Review: 'The Rule of Jenny Pen' is a serviceable suspense thriller, and a chance to see John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush trade theatrical hamminess

Insanity runs deep in a nursing home in “The Rule of Jenny Pen,” a suspense thriller that seems designed primarily to let two old warhorses — John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush — chew as much scenery as they, and we, can stomach.

Rush plays Stefan Mortensen, an imperious New Zealand judge who has a stroke in the middle of a sentencing hearing. He heads to an out-of-the-way nursing home for recuperation, where he talks condescendingly to his roommate, Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby player

Tony looks tough, but it turns out there’s someone who terrifies him: Dave Crealy, played by Lithgow. Dave appears to be a dotty patient at the nursing home, who wears on his hand a doll’s head puppet that he calls Jenny Pen. It doesn’t take Stefan long to learn, the hard way, that Dave is a psychopath who brutally terrorizes the other patients while playing the addled old man for the harried and uncaring staff. 

Dave recognizes in Stefan both the ultimate challenge — a man of letters — and also the ultimate trophy to take down. Stefan, who needs a wheelchair to get around, finds himself in a battle of wills and wits with a ruthless opponent and with no assistance. 

Director James Ashcroft, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eli Kent (adapting a short story by Owen Marshall), mixes a fascinating concoction, finding creepy suspense within the sedate confines of a nursing home. It takes a few wild swings, and a few leaps of willful narrative ignorance (seriously, does the staff ever look at the surveillance footage?), but it earns its chills and scares.

The main draw to “The Rule of Jenny Pen” is watching Rush and Lithgow match their acting skills in a theatrical face-off. One could easily imagine Lithgow using his autocratic voice, the one he deploys so well in “Conclave,” to play the judge while Rush went to town as the psycho with his best “Pirates of the Caribbean” hamminess. Switching it up allows both actors to command their best solo moments, and allow them to spark off each other in their shared scenes. Together, they put some grand polish on what could have been a standard suspense thriller.

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‘The Rule of Jenny Pen’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 7, at AMC West Jordan and Regal Crossroads (Taylorsville). Rated R for violent content including sexual assault, and some language. Running time: 104 minutes. 

Review: 'Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat' recounts the rocky road to independence for African countries, and the Cold War games the U.S. played there

Belgian director Johan Grimonprez’ documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a rich account of a violent history that most Americans have likely forgotten — which is a shame, since American tax dollars, funneled through the CIA, financed a lot of it.

It’s also a history that’s punctuated by American jazz music, as some notable musicians protested the violence, while others toured Africa on goodwill tours — usually not knowing that the tours were paid for by CIA front groups.

The key date in the action is June 30, 1960, the day the Republic of the Congo (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo) officially became independent of its colonizers, Belgium. The key figure here is Patrice Lumumba, who became the country’s first prime minister shortly before his 35th birthday, and was deposed in a military coup led by Col. Mobutu Sese Seko a few months later — and killed by a firing squad the following January. 

Grimonprez, using archival footage and readings of memoirs and letters from several people in the thick of it, captures the backstory of how Lumumba rose to prominence — starting with the influence of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, who oversaw the independence movement of his country three years earlier, and launched the Pan-African movement, which encouraged independence from colonizers across the continent. 

The West, particularly the United States, saw the growing independence movement across Africa through a Cold War lens. The reasoning went that if these new African nations were against their former oppressors — the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, all America’s allies — they could easily side with the Communist regimes of the USSR and China. And in the brutal calculus of men like John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s CIA chief, installing a dictator who was on the American side was better than allowing a democratically elected leader like Lumumba to rule. That’s how Mubuto came to lead that country, which he renamed Zaire, ruthlessly from 1965 to his death in 1997.

The United States didn’t do much to win Lumumba over, as the movie tells it. The U.S. government did give Lumumba official lodging on his one trip to D.C. — even letting him sleep on a bed that Belgium’s King Leopold II once slept in, something the Belgians didn’t like one bit. But Eisenhower canceled a meeting with Lumumba, the movie tells us, opting instead to play a round of golf. 

The other government entity with a role here — besides Eisenhower’s White House and Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union — was the United Nations. In the U.N.’s General Assembly, a coalition of African and Asian nations formed a powerful voting bloc, passing resolutions against the European countries that used to control their territories. At the urging of members, the U.N.’s secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, sent peacekeeping troops to keep Lumumba’s government in place as Belgian forces worked to oust the newly independent government.

Grimonprez also features archived interviews with some of the spies who worked out of Congo back in the day, in which they hint at war crimes before coyly backing away from any such suggestion. Through those interviews, and the documents unearthed years after the fact, a clear narrative emerges that the American government, their European allies and various economic interests – including a major mining company that aimed to profit from Congo’s reserves of uranium — thought Lumumba was a hindrance to their plans.

Setting this to the jazz music of the day — with footage of such greats as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln (who led a protest within U.N. headquarters) — the movie builds a furious tension, while also highlighting the American racial divide that informed many of the U.S. government’s decisions.

Grimonprez packs a lot into “Soundtrack of a Coup d’Etat,” which clocks in at two-and-a-half hours and feels like it could have gone on much longer. The result is a powerful history lesson, set to a strong beat.

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‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 28, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for war footage and language. Running time: 150 minutes; in Dutch, Russian, French, Arabic and English, with subtitles. 

Review: 'The Monkey' is a horror movie dripping in blood and humorous irony, but the mix doesn't always hold together

If the “Saw” movies kept their gore but were repurposed as farcical comedies, they might look a lot like “The Monkey,” in which writer-director Osgood Perkins reveals his funny bone — and a lot of other bones, blood and viscera as well.

Freely adapted from a Stephen King short story, “The Monkey” starts with a frantic pilot (Adam Scott, in an unnerving cameo) entering a pawn shop trying to unload a wind-up monkey that plays a drum. Before the pilot can make a deal, the monkey starts banging on its drum — and when it stops, something awful happens.

The action then moves to the pilot’s sons, twin brothers Bill and Hal (played as teens by Christian Convery). The twins share a mutual animosity, as Bill bullies Hal and blames Hal for their dad leaving their mom, Lois (Tatiana Maslany). The boys start exploring the stuff Dad left behind, and find a massive hatbox that contains a drumming wind-up monkey.

It doesn’t take long to discover the monkey’s secret: When it finishes playing its drum, someone nearby dies horribly. The monkey also can’t be directed to killing a specific person (“it doesn’t take requests,” young Hal says at one point). So, after some gruesome deaths — which Perkins presents with the complex absurdity of a Rube Goldberg contraption — the boys decide to throw the monkey down the deepest well they can find.

Move forward 25 years, to the present day, and the adult Hal (now played by Theo James) lives a solitary life, avoiding contact with his twin and his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien). On his one week of the year when he has custody, Hal and Petey find their theme park plans upended when the monkey resurfaces — as does Bill. 

Perkins, the guy behind last year’s creepy “Longlegs,” seems to be having lots of fun devising clever ways for characters to die in freakish and gruesome ways. He also features a fair share of oddballs, including the twins’ brash Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy, from “Schitt’s Creek”), a fumbling priest (Nicco Del Rio), and Petey’s self-help guru stepdad (Elijah Wood). 

But Perkins doesn’t maintain a consistent tone between the blood-splattered hilarity and the more complicated handling of Hal’s emotional state, and the movie suffers for it. Perkins is a seriously good director, but he needs to work on balancing the serious with the silly.

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‘The Monkey’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'No Other Land' gives an inside look at Palestinians being forced off their land, and offers a viewpoint not often seen

The documentary “No Other Land” chronicles life in a group of Palestinian villages on the West Bank — and if merely mentioning the setting doesn’t clue you in on the complexities of the narrative, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta say their families have lived on this part of the West Bank for more than a century. The Israeli officials and soldiers who occupy the land say otherwise, that the land is a training area for their tanks — and the Israeli courts have upheld that claim. 

So, as the movie shows, Israeli soldiers regularly come to a house, order the residents out with barely enough time to gather their belongings, and then direct construction vehicles to tear the house down. The people living there often move into nearby caves, which anyone would agree is a poor substitute for four walls and a roof.

Two Palestinians, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, and two Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, are the credited directors of “No Other Land.” Adra and Abraham are also two of the film’s main subjects. Adra grew up in Masafer Yatta, with parents who taught him to protest, and has filmed the destruction of his peoples’ homes for years. Abraham is a journalist based in Jerusalem, who makes repeated trips to Masafer Yatta to cover what’s happening — and to convince his Israeli editors that the story is worth pursuing.

The filmmakers make their feelings about the conflict quite clear — and whether a viewer agrees or disagrees is probably determined by one’s views of the Middle East as a whole. The Palestinians shown here are desperate, unable to win in court or in the field, risking arrest from Israeli soldiers and violence from Israeli settlers. The filmmakers depict the soldiers as rigid, their civilian leaders as uncaring and callous, and the settlers as a mob.

It’s important to note that filming for “No Other Land” started in the winter of 2019, and ended in the fall of 2023, just before the attacks by Hamas militants that killed some 1,200 Israelis and prompted airstrikes and a ground offensive on Gaza that has left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and countless numbers displaced. It’s also worth noting that some of the reasons Hamas gave for mounting their attacks — Israeli raids in the West Bank, attacks by settlers against Palestinians, and expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied lands — are the things chronicled in this film.

Does what the filmmakers show justify Hamas’ attacks? Of course not, and most everyone would say “no” — just as many would say the ferocity of the Israeli military in Gaza isn’t justified by what Hamas did. I, like the majority of Americans, don’t know enough about the long history of Israelis and Palestinians to express anything but a naive hope that a solution can be found without violence from either side.

I can also hope — again, naively — that more Americans can seek out information about this intractable conflict, including watching “No Other Land.” The movie, though it has won awards at festivals and is nominated for an Academy Award, does not have a U.S. distributor. According to The New York Times, the filmmakers are self-distributing the movie to 23 cities, including Salt Lake City, with plans of a larger rollout. Here’s hoping as many people as possible will see it.

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‘No Other Land’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for violence and language. Running time: 92 minutes; in Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles.

Review: 'Parthenope' bursts with sensual beauty — including from its star, Celeste Della Porto — but without a lot of coherence

Paolo Sorrentino makes movies that are extravaganzas of sensual pleasure, just as a cow eats grass — it’s just what they do.

Sorrentino’s latest movie, “Parthenope,” has sensuality bursting from every frame — and in most of those frames, it’s coming from the beautiful actress in the title role, Celeste Della Porta. What’s more elusive, as Della Porta sashays through Naples and leads every man she meets to distraction as Parthenope seeks her life’s purpose, is a coherent thread leading the viewer to any deeper understanding.

Born in the Neapolitan harbor, the adult Parthenope often finds herself by the shore, usually in a bikini. She’s the center of attention at every party at her parents’ seaside house, circa 1968. One of the old men (Alfonso Santagata) asks her, “If I were 40 years younger, would you marry me?,” and she seductively and smartly turns the question around: “If I were 40 years older, would you marry me?”

When Parthenope isn’t fending off leering old men, she actually befriends one — an alcoholic American author visiting Naples. The author, played charmingly by Gary Oldman, asks, “Are you aware of the destruction your beauty causes?” And it’s clear that she does. After a brief friendship, the author tells her she must find her own way. “I don’t want to steal one minute of your youth away from you,” he says.

In her teens and 20s, Parthenope is torn between two men — her melancholy brother, Raimondo (Daniele Rienzo), and Raimondo’s friend and her lover, Sandrino (Dario Alta). The choice she makes leads to a tragedy, and puts Parthenope on a different path.

Except for a flirtation with becoming an actress — when she meets a masked casting director (Isabella Ferrari) and a haughty film star (Luisa Ranieri) — Parthenope chooses academia. She studies anthropology, and finds a professor (Silvio Orlando) who takes her on as his protege. Along the way, there are flings with a brooding movie actor (Marlon Joubert) and a vain bishop (Peppe Lanzetta). 

Sorrentino — whose 2013 movie “The Great Beauty” won the international-film Oscar — reunites with that movie’s cinematographer, Daria D’Antonio, and the pairing is again fruitful. Everywhere D’Antonio points the camera, some bit of breathtaking beauty is to be found, particularly when it’s pointed at Della Porto.

And the young actress holds up her end of the bargain, finding inner depth in Parthenope behind her gorgeous eyes and below her sensuous curves. Alas, Sorrentino can’t bring it together into something more meaningful. In “Parthenope,” Sorrentino offers us only glimpses of the divine in his main character’s radiance.

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‘Parthenope’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and the Century Salt Lake 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated R for strong sexual content/graphic nudity, and language. Running time: 137 minutes; in Italian, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Unbreakable Boy,' though based on a true story about a boy with autism and his father's struggles, comes off as false and manipulative

There must be a way, in some alternate universe, to tell the story of Austin LeRette — a boy with brittle-bone disease and autism whose perpetually sunny disposition made him a beacon of hope and positivity to all around him — that doesn’t feel phony and maudlin.

That is not the way writer-director Jon Gunn tells Austin’s story in “The Unbreakable Boy,” a saccharine slog that can’t find its way toward genuine feeling, in spite of a winning performance by Jacob Laval.

Laval’s Austin narrates the story, which starts with Austin’s father, Scott — played by perpetual man-child Zachary Levi — getting drunk at a New Year’s Eve party and then attempting to drive home with Austin and his little brother, Logan (Gavin Warren) as passengers. Then the action flashes back 13 years and change, when Scott and his buddy Joe (Drew Powell) are shopping for clothes, and Scott eyes the pretty store clerk, Teresa (Meghann Fahy).

In the telling, we see Scott and Teresa on their first three dates — and that instead of a fourth date, Teresa informs Scott that she’s pregnant, and a quickly arranged wedding soon follows. We’re also told that Joe is Scott’s imaginary friend, his sounding board for talking through his problems.

Then Austin is born, and he has the same genetic condition Teresa does — osteogenesis imperfecta, or OI, or brittle-bone disease. The condition means Austin is prone to breaking bones (we’re told he broke two ribs when the obstetrician used forceps during his birth), so the LeRettes become familiar figures at the emergency room. 

The autism diagnosis comes later, and while some of Gunn’s script (adapted from Scott LeRette’s inspirational memoir, co-written by Susy Flory) depicts Austin’s eternal optimism, far more of the story is focused on Scott’s complaints about how unprepared he was to be a dad — not just of a kid who’s got a congenital condition and a neurodivergent issue, but of any kid. 

The story also shows, with plodding deliberation, Scott’s descent into alcoholism — and it feels like the filmmakers have pulled a bait-and-switch on the audience, promising a unique inspirational story and delivering a much more mundane one. 

Then, as Gunn completes the LeRettes’ story, Austin’s story becomes as mundane as any other story about a character who’s different from everyone else. In straining to find some syrupy moralizing about the lessons Scott learns from Austin, the movie neglects showing Austin as a complete human being.

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‘The Unbreakable Boy’

★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong thematic material, alcohol abuse, language and some violence. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'Paddington in Peru' is funny and whimsical, and nearly as good as its amazing predecessor

Perfection is such a rare commodity in movies that it’s easy to forgive “Paddington in Peru” for not being as good as its 2018 predecessor, “Paddington 2” — because the third movie in the series has plenty of charms and good humor in its own right.

This installment starts with big news for the kindly bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw), as he’s finally been given his British passport. Even though he’s now a true Englishbear, Paddington feels a bit homesick for Peru — particularly his aged Aunt Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton), who rescued young Paddington from a raging river and raised him like her own cub. 

As fate would have it, Paddington receives a letter from the Home for Retired Bears in Peru — not from Aunt Lucy, but from the Reverend Mother (Olivia Colman) who runs the place. The Reverend Mother informs Paddington that Aunt Lucy has gone missing, and none of the nuns can leave the home to find her in the Amazonian jungle. So Paddington and his English family, the Browns, fly to Lima to start the search.

For the Browns, the trip checks a lot of boxes. Henry (Hugh Bonneville), the insurance-selling patriarch, is under pressure from his new American boss (Hayley Atwell) to “embrace risk.” Mary (Emily Browning, replacing Sally Hawkins), Henry’s wife, is feeling the early pangs of “empty nest” syndrome, with older daughter Judy (Madeleine Harris) preparing to leave for college and son Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) self-exiled to his room and his labor-saving inventions. The kids’ grandmother, Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters), comes along for the ride.

That ride is taken up the Amazon on a rickety boat owned by a veteran river pilot, Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas), whose daughter, Gina (Carla Tous), is the engineer. Hunter harbors a secret, though — a fever, passed down from his ancestors (all played by Banderas), to find the mythical Eldorado, the city of gold. 

Director Dougal Wilson, whose resumé is in music videos, takes over from the wizardly Paul King and acquits himself well. (Having King and longtime writing partner Simon Farnaby take story credit undoubtedly helps.) The whimsical charm of this blue-coated bear with a marmalade fixation remains intact, and the movie takes time for some wonderfully absurd humor and a few sly movie references — everything from “The Sound of Music” to Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill Jr.” Even the fan service at the movie’s mid-credit scene feels earned and happily offbeat.

Paddington remains a bear to be reckoned with, making his way through the world with kindness and resourcefulness — and knowing the value of a good hard stare to convince people to do the right thing. “Paddington in Peru” isn’t quite as wondrous as the first two installments, but it’s wonderful enough for these times.

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‘Paddington in Peru’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, mild rude humor and some thematic elements. Running time: 106 minutes. 

Review: The Oscar-nominated short films are (mostly) wonderful, exploring crime, punishment, childhood, and whether someone is a robot

One of the best things about awards season is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences reminds us in three of its Oscar categories that movies don’t have to be between 90 and 200 minutes long. 

The short-film categories — animation, live-action and documentary — consistently deliver fascinating views of the world, quick but deep dives into other cultures, and hard-hitting documentaries that don’t need a lot of time to make an impact.

• The slate of nominated animated films isn’t quite as strong as the other two this year, but there are two gems, both stories about childhood. The best two are both stories about childhood. One is Daisuke Nishio’s “Magic Candies,” a stop-motion work from Japan, shows a lonely boy who gets a bag of candies that have unusual properties — such as the ability to let him hear the thoughts of his sofa and his dog. The other is director Loïc Espuche’s cel-animated French coming-of-age story “Yuck!,” where children hanging out at a campground mock the adults who are kissing, until two of them decide they want to try it themselves.

Nearly as good is the wordless cel-animated “In the Shadow of the Cypress,” by Iranian directors Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani. It tells of a former sea captain and his long-suffering daughter, and what happens when a beached whale gives the captain a chance to atone for his past sins.

Two more stop-motion works round out the nominees, both of which include male figures nude from the waist down. “Wander to Wonder,” a Dutch-Belgian-French-British co-production rendered in English, is a bizarre tale that features tiny human figures from a long-forgotten children’s TV show fending off starvation. And “Beautiful Men,” director Nicolas Keppens’ Belgian-French-Dutch co-production, follows three brothers who have traveled to Istanbul for hair transplants; the movie is tenderly realized, but one wonders why it couldn’t have been done as live-action.

• The live-action nominees include two movies about children in developing countries trying to better their lives. 

Director Adam J. Graves’ film “Anuja” follows two sisters working in a clothing factory in New Delhi — with the older sister (Ananya Shanbhag) working to convince her math-wizard 9-year-old sibling (Sajda Pathan) to enroll in a boarding school to get away from the sweatshop life. The film, we learn at the end, is a public-service announcement for a charity that helps children in such situations — including, we’re told, the girl playing the title role.

In director Cindy Lee’s South African drama “The Last Ranger,” a girl, Litha (Liyabona Mroqoza), meets Khuselwa (Avumile Qongqo), who works on a game preserve trying to protect endangered rhinos from poachers. This lusciously shot film also ends with a PSA, this time for rhino protection. 

Injustice is at the heart of two chilling live-action shorts: “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” tells the true story of an act of courage by a retired Croatian military officer during the 1990s’ ethnic cleansing of Bosnia; and in “A Lien,” brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz depict a New Jersey family trying, during the first Trump administration, to get the Salvadoran-born husband (William Martinez) his green card — when he’s swept up in an ICE raid. (A title card tells us this practice, of ICE nabbing undocumented people while they’re trying to follow U.S. immigration rules, is as common as it is cruel.)

My favorite of the live-action slate is the one comedy of the bunch, writer-director Victoria Warmerdam’s “I’m Not a Robot,” in which a Dutch music producer (Ellen Parren) tries to log onto her computer and can’t get past the Captcha test — leading her to question whether she is, as her computer suggests, a robot.

• The longest program, and the best, consists of the five documentary short subject nominees, which are split between chronicles of musicians and explorations of violence and the justice system.

The musical docs cover both ends of the age spectrum. Director Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s “Instruments of a Beating Heart,” made for The New York Times’ Op-Docs series, goes inside a Tokyo elementary school school where the first-graders aim to end the year by learning to perform Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” for the incoming first-grade class — and feel the pressure to be perfect. In “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” filmmaker Molly O’Brien profiles her aunt, double bassist Orin O’Brien, the first woman to be hired full-time to play in the New York Philharmonic and now approaching retirement.

Director Smriti Mundhra’s “I Am Ready, Warden,” made for MTV Documentary Films, captures the final week of existence for John Henry Ramirez, a Texas death row inmate; the movie also introduces us to the pastor working to save Ramirez’ life and the son of Ramirez’ victim, whose sure he wants Ramirez to die but isn’t sure his execution will bring closure.

In “Death By Numbers,” director Kim A. Snyder re-introduces us to Sam Fuentes, a young poet who writes regularly about the worst day of her life: Feb. 14, 2018, when 14 of her classmates and three adult staffers were shot dead at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Snyder, who followed the Parkland students in “Us Kids” (which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival), lets Fuentes’ dynamic words — both from her journals and in her defiant statement during the shooter’s sentencing hearing — do the talking.

The best of the bunch is director Bill Morrison’s “Incident,” made for The New Yorker. Using only footage from overhead surveillance, and police dash cams and body cams, Morrison dissects a 2018 police shooting in Chicago — as a cop’s questionable decision leads to a man’s death in the street, a confrontation starts to boil over in the neighborhood, and a narrative starts to form about what happened. It’s a compelling look into what we know and what we think we know, and how the two don’t always match.

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Oscar-nominated short films — animation

★★★

Opens Friday, February 14, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for for animated depictions of graphic nudity. Running time: 87 minutes; shorts are in French, Japanese and English, with subtitles where appropriate. 

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Oscar-nominated short films — live-action

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 14, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for for scenes of violence and language. Running time: 103 minutes; shorts are in English, Hindi, Dutch, Xhosa and Croatian, with subtitles where appropriate.

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Oscar-nominated short films — documentary

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 21, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for for violence and language. Running time: 163 minutes; four shorts are in English, one is in Japanese, with subtitles.