Review: 'September 5' takes a historical moment — the hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympics — and creates harrowing tension like it was happening in front of us

Director Tim Felhbaum’s “September 5” does something quite remarkable — it creates nerve-rattling tension out of a real-life event, one whose outcome is known to many people with living memory of it.

The date is in 1972, the place is Munich, West Germany (yes, still West Germany) — specifically, inside the control room and offices of ABC Sports, which is broadcasting the Summer Olympic Games back to the United States. The boss is the legendary producer Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), who pioneered the “up close and personal” approach to sports. When one of his assistants wonders if showing a boxing match between an American fighter and a Cuban one is getting political, Arledge replies, “It’s not about politics — it’s about emotion.”

In the floor director’s chair is a rookie, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), subbing for the veteran who’s taking a day off to hike in the Alps. It’s a routine day, everyone thinks, so having Mason in the chair shouldn’t be a problem.

Then the people at ABC Sports hear gunshots.

Quickly, they discover that armed gunmen have made their way into the Olympic Village, where the athletes are living, and have taken the Israeli Olympic team hostage. With some fast reporting, and help from a German translator (Leonie Beseech), the control room learns that the gunmen are Arab terrorists, and that the German cops — more accustomed to traffic control than an armed siege — are out of their depth.

Mason is pressed to make some tough calls, on whether to go live, how to get a camera close to the Village, and how to smuggle film canisters into and out of the police cordon. (This is before the days of digital cameras and wifi.) Meanwhile, Arledge is fighting other battles, like negotiating for satellite time and keeping ABC’s news division from taking the biggest story of the Olympics away from the sports team.

There also are moral quandaries that Mason, Arledge and senior staffer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) try to answer — like whether ABC will show a terrorist killing on live TV, or whether they should be broadcasting the anti-terrorism squad’s actions when the terrorists have TVs and can see everything the control room sees.

Fehlbaum, working of a script he co-wrote with Moritz Binder, digs into the tiny details of making ’70s television, like the plastic lettering used to create onscreen captions. (In one scene, a technician essentially invents, on the fly, the superimposed network logo in the corner of the screen.) He also maintains the reality of what’s happening on TV screens by not dramatizing them — when anchor Jim McKay appears in the monitor, that’s archival footage of McKay, not an actor.

The movie is blessed with a strong acting ensemble, talking in overlapping dialogue that captures the pressures in the control room without getting in the way of the film’s storytelling. In a cast of equals, though, Magaro — recently seen in “Past Lives” and “Showing Up” — gives a quietly powerful performance, showing Mason plunging into a live news event and trying not to show how scared he is of blowing it.

The Munich Olympics happened just over 52 years ago, recently enough that some people remember watching the hostage crisis as it happened. (I was one month from turning 8, and I remember it vividly.) There’s also Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 documentary “One Day in September,” which recounted the events with lucidity and empathy for those taken hostage. The miracle of “September 5” is that even people who watched both of those, and knows the outcome, can get absorbed into the excitement and horror of what unfolds, as if they are hearing about it for the first time.

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‘September 5’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 31, at theaters across Utah. Rated R for language. Running time: 93 minutes.

Review: 'Love Me' is a clever techno-romance, with two machines figuring out what it means to be human

Can a grand visual experiment also be emotionally moving? In the case of “Love Me,” a swoon-worthy romance between pixels, the answer is yes, yes, a thousand times, yes.

The filmmaking team of Sam and Andy Zuchero start with the formation of the Earth, then fast-forward rapidly through to an indeterminate number of years from now — when humanity is extinct. (The brief loud blip of the Anthropocene epoch generates the movie’s first laugh.) When the ice breaks, it releases a “smart buoy” that seeks to communicate with a satellite circling the planet, offering to help any lifeform that approaches ‘the planet formerly known as Earth.” (The satellite also carries a variation of the plaque that was carried on Pioneer 10 and 11, showing what humans looked like.)

The buoy tries to signal the satellite, which at first isn’t interested because a buoy isn’t a lifeform. So the buoy, getting some access to the satellite’s memory banks of humanity’s collected knowledge, figures out how to lie and claims to be a lifeform. The buoy uses as its guide the vast amounts of social media posts it has collected — and finds as its model a vapid Instagram influencer named Deja (played by Kristen Stewart), who posted constantly about her post-perfect romance with Liam (Steven Yeun).

Once they connect, the buoy, who takes the name Me, tries to turn itself and the satellite — called Iam — into computer-generated versions of Deja and Liam. They repeat the same “date night” Instagram post, wearing adult onesie pajamas, cooking quesadillas (from a Blue Apron box) and cuddling up with “Friends” reruns. But even as software just learning about human romance, they can’t shake the feeling that something’s phony about the whole thing.

The Zucheros deploy a delightfully manic visual vocabulary — with rapid-fire cutting of the two main characters as mechanical objects, computer avatars and fully lifelike human forms — that has echoes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” with stronger science-fiction elements. The romance between Me and Iam plays out a bit like the robot love of “Wall-E,” with more introspection and self-doubt.

The Zucheros’ visual wit is matched by strong performances by Stewart and Yeun, who gracefully capture the idea that computers who learned about relationships from humans would inevitably end up with relationships as screwed up as the ones humans have. “Love Me” in the end, is a sweet, intelligent story of a satellite, standing in front of a buoy, asking it to love it.  

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‘Love Me’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 31, in theaters. Rated R for some sexuality/nudity. Running time: 92 minutes.

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

Review: 'All We Imagine As Light' is a beautiful tale of women in modern Mumbai, finding joy despite setbacks and hardships

The Indian drama “All We Imagine As Light” is a tenderly rendered look at women striving to make it in the heart of one of the world’s most fascinating cities, Mumbai.

Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are both Malayali, one of the many ethnic groups in India. They are roommates, and nurses at a Mumbai hospital. Their personalities are quite different, though. Prabha, the older of the two, is quiet and pragmatic; Anu is much more outgoing.

Prabha is married, though her marriage was arranged when she was younger, and her husband has lived in Germany for years — and the last time they spoke was over the phone a year ago. So when Prabha suddenly receive a rice cooker in the mail, one made in Germany, she suspects it’s come from her husband.

Meanwhile, Anu secretly is having a romance with a Muslim boyfriend, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and they search all over for some place where they can be alone and have sex. 

At the hospital, Prabha tries to help Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), one of the cooks, who’s fighting to keep her apartment from a builder who wants to evict her and build a skyscraper. But because all the papers are in the name of her late husband, Parvaty can’t prove a legal claim to the apartment. Dejected, she moves back to her rural village, Ratnagiri, and Prabha and Anu help her relocate.

Writer-director Payal Kapadia, making her feature debut, divides her movie neatly into acts. In the first act, she shows Mumbai as a polyglot metropolis, filled with people who have ventured from across India to find prosperity, happiness or even just a decent job. In the second half, in Parvaty’s village, Kapadia captures another side of India — the scenic rural part of the country, just as complex as the city.

Kapadia also captures, with the help of her engaging cast, the spectrum of attitudes of women in this beautiful country, striving to build a small piece of happiness amid the economic, religious and patriarchal limitations placed on them. These women live hard lives, sometimes frustratingly so, but find moments for themselves and with each other to celebrate their shared joy.

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‘All We Imagine As Light’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 24, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for some nudity, sexuality and language. Running time: 118 minutes; in Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Brutalist' tells an epic story — of an architect battling small minds and personal demons — in an epic, 3½-hour masterpiece

“The Brutalist” is an uncompromising movie about an uncompromising artist — a 3½-hour epic drama about an immigrant architect battling his rich benefactor, capitalism, antisemitism and his own demons to see his vision to creation.

Director Brady Corbet, co-writing with his wife Mona Fastvold, tells the fictional story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect to survives the Nazi concentration camps and arrives in America in 1947. He’s given a place to sleep by a cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), a thoroughly Americanized furniture store owner. Laszlo, who designed boldly creative buildings in Budapest before the war, is now relegated to designing furniture. 

Attila manages to get Laszlo a commission from a business associate, Harry Lee (Joe Alwyn), to design a new library as a surprise for Harry’s rich father in Pennsylvania. The father, Harrison Lee Sr. (Guy Pearce), hates the design at first — but when he figures out who Laszlo was back in Budapest, Harrison appreciates the work and wants him to do more.

Specifically, Harrison has a vision for building a cultural center on a large hill near his home in Pennsylvania — and he wants Laszlo to design and build it. Laszlo accepts, and soon discovers that was the easy part. Soon, he’s dealing with Harrison’s bean counters, local politicians who don’t understand his grand design, and the contradictory whims of his super-rich client. 

Laszlo also is working to get his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who barely survived the Holocaust, passage to America. And he’s in constant pain from the injuries he suffered in the camps, which he’s self-medicating with heroin.

Corbet (“Vox Lux”) takes his time telling Laszlo’s story — there’s a 15-minute intermission built into the movie’s 3-1/2-hour running time — but not a minute of it feels excessive or thrown away. Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley immerse the viewer in the period, both the gritty streets of Laszlo’s immigrant journey and the luxurious digs of the Lee family, to give context to the concrete and steel the architect aims to shape into something monumental.

The ensemble cast, particularly the three leads, ensure that audiences aren’t just admiring the design. Pearce channels the spirit of robber barons and Rockefellers in his portray of Harrison, who knows how much it costs to hire a genius but doesn[t comprehend the sweat that the genius expends in creation. Jones, who before the intermission is only heard as a voice through her letters, shows Erzsébet not just as a frail wife but as the emotional anchor Laszlo needs to finish this project. And Brody carries the heavy load of shouldering this grandly scaled movie by embodying both the intelligence at work and the frustration that others don’t see what he sees.

“The Brutalist” isn’t an easy watch, but it’s a rewarding one. People like Laszlo are the reason this country got built after World War II — often while in conflict with men like Harrison, who recognize and pay for talent without understanding how they decide on what they’re creating.

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’The Brutalist’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use and some language. Running time: 215 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission.

Review: 'Nickel Boys' captures the horrors of a racist reform school in all its cruelty, in a movie that's strangely beautiful

It’s quite a feat that director RaMell Ross achieves in “Nickel Boys,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about young Black men caught in a horrific spiral of oppression in a 1960s Florida reform school,

The feat is how Ross, in only his second movie (after his acclaimed documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening”), can aim his camera past the overt violence and cruelty of what’s really a segregated prison — and by capturing the viewpoints of the two young men at the movie’s heart, crystalizes both the horrors of the place and the hope they hold trying to survive it.

When the movie begins, Ross’ camera — masterfully operated by cinematographer Jomo Fray — shows us the world through the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a smart young man who is encouraged by one of his teachers (played by Jimmie Fails) to think about college, something encouraged by his grandma, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who’s raising him in the absence of his parents. 

On his first day in college in Tallahassee, Fla., he hitches a ride to school, and learns too late that the car he’s in was stolen by the driver. The police arrest him, and he’s sent to the reform school known as the Nickel Academy.

It’s at Nickel — as Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes recount in their quietly moving script — that Elwood meets Turner (Brandon Wilson), an inmate in a similar situation. It’s also at Nickel that Elwood is brutally disciplined in a building called the White House. There, a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater) flogs him so hard that he is sent to the school infirmary. 

It’s around this point that the camera’s point of view shifts from Elwood to Turner, which allows us — for the first time in the movie — to get a good direct look at Elwood. Up to then, we’ve seen his face only in oblique reflections. As Turner gets his first look at Elwood, the audience can sense that Ross’ direction is teaching us how to see these characters, and how to watch the movie. The first-person camera is not just an artistic choice, but Ross’s way of making us feel the weight of the movie’s heartbreaking ending.

The first-person camera does make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the performances by Herisse and Wilson, and we must judge them from the glimpses they show us when the other’s viewpoint is in play. There’s no doubt, though, that Ellis-Taylor’s portrayal of Elwood’s grandmother, trying to maintain an attitude of hope in an increasingly hopeless situation, is devastating — and provides the emotional anchor for this painful, beautiful film.

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‘Nickel Boys’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy). Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Hard Truths' gives director Mike Leigh a chance to create an indelible — if insufferable — character, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste room to make it brilliant

Every few movies, the director Mike Leigh collaborates with an actor to create a diamond of a character study — hard, cutting, multi-faceted and undeniably brilliant. 

That pantheon includes David Thewlis in “Naked” (1993), Imelda Staunton in “Vera Drake” (2004), Sally Hawkins in “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008), Timothy Spall in “Mr. Turner” (2014), and now Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “Hard Truths.”

Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, who lives with her construction worker husband, Curtley (David Webber), and their son, a quiet giant named Moses (Tuwaine Barrett). Pansy has a loving sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin), a hairdresser who has two adult daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson), who hold down jobs in the city.

As we first encounter Pansy, she’s quite insufferable. She complains incessantly about everything — from the banana peel Curtley leaves on the kitchen counter to the grocery customers behind her in line. Her remarks are always devastating, with insults that would make Larry David applaud. The audience’s first impulse, and it’s a good one, is to laugh at Pansy’s misanthropic life.

As Leigh and Jean-Baptiste dig deeper into Pansy’s life, the audience starts to understand the roots of Pansy’s constant anger, and we start choking on those chuckles. The key scene comes when Pansy reluctantly accompanies Chantelle to the cemetery on Mother’s Day, to visit the grave of their mum — about whom Pansy, the older of the sisters, still holds a lot of unresolved anger and pain.

Much has been written about Leigh’s process, in which he rehearses for weeks with his actors, developing the characters’ mannerisms and motivations together, before the camera starts rolling. Jean-Baptiste has worked with Leigh this way before, producing her breakout performance in the 1996 drama “Secrets and Lies.” Here, they turn Pansy from an irritable punchline to a sympathetic figure of deep loneliness, fear and self-loathing — one that Jean-Baptiste invests an amazing amount of love and attention, with breathtaking results.

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‘Hard Truths’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, at Megaplex at The District (South Jordan). Rated R for language. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Wolf Man' has its moments, but it isn't the smart throwback to Universal's monster franchises that 'The Invisible Man' was.

Heaven help the horror movie, like director Leigh Whannell’s “Wolf Man,” that has 45 minutes’ worth of good ideas bouncing around in a 100-minute running time. 

This half-killer, half-filler body horror thriller comes from the fertile mind of writer-director Leigh Whannell — one of the most influential names in horror, on the strength of creating the “Saw” and “Insidious” franchises. Alas, this effort to pump some new energy into one of Universal’s classic monster franchises isn’t as smart or as shocking as his first attempt, 2020’s “The Invisible Man.”

Blake and Charlotte, played by Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, are a San Francisco couple with what looks like a good life. She’s a journalist, and he’s a writer who’s between jobs — so he’s stay-at-home dad caring for their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake tells Charlotte he’s worried they’re becoming distant, so when he receives a legal notice that his father has been declared dead, he suggests the family go to the remote Oregon farm they’ve just inherited.

In an overlong prologue, we get a taste of the uneasy father-son dynamic. Young Blake (Zac Chandler) accompanies his strident father (Sam Jaeger) on a hunting trip, where they encounter something in the woods — something the townsfolk chalk up to “hills fever” but the Indigenous people in Oregon label “the face of the wolf.”

The family doesn’t even get to the house when trouble starts, when their rental moving truck goes off the road and crashes. As they escape the upended truck, something puts a deep scratch in Blake’s arm. After that, Blake slowly feels sick, and starts turning into something beastly — something everyone in the theater figures out well ahead of the three people on the screen.

The script — co-written by Whannell and his wife, Corbett Tuck — moseys along with this slow transformation, predictably hitting its gruesome milestones. Blake’s fingernails chip off, revealing the claws emerging underneath. His jaw starts jutting out. Some hair starts falling out, while other hair starts cropping up. And so on.

Whannell does add some fascinating elements — the best of which is moving from Charlotte and Ginger’s view of the infected Blake to Blake’s sensory-overload view of them now that he’s in this new physical state.

Abbott (“Poor Things,” “Possessor”) makes Blake’s transformation feel lived-in, and he brings out the character’s humanity even through the prosthetics. Garner gives a sharp performance that reflects real fear without becoming a “scream queen” stereotype. These actors give their all, which makes it even more disappointing that there weren’t enough interesting moments around them.

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‘Wolf Man’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, January 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violent content, grisly images and some language. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'Better Man' puts a computer-animated chimp in the place of British singer Robbie Williams, for a cheeky reset of the musical biopic

The musical biographical drama “Better Man” is a straightforward warts-and-all account of the life of British singing star Robbie Williams. Except for one thing in the telling that occasionally makes the movie spectacular.

Director Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) takes us through Williams’ story, from a poor, bullied kid growing up in Stoke-on-Trent, the last kid picked for soccer and the cheekiest boy in class. He lives with his doting Nan (Alison Steadman), his hard-working mum (Kate Mulvany), and his policeman dad (Steve Pemberton) — who worships Frank Sinatra and harbors a desire to be a lounge singer. One day, Robert (as he’s called by his family) sees Dad leave on a football-supporters bus for London and never return.

Robert auditions for a spot in a boy band, but his singing doesn’t impress the producer, Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman) — but his cheekiness does. Nigel selects Robert for his pop quintet, Take That, changes the lad’s name to Robbie, and sets them off on the road to stardom. Gracey puts his music-video skills to good use with one energetic number, to the band’s hit “Rock DJ,” cycling through several levels of fame in a couple of minutes.

Robbie’s story proceeds through success and excess, mostly through alcohol and cocaine — until Robbie is forced out of Take That and works to reinvent himself as a solo artist. There’s a lovely interlude in which Robbie meets Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), from the girl group All Saints, and they dance a duet on a yacht to Williams’ cover of World Party’s “She’s the One,” that encapsulates the highs and lows of their two-year relationship.

The script — by Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey — follows the contours of a standard musician biopic. It’s less ploddingly literal than the Freddie Mercury film “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and more prone to flights of fancy like Elton John’s biographical drama “Rocketman.” And, except for that one thing that’s different, that’s all “Better Man” depicts.

That one thing is how Robbie says he sees himself, at all the stages of his life: As an animal, something unevolved. So Gracey shows Robbie, from beginning to end, as a chimpanzee in human clothing — seamlessly realized through computer animation, with Williams providing his own voice to accompany Jonno Davies’ performance-capture movements. 

Robbie as chimp, we’re told, symbolizes Williams’ long bouts with depression. It’s explained that, because of his father’s influence, Robbie grew up thinking the only way to measure his self-worth was by how many other people knew who he was. He pursued fame relentlessly, and when he caught it, it still didn’t fill the hole in his soul.

Seeing Williams as something not himself is a creative way around a problem that most musician biopics face: The wide gulf between subject and performer. In a more routine biopic, some actor would be cast who would either struggle to imitate the singer’s voice — or, worse, lip-sync to Williams’ tracks. Not every movie can get Timothée Chalamet to be their Bob Dylan, and Gracey and Williams are smart enough to try something else.

Sometimes, Gracey’s metaphorical depictions of Williams’ life are a bit on the nose — like a sequence where he literally battles his judgmental past selves, or a finale in which he sings “My Way.” But the experiment, or gimmick if you prefer, generally works, and makes “Better Man” rather better than the average biopic.

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‘Better Man’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for drug use, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and some violent content. Running time: 134 minutes.