Review: 'The Ugly Stepsister" is a fractured fairy tale that shows the fear guiding Cinderella's antagonist toward disaster

Spare a thought for the plight of the fairy tale stepsister — who, as depicted in writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s subversively grotesque “The Ugly Stepsister,” is under a lot of pressure and hits the breaking point.

In this disturbing mix of medieval misogyny and body horror from Norway, we are introduced to Elvira (Lea Myren), a teen girl who has a crush on her kingdom’s prince, Julian (Isac Calmroth), whom she knows only from his published book of love poems. Elvira’s image of Julian is of a perfect boyfriend, tender and loving, ready to sweep up a fair maiden in his arms, even if she’s got braces on her teeth, as Elvira does.

Elvira’s mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), marries Otto (Ralph Carlsson), thinking he’s got enough money to solve the family’s financial problems. Elvira figures out Otto is broke, but unfortunately that’s just after Otto has keeled over dead at dinner. Rebekka reluctantly takes Otto’s beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), under their roof, but soon the stepmother is treating Agnes like a servant — and given her an unflattering nickname: Cinderella.

Word spreads from the castle that Julian is inviting all young virgins to a ball, where he will choose among them to be his bride. Through the kingdom, the competition becomes fierce to find ways to impress Julian, which is why Rebekka has rushed Elvira to the Shrek-universe version of a plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), to remove her braces and take a chisel to her slightly imperfect nose.

Elvira and Agnes are enrolled in a finishing school to learn the social graces, like dancing ballet — presented here as a way to display one’s femininity. Rebekka bribes the school’s headmistress, Miss Sophia (Cecelia Forss), to help Elvira get through, and it’s Sophia who gives Elvira a secret weapon to lose weight: A tapeworm egg.

Blichfeldt imagines the rivalry between Cinderella and her stepsister not as a head-to-head competition for the charming prince, as the common fairy tale narrative tells us. Here, the conflict is a forced competition of survival, set up by the scheming Rebekka and by a society that will only tolerate one kind of princess — blonde, thin, demure and unrealistically beautiful. Elvira is obsessed with landing Julian, but it’s an obsession build on fear of rejection of both the kingdom’s noblemen but also the rejection from her own mother.

The body horror elements build slowly, but do escalate fairly quickly. The gory effects don’t reach the bloody excess of, say, “The Substance,” but there are moments when the audience is likely to wince at something Elvira has done to maintain her beauty secrets. Those scenes punctuate the brutal unfairness foisted on these characters, an ocean and a couple centuries away from us — but as real and as sympathetic as your neighbor.

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‘The Ugly Stepsister’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and soon streaming on Shudder. Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore, some sexuality and language. Running time: 110 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.

Review: 'Drop' keeps the thrills going in a confined space, thanks to a sharp script and Meghann Fahy's emotion-packed performance

The thriller “Drop” is a fast-paced nail-biter that shows again that Christopher Landon — the guy who directed “Happy Death Day” and “Freaky” — is the master of movies whose basic premise can be written on a cocktail napkin.

Meet Violet (Meghann Fahy) a widow, whose late husband, Blake (Michael Shea, seen in flashbacks) was physically and emotionally abusive. Now she’s a therapist, specializing in helping women who were abused like her. On this night, four years after her husband’s death — the details of which will become important later — she’s going out for a date for the first time, with Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer who works for the mayor. Violet’s sister, Jen (Violett Beane), is babysitting Violet’s 5-year-old son, Toby (Jacob Robinson). 

The date seems to be going well, because Henry is charming and puts Violet at ease. If only her phone would stop buzzing with unsolicited drops. They’re annoying at first, but get threatening — with the unseen person on the other end displaying video from Violet’s home security system, and the masked gunman already in her kitchen. The texts tell her what she must do to keep the gunman from killing Toby: She must kill her date.

The bulk of the movie, written by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, follows Violet as she tries to stall for time as she sizes up the people in the rooftop restaurant to figure out who might be sending the texts. Among the possible suspects: The improv-comic waiter (Jeffery Self), the leering piano player (Ed Weeks), the sympathetic bartender (Gabrielle Ryan), the older man (Reed Diamond) there on a blind date, the tech bro (Travis Nelson) who’s suspiciously alone, or the table of teens going to the prom. 

None of this works without Fahy, familiar to fans of “The White Lotus’” second season or the pre-pandemic Freeform series “The Bold Type.” Here, Fahy gets to run through a lot of emotions — fear and sadness when her husband is abusing her, guilt and resolve as she rebuilds her life and her therapist practice, and glimmers of hope when she meets Henry, and anger and steely determination as she works to escape the threats of her telephone tormenter.

Landon embraces the inherent tension of creating a thriller all set in the confined space of the restaurant, where Violet can see everyone else and vice versa. Superimposing the words of the texts on the walls around Violet just adds to the claustrophobia. Unfortunately, Landon can’t sustain that constricted feeling for the whole run, and the action kind of goes off the rails outside the restaurant. By then, the audience is committed enough to “Drop,” and invested in seeing Violet get out of this mess, that we’re forgiving of a disjointed conclusion.

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‘Drop’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, suicide, some strong language and sexual references. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Warfare' puts its cast and the viewer in the middle of battle, in a harrowing depiction of combat during the Iraq War

I’ve never served in the military or seen combat close-up, so I can’t say definitively that writer-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland put viewers in the middle of the fray in their movie “Warfare” — but they create moments of chaos, blood and pain that are as close as I or any other civilian likely will want to be to the fight.

Mendoza served in a Navy SEAL sniper unit during the Iraq War, and the story told here is based on his memory of that time in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. There’s a character named Ray, played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (from “Reservation Dogs”), who is providing what appears to be Mendoza’s P.O.V. He’s usually the one on the radio, reporting the situation to superiors back at base and relaying orders from above.

The mission seems simple: Commandeer a house and set up a sniper post that has eyes and rifles trained on an open-air marketplace nearby. Of course, in combat, nothing is simple — and the unit must move the Iraqi families living in the house into a back room while they set up their observation area.

Then there’s gunfire and one word yelled into the sniper’s space: “Grenade!”

In that moment, one sniper is wounded sufficiently that an armored personnel carrier, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, is called in to take the injured man to safety. But when the Bradley gets there, an IED is set off. More damage, more injuries, more carnage and more chaos.

Garland, who last directed “Civil War,” brings the technical firepower to make the fake carnage look and feel as real as he can. Mendoza, who was Garland’s military consultant on “Civil War,” is here to provide his on-the-ground recollection of what that should look and feel like.

The viewer may recognize some of the actors playing SEALs and other military men here, like Will Poulter (“Death of a Unicorn”), Joseph Quinn (“A Quiet Place: Day One”), Charles Melton (“May/December”) or Michael Gandolfini (“The Many Saints of New Jersey”). Others will be less familiar. 

Mendoza and Garland (who directed “Civil War,” for which Mendoza was a military consultant) don’t provide backstories for these guys, and if you catch someone’s name, largely It’s incidental. In the dust and sweat and blood, it becomes difficult to tell them apart — and that’s the point.

This isn’t a war movie of your grandparents’ generation, where you knew there would be one farm boy, one guy from Brooklyn, and so on. “Warfare” is about how the camaraderie of the unit — depicted in the first scene, when the men are whooping and hollering at women in leotards in an ‘80s dance-aerobics video — makes these individuals a fighting force, with one shared purpose. That purpose is to do everything to make sure everyone who went out on this mission comes back alive. 

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‘Warfare’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for intense war violence and bloody/grisly images, and language throughout. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'The Amateur' follows Rami Malek as a CIA codebreaker on a revenge spree that's intricate and oddly distant

The spy thriller “The Amateur” takes the old saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” to extremes — as its coldness keeps us from getting to know or feel for star Rami Malek’s vengeance-seeking character.

Malek plays Charlie Heller, a super-nerdy computer expert who works in the deepest depths of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He’s happily married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), and gives her warm hugs and kisses as she heads off to a business trip to London. The movie establishes early that Charlie doesn’t like to travel, more content with puttering with an old Cessna he’s trying to rebuild in the barn behind their house.

We follow Charlie into CIA headquarters, which has the same dynamic as high school. Charlie, whose expertise is encryption and computer hackery, sits with the nerds in the CIA cafeteria. The jocks are the field agents, like one called The Bear, played by Jon Bernthal, who is pals with Charlie. Consider this Chekhov’s Jon Bernthal — if we see Bernthal in the first act, it’s a good bet he’ll come into play in the third act.

One day, Charlie gets called in to see the deputy director, Moore (Holt McCallany), and Director O’Brien (Julianne Nicholson), with horrific news: There’s been a terrorist attack in a London hotel, in which Sarah was taken hostage and then killed.

Charlie uses his computer and surveillance skills to figure out who plotted the attack, and is angry when Moore sits on the information. So he demands from Moore that he be trained to go into the field, to find and kill those who killed his wife. Moore and his aide, Caleb (Danny Sapani), laugh off the request — but then Charlie backs it up with a bit of blackmail, using some intel about some of Moore’s off-the-books operations. Moore decides to play along, figuring that Charlie will either give up or get himself killed.

Moore assigns a hard-as-nails trainer, Col. Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), to show Charlie how difficult being a killer can be — determining that Charlie doesn’t have the instinct to pull the trigger when necessary. When Charlie slips Henderson’s custody and heads to Paris to pursue the terrorists, Moore puts Henderson on his trail. But Charlie proves to be cagier than anticipated, telling Henderson during one encounter, “Do you ever account for the things I’m good at?”

Director James Hawes — whose career mostly has been in TV, most recently on the first season of “Slow Horses” — and screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli adapt Robert Littell’s novel into essentially a geek version of a Jason Bourne movie. Charlie’s route goes through several intriguing locations, from Paris to Istanbul to Romania, where he creatively dispatches the killers, one with a bag of pollen, another in a rooftop swimming pool.

Unfortunately, because Hawes presents the action in such a cool, calculating way, and because Malek so internalizes his character’s emotional state, we’re never let in on Charlie’s emotions as he carries out his mission. Even the big confrontation with the terrorist ringleader (Michael Stuhlbarg) comes off as remote, a damp ending to what could have been a firecracker of a thriller.

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‘The Amateur’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, and language. Running time: 123 minutes.

Review: 'One to One' captures John Lennon and Yoko Ono in concert, and working out in public how to use their fame for positive change

Director Kevin MacDonald’s documentary “One to One: John & Yoko” pinpoints a crucial passage in the shared lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono — a time when the ex-Beatle was feeling his way through the applications of his fame, and relying on his wife and artistic collaborator as his north star.

It’s 1971, and Lennon and Ono have just moved from London to a tiny two-bedroom apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. The apartment — which MacDonald has re-created for illustrative purposes — is dominated by a large bed with a TV set at the end. Lennon and Ono would spend good parts of the day in this bed, watching TV and gathering an understanding of both the news and the culture of the United States.

Lennon is looking for an outlet for his social-justice beliefs, with quiet guidance from Ono. With the war in Vietnam raging, they look toward the anti-war movement, and for a time connect with such notable of the time as the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, Beat poet Allen Ginsburg and activist musician David Peel. There’s talk of a tour, combining music and political activism, and possibly enlisting Bob Dylan — but that falls apart when Lennon and Ono become disillusioned by Rubin’s violent radicalism.

The couple gets involved in the campaign to free activist John Sinclair, facing a 10-year prison sentence for possessing two joints. Lennon tags along with Ono to a feminist conference — and we hear Ono talk candidly about how the pressure from Beatles fans and vitriol from the press were so damaging to her mental health that she developed a stutter.

Finally, it’s Geraldo Rivera, of all people, who brought an issue to Lennon and Ono that they felt they could do something about. The couple was watching TV in bed, and saw Rivera do an exposé about the horrible living conditions at Willowbrook, a school for children with intellectual disabilities on Staten Island. Lennon and Ono decided the way they could help was to put on a concert to raise money for the school.

The concert, called “One to One” because it aimed to raise money for one-to-one teaching for each child there, was the only full-length concert Lennon performed between leaving The Beatles and his murder in 1980. It’s a hell of a show, and MacDonald uses the footage generously, showing performances of such songs as “Instant Karma,” “Give Peace a Chance” and “Come Together.”

Sometimes the songs play as backdrop for other footage. The most poignant example comes when MacDonald shows footage from a day trip organized for the Willowbrook kids in Central Park, a chance for them to enjoy the sunshine and the grass, to feel love and connection with the volunteer teachers chaperoning them. Accompanying these scenes is “Imagine,” and the pairing blows the cobwebs off that overused song, reminding us of the power and hope Lennon and Ono infused in it.

There’s ample footage of Lennon and Ono speaking for themselves. They appeared on a lot of talk shows, including an infamous week as guest co-hosts of “The Mike Douglas Show,” exposing afternoon homemakers to the likes of Rubin and the Black Panthers. There’s also audio of Lennon on the phone with various people; Lennon started recording his phone calls, he said because he suspected the FBI was bugging his phone so he’d like his own copy of what they were hearing. 

The TV at the end of the bed becomes a framing device, as MacDonald uses a steady barrage of video images — Tupperware commercials, “Sonny & Cher” clips, news footage of Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign, and so on — to fill us in on the historical timeline and capture the mood of the day. 

“One to One: John & Yoko” may not deliver new information to many fans. For the casual follower of the lives of Lennon and Ono, a couple things stand out. One is an appreciation for Ono, both for her talent — her vocals were punk rock, years before that was a thing — and for her resilience against the haters. The other is watching how Lennon and Ono, two of the most famous people on the planet in 1972, were developing their shared political consciousness in front of the cameras of the world, with stumbling steps and open hearts.

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‘One to One: John & Yoko’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, at Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville) and Megaplex Geneva (Vineyard). Rated R for graphic nudity, some violent content, drug use and language. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'The King of Kings' tells Jesus' story to children through elegant animation, hindered by an unnecessary framing device

I don’t remember my old parish priest saying that the story of Jesus needed an adorable cat — but that’s one of the extraneous frills in “The King of Kings,” a computer-animated account from the Gospels that interrupts the telling of Christ’s story with too much comic relief aimed at keeping the little viewers invested.

Made by a South Korean animation house, Mofac Studios, the movie delivers some handsomely realized depictions of stories from the New Testament — Jesus’ birth in a Bethlehem manger, some familiar miracles and parables, his arrival in Jerusalem, the Last Supper, his crucifixion and resurrection. Oscar Isaac, providing the voice of Jesus, captures the import of his words and the serenity as he gets closer to his preordained death. 

And if those scenes were all “The King of Kings” were about, you’d have a nice collection of illustrated Bible stories — with an impressive voice cast that includes Forest Whitaker as Peter, Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate, Ben Kingsley as the high priest Caiaphas, and Mark Hamill as King Herod.

The problem that writer-director Seongho Jang adds to the mix is the framing story, about Charles Dickens and his family. Dickens (voiced by Kenneth Branagh) performs a one-man show of “A Christmas Carol,” but his kids backstage are too rambunctious. So, after one show, Charles brings his King Arthur-obsessed youngest son, Walter (voiced by “Jojo Rabbit” co-star Roman Griffin Davis), into the study to tell him a story about a real king, “the king of kings.” Walter and his cute computer-animated cat are meant to be the young audience’s conduit into the biblical tale, but too often they come off as an annoying distraction.

“The King of Kings” is distributed in the United States by Provo-based Angel Studios, whose main contribution is in its marketing. The last sales pitch comes over the closing credits, with a QR code and video testimonials from kids about the movie we’ve just watched, urging viewers to buy tickets online to give to other people who might want to see it. It’s the same set-up Angel has been using since its breakout hit, “Sound of Freedom” — a promotion that sounds like altruism, but notably isn’t tax deductible.

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‘The King of Kings’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters. Rated PG for thematic material, violent content and some scary moments. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Freaky Tales' is a kaleidoscopic blend of ferocious storytelling and comical violence

“Freaky Tales” is a vibe — a “Pulp Fiction”-style amalgam of comically gory set pieces — and you’re either into it or not. I was definitely into it, riding on its giddy storytelling wave.

Director-writers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden — whose careers have veered from Sundance darlings (“Half Nelson”) to the MCU (“Captain Marvel”) — tell four interconnected stories set in Oakland, Calif., in May 1987. The common threads of the four tales are bloodshed, the Golden State Warriors’ epic playoff showdown with the Los Angeles Lakers, and a weird green glow that supposedly permeates what locals call The Town.

• The first chapter shows a group of punks standing up for their club against attacks from a group of skinheads, and the budding romance between two of the punks, Lucid (Jack Champion, from “Avatar: The Way of Water”) and Tina (Ji-young Yoo) 

• Chapter 2 introduces Barbie (Dominique Thorne) and Entice (Normani), who work at an ice cream shop by day and enter a battle-rap at night against an Oakland legend, Too Short.

• In the third story, Clint (Pedro Pascal), the muscle for a shadowy figure referred to as “the guy,” who aims to exit the bone-breaking racket to be with his very pregnant wife (Natalia Dominguez) — but a visit to a video-rental store proves fateful.

• And, finally, a story with the title “The Legend of Sleepy Floyd,” referring to the Warriors star (played by Jay Ellis) and his performance on and off the court.

Fleck and Boden have written a tight script, where offhand comments early on turn out to be seeds planted for later twists, where even a random movie reference becomes significant. They have fun playing with visual styles to evoke the ‘80s period — the aspect ratio changes from chapter to chapter, with some showing the static of old VHS tapes while others have “cigarette burns” to mark the reel changes. And they get support from a cast that includes Ben Mendelsohn as an obnoxious cop and Angus Cloud (who died in July 2023) as a heist organizer. 

Like I said, “Freaky Tales” may not be for everyone. The first and fourth chapters evoke levels of stylized violence reminiscent of “Sin City” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” while also riffing on classic martial arts movies. If you’re on its wavelength, though, it’s a blast.

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‘Freaky Tales’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 4, in theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, language throughout including slurs, sexual content and drug use. Running time: 107 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this website on January 21, 2024, when the movie premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' is a whimsical story of music and nostalgia, and an introduction to a sharp British comedy duo

Providing dry humor in a damp place, the British comedy “The Ballad of Wallis Island” dances effortlessly between whimsy and melancholy with a story of two men looking for a way to restart their lives.

Herb McGwyer (played by Tom Basden) is a folk singer whose best years are in his past — at least a dozen years, when he harmonized beautifully with his singing and romantic partner, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan).  Today, he’s making schlocky dance-pop, and needs an infusion of cash to get his next album off the ground.

Charles Heath (played by Tim Key) has that cash, and he’s paying half-a-million pounds for Herb to come to his remote island for a private gig. The audience, Charles tells Herb, is “less than 100” — and, eventually, Charles admits that it’s 99 less than 100, because it’s just Charles.

Something else Charles hasn’t told Herb yet: He’s also invited Nell, who arrives on the island with her bird-watcher husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen). Nell has left the music business, and makes jams she sells at the Portland farmers’ market, and is equally taken aback by Charles’ attempt at creating a reunion of McGwyer Mortimer — whose albums and cassettes fill Charles’ music collection.

Basden and Key wrote the script, based on characters they created for a 2007 short film directed by James Griffith, who reunited with the lads 18 years later for this feature-length version. Basden also wrote the folk songs that Herb performs, with Mulligan’s Nell and without.

The droll chemistry between Basden and Key in their frequent scenes together suggests a comedic collaboration on the order of Fry & Laurie. These two know each other’s rhythms, and let their characters — the jaded musician and the socially awkward millionaire — play against each other in beautiful ways. Throw in Mulligan, who grounds the comedy with a bracing dose of sensibility and charm, and the results are quietly magical.

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‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for some language and smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.