.

The examination of the fluid nature of sexual identity in the mid-19th century is film’s most fascinating discussion. Yes, the experts here note, Lincoln was married to a woman and had three children — but they also argue that such a marriage was expected for anyone harboring political ambitions, regardless of their romantic feelings or sexual attraction. 

Relationships between two men, the experts say, were not as reviled as they became — and that shift, they say, was promulgated both by Christian churches and the nation’s new religion, science, through which the white male elite tried to solidify their power by “othering” marginalized groups. One of the people blamed most strongly for demonizing same-sex attraction, the movie says, was the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who helped bring the word “homosexual” to its place in the language.

“Lover of Men” will not convince a lot of skeptics, or those who find their own identity challenged by the very notion of America’s most revered president being queer. (Reportedly, moviegoers seeing the conservative-leaning biopic “Reagan” over Labor Day weekend were outraged when the “Lover of Men” trailer played.) Those interested in seeing American history through another lens, and in hearing a discussion of why those different lenses matter, will be intrigued.

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‘Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 6, at the AMC West Jordan 12. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some sexual references and mature themes. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: The strained thriller 'Afraid,' about a family terrorized by A.I., is more artificial than intelligent

The suspense thriller “Afraid” is a slickly produced but dimly conceived mishmash of every dime-store tech analyst’s worry about artificial intelligence, tied together with an idiotic home invasion narrative.

Curtis and Meredith Pike (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) would seem to have an enviable upper-middle-class California life. Curtis works for a high-paying marketing firm, where he can spin pitches about how they don’t sell products but tell stories. Meredith is stay-at-home mom to their three kids — teen Iris (Lukita Maxwell), 10-year-old Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and first-grader Cal (Isaac Bae) — who’s just restarting her work to get her Ph.D. as an insect biologist.

They would seem to be the last family to need the help of a hyper-intelligent A.I. system, called Aia, that his boss, Marcus (Keith Carradine), wants to attract as a marketing client. Curtis meets Aia’s human developers, Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans), and agrees to have Aia installed in the family home for a test run.

At first, Aia — voiced by Havana Rose Liu, who also plays Lightning and Sam’s assistant, Melody — seems like a benign household helper. It encourages Cal and Preston to do their chores, offers Iris an assist on her college application essay, and orders organic foods for Meredith to ready-pack for the kids’ lunches. 

But Curtis starts to suspect some more sinister at work, in part because Sam and Lightning are just a little off. (Note to casting directors: Dastmalchian — after his work in “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” “The Boogeyman” and “Late Night With the Devil” — is a little on-the-nose if you’re trying to signal eerie menace in your movie.)

Every story scared parents know about their kids and technology — from a concern about too much screen time to fears of their daughters being edited into deepfake porn — gets turned into a clever plot point, as Aia’s fierce protectiveness toward the children turns aggressive and even murderous.

If writer-director Chris Weitz (“The Golden Compass,” “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”) had kept this good-looking but shallow thriller in that groove, he might have had something. But when the script tries to tell Aia’s origin story, the movie goes off the rails. I won’t try to explain the backstory, partly to avoid spoilers but mostly because it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Cho and Waterston, both strong actors, do their best through the movie’s choppy pacing — which makes one suspect that half the movie got left behind in the edit. Waterston is particularly good in an isolated moment when Aia tries to manipulate her emotions. 

But there’s not much to be done with a movie like “Afraid,” that sets up its technological boogeyman in such a hermetically sealed way that genuine terror — or any other non-algorithmic emotion — can’t penetrate. Better to log off and touch grass.

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‘Afraid’

★★

Opens Friday, August 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual material, some strong violence, some strong language, and thematic material. Running time: 83 minutes.

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.

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‘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.

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‘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.