Review: A new Captain America, but familiar themes of political intrigue, in a satisfying 'Brave New World'

It’s a fascinating thread of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that of the four movies with “Captain America” in the title, the last three — including the new one, “Captain America: Brave New World” — play out as political thrillers in disguise. 

In “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” possibly the best MCU movie ever, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) learned that the evil Hydra had infiltrated the supposed good guys, S.H.I.E.L.D., all the way up to Nick Fury’s boss, Secretary Alexander Pierce (played by Robert Redford). “Captain America: Civil War” begins with plans by the Secretary of State, Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt), to rein in superhero might — and ends with a Sokovian general (Daniel Brühl) manipulating things to set Avenger against Avenger.

With “Brave New World,” director Julius Onah (“Luce,” “The Cloverfield Paradox”) is dealing with a new Captain — Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, inheriting the shield and the responsibility — and a new Thaddeus Ross, with Harrison Ford taking over from Hurt, who died in 2022. But those themes of politics and duplicity under the surface are as strong as ever.

The action starts immediately, with Sam taking part in a mission in Mexico. The assignment is to retrieve a canister stolen by a villain, Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s being paid by an unseen buyer. Sam diverts from the canister to save some hostages and fight some ancillary baddies, and gets some airborne help from Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), an Air Force intelligence officer who’s training to be Falcon to Sam’s Cap. 

The heroics get Sam and Joaquin invited to the White House by Ross, who’s now the president. Sam is wary, considering his past run-ins with Ross, but Ross wants Sam to work on a new project: Bringing back the Avengers. 

Sam and Joaquin are also invited to a gala to celebrate a summit to negotiate a treaty over Celestial Island, a giant formation in the Indian Ocean (see Marvel’s “Eternals” for details) that has the richest deposits of a metal even more versatile and strong than vibranium — adamantium. (No Wolverines were harmed in the creation of this MacGuffin.) But the peace-loving vibe of the summit is shattered by an assassination attempt within the White House.

I’ve been skipping over a few details here, because the script that Onah and four other writers have cobbled together doesn’t benefit from too much advance information. Unfortunately, Marvel’s marketing geniuses think too much information — particularly about a certain crimson character — is the only way they’ll get butts in seats.

I will say several characters from past MCU titles make important appearances, such as Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley, a Steve Rogers-era super soldier who was featured with Mackie in the 2021 miniseries “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” There also are some references to the first time we saw Hurt’s Ross, in 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk,” notably the inclusion of Tim Blake Nelson in a key role. But the most interesting supporting character is a new one: President Ross’ short-but-potent security expert, Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by the Israeli actress Shira Haas. 

Through all the action — some of it quite exciting, some of it oversaturated with computer animation — two thoughtful threads emerge in “Captain America: Brave New World.” One is how Mackie’s Sam wrestles with the responsibility of carrying Cap’s shield, without benefit of super-serum. The other is the idea, at this moment in American history, that the most difficult thing a president has to control is himself.

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‘Captain America: Brave New World’

★★★

Opens Friday, February 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and some strong language. Running time: 118 minutes.

Review: 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig,' made in secret in Iran, captures the corrosive paranoia of life under an authoritarian regime

Someday they’ll make a movie about how writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof made “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” — but it will have to be amazing to be as good as the movie he made, an examination of the corrosive effects of life in a totalitarian state, wrapped in a nail-biter of a suspense film.

The story goes that Rasoulof filmed in his home country, Iran, in secret — because the movie is concerned with the brutality of Iran’s enforcement of so-called “morality laws,” like women wearing head coverings, and the bloody 2022 crackdown on student protests against such laws. The film’s footage was smuggled out of Iran on thumb drives, reassembled in Germany. And Rasoulof himself was arrested for his dissent, sentenced to eight years in prison and a flogging. He managed to escape Iran, and appeared at Cannes two weeks later for his film’s premiere.

And, believe it or not, the story Rasoulof tells in the movie is even more compelling.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just landed a job as an investigating judge for Iran’s judiciary, looking into crimes against the state and the country’s strictly religious leadership. His colleague, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad), warns Iman that his life is going to change radically — because people who lose their cases in court may want to seek revenge against the court investigator. Ghaderi also gives Iman something to protect his family: A handgun.

Iman’s wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), isn’t thrilled about the gun, but she’s elated by Iman’s promotion, and the change in their social status that will come with it. Their teen daughters — Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), who’s a college student, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), a high-schooler — are less thrilled when Najmeh tells them they’ll have to rein in their social-media profile, because Iman’s new job means more scrutiny on the family.

Iman’s promotion happens just as a wave of student protests consumed Iran in fall of 2022. The catalyst was the death of Mahsa Amini, who died while in police custody — who was arrested for not wearing a hijab properly in public. Witnesses said Amini was beaten by police, something the police denied. According to one human rights group, more than 500 people died as the government cracked down on the protests.

Iman notices the protests only because his workload has increased, and he’s hearing more cases in which people have confessed to crimes — confessions, we later see for ourselves, that were often coerced. Rezvan and Sana experience the protests close up, particularly when they harbor one of Rezvan’s classmates, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), who has been wounded by police.

The movie shifts tone and setting, when Iman bundles Najmeh and their daughters into the car, and drive into the country. Iman’s hope of escaping the chaos in Tehran is threatened by his suspicion of his family — which has grown more intense since Iman misplaced his gun.

In “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Rasoulof uses the contours of a paranoid thriller, one that has the audience making fists of tension, to examine how life in Iran’s authoritarian regime — and, by extension, any authoritarian system — has rigged the game against its own people, relying on fear and distrust to do its work of making the people perpetually scared and submissive. It makes for riveting drama, and a timely lesson.

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‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’

★★★★

Opens Friday, February 7, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for disturbing violent content, bloody images, thematic content, some language and smoking. Running time: 167 minutes; in Persian with subtitles.

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.