Review: 'Monster Summer' is a thriller without thrills, a kid-friendly supernatural tale with nothing to surprise you

The supernatural thriller “Monster Summer” feels like one of those movies the Disney Channel (now, I suppose, Disney+) would release every October — a blockheaded kid-centered scary story, one where 12-year-olds race around on their bikes either toward or away from something menacing and creepy.

This variation on that theme stars Mel Gibson — who, despite what many people who have encountered him will tell you, is neither menacing nor creepy in this none-too-thrilling thriller.

The movie’s young hero, Noah (Mason Thames), wants to get out of the small Martha’s Vineyard summer town, circa 1997, where he lives with his mom (Nora Zehetner), who runs a bed-and-breakfast and can barely make ends meet. Noah wants to be a journalist, like his deceased father, but he can’t convince the tourism-obsessed editor of the town paper (played by comedian Kevin James) to run his exposés of unusual small-town occurrences.

One town over, a very unusual occurrence is happening: A local boy goes missing, and when he returns he’s catatonic and uncommunicative. When the same thing happens to Noah’s best friend, Ben (Noah Cottrell), Noah can’t get the paper’s editor or the police chief (Gary Weeks) to believe it’s something supernatural.

The one person Noah comes to trust is the crotchety old man with the big “no trespassing” sign outside his yard. That’s Gibson’s character, Gene, an ex-cop who, we’re told, saw his 5-year-old son taken from him decades before.

Reluctantly, Gene agrees to hear Noah out, even if his theories — namely, that the woman lodged (Lorraine Bracco) in her mom’s bed-and-breakfast is a child-snatching witch — are on the outlandish side.

The Disney Channel vibe isn’t an accident, since director David Henrie came to fame as Selena Gomez’ brother on that network’s “Wizards of Waverly Place” (as well as the son who listened to his dad’s stories on “How I Met Your Mother”). Henrie and screenwriters Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano (who collaborated on “The Peanuts Movie”) have trouble finding a consistent tone, as the movie moves from bargain-basement ghouls to CGI-generated monsters without any sense of what makes a thriller — even one aimed at young audiences — truly work. It may be a “Monster Summer,” but it doesn’t hold up to the chills of Halloween season.

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‘Monster Summer’

★1/2

Opens Friday, October 4, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for some violence and terror. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Megalopolis' is Francis Ford Coppola's gloriously contradictory and very messy epic parable of America at a crossroads

Say this for “Megalopolis” — it’s never boring.

Francis Ford Coppola’s parable of American political decay dressed up in Roman finery is many things — ambitious, grandiloquent, grandiose, self-indulgent, gorgeous, thoughtful, silly, overstuffed and over the top — sometimes all at once. But it all engages the eye, the heart and the mind, though sometimes in ways I don’t think even Coppola has under his control.

Coppola — who wrote and directed (and, he says, sold off a winery to make the budget) — imagines New York City as a 21st century Rome, approaching its decline as wealth, decadence and debauchery have overtaken the nobler ideas of a republic. What we see at first is a power struggle between two men: Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s trying to bring jobs and casinos to the city’s population, and Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), the visionary urban planner who imagines the city as a potential utopia with moving sidewalks and endless parks.

Standing between Cesar and Cicero is the mayor’s daughter, Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who we meet first as one of Rome’s hedonistic young ladies — a cohort that includes Clodia Pulcher (Chloe Fineman), whose brother, Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), plays the fool to Rome’s richest man, Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight). But Clodio’s hopes of being the automatic heir to Hamilton’s fortune are threatened when the old man marries Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), the scheming “Money Bunny” host of a financial talk show. 

When Julia and Cesar begin a romance, Cicero sees the move as a power grab by Cesar, attacking the mayor through his family. But others see that this is a meeting of minds, bodies and souls, and that Julia is becoming the muse that fuels Cesar’s grand designs for a better Rome — something that Clodio, launching a faux-populist uprising, wants to defeat. (If the metaphor isn’t obvious, there are men in Clodio’s mob carrying signs that say “Make Rome Great Again.”)

Driver’s Cesar is sketched out by Coppola as a hybrid of the powerful New York planner Robert Moses and the idealist architect Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” He utters deep pronouncements like “don’t let the now destroy the forever” or “It’s time to have a debate about the future,” leaving the viewer to wonder if he’s naive or smarter than everyone, or both.

Cesar touts a miraculous new building material, megalon, which he says is stronger than steel, more durable than concrete, and can even be made to appear invisible. Cicero is dubious, preferring to trust in the materials that have stood the test of time for decades. The two men also disagree on the strength of their fellow Romans — whether they can aspire to the better angels of their nature, or descend to the depths of greed and depravity.

The cast is sprawling — I haven’t even mentioned Laurence Fishburne as Cesar’s driver and the film’s narrator, Talia Shire as Cesar’s mother, Kathryn Hunter as Julia’s mother, Jason Schwartzman as an officious mayor’s aide, and Dustin Hoffman as Crassus’ fixer — and Coppola’s design team has created opulent sets with room for all those people. But even more scattered are Coppola’s ideas for how this story should be told.

There are dream sequences, frenzied montages, moments where Cesar can stop time — and even a press conference where a live actor in the movie theater asks a question. (This reportedly happened at the movie’s premiere at Cannes, and was replicated for the preview screening I attended in Orem. Lord knows if they’ll keep that up for a regular theatrical run, or have edited that moment for a screen-bound questioner.) It’s as if Coppola, at 85, knows he might not have another movie left in him, and he wants to put it all out there one last time.

The problem, though, with bankrolling your own dream project is that you don’t have anyone to tell you you’re doing something wrong. Coppola could have used an outside voice, particularly when writing dialogue, which here is ponderous and predictable, and borrows too heavily from Shakespeare. (Driver enters one important scene reciting a fair chunk of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy.) With this cast eager to deliver on the master’s vision, it’s a shame Coppola didn’t trust anyone enough to workshop it a little first.

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‘Megalopolis’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violence. Running time: 137 minutes.

Review: 'My Old Ass' gives a cocky 18-year-old girl a chance to see her future self, in a brilliant coming-of-age comedy about the mistakes we make toward adulthood

Writer-director Megan Park’s comedy “My Old Ass” is hands-down one of the best coming-of-age stories in a long time — one that asks viewers to consider what they would have told their younger selves if given the chance.

Elliott, played by Maisy Stella, is 18 and exceedingly eager to leave her small Canadian town, her parents’ cranberry farm and her two brothers behind for college in Toronto. As she’s counting the days to her departure, she’s hanging out with her friends, Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks), and making out with the girl at the coffee shop, Chelsea (Alexandria Rivera).

One night, Elliott goes with Ruthie and Ro to go camping in the woods, to enjoy some quality time before school starts — and to consume a massive bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms. While Ruthie and Ro start tripping amiably, Elliott thinks she got an ineffective dose. “That’s because we don’t tolerate drugs well,” says a voice suddenly near the campfire.

The woman talking, Park soon establishes, is Elliott’s 39-year-old self (played by Aubrey Plaza). As young Elliott tries to get a grip, she is given enough evidence to convince her that this woman is who she says she is. 

Young Elliott has a million questions — What stock should I invest in? What’s it like being older? Would it be weird if we kissed? — but older Elliott is uneasy about possibly changing the past. She tells her 18-year-old self to be nicer to Mom (Maria Dizzia), spend more time with her brothers and, above all else, if she meets a boy named Chad, she should stay far away from him.

The next morning, the ‘shroom high seemingly dissipated, Elliott wakes up to two surprises. One is that her older self has left her phone number in young Elliott’s phone. (“I can’t believe this worked,” older Elliott says when young Elliott calls for the first time.) The other surprise is when she goes skinny-dipping in the nearby watering hole, and soon encounters a boy (Percy Hynes White) — named, you guessed it, Chad.

Park perfectly deploys her co-leads, Stella and Plaza, to paint an indelible portrait of Elliott at two stages in life — at 18, when she thinks she’s got life by the tail, and at 39, when we see what life and many disappointments have done to her take-charge optimism. It’s a beautifully twinned performance, and special attention should be given to Stella, who at 20 shows that her future is even brighter than Elliott’s.

Park’s other gift is her comic timing — there are moments of sly banter and romantic-comedy awkwardness that are the funniest things I’ve seen in ages — and her ability to turn serious when called upon. There’s a late reveal that hits like a punch in the gut, and it wouldn’t have worked if Park and her talented cast hadn’t laid out the trail so cleverly and honestly.

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‘My Old Ass’

★★★★

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters. Rated R for language throughout, drug use and sexual material. Running time: 89 minutes.

Review: 'Lee' provides a portrait of a woman at war and battling demons, and gives Kate Winslet a juicy role to bite into

If the photojournalist and war correspondent Lee Miller hadn’t existed, Kate Winslet would have to commission a screenwriter to invent her — because the title character of director Ellen Kuras’ biopic “Lee” is the sort of prickly, free-spirited person that Winslet excels in portraying.

Kuras introduces Lee Miller in the middle of a war zone, as she rushes to a bunker while trying to work her camera. She snaps images of the violence and carnage going on around her, often oblivious to the bullets and bombs around her until she’s literally knocked off her feet by one.

The story then cuts ahead to 1977, in a farmhouse in the UK, where Lee is barely tolerating questions from a young interviewer (played by Josh O’Connor, from “Challengers”). The interviewer has a stack of Lee’s photos, and is seeking the story behind each one. Those stories form the backbone of the script, credited to Liz Hannah (“The Post”) and the team of Marion Hume and John Collee. 

Lee’s memories start in 1938 in the French countryside, where she’s enjoying a seemingly endless — and for some of her friends, topless — luncheon, talking with artist friends about creativity and life and, oh, that awful man Hitler that the Germans have made leader. (The acting talent in this one scene is impressive, including both Marion Cotillard and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Noémie Merlant.)

It’s in this sunny French setting that the American-born Lee meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), a gallery owner and sometime painter. Within hours, they’re in bed together. Within months, they’ve relocated to London, just as Hitler’s Nazis have invaded Poland and World War II has started.

Roland, a conscientious objector, employs his painting skills to test new types of camouflage paint — sometimes using Lee’s bare breasts as a canvas. Lee, a former model turned photographer, looks for a job with Vogue’s UK edition, where she’s hired by editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) over the objections of the magazine’s chauvinist fashion director, Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett).

Lee wants to use her photography to help in the war effort — so she asks Audrey to assign her as a war correspondent to Europe. After fighting layers of bureaucratic sexism, she ends up paired with another Yank, Life magazine reporter/photographer David E. Scherman (Andy Samberg, doing well in a rare dramatic role). Together they chronicle the later years of the war, from the liberation of France through the fall of Berlin. (Famously, Lee and David snapped a photo of Lee taking a bath in Hitler’s rest room.) 

They also press on to follow up on reports of thousands of missing Europeans, mostly Jews. They end up bringing back the first harrowing images from the concentration camps. The challenge for Lee is whether British censors or a public wanting to move on from the horrors of war will want to see them.

It’s appropriate that Kuras, making her feature directing debut after decades as the indie world’s go-to cinematographer, is telling the story of someone who made images to shake up the world. Kuras seems to know instinctively what Lee Miller discovered, that a photograph has two moments of connection — one between the subject and the shooter when the shutter is snapped, and one between the printed image and the viewer to learns something about the subject and the photographer.

Winslet gives one of the stronger performances of her stellar career. She finds within Lee both the flinty edge that drove her to push into areas women weren’t allowed to go and the vulnerability that allowed her to capture images no one else could make. Those contradictions, among many, are what made Lee Miller a chronicle of horrors — and they’re what make “Lee” an intense and satisfying biography.

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‘Lee’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters. Rated R for disturbing images, language and nudity. Running time: 117 minutes.

Review: 'The Substance' coats its subversive message about body image and self-loathing with an impressively insane amount of gross horror

There’s out there, there’s crazy, there’s bat-crap insane, and if you keep going further out on that limb, there’s writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” — a body-horror movie about beauty, age and the efforts to keep those two ideas separated for as long as possible.

Fargeat shows the career track of her movie’s main character through a clever montage, in which a Hollywood Walk of Fame star goes from shiny and adored by fans to cracked and ignored. A similar process is happening to the star’s honoree, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an award-winner in her heyday who’s now hosting a morning aerobics show.

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth gets the word from the network’s repugnant boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), that she’s fired — and will be replaced by a younger version of her. She leaves the studio enraged, and ends up in a car wreck, which she survives with barely a scratch.

A nurse at the hospital suggests Elisabeth could be a good candidate for a new drug, called The Substance. The promise is that this wonder drug will restore one’s youth, by allowing a person to become two people, one of them younger. 

Of course, there are rules: The patient injects an “activator,” then the other self extracts a liquid, called a “stabilizer,” from the unconscious first self and injects it once a day for a week — and every week, the two must switch back, no exceptions.

Elisabeth tries it, and suddenly there’s a 30-year-old woman (Margaret Qualley) looking in the bathroom mirror where Elisabeth had been standing before taking the shot. This younger woman, who gives herself the name Sue, walks into the network’s offices and nails the audition to take over Elisabeth’s aerobics show — and even gets Harvey to agree to her unusual schedule, where she’s mysteriously out of town every other week. A star is cloned.

Like the Gremlins, there’s no movie if they don’t get fed after midnight — or, more accurately here, if Elisabeth and Sue stick strictly to the one-week plan. When that detail is violated, things go downhill very fast, leading to one of the most blood-splattered finales I have seen in ages.

Fargeat doesn’t sugar-coat the bloody mess that Elisabeth’s descent becomes — in fact, by the ending, which goes on a little bit too long, she’s fully immersed us in Elisabeth and Sue’s shared psychosis, and in the buckets of blood and viscera that go with it. To paraphrase Mark Twain, never argue with someone who buys their stage blood by the barrel.

If you’re OK with that level of grotesquerie, though, “The Substance” has a lot to say about the sadly obvious predictability of the male gaze, the impossible beauty standards placed on women hitting 50 — and, most importantly, how women contort themselves (in this case, literally) to reach for those standards.

Moore and Qualley play sharply divided sides of the same coin: The older woman trying to forestall time and recapture her youth, and the younger version trying not to screw up her second chance but finding the old bad habits returning. The two women combine for a perfectly mirrored performance, which makes the weirdness of “The Substance” more than arresting, but strangely affecting.

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‘The Substance’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and other theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Transformers One' is a cleverly conceived animated tale of 'robots in disguise' that works better if you ignore the marketing

In the 40 years since the first “Transformers” series played on TV screens, there have been countless animated TV shows, videos and movies — plus six overamped live-action films (plus a really good one, “Bumblebee”) — and now the fully computer-animated “Transformers One.”

This latest iteration of the “more than meets the eye” mechanical shape-shifting robots that sell a lot of product for Hasbro is energetic and entertaining — and could have been even more, if the Paramount and Hasbro marketing departments hadn’t gotten in the way.

On the planet Cybertron, all the locals are robots but aren’t all created equal. The elite of Iacon City, led by the charismatic Sentinel Prime (voiced by Jon Hamm), have the power to change their form — while the rest, robots without the “cogs” that allow transformations, labor in the mines digging up the “energon” that powers the planet and helps Sentinel Prime fight the never-ending war against invading aliens on the surface of Cybertron.

One of the “no-cogs” in the mines, Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth), thinks there’s something out there better for him. He convinces his buddy, D-16 (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry), to enter Iacon City’s big race, something no cog-less ‘bot has ever done successfully. Their bravado impresses Sentinel Prime, but not their mine supervisor, who banishes them to the lowest levels — where they encounter a chatty robot named B-127 (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key), or Bee for short.

Eventually, Orion, D-16 and Bee wind up on the surface, along with a no-nonsense robot, Elita-1 (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Up there, they learn some hard truths about the war, Sentinel Prime, and the ancient “Prime” robots who once ruled Cybertron. The truth makes Orion determined to change things for all robots, while it makes D-16 feel betrayed and seeking revenge.

The conflict between Orion and D-16 fuels the back half of this smoothly animated movie. And if you don’t want to know the “spoiler” — the one that is the focus of the movie’s marketing campaign — skip the next paragraph.

The movie, the advertising tells us, is the origin story of the most important figures in the “Transformers” canon. Orion becomes Optimus Prime — the red paint job is an early clue, and eventually the semi-truck look is a giveaway. That makes D-16 the future Megatron, who becomes Optimus Prime’s sworn enemy for the franchise.

The thing is, not knowing what’s in that last paragraph makes “Transformers One” a more interesting movie — because without that knowledge, the audience is allowed to discover these characters as they evolve. With that knowledge, the audience is just tapping its collective feet, waiting for the inevitable reveal.

The animated action set pieces are engaging, as director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) and his band of visual stylists make Cybertron a fully realized world with some interesting robot creatures living there. The pacing is solid, and even if you don’t know what’s always happening, it’s never boring.

“Transformers One” is a solid movie, and one that’s most likely to spawn a couple of sequels to explore the myth-making that the franchise’s diehard fans from childhood will want to see.

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‘Transformers One’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for sci-fi violence and animated action throughout, and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

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.