Review: 'In the Summers' captures the eras of two siblings' life with their troubled dad, more with looks than with words

The thoughtful and sometimes wrenching drama “In the Summers” takes an episodic look at a difficult childhood, showing two siblings on their summertime visits to their volatile father.

Each of the four chapters starts the same way: The kids, Violeta and Eva, are standing outside the airport in Las Cruces, New Mexico, waiting for their father, Vicente (René Pérez Joglar, known by his rap name, Residente), to pick them up. In the first chapter, Violeta (Dreya Castillo) and Eva (Luciana Elisa Quinonez) are elementary-school age, and enjoying swimming in the pool at Dad’s house, or going out stargazing in the desert. The most dramatic moment in this segment, and a foreshadowing of what’s to come, is Violeta cutting her hair to a more masculine bob.

In the second chapter, Violeta (Kimaya Thais) and Eva (Allison Salinas) are a few years older, and Dad is more troubled. They notice more easily, playing pool at the bar of Vicente’s friend Carmen (Emma Ramos), that Dad drinks too much. One night, on a long drive, Dad’s interest in beer leads to horrific results.

Chapter 3, and Eva arrives without her sister, and finds Dad has a new girlfriend, Yenny (Leslie Grace, from “In the Heights”), and together they have a baby girl, Natalia. In Chapter 4, the siblings are out of college, Violeta (played now by Lio Mehiel, from last year’s Sundance hit “Mutt”) is transitioning and Eva (Sasha Calle, who played Supergirl in “The Flash”) is wary of getting too open with Dad.

Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is not particularly interested in the surface details of these characters — for example, it’s never clear what Vicente does for a living, other than once when we see him tutoring a student, Camila (played by Gabriella Surodjawan and Sharlene Cruz at different ages). Instead, Lacorazza is aiming for the emotional truths that lie deep below. This may be confounding for fans who expect an explosive argument where all the grievances are finally aired, but it turns out the subtle approach is more true to who these characters are.

Though Pérez Joglar is the constant force of “In the Summers” and carries Vicente’s pain well, the film’s emotional weight is handled adeptly by the six young actors who play Violeta and Eva at three different ages — particularly Mehiel and Calle, who communicate years of pain and memory with a single look.

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‘In the Summers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, Oct. 11, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and other theaters. Not rated, but probably R for sexuality, some violence, alcohol and marijuana use, and language. Running time: 98 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 24, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Joker: Folie à Deux' is a dull wallow that drags Lady Gaga into Joaquin Phoenix's tedious darkness

There’s a dim coldness to director Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux” — like a carp flopping in the bottom of the boat — that permeates every moment of this casually cruel and clumsily nihilistic follow-up to the 2019 Gotham-as-cesspool psychological drama that won Joaquin Phoenix his Oscar.

Phillips and writing partner Scott Silver find Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck right where his past crimes left him: Arkham Asylum, taking his court-ordered meds so he can be deemed competent to stand trial for the five killings he committed, most prominently of talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) live on national television. He spends his days anonymous among the other asylum patients, even though his notoriety has the guards (led by an oily Brendan Gleeson) constantly asking him to tell a joke.

One day, after a visit from his overworked defense lawyer (Catherine Keener), Arthur is being led back to the maximum-security ward and sees a woman in the minimum-security area. That woman, Lee Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga), seems to make an instant connection with Arthur — two kindred spirits who see the madness of the world as more dangerous than the madness of each other. (The movie’s title translate to “madness for two.”)

Here, the shared insanity manifests itself through music. Arthur and Lee begin a halting, unsteady duet on a song like “For Once in My Life” or “That’s Entertainment,” in the dank confines of Arkham — and, within a few bars, their voices firm up, and the “reality” of the asylum transforms into a colorful Broadway stage or a TV studio, and the pair are dressed like movie stars. But there’s no rhyme or reason to the song cues, seemingly chosen less for appropriateness to the story than because Gaga likes the oldies.

Lee gets released from the asylum just as Arthur’s trial is starting, which means Lee gets a gallery seat while Gotham City prosecutor Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) launches into an open-and-shut case of five murder counts. Arthur’s defense, such as it is, is to plead that Arthur’s mind was hijacked by the character of Joker, and wasn’t responsible for his actions. That argument takes on added weight when Arthur, as Joker, decides to represent himself — playing to the gallery and the mob more than to the jury.

The trial’s details cling so tightly to the events of the first movie that there’s no room for this suffocating movie to breathe on its own. How dark and depressing is this movie? Let’s put it this way: If “Seven” had musical numbers, it might get to where “Joker: Folie à Deux” has set up shop.

The only positive note for this movie is Gaga, who fully commits to the bit. She imbues Lee, aka Harley Quinn, with the true-believer zealotry of a true convert. And getting to hear Gaga sing, even in this dispiriting context, is a pleasant experience. 

The worst part about a movie being as nihilistic as “Joker: Folie à Deux” is that it’s boring. Right up to the movie’s final image, nothing matters in a world this bleak — and when nothing matters, why bother watching?

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‘Joker: Folie à Deux’

★1/2

Opens Friday, October 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality, and brief full nudity. Running time: 138 minutes.

Review: 'The Outrun' is a raw, beautiful look at alcoholism, with a fearless performance by Saoirse Ronan

Director Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun” is a strong drama about alcoholism — joining a crowded movie roster that includes “The Lost Weekend,” “The Days of Wine and Roses,” “When a Man Loves a Woman,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Flight” and countless others.

What brings the movie to that top tier are the raw honesty of the script, by Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot — on whose memoir it’s based — and the full-tilt fearlessness that actor Saoirse Ronan applies to the central role.

Ronan’s character, Rona, has been in London for several years, in a life of rave parties and constant drinking — and, as the movie jumps forward and backward in her timeline, we see the toll that all this drinking has had on her health, her physical safety, her romantic life, and her overall happiness. (Fingscheidt uses a clever visual device to help viewers keep the threads of Rona’s timeline straight: The changes in her hair color, from aquamarine to faded blue-on-blonde.) 

Months into sobriety, Rona moves home to the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland. That’s where her mother (Saskia Reeves) lives in their house on the family farm, while her father (Stephen Dillane) lives separately in a caravan on the property. As the story unfolds, we learn about Mom’s late-in-life conversion to evangelical Christianity and Dad’s recurring bouts of manic depression — and their effect on Rona growing up.

Flashing back and forward, we get glimpses of more of Rona’s life. A boyfriend, Dayton (Paapa Essiedu), and how Rona’s drinking intruded on that relationship. A career in biological research that was derailed. Moments of blackout drinking and their violent aftermath. A rehab circle in London, and an AA meeting on the island — where one man, sober for 12 years, gives her the advice that staying away from alcohol “never gets easy. It just gets less hard.”

Much of the power in “The Outrun” comes from scenes where Ronan is alone, on the windy shores of the Orkneys, helping a conservation group’s survey of a rare bird, or hanging out in a drafty cottage — always alone with her thoughts, considering her past mistakes and figuring out what to do with her life next. 

Ronan’s performance is tender, passionate and intense, and will be deserving of every bit of awards-season conversations coming in the next few months. Most of those conversations will mention that Ronan turned 30 in April, and how weird it is that a 30-year-old actor would be considered overdue for an Oscar. (She’s been nominated four times before — “Atonement,” “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” — without winning yet.) Ronan is overdue, and “The Outrun” could be the venue to correct that omission.

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‘The Outrun’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 4, in theaters. Rated R for language and brief sexuality. Running time: 118 minutes.

Review: 'A Different Man' depicts two ways a life with disability can be lived, and gives actor Adam Pearson a springboard to greatness

In the drama “A Different Man,” writer-director Aaron Schimberg provides an offbeat object lesson in how fate is what one makes of it — and what happens when one discovers that your best life is being lived by someone else.

Edward (played by Sebastian Stan) is a morose man living in New York with dreams of being an actor. Schimberg shows him at work, with a minor role in what turns out to be a training video — to teach employees how not to freak out when they meet a coworker with a physical disability. Edward has neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that causes his face to be disfigured.

Edward lives a sad, lonely life. He tries to make friends with his neighbor, Ingrid (played by the great Norwegian star Renate Reinsve), a budding playwright, but his self-consciousness about his disfigurement keeps him from showing his feelings for her.

His doctor tells Edward that a researcher he knows is working on a wonder drug that might help lessen Edward’s disfigurement. He gives it a try, and it turns out to be even better than advertised. In a short time, the lesions and skin tags have peeled away, and Edward has a face that looks like — well, like Sebastian Stan without prosthetic makeup. Edward takes on a new persona, Guy, and goes out to be the success he always dreamed of being.

In short order, Guy is a real estate success and sleeping with beautiful women in his new luxury apartment. One day, he comes across an off-Broadway theater, and discovers that Ingrid is auditioning people for her new play — which is largely inspired by her encounters with Edward. Ingrid’s problem is finding an actor, preferably one with a physical condition, to play the lead role. Guy retrieves the mask of his old self, made by the researchers who gave him the wonder drug, and lands the part.

During rehearsals, though, someone steps into the theater. He has a face similar to what Guy used to have when he was Edward. But this fellow, Oswald (played by the British actor Adam Pearson), is happy-go-lucky, enjoying life to its fullest — without letting his disfigured face stand in his way. In short, he’s living happily in ways Edward could never imagine doing, and living a better life than Guy is now.

Here’s the thing that makes “A Different Man” fascinating to watch: Pearson isn’t wearing prosthetics or movie makeup. That’s all him.

Schimberg works hard to make sure Pearson’s casting isn’t a gimmick or exploitative. He and Pearson make such a rich character of Oswald, with an aura of humility and joie de vivre radiating around him, that he steals the movie — though he only enters at about the midpoint. Pearson puts the lie to every narrow cliche we think of when we think of depicting people with disabilities on the screen, and seems to be enjoying himself immensely in the process.

Once that brilliant set-up is sprung, though, Schimberg has a bit of difficulty bringing the movie in for a landing. But Pearson’s performance, and the byplay of Stan and Reinsve to both react to him and be worthy to share the screen with him, makes “A Different Man” an astonishingly different movie experience.

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‘A Different Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 4, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violent content. Running time: 112 minutes.

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.