Review: 'Hurry Up Tomorrow' is a disaster of a music movie, a vanity project for The Weeknd with abstract visuals and jumbled storytelling

Somewhere between failed experiment and vanity project sits “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a tediously arty mess of a movie in which the fledgling actor Abel Tesfaye — better known to the world as the musical star The Weeknd — tries to get you to buy his album while also arguing how horrible it is to be a rock star.

Tesfaye’s character here happens to be called The Weeknd, and he’s an internationally famous performer who fills arenas with adoring fans wanting to hear his sing his songs. Backstage, though, he’s a miserable mess, listening to the voice message left behind by the woman who’s leaving him. There’s an entourage just out of view, and the only person we see on The Weeknd’s side is his smarmy Irish manager, played by Barry Keoghan.

As director Trey Edward Shults (“Waves,” “It Comes at Night,” “Krisha”) follows The Weeknd through his self-inflicted spiral of depression, he also follows another character — played by Jenna Ortega — whose connection to the rocker is not clear. This woman, called Amina in the credits and nowhere else, is busy walking through a remote house in Montana, pouring out a can of gasoline and setting it on fire.

Shults spends a long time creating artfully abstract images of Tesfaye in his funk, while Ortega’s character drives away from the burning house and into the night. The script — by Shults, Tesfaye and Reza Fahim — is so vague that a viewer might surmise that Ortega’s character is the woman who was breaking up with The Weeknd via voice message. But, at the 40-minute mark, we see them meet for the first time.

There’s an instant connection, and the two seem to be falling in love without ever saying the words. After a night in a fancy hotel room, away from The Weeknd’s manager, Amina finds The Weeknd to be distant and self-involved — nothing like the man who fell in love with her the night before. Then things take a turn toward Stephen King’s “Misery.”

So, as that synopsis indicates, not much in “Hurry Up Tomorrow” makes a lick of sense. And if you were hoping hearing new cuts from The Weeknd’s new album — for which an ad and a music video are served to viewers before the movie “officially” begins — will find the songs dreary, particularly compared to The Weeknd’s better-known hits, which Amina comically dissects before a tied-up Mr. Weeknd.

Shults is a gifted director, and his arresting imagery works to hold the viewer’s attention when everything else fails to do that. Here’s hoping he will bounce back from this tiresome misfire, which is as much of an endurance test as — if you believe Tesfaye — being a ridiculously famous rock star.

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‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’

★1/2

Opens Friday, May 16, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, some bloody violence and brief nudity. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' lets Tom Cruise deliver the stunts, in a bloated story propped up by callbacks to past installments

Like a good magician, “Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning” does a very good job of misdirection — of putting so many spectacular stunts and cool set pieces in front of the viewer that they will be tempted not to notice the flimsy framework that is barely holding it together.

The eighth installment of the movie franchise, started 29 years ago when star Tom Cruise was a mere lad of 33, is a nearly three-hour effort to wow audiences. It’s also a brazen attempt to gaslight the audience, to make them believe that the three decades of these frenetic, disjointed movies were following some kind of master plan.

It’s breathtakingly impressive that director Christopher McQuarrie, who will now be known for directing the last four movies in this franchise, and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, have cobbled together enough callbacks and returning characters to create a grand facade of continuity. But if you think movie buffs are going to buy the idea that past franchise directors Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird were all conspirators in a grand cohesive narrative, you’ve got another thing coming.

The new movie picks up pretty much where the last movie, subtitled “Dead Reckoning,” left off — with Cruise’s intrepid Ethan Hunt in a bind. An AI program called The Entity has taken over cyberspace, manipulating people’s information, and making them believe the world’s great powers are at each other’s throats. It’s also inspired a doomsday cult that has infiltrated law enforcement and government agencies everywhere. And The Entity’s next step is to breach the security systems of nuclear arsenals in the nine countries that have them. If it weren’t so creepily close to current events, it would be comical.

Ethan is also on the run from, well, everybody — and has gone into hiding in London’s Underground. The only person with enough juice to get a message to him is the president of the United States, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), who, incidentally, been in office since 2018’s “Fallout.” 

Ethan has a daring plan to stop The Entity, a convoluted plot that involves retrieving a box with The Entity’s original source code, pairing it with a digital “poison pill” devised by tech genius Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise to appear in all eight movies), and downloading it into The Entity. 

There are numerous problems with this plan: The box is inside a sunken Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean; Sloane and her top advisers want to keep Ethan locked up; and one of The Entity’s human operatives, Gabriel (Esai Morales), is out for revenge on Ethan. (None of these are spoilers, as they were laid out pretty clearly in “Dead Reckoning.”)

But even getting through this set-up seems to take an eternity — it’s 23 minutes before the title credits appear — in a movie that clocks in a bit shy of three hours. McQuarrie weighs down the exposition with a ton of callbacks, mentioning everything from Jon Voight’s character in the first movie to the bombing of the Kremlin in the fourth, “Ghost Protocol.” There’s one callback that’s actually quite charming, involving an actor named Rolf Saxon, who appeared in the first movie in 1996 and hasn’t been seen since.

All those references to the previous chapters are meant to serve a purpose, to invest Ethan Hunt’s endless lone-wolf battles against evil with an air of destiny — a word that’s overused in the movie’s ponderous dialogue, with many scenes of other characters telling Ethan the fate of the world is, again, on his shoulders.

The story puts us back with Ethan’s support team: Tech expert Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and cop-turned-ally Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). Each gets some interesting bit of business, though they’re mostly there to give Cruise’s Hunt what he needs at the exact moment he needs it to save the world.

When McQuarrie and Cruise dispense with the blah-blah-blah, they move into a series of dynamic set pieces. There are some smartly executed hand-to-hand fight scenes on a U.S. submarine and an Arctic outpost, a nifty bit with Cruise in diving gear on that Russian sub, and a climax involving biplanes that — as the movie’s marketing has already shown us — features Cruise himself hanging on a wing and getting his face whipped by the onrush of air.

The action sequences are a reminder that the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise isn’t a cerebral cat-and-mouse game, the way Bruce Geller’s ‘60s TV series was. It’s a stunt show, which has seen Cruise morph into a do-it-yourself action performer in the spirit of Jackie Chan. Pretending otherwise wastes the filmmakers’ time and the audience’s patience. Cruise and McQuarrie have a mission, which they’ve chosen to accept, to pump up the intensity and letting logic self-destruct.

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‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language. Running time: 169 minutes.

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.