Review: In 'After the Hunt,' director Luca Guadagnino provokes thought and emotion with this quietly slashing takedown of academic pretention.

Director Luca Guadagnino finds new ways to be confrontational in his new movie, the college-set drama “After the Hunt,” a bitter drama about the things privilege can and can’t get a person on a modern college campus.

At the center of the story is Alma, a professor at Yale who’s one of the stars among the school’s faculty. She’s expecting news any day now of whether she will get tenure, and her main competition is Hank (Andrew Garfield), a charismatic professor and one of Alma’s closest friends. Alma is also grooming her star student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) — who, it’s noted early on, is Black, has rich parents, and is dating a nonbinary law student, Alex (played by the talented trans actor Lîo Mehiel).

Alma’s well-ordered life — which includes her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a friendship with a psychiatrist, Kim (Chloë Sevigny) — is rocked when Maggie shows up on her doorstep one day and says something shocking: She accuses Hank of sexually assaulting her.

It’s one thing if Alma could assess this accusation in a vacuum, choosing whether she should believe Hank or Maggie. But in first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett’s sharp script, nothing is so simple. Hank has a history, we learn — and some of that history involves Alma. And Maggie’s accusation quickly becomes embroiled in the politics of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter in the hothouse environment of campus protests.

The script is predicated on something called Sayre’s Law, named for a late academic who once wrote that “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” (The quote is sometimes misattributed to Henry Kissinger.) The players, particularly Alma and Maggie, must play out their roles in this intense story, which tries to tackle political correctness, the semantics of victimhood, the demands of pampered rich kids and perpetually angry protesters.

It’s clear from the opening credits that Guadagnino wants to provoke an argument. The credits are shown in a particular typeface — Windsor Light Condensed. It’s the same typeface Woody Allen has used on his films since 1975. Evoking the now-canceled Allen in a theater of cinephiles is a choice, even a provocation. What’s not clear is what, exactly, Guadagnino wants to provoke from his audience.

The audience can and will ponder that question throughout “After the Hunt.” If we need a break from weightier thoughts, we can stop to admire the strong central performances by Roberts as the flinty academe who resents anyone upsetting her well-ordered world. But the most acting praise here goes to Edebiri, who gives a purposefully enigmatic performance — the audience isn’t sure what the truth is, or whether anyone else here ever will.

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‘After the Hunt’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 139 minutes.

Review: In 'Good Fortune,' director-star Aziz Ansari wavers from funny to overly serious, but Keanu Reeves' portrayal of a hapless angel is heavenly

Good intentions alone cannot save “Good Fortune,” a comedy-drama directed, written by and starring Aziz Ansari that tries too hard to be funny and meaningful at the same time.

Ansari plays Arj, an unemployed documentary editor who struggles to make it in the gig economy in Los Angeles. He works in a big-box hardware store, where he befriends Elena (Keke Palmer), a coworker who is trying to unionize the store’s employees.

Arj lives in his car, which is also his workspace for his other job, as a driver and body-for-hire for a delivery app. We see him waiting for cinnamon rolls at a trendy bakery, only to learn the bakery has sold out for the day — and the person who ordered his services cancels payment, even though Arj spent much of his day in line. What’s more, the bakery saved some rolls for one of its rich investors, a venture capitalist named Jeff (Seth Rogen). 

On one call, Arj ends up cleaning out Jeff’s garage — and does such a good job that he convinces Jeff to hire him as his assistant. The job puts enough money in Arj’s pocket to let him get a cheap motel. But when Arj tries to impress Elena with dinner at a fancy restaurant, one recommended by Jeff, Arj uses Jeff’s company credit card, and Jeff fires him over it.

We, the audience, aren’t the only ones watching Arj’s miserable life. So is Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), an angel who sees Arj as a lost soul — and Gabriel wants to save him. However, as his boss angel, Martha (Sandra Oh), reminds him, Gabriel isn’t that high up in the angelic organizational chart. Gabriel’s assignment is to nudge people who are texting while driving, so they don’t get in accidents.

Gabriel, on his own volition, decides to show Arj that his life isn’t so bad – by have Arj live Jeff’s life, so he can learn being rich isn’t all that great, either. Arj, however, rather likes being a rich guy in a big house and every comfort available to him. The pleas from Jeff, who’s now living Arj’s paycheck-to-paycheck existence, aren’t enough to compel Arj to go back.

Watching “Good Fortune” put me in mind of “Sullivan’s Travels,” Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy masterpiece about a Hollywood filmmaker (Joel McCrea) who decides to give up making light-hearted popcorn movies to create a serious movie about the plight of the common folk. The filmmaker learns, through his misadventures, that the common folk want to see a movie that’s fun and diverting, to make them forget about their plight for a couple of hours.

It turns out the comparison isn’t all in my head. A day after I saw “Good Fortune,” I saw Ansari was a guest programmer for TCM, showing films that he said he connected with while making his movie — and the first one up was “Sullivan’s Travels.”

Where Ansari goes off the track with “Good Fortune” is that he’s trying to make both movies — a light comedy and a serious movie about how the working class gets screwed over — and it never gels convincingly on either front. The jokes are muted by Ansari’s sober tone, and the message is undercut by the manic edge. 

Some of the problem is that Ansari is unsubtle as a performer — though he’s Daniel Day-Lewis next to Rogen, whose tech bro arrogance here feels only a degree or two off from his other roles, notably his work as the conniving Hollywood executive on Apple’s “The Studio.”

The upside to “Good Fortune” is Reeves, whose deadpan portrayal as a hapless — he uses the term “dumb dumb” — angel, discovering the joys of milkshakes and psychedelics, earns whatever laughter this movie generates. Now if Reeves could find a guardian angel who could nudge him into better projects.

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‘Good Fortune’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 17, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Truth & Treason' is a thoughtful, and unusually timely, story of a German teen showing resistance to the Nazis.

Not many people know the story of Helmuth Hübener, a German teen who worked in the shadows to resist the Nazi regime during World War II — and many of those who have told it are, like Hübener, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

One member of the faith, Matt Whitaker, directed and co-wrote “Truth & Treason,” a surprisingly tough-minded movie that tells Hübener’s story with a measured tone and strong central performances.

Hübener, played by young British actor Ewan Horrocks, is a teen hanging out with his pals, Karl (Ferdinand McKay) and Rudi (Daf Thomas), riding their bikes around Hamburg and avoiding hanging out with their Hitler Youth classmates — not necessarily because of their classmates’ fascist beliefs, but because those classmates are simply jerks. When Hübener gets a job as a gofer at City Hall, it’s not out of ambition but because his stern stepfather (Sean Mahon) made him do it.

At City Hall, Hübener gains access to a basement room filled with banned books. On the sly, he starts reading some of them, and quickly comes to learn that the propaganda spouted by Hitler and his followers is all a bunch of lies. Hübener is further driven — “radicalized” is the term some today might use — when he gets an illegal shortwave radio and listens to the BBC, and when his friend Salomon (Nye Occomore), a converted Latter-day Saint but still seen by the regime as Jewish, suddenly disappears.

Hübener starts small, typing small pamphlets denouncing Hitler and sticking them in mailboxes around Hamburg. Over time, he enlists Karl and Rudi, and the pamphlets spread around the city — ultimately drawing the attention of a Nazi official (Rupert Evans) determined to crush this paper rebellion.

Whitaker, who co-wrote the 2003 World War II drama “Saints and Soldiers,” has been fascinated with Hübener’s story for decades. He even directed a documentary about Hübener in 2002, in which he interviewed the real Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, Hübener’s friend. That dedication is evident in the intense and evenhanded approach he brings to the story.

For example, the movie doesn’t show Latter-day Saints as always doing good; notably, Hübener’s bishop (Daniel Betts), in the early going, is shown as overly pliant to German law, even putting a sign on the meetinghouse door barring Jews from entering. On the other hand, Whitaker spares a moment to consider the Nazi investigator as a family man, kind to his children, not a cardboard villain — and that approach pays off, particularly in Evans’ startling performance.

Whitaker closes out “Truth & Treason” with a quote from Alexei Navalny, the recently martyred Russian resistance leader, that says “sometimes the greatest act of rebellion is to simply speak the truth.” It’s clear Whitaker has more on his mind than a totalitarian regime that’s been gone for 80 years. The question is whether the movie’s target audience will make the connection to current events. 

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‘Truth & Treason’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 17, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images, thematic elements, and smoking. Running time: 122 minutes.

Review: 'Tron: Ares' looks spectacular, but could have gone deeper into critiquing our tech obsession

“Tron: Ares” is caught between two worlds — the one where director Joaquim Rønning gets to comment on our technology-addicted society, and the one where he must deliver a Disney legacy sequel that must drive ticket sales for the shareholders — and can never fully reconcile the two.

The plot exposition at the opening, delivered through fake news reports, tells us that Encom, the computer game maker at the heart of the franchise, was acquired by a pair of tech-savvy sisters, Eve Kim (Greta Lee) and Tess Kim (Selene Yun). They forced out the previous CEO, Julian Dillinger (Ewan Peters) — the grandson of David Warner’s ruthless character from the original movie. Julian has started a rival company, Dillinger Systems, and started working on creating cyber weapons for the military.

Julian’s breakthrough is in implanting a super-soldier computer program into a 3D-printed body. His most sophisticated program is named Ares, for the Greek god of war — and enters the real world as a human-like mechanism, played by Jared Leto. 

The glitch in Julian’s plan is that nothing he builds in the real world, including Ares, lasts more than 29 minutes. Julian needs something called the “permanence code,” which will allow his devices to last indefinitely. Eve, off the grid in Alaska, has found that her late sister found that code — which has something to do with Encom’s long-missing chief programmer, Kevin Flynn (the part Jeff Bridges played in the original). Eve must get back to Encom’s headquarters before Julian sends Ares and another battle program, Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith), to steal it.

What Julian doesn’t notice at first is that Ares, programmed to consume information, has learned too much from studying the Kim sisters — including their capacity for empathy, which he adopts as he goes against his programming and try to help Eve, in both our world and the computer world. (Ares also develops a taste for Depeche Mode, a joke about the ‘80s culture that created “Tron.'“ The joke never quite lands.)

Rønning — a Disney veteran, having directed the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” installment and the second “Malificent” movie — and screenwriter Jesse Wigutow (who shares story credit with David DiGilio) create some eye-popping set pieces, such as the deployment of the Tron lightcycles in the real world, creating energy trails that look like molten glass. Dillinger’s CPU world, where Eve briefly finds herself, is too brooding to be effective, but there’s a later visit to the cyber realm that will make fans of the 1982 version smile.

The best performance here is from Peters, who takes the maniacal supervillain trope and finds new life in it — with the bonus of pairing Julian with his mother (Gillian Anderson), who continually warns Julian that he’s playing with forces he doesn’t understand and can’t control.

Speaking of control issues, couldn’t Rønning have done something about Jared Leto? Turns out that Leto is more fascinating when he’s a villain, and dull as dishwater when he’s supposed to be heroic. It’s a casting choice that comes close to sinking the movie.

What keeps “Tron: Ares” going are the breathtaking special effects, which borrow ideas from the original and adds some updates, and the propulsive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (recorded under the name of Reznor’s band, Nine Inch Nails). One wishes the movie’s viewpoint on technology — after all, the original “Tron” was Hollywood’s first real exploration in the world we now call A.I. — was as dynamic as the visuals and as insistent as the Nine Inch Nails music.

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‘Tron: Ares’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence/action. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Roofman' puts Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst in an absurd true-crime story, and finds the loneliness and love underneath.

The wacky, but true, premise of “Roofman” turns out to be only half the story of the completed movie, a surprisingly tender movie about crime, love and the tricky nature of second chances.

Channing Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, an ex-soldier who took to crime after his return from Afghanistan in the late ‘90s. His modus operandi was to break through the roof of a McDonalds, then wait for the morning crew to arrive. Then he would get them to open the store’s safe, then put the workers in the walk-in freezer.

Jeffrey applies the proceeds from these robberies around North Carolina, for which the media dubs him “the roofman,” to his young daughter (Alissa Marie Peterson), and briefly rekindling his marriage to Talena. It’s all going well for Jeffrey, until it doesn[t — when he’s caught in 1998, and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

Prison, Jeffrey soon figures out, is a system like any other — and if you blend into the crowd, and are generally nice to others, they will forget about you, which makes escape controllable. After he escapes, Jeffrey gets some advice from Steve (LaKeith Stanfield), a former comrade from Afghanistan who’s now selling phony ID’s. Steve’s advice: Don’t run; lie low and find some place to hide until public interest in the escape dies down.

Jeffrey finds that hiding place in an unseen space in a Toy’s ‘R’ Us store. From there, he lives off of baby food and M&M’s and wears Spider-Man t-shirts — and he disables the store’s surveillance cameras, and creates his own network using baby monitors so he can keep an eye on the employees and the store’s officious manager, Mitch (Peter Dinklage). He also notices Leigh (Kirsten Dunst), who prods Mitch unsuccessfully to donate some surplus inventory for her church’s toy drive.

Venturing out from his hiding place, Jeffrey takes some toys to Leigh’s church, and soon finds himself welcomed by the church’s husband-and-wife pastors (Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba). He also connects with Leigh, a divorced mom with two daughters — Dee (Kennedy Moyer), who’s 11 and quickly accepts Jeff’s presence, and Lindsay (Lily Collias), a sullen 16-year-old who objects to her mom bringing a new man into the house.

Director Derek Cianfrance isn’t known for comedy — his best known movies are the dark dramas “Blue Valentine,” “The Place Beyond the Pines” and “The Light Between Oceans” — so it’s a nice surprise that he plays the absurdities of Jeffrey’s situation with such a light touch. At the same time, though, he and co-writer Kirt Gunn dig into the raw emotions as Jeffrey and Leigh take their first steps out of their loneliness, a risk for both of them for different reasons.

Tatum and Dunst give tender performances, one holding back because of his dangerous secret, the other hoping he’ll let down his guard and let her in. They raise “Roofman” from what could have been a ridiculous true-crime comedy to something truly touching.

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‘Roofman’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 10, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, nudity and brief sexuality. Running time: 126 minutes. 

Review: 'Orwell: 2+2=5" recounts the life of the "1984" author, and shows how his descriptions of totalitarianism still hold true

In his latest documentary, “Orwell: 2+2=5,” filmmaker Raoul Peck does for the author of “Animal Farm” and “1984” what he did for James Baldwin in “I Am Not Your Negro”: He transcends the mere recitation of the events of the writer’s life to analyze the writer’s work and how it resonates in today’s world.

With Orwell, who dissected the effects of totalitarian societies and described them with laser-like precision, the parallels between what was written in the 1940s and what’s happening today are frighteningly prescient.

The biographical information is compelling in itself. Orwell was the pen name of Eric Blair, a journalist and activist — he espoused democratic socialism — who was born in 1903 in India, at the height of British imperialism. At 19, he began serving in the Indian Imperial Police in another part of the empire, what was then called Burma. 

There, he witnessed first-hand the brutality and absurdity of his people subjugating another on the flimsy excuse that they thought themselves better because of their skin color and class status.

Blair became a journalist, eager to report on these class divisions and the efforts to dismantle them. This led him to go to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War — where he became disillusioned with Soviet-style Communism, which he came to believe was no less brutal and authoritarian than the Nazi-backed Spanish regime.

Peck uses Blair/Orwell’s actual words, read by the British actor Damian Lewis, to illustrate the author’s points but also to fill in moments of his life — through letters and diaries. Some of those entries were written on the Isle of Jura in Scotland, where Orwell wrote his masterpiece, “1984,” and in sanatoriums, where Orwell was treated for the tuberculosis that took his life in 1950, at age 46.

Peck uses movie adaptations of “Animal Farm” and particularly of “1984” to illustrate the book’s points. When the protagonist, Winston Smith, is shown four fingers and told it’s actually five, the movie shows us Edmond O’Brien in a 1956 version being tortured for saying there are four fingers. (The documentary also uses clips from a 1954 British TV movie starring Peter Cushing, and director Michael Radford’s adaptation, released in the actual year 1984, with John Hurt as Smith and Richard Burton as his torturer.)

It’s in the dissection of the themes of “1984,” and their applications to today’s world, where Peck’s movie burns brightest. It starts with the way Orwell described the malleable nature of language, and how regimes have always twisted words to hide their crimes. A recent example was in 2022, when Russian leader Vladimir Putin called the invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.”

Peck doesn’t spare countries we in the West may like more. He also cites Orwellian doublespeak within propaganda from China, Sudan, Israel and the United States (e.g., George W. Bush’s orders to invade Iraq).

The point Peck makes is that Orwell would have recognized much of what’s going on, particularly in the United States right now, because he saw it coming — if not in these specific details, at least in the broad contours.

Peck tabulates the censorship both around the world (the Soviets banned “Animal Farm” for being anti-Communist) and in the United States. One list that scrolls on the screen shows book bans in U.S. states from 2022 to 2023 — and my home state of Utah pops up, for books by Elana K. Arnold and Margaret Atwood. (The list is so long that in the time it’s displayed in the film, it only gets through the authors whose names start with “A.”)

Censorship, like rewriting history (cue the footage of the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol), is of a piece of the totalitarianism playbook, Orwell said. “From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned,” he wrote. 

Any time Lewis reads a quote from Orwell’s writing, an image from the evening news pops into one’s head. The scariest observation Orwell made in “1984” is the idea that “no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” It’s almost 80 years since Orwell wrote that, and Peck’s “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a reminder of how it’s just as true now — and will become more true unless the people speak up, march and vote.

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‘Orwell: 2+2=5’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 10, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for some violent content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'A House of Dynamite' emulates the great nuclear-war thrillers of the '60s, but pulls its punches in the end

The geopolitical thriller “A House of Dynamite” tries to tackle a big topic — the ever-present threat of nuclear war — within a series of small spaces: Military control rooms, the White House situation room, and ultimately Marine One, where the president is faced with the awesome decision whether or not to order a missile strike.

Through these tense sessions, one can see how director Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty”) and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (“Jackie”) were trying to evoke classic Cold War nuclear movies, like “Fail-Safe” or “Dr. Strangelove.” One can also see how delivering an ambiguous ending, or making one mistake in the movie’s execution, can undercut those efforts.

The story plays out in three acts, each depicting the same span of time — during which an intercontinental ballistic missile is launched, from where our surveillance satellites cannot tell, and is heading toward the American Midwest. The people in charge of preventing such things, and the people who must respond to them, have about 35 minutes to figure out what to do next.

Act 1 is partly set in a military base in Alaska, where a team of soldiers sit behind screens trying to operate the levers of the U.S. missile defense system, as Maj. Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) must give the order to launch interceptor missiles to take out the rogue nuke. Gonzalez’ team is in contact with the White House situation room, where Capt. Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) gives the orders — because her boss, Adm. Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), has been ordered to a bunker, in case the worst happens.

Act 2 gets a little closer to the center of the decision web, in a control room of Central Command, or CentCom, where Gen. Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) has to relay information to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the cabinet and ultimately to the president — who, for this section, is just a blank square on a Zoom call. Brady is trying to relay what the military knows about the missile’s origin, while in another room, Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso), a nervous deputy national security adviser, tries to wrangle enough foreign intelligence to determine whether our chief adversaries, Russia or China, launched the missile.

Act 3 takes us to the heart of the decision, putting us close to the one man who must make the decision whether to retaliate — the President.

Up to now, the audience has been able to play out all the scenarios, just as the military and civilian strategists have been doing. We also get to appreciate a strong supporting cast, which includes Jared Harris as a bewildered defense secretary, Moses Ingram as a FEMA official who’s surprised to learn she’s been moved to that top-secret bunker, and Greta Lee as a security analyst being called on her vacation — trying to help stop armageddon while keeping her son from running off at a Gettysburg re-enactment. After that moment, there are two more familiar actors who deliver quick, soulful performances: Kaitlyn Dever and Renée Elise Goldsberry.

However, the moment we see the president is when the military authenticity Bigelow has been so carefully building starts to fall apart, because of a single casting choice. The President is never identified by name or political party, but by casting Idris Elba to play him, Bigelow irrevocably alters the movie’s tone and message.

Casting Elba makes this president someone who’s cool under fire, thoughtful in his decision-making, and understanding the weight of the choice he must make. In other words, a president unlike any we’ve had in about a year — and, one could argue, since Jan. 20, 2017. 

Of course, any hope the audience might have of the characters of “A House of Dynamite” surviving this scenario depends on having an Elba-like president — not one modeled after the current occupant of the White House. It’s the difference between a sharp-minded Henry Fonda in “Fail-Safe” or a buffoonish Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove.” “A House of Dynamite” presents the threat of nuclear war as we would hope it would be handled, but the true horror is how it makes us think about how poorly it would play out in this reality.

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‘A House of Dynamite’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 10, in theaters; then streaming on Netflix starting October 24. Rated R for language. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'The Smashing Machine' traps a strong performance by Dwayne Johnson in a surprisingly ordinary sports drama

Sometimes the people who handicap Oscar contenders care more about the narrative behind an actor’s potentially award-winning performance than what’s actually on the screen — which is why there’s maybe more hype than substance behind the talk about Dwayne Johnson’s performance in the sports drama “The Smashing Machine.”

Don’t get me wrong, Johnson gives a good performance as Mark Kerr, an early star in the fledgling sport of mixed martial arts. He shows a range of emotions, allows himself to be vulnerable, and even does something Johnson contractually does not allow in his action movies: He loses a fight.

The problem here isn’t Johnson, who goes the distance and submerges his charismatic persona behind facial prosthetics and a moody character. The problem is with writer-director Benny Safdie, who takes a conventional underdog sports story and tells it quite conventionally — which is a surprise for one half of the sibling filmmaking team who made gritty work like “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time.”

When Safdie introduces the audience to Kerr in 1997, he’s recently graduated from college wrestling and starting into mixed martial arts — which combines elements of boxing, karate and other kicking sports, and old-school wrestling, which is Kerr’s specialty. Kerr wins all of his early matches, and he describes (in voice-over) how winning is the best feeling ever. 

It’s a feeling that’s difficult to share with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt). Dawn is supportive, trying to help Kerr at home by mixing his protein shakes, but she gets defensive when Kerr says she got the recipe wrong. 

Their relationship is depicted as a series of arguments, where Dawn yells at Kerr until he explodes into physical violence — never hurting her physically, but terrifying her when he destroys a door or some other inanimate object — and they then kiss and make up for a while. Even when Kerr enters rehab for an opioid addiction, that pattern doesn’t change much.

The relationship Safdie depicts with more nuance is between Kerr and fellow fighter Mark Coleman, played by former MMA champ Ryan Bader. Coleman alternates between training Kerr and competing against him, notably in a brutal MMA tournament in Japan, where the grand prize (as various sports announcers say repeatedly) is $200,000, then a respectable number for winning an MMA competition. Bader shows some talent in his first acting role, depicting Coleman as the level-headed family man whose life contrasts with Kerr’s personal and professional rollercoaster ride.

Johnson works up some genuine emotion as he portrays Kerr’s rapid professional rise and, more particularly, his stumbles in the ring and out of it. I wonder about the prosthetics to make Johnson look more like Kerr, because (as the obligatory photos of the real Kerr play over the closing credits) I think Kerr at that age looked more like Johnson than Johnson does here. Maybe Johnson decided that wearing them helped him get into character, without carrying the persona of The Rock into the ring. 

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‘The Smashing Machine’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some drug abuse. Running time: 123 minutes.