Review: 'Clown in a Cornfield' is a horror comedy that delivers the blood with a justified sense of irony

The title really says it all: “Clown in a Cornfield.” Read it cold, without any preparation, and you’d guess that it’s a horror movie — but what you wouldn’t guess is that it’s a pretty good one, working within and sometimes toying with the parameters of the teen slasher movie.

High school senior Quinn (Katie Douglas) is not pleased that she and her dad (Aaron Abrams) have relocated to the small town of Kettle Springs, Missouri, which is economically depressed ever since a fire destroyed the town’s main industry, a corn syrup factory. But Quinn soon befriends some of her classmates, who spend their spare time making YouTube videos in which they have reimagined the factory’s happy mascot, Frendo the Clown, into a psychotic killer.

Quinn gets a fright the first time the other teens surprise her with a Frendo jump-scare. But when a couple of the teens are murdered bloodily, Quinn realizes someone else is using Frendo for their own nasty purposes. Unfortunately, Quinn’s new friends — led by the swoon-inducing Cole (Carson MacCormac) — have a reputation for mischief, and neither Sheriff Dunn (Will Sasso) or the town’s leading businessman, Mr. Hill (Kevin Durant), believe them. (I should mention that Mr. Hill is Cole’s father.)

Then director Eli Craig — whose first movie was the clever horror-comedy “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” — and co-writer Carter Blanchard up the stakes, and the chances for mayhem, with a twist I will not spoil.

Craig finds a nice balance between scary and silly in this gore-fest. The horror set pieces are smartly staged, and the teen heroes are engaging. That’s especially true of Douglas, who has a pleasant Jenna Ortega vibe and could easily graduate to bigger things after this. 

Needless to say, if horror’s not your bag, there’s nothing in “Clown in a Cornfield” that’s going to change your position. But for lovers of meat-and-potatoes slasher movies, it delivers with a dose of ironic detachment.

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‘Clown in a Cornfield’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 9, in theaters. Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout and teen drinking. Running time: 97 minutes.

Review: 'Secret Mall Apartment' captures a clever artists' project, but doesn't go deep into why it happened

The documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” captures how a group of artists created a space to live, and simulate a home, in an unused space in a New England shopping mall — but the movie is so intent on showing how they did it, they give short shrift to the question of why they did it.

The project started in 2003, shortly after the Providence Place Mall opened in Providence, Rhode Island. Eight people — Michael Townsend, an art teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design, and some friends and students, along with his then-wife, Ardriana Valdez-Young — found the space, in a corner created by the mall’s odd architecture, where they could set up a place of their own. 

Of course, they have a cheap camera to capture their actions on video, the footage from which director Jeremy Workman uses to tell much of the story.

The artists string an extension cord to bring electricity to the space. They go to the Salvation Army thrift store for a couch and other furniture. And, most importantly, they figure out how to get in with these bulky items without attracting the attention of the mall’s security team.

Through interviews with the artists themselves, Workman captures the excitement and adventure of their hidden art project, as the eight of them describe their close calls and their life hacks — like the amount of movie-theater popcorn they ate while staying there.

Townsend is essentially the hero of the piece, and Workman devotes a great deal of time to what’s essentialy the art teacher’s day job: Creating murals out of masking tape for the local children’s hospital, and teaching the young patients to join in — creating a bit of whimsy and joy in a sad and scary place. 

But when Workman could dig a bit deeper, asking Townsend and the others to explore what was behind the apartment project — beyond the facile discussions of gentrification, urban blight and rampant capitalism — the movie instead becomes a parody of itself. The second half of the documentary consists of an effort by the production to duplicate the apartment on a soundstage, a move that’s too cutesy for the movie’s own good. In the end, the real secrets of “Secret Mall Apartment” remain frustratingly underexplored.

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‘Secret Mall Apartment’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 9, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for language and some references to drug use. Running time: 92 minutes.

Review: 'Another Simple Favor' brings Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively back for martinis and murder, but the mix of comedy and blood doesn't sparkle this time

There’s a lot I will tolerate in order to watch Anna Kendrick having fun as she tears into a comedic role — and there’s a lot one must tolerate surrounding Kendrick in “Another Simple Favor,” a mishmash of martini-swigging comedy and bloody murder mystery that doesn’t quite get the recipe right.

Director Paul Feig got that balance perfect in 2018’s “A Simple Favor,” in which Kendrick played Stephanie Smothers, suburban mom and baking vlogger — now we’d say “influencer,” I suppose — who becomes fascinated with a sophisticated new mom at her son’s school, Emily (Blake Lively). When Emily disappears, Stephanie became neighborhood sleuth, though she took time out for a romp in the sheets with Emily’s novelist husband, Sean (Henry Golding). 

You may remember — and if you didn’t, I’m about to spoil a 7-year-old movie — that Emily faked her own death by killing her secret twin sister. And she would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling Stephanie.

The new movie starts with Stephanie, who has graduated online from baking videos to true-crime case-solving, at a bookstore reading for her first book — which is all about her strange encounter with Emily. Who should walk in to the reading but the recently sprung-from-prison Emily. Stephanie fears Emily is seeking revenge, but her request is even more unsettling: Emily wants Stephanie to be her maid of honor at her destination wedding in Capri.

Stephanie takes the trip, still suspicious of Emily – but soon discovering there’s a lot more she should be suspicious about. Like the fact that Emily’s fiancé, Dante (Michele Morrone), is apparently part of the Mafia, and that the family’s matriarch, Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci), vocally despises her prospective daughter-in-law. Or the fact that Emily’s estranged mom (Elizabeth Perkins) shows up, seemingly in the throes of dementia, accompanied by Emily’s previously unseen Aunt, Linda (Allison Janney), who’s way too nice to be real. Or the fact that her son, Nicky (Ian Ho), is being chaperoned by Emily’s now ex-husband, Sean, who’s frequently soused.

With all this animosity brewing under the Mediterranean sun, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the movie’s first murder isn’t too far away. But who? And why? That’s what Stephanie wants to figure out — in part because the incompetent Caprese police detective in charge (Max Malatesta) thinks she’s the killer.

The script, by Jessica Sharzer — who adapted Darcey Bell’s novel for the first movie — and Laeta Kalogridis (“Alita: Battle Angel”), doesn’t have the same heady fizz of its predecessor. Emily’s sinister banter has more of a nasty edge, without being as smart. And the writers rely too much on chemical enhancement (gin in one scene, truth serum in another) to make Stephanie artificially ditzy for comical effect.

Kendrick and Lively are clearly enjoying their characters’ love-hate relationship, and both performers get some nice moments where both Emily and Stephanie think they’ve got everything figured out. But if one person involved in this movie has nailed the assignment, it’s costume designer Renée Ehrlich Kalfus, another crew member returning from the first movie, who finds gorgeous couture — especially for Lively — that is both drop-dead sexy and hilariously too much.

For most of the movie, I was on the fence about whether I was enjoying it. Then there’s a big twist at the end — which is both outlandish and tiresomely predictable, and shows how desperate everyone involved was to figure out the secret sauce that made the first movie so enjoyable. That twist knocked me off the fence and into the “no” camp, in spite of Kendrick’s charms. 

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‘Another Simple Favor’

★★1/2

Available Thursday, May 1, streaming on Prime. Rated R for violence, sexual content, nudity, language throughout, and suicide. Running time: 120 minutes.

Review: 'The Surfer' is a psychedelic psychological drama, and a showcase for Nicolas Cage's brand of weird

There are a lot of questions posed in director Lorcan Finnegan’s sun-baked psychological thriller “The Surfer” asks — about pride and family and toxic masculinity — but even more questions that are answered simply by saying, “It’s a Nicolas Cage movie.”

Cage plays the nameless protagonist, a businessman who aims to show his teen son (Finn Little) the Australian surfing bay where he first learned to ride a board. When they get to the beach, though, they’re harassed by a trio of snotty teens, and then threatened by some muscular locals, whose menacing mantra is “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.” The leader of this group, an alpha male guru named Scally (played by Julian McMahon, formerly of “Nip/Tuck”), delivers a calmly emasculating warning that Cage and son should bugger off.

Cage, though, doesn’t want to back down, and Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin (on his first feature) gradually show us why. Cage is desperate to buy a house overlooking this bay, the house he grew up in before his father’s death. He’s leveraged his fortune, and jeopardized his job to close the sale. He’s also alienated his wife, now ex-wife, and his son in the process.

His character’s desperation and the merciless December sun (it’s near Christmas in the southern hemisphere) lead our protagonist to do some stupid things — like letting the battery on his Lexus die, or losing custody of his surfboard, phone and shoes. Everyone, from the carpark barista (Adam Sollis) to the local cop (Justin Rosniak), seems to be in on the conspiracy to send Cage’s character packing. And the longer he stays, the more he starts to resemble the poor homeless man (Nic Cassim) who blames Scally for his son’s disappearance.

Finnegan turns the plight of Cage’s character into a psychedelic journey through hell, often filmed with shimmering camera effects to approximate a bad acid trip. Of course, this is a perfect setting for Cage, an actor who delights in such an emotional wasteland and turns it into his sandbox. “The Surfer” is a showcase for the glories and excesses of Cage’s brand of acting.

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‘The Surfer’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 2, in theaters. Rated R for language, suicide, some violence, drug content and sexual material. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Bonjour Tristesse' is a luscious summertime drama, showing a 19-year-old's heartbreaking view of love and jealousy

The quietly brooding protagonist of the darkly romantic drama “Bonjour Tristesse” is — like author Françoise Sagan, who wrote the 1954 novel being adapted here — a 19-year-old woman. And writer-director Durga Chew-Bose shows, in sumptuous detail, why a woman that young isn’t the most reliable judge of emotional states, including her own.

Lily McInerny, a young actor to watch, plays Cécile, who’s enjoying a summer vacation at a seaside French villa with her father, Raymond (Claes Bang), and Raymond’s current girlfriend, Elsa (Nailia Harzoune), a vivacious dancer. Cécile’s mother died several years ago, and both Cécile and Raymond have felt the void in their lives ever since.

Raymond is an indulgent father, letting Cécile do pretty much anything she wants to do on this vacation. That includes neglecting her school work ahead of fall exams, and not interfering as Cécile enjoys her first sexual relationship, with Cyril (Aliocha Schneider), who’s about 22 and the son of their neighbor and friend, Nathalie (Nathalie Richard).

A couple weeks into this vacation, Raymond announces that they’ll be getting a visitor: Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a famous fashion designer and an old friend of Cécile’s mother from their college days. At first, Cécile is a little intimidated by Anne, who’s very composed and tough to read. It doesn’t take long for Cécile to become fascinated by Anne, who shows Cécile her sketchbook and shows an interest in Cécile’s creative side.

Then, outside a fancy party, Cécile learns a secret: That Anne and Raymond have fallen in love — or possibly fallen back in love, after decades apart. Soon Elsa is packing her bag, and Raymond is announcing that he and Anne are engaged. Cécile decides she doesn’t like this, and works out a plot to stop the wedding from happening — and the consequences of that decision fill the rest of this drama.

Chew-Bose makes an assured debut as writer and director, setting a languid pace that matches the rhythms of a romantic summer vacation, where things play out slowly and sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly all at once. This trajectory gives us moments where we just luxuriate on the rocky shore with Cécile and Cyril, or lounge in the villa with Raymond and Elsa, or sip wine on the patio with Raymond and Anne. Don’t mistake those moments as quiet or dull, because there’s so much emotion bubbling just under the surface.

And, like I said before, keep your eyes on McInerny, who’s stunning as the mercurial young Cécile. “Bonjour Tristesse” is only McInerny’s second movie — the first was the 2022 Sundance Film Festival drama “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” where she played a teen being groomed by a much older man — and she perfectly embodies the unbridled confidence and inner doubts of a teen who thinks they know everything and finds out tragically that they don’t. 

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‘Bonjour Tristesse’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 2, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for some sexuality. Running time: 110 minutes; in English and in French with subtitles.

Review: 'Thunderbolts*' gives a necessary jolt of emotion and psychological menace to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

With “Thunderbolts*,” the Marvel Cinematic Universe dives into some intriguing and ultimately fulfilling new territory — mixing the psychological and the surreal with the usual superhero stuff, making for the most unpredictable and character driven MCU entry in a long while.

Of course, what it says on the box isn’t quite so promising. We’ve been told we’re getting a showdown of some of the MCU’s most hardened anti-heroes — selfish loners with tactical experience and a sarcastic streak. In other words, Marvel’s version of DC Comics’ “Suicide Squad.”

But Marvel’s brain trust — and director Jake Schreier (“Paper Towns”) — has something else on their collective minds, with a storyline that explores what it means to be a superhero. Sometimes, it takes someone who’s nobody’s idea of a hero. As the movie’s ostensible villain, corrupt CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), says at one point, “there are bad guys and there are worse guys.”

Valentina, who’s in the middle of her own impeachment hearing, is busy trying to erase the evidence of her shadow operations in the CIA, and her previous career in a corporation doing some nasty medical experiments. She has a few paid operatives doing her dirty work — and the first we see is Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the former Russian super-spy and undercover “sister” of Scarlett Johansson’s late Natasha Romonoff. (A rewatch of “Black Widow” might be helpful if you don’t remember all the characters.)

When Yelena tells Valentina she wants out, Valentina gets her to agree to one last job — taking out a rival baddie in an underground bunker. Once inside, Yelena finds that while she’s targeting Ava Starr, aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who can phase through walls, she’s also the target of John Walker (Wyatt Russell), who had a short-lived stint as Captain America. Then there’s a fourth, Antonia Dreykov, alias Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), one of Yelena’s classmates in the Russian assassin school, who’s pursued by Ghost and pursuing Walker.

After a few minutes of beating each other up, they realize that they’ve been set up by Valentina. “We’re the evidence, and this is the shredder,” Yelena says. But there’s someone else in the room that no one, least of all Valentina, suspects: A somewhat dazed civilian who identifies himself as Bob (played by Lewis Pullman).

Two other characters we know also play important roles here. One is Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), once the Red Guardian, the Soviet version of Captain America, and Yelena’s pretend father. The other is the former Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), a freshman congressman struggling to work within the system to take down Valentina — and working to convince Valentina’s morally conflicted assistant (Geraldine Viswanathan) to testify against her boss.

That’s as much information as you need going into “Thunderbolts*,” which makes everything clear — even that hard-to-type asterisk — in due course. What’s fascinating, as Schreier navigates a compelling script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, is how much tension can be built up by not knowing how a character is going to act in a stressful situation, something that’s never an issue when Cap or Thor is the main player. 

It helps that the MCU has hired some solid actors in these not-so-heroic characters. Harbour and Stan are good at playing bad-asses with underlying charms, and Louis-Dreyfus shows the gap between her conniving character in “Veep” and a manipulative supervillain is a small one. But Pugh is the most compelling member of the cast, revealing in Yelena a sensitive heart in spite of the many shocks that her deadly profession has delivered to it.

The least interesting part of “Thunderbolts*” is the post-credit scene that ties an engrossing standalone movie to the rest of the MCU timeline. Such scenes, and nearly every MCU movie has one, take away the goodwill the movie has gathered from its audience, and reminds you that it’s all about commerce. Don’t think about this movie any more, those post-credit scenes tell us, and get ready for the next product off the assembly line — which, in this case, is “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” on July 25.

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‘Thunderbolts*’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 2, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for strong violence, language, thematic elements, and some suggestive and drug references. Running time: 126 minutes.

Review: 'The Accountant 2' gives Ben Affleck his action-star franchise, and all it cost him was any sense of coherence

The people in Hollywood who get worked up about A.I. replacing screenwriters should relax for a minute — because the brutal action sequel “The Accountant 2” proves, hack writers have been churning out formulaic crap like this before computers were invented.

In case you don’t remember — and I didn’t until I looked up my review from 2016 — this franchise centers on Christian Wolff, an accountant who has something called acquired savant syndrome (don’t Google the acronym), which gives him uncanny abilities to crunch numbers and outsmart algorithms. He’s also socially awkward, to the point where one might suspect he’s on the autism spectrum. (In the first movie, the script mentions autism, but no one does here, which may be an indication of how much more medical science knows about autism.) 

You may also remember, though I didn’t, that in the first movie a Treasury Department agent (J.K. Simmons) and his protege (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) were on Wolff’s trail — which crosses paths with an assassin, Brax (Jon Bernthal), who turns out to be Wolff’s brother. 

It would help to remember those details, because it might have given viewers a chance at understanding the sequel’s emotional stakes — something director Gavin O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque, both returning from the first film, neglect to do throughout this movie.

In the opening sequence, Simmons’ Ray King is retired from the government but occasionally taking cases as a private investigator. For his current case, trying to locate a missing Salvadoran couple and their child, he asks for help from Anaïs (Daniella Pineda), a contract killer. Before he gets far, a gang of gunmen start shooting, and King ends up dead, making Simmons the luckiest man in this movie. 

King’s last act is to write a note on his arm: “Find the Accountant.” King’s old protege, Agent Marybeth Medina, is shown this message and understands what it means. Medina has moved her way up in the ranks at Treasury — though, it’s mentioned, she’s gotten tips from the mysterious network that supports Wolff’s endeavors. That network was a mystery held until the end of the first movie, and seeing it regularly in the sequel spoils the fun.

Agent Medina gets in touch with Wolff, who’s still living in an Airstream trailer with a small arsenal in the back. Wolff helps Medina sort through the clues King left behind, and gets some information about who Anaïs is — though Wolff’s methods, such as beating up suspects and having his network hack people’s computers undetected, go against her straight-arrow law enforcement sensibilities.

When the trail becomes littered with a few dead bodies, Wolff calls him some help from Brax, who’s still working as a hitman. The brothers haven’t spoken in years, which means Dubuque gets to load up on sibling distrust wrapped in action-movie bickering.

If you thought the first movie, with its arcane dive into math intercut with random bursts of gunplay, was nonsensical, you haven’t seen anything yet. “The Accountant 2” is breathtaking in the randomness of its plot points, which would start to make sense only if the filmmakers are trying to set up Wolff and his shadow network of savants as their own “X-Men” cohort.

The only reason I can see for “The Accountant 2” existing is that Affleck, who’s one of the movie’s producers, decided he wanted his own version of the “John Wick” franchise — and this mishmash based on his 2016 movie was the best option available. The problem with this sequel, one that a good accountant like Wolff would find shameful, is that nothing adds up.

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‘The Accountant 2’

★★

Opens Friday, April 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, and language throughout. Running time: 125 minutes.

Review: 'The Legend of Ochi' brings a modern fantasy tale to vivid life, with puppetry and Helena Zengel's luminous performance

Folklore and fantasy intertwine beautifully in “The Legend of Ochi,” an eccentric and wonder-filled children’s adventure that grown-ups may come to appreciate even more than their kids.

Writer-director Isaiah Saxton, making a sure-footed feature debut, starts on a remote island in Carpathia, where teen girl Yuri (Helena Zengel) has grown up in a house full of boys – all trainees in the hunting squad maintained by her father, Maxim (Willem Dafoe). Maxim trains the boys to hunt down the elusive and fear-inducing creatures called Ochi, which live in hiding on the island.

One day, Yuri discovers that a baby Ochi has hidden in her knapsack and come home with her. In her bedroom, Yuri soon discovers that Ochi aren’t the terrifying creatures Maxim has taught her they are. So she decides to strike out on her own, to return the baby Ochi to its tribe. To do that, she needs help — from her estranged mom, Dasha (Emily Watson), who lives in a cabin far up into the mountains.

Meanwhile, Maxim, thinking that the Ochi have kidnapped Yuri, assembles his young hunters into a search party — with his most trusted protege, Petro (Finn Wolfhard), leading the way. What Maxim doesn’t realize is that Petro might be harboring a crush on Yuri.

Saxton spins the events in Ochi like a fairy tale, sometimes following the dream logic of folktale. He also tosses Yuri, and us, into the fray and lets us figure out the complex backstory of the Ochi as we go. Saxton undoubtedly wrote Tolkien-sized amounts of lore to make the Ochi story complete, but he’s smart enough not to show all of his homework.

Most spectacularly, Saxton deploys some master puppeteers to make the Ochi look realistic, both in their expressions and movement. Making these creatures interact with Zengel (who’s grown more talented since her breakout role opposite Tom Hanks in “News of the World”) is like witnessing magic in real time.

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‘The Legend of Ochi’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for violent content, a bloody image, smoking, thematic elements and some language. Running time: 96 minutes.