Review: 'Frankenstein' shows director Guillermo Del Toro at his best, capturing the horror and beauty of Mary Shelley's classic.

We’ve had so many adaptations of Mary Shelley’s classically gothic horror story “Frankenstein” — starting with James Whale’s atmospheric 1931 version — that one wonders what Guillermo Del Toro might do with it. 

Then you remember that Del Toro has been telling us, over and over again, why he would be the perfect director now to tell this story of scientific hubris and human frailty — because it contains many of the ideas he’s been playing with for decades, in “Cronos,” “MimIc,” two “Hellboy” movies, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Crimson Peak” and “The Shape of Water.”

Del Toro, who directed and wrote the screenplay, frames the story in the Arctic in 1857, on a ship stuck in the ice near the North Pole. The crew soon sees that there’s someone else out there — a haggard, haunted man running for his life. That’s Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac, who tells the ship’s captain (Lars Mikkelsen, Mads’ brother) the story of how he got here.

“Victor’s Tale,” as the title card puts it, begins with young Victor (played by Christian Convery) learning medicine and anatomy from his brutal father (Charles Dance). Young Victor is much closer to his mother (Mia Goth), but when she giving birth to Victor’s brother William, Victor becomes more resentful of his father — who, despite his brilliance as a doctor, couldn’t save his wife.

As a young adult, Victor’s experiments with reanimating dead bodies earns him the condemnation of the medical establishment. He does have one admirer, though — the eccentric and rich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), who has conducted similar research in bring the dead back to life, and offers to bankroll Victor’s efforts.

Victor and Harlander scour graveyards and impending hangings to find the right parts they needs to complete Victor’s experiments. Ultimately, he builds his creature (Jacob Elordi) and brings it to life. However, Victor is ill-prepared for what comes next — and reverts to cruel parenting skills he inherited from his father.

In contrast, Harlander’s cousin, Elizabeth (also played by Goth) arrives at the castle, meets the monster and shows it compassion. That makes things worse, and soon Victor’s lab is destroyed and the creature is loose.

Del Toro paces this first 90 minutes with deliberation, building up the period details and unsettling details of Victor’s experiments. This section may feel like it’s dragging a bit, though that may be in comparison to what happens next — when Del Toro forcefully reminds us that for every creator there’s a creation, who has his own tale to tell. When that transition happens, the movie’s energy skyrockets, its purpose of reclaiming Mary Shelley’s story from decades of schlock coming into sharp focus.

I won’t say much about part 2, called “The Creature’s Tale,” other than it sets Victor’s cruelty and the creature’s humanity on a collision course. Oh, and there’s a character, played by David Bradley (Filch from the “Harry Potter” films), whose absence would have prompted riots from film buffs worldwide. 

Isaac is compelling as Victor, a brooding and arrogant symbol of humanity’s inability to leave well enough alone, in science and in life. And Goth — so good in the “X”/“Pearl”/“MaXXXine” trilogy — shows us a fragility and tragic goodness that we haven’t seen from her before.

But just as Shelley’s story is about the creature and its creator, this movie comes down to how two creators — Del Toro and Elordi — imbue this creature with life. The make-up designs capture a being that’s evolving in front of our eyes, subtly growing and changing as his indestructible body heals. Elordi works from within to find, or at least search for, the creature’s soul. It’s one of the most brilliant actor-director collaborations in ages, and makes this “Frankenstein” more than the sum of its parts.

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‘Frankenstein’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 24, in theaters; starts streaming Nov. 7 on Netflix. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Regretting You' is a mishmash of soap opera cliches about love, grief and mother-daughter turmoil — but Mckenna Grace is good in her first grownup role.

The movies based on the books of Colleen Hoover — the domestic violence drama “It Ends With Us” and now the teen- and grownup-centered romance “Regretting You” — have their value as time-savers, because people can sit through two hours of turgid melodrama instead of taking more time reading it. The number of people who can fake their way through their book clubs will go up exponentially. 

“Regretting You” starts with one bunch of teens: Morgan (Allison Williams) is at a beach party after graduating from high school, with her boyfriend Chris (Scott Eastwood), Scott’s best pal Jonah (Dave Franco) and Jonah’s girlfriend, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) — who’s also Morgan’s younger sister. Morgan isn’t having fun or alcohol, because, as she confides in Jonah, she’s pregnant with Scott’s child.

The movie then cuts forward 17 years — rescuing viewers from the discomfort of watching those four actors playing high-schoolers, either through wide eyes or CGI de-aging. Morgan and Chris live in Chris’s childhood home, where they care for their 16-year-old daughter, Clara (Mckenna Grace). Jenny is now with Jonah, who returned after a long absence, and they now have a baby boy.

Clara’s relationship with Morgan is strained in the typical teen-daughter ways. At the start of the story, the sticking point is Clara’s interest in the cutest boy in school, Miller (played by Mason Thames, from “How to Train Your Dragon” and the “Black Phone” movies) — seen by Morgan as a bad boy, entirely because his dad was the town drug dealer and is now in prison. In truth, Miller’s a budding film student who takes care of his cranky grandpa (played by Clancy Brown). 

Then tragedy strikes, when Morgan gets a call that Chris has been in a car accident. At the hospital, she learns Chris has died. Then Jonah also runs in, having been told that Jenny also was in a car crash. Quickly, they realize that they both died in the same car crash — and, more slowly, Morgan and Jonah piece together that Chris and Jenny were having an affair. Morgan forbids Jonah from telling Clara this last part, and keeping that secret further divides mother and daughter.

There are more melodramatic plot twists scattered through screenwriter Susan McMartin’s adaptation, mostly to delay resolutions that any sentient creature could figure out long before the closing credits. (One of those complications — regarding Jonah’s long-buried feelings for Morgan — prompt another flashback with Williams and Franco looking artificially younger.) 

Director Josh Boone had more to work with in adapting John Green’s equally weepy “The Fault in Our Stars,” and does what he can giving his actors, particularly Williams and Franco, something to do with their moony-eyed characters. If there’s a positive in all this soap opera, it’s the idea that the female characters, Morgan and Clara, ultimately get to chart their romantic and sexual destinies, which is a nice change.

The one redeeming thing about “Regretting You” is Mckenna Grace, who at 19 is blossoming into grown-up roles after showing talent as a child actor. (Most notably, Grace was the best part of the last two “Ghostbusters” movies, playing Egon’s nerdy granddaughter Phoebe.) Grace’s portrayal of the emotional complications of being a teenager are the one element of this syrupy movie that rings true.   

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‘Regretting You’

★★

Opens Friday, October 24, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, teen drug and alcohol use, and brief strong language. Running time: 117 minutes.

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.