Review: 'I'm Still Here' is a moving drama of love and grief in a Brazilian dictatorship, with a steely lead performance by Fernanda Torres

Brazilian director Walter Salles’ drama “I’m Still Here” manages to be a razor-sharp thriller, a painfully emotional tale of grief, and a deeply felt romance in which love is measured by the absence.

It’s Rio de Janeiro in 1971, under the military dictatorship known as the “Argentine Revolution.” Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) and his wife, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres), believe the regime won’t dare touch their family. Rubens, a former congressman and a critic of the dictatorship, thinks he’s too high-profile, and that if the military cracks down on him, people would talk.

One day, armed men in plainclothes barge into the Paiva house, taking Rubens, Eunice and their daughter Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), are taken into custody. The armed men say they just want Rubens to give a deposition. But once in a military prison, all assurances are worthless. Eunice ends up being held for 12 days, with no word on what’s happening to Rubens or Eliana.

When she’s released, Eunice learns that Eliana was held for a day and then released. As for Rubens, he’s been “disappeared” in custody. No one knows where he is, or at least won’t say. 

Eunice eventually must figure out how to go on without her husband — which is as much a financial issue (she can’t access his bank account without his signature) as it is a personal one. She also makes the decision that she won’t tell their three younger children what happened to their father, though Eliana and the oldest daughter, Vera (Valentina Herszage), who was in London for college, know the truth and don’t like keeping it from their siblings.

Screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega adapted a memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, one of those younger siblings all grown up — and the fascinating thing about the narrative is that knowing it’s a true story doesn’t alter the white-knuckle effect Salles creates. The focus is on Eunice, as her personal tragedy spurs her to remake her life, as the family moves to a São Paulo apartment and Eunice starts studying the law and gathers evidence to prove what the dictatorship is lying about in Rubens’ disappearance.

So at the heart of this movie is Torres, in an Oscar-nominated central performance as Eunice. Torres contains a multitude of emotions in her concise, controlled portrayal — fear, grief, anger, determination and love to keep the memory of her husband alive. (Salles also provides a beautiful grace note at the end, casting the Brazilian legend Fernanda Montenegro — Torres’ 95-year-old mother, and the Oscar-nominated star of Salles’ 1998 masterpiece “Central Station” — as Eunice as an old woman.) 

“I’m Still Here” surprised a lot of people when it showed up as one of the 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees. A surprise, that is, to anyone who didn’t see this profoundly touching movie. 

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‘I’m Still Here’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic content, sone strong language, drug use, smoking and brief nudity. Running time: 137 minutes; in Portuguese with subtitles.

Review: 'Love Hurts' is an uneven action rom-com that doesn't get the full use out of Oscar winner and martial-arts expert Ke Huy Quan

I love a good underdog story as much as the next guy, and the career of Ke Huy Quan — from child actor in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “The Goonies” through the wilderness years and back in an Oscar-winning performance in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” — is one of the best Hollywood has ever produced.

So I was hopeful going into Quan’s first movie as a leading man, the action comedy “Love Hurts” — and a bit disappointed coming out, seeing that the star’s full potential wasn’t realized.

Quan plays Marvin Gable, who’s one of the most successful real estate agents in Milwaukee, and certainly the most optimistic. He tells his harried assistant Ashley (Lio Tipton, training to be the next Aubrey Plaza) that she should find something she loves and go for it — like he has with selling houses to young families.

On this Valentine’s Day, something’s off in Marvin’s routine. It starts when he gets a valentine from Rose Carlisle (Ariana DeBose), a woman the world thinks is dead. It gets worse when a big man with many knives, called The Raven (Mustafa Shakir), shows up in Marvin’s office trying to kill him. What’s surprising is that Marvin, for a real estate agent, is remarkably adept at dodging The Raven’s knives and kicks.

Before you can say “didn’t I see this in a Jackie Chan movie?”, longtime stuntman and first-time director Jonathan Eusebio and the three credited screenwriters have revealed that Marvin isn’t just another Milwaukee real estate agent. In an earlier life, Marvin was an assassin, who killed anyone his crime lord brother Alvin, aka Knuckles (Daniel Wu), wanted dead. The last person Knuckles wanted dead was Rose, and Marvin spared her life and told her to hide — just as Marvin did in his new life in real estate.

But Rose is done hiding, and has come back to settle scores — with Knuckles and with Knuckles’ right-hand man Merlo (Cam Gigandet), who’s skimming from Knuckles’ ill-gotten gains. Rose, as a former mob accountant, knows about Merlo’s double-dipping, which is why Merlo wants Rose dead even though Knuckles wants her brought back alive, and has hired two thugs (André Eriksen and former NFL star Marshawn “Beastmode” Lynch) to finish her off. But Marvin, for reasons true to the Valentine’s Day theme, wants to keep Rose alive.

Eusebio and Quan — who worked as a stuntman and martial arts choreographer between acting careers — put together some solid fight sequences. Unfortunately, the fights are a bit truncated, and make action fans long for the sustained craziness of a classic Jackie Chan movie. (As a martial arts fan, I also wish Eusebio had shot Quan in full frame more often, so we could see his moves in full.)

For sporadic bursts, we see that Quan, at 54, has some ferocious moves — and enough charisma to carry a movie as action star and romantic lead. He’s also what keeps “Love Hurts” from being a painful viewing experience.

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‘Love Hurts’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 7, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/bloody violence and language throughout. Running time: 83 minutes.

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.