Review: 'The Running Man' is an action-packed takedown of corporate media's distraction machine, but it's more entertaining when it sticks to enjoyable mayhem

One’s enjoyment of “The Running Man,” director Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about televised bread-and-circuses, depends entirely on how seriously one takes it — the more fun it’s having, the more fun you’re having.

In a semi-dystopian America where one mega-corporation controls the government, police, health care and the media, Ben Richards — played by the amiably hunky Glen Powell — has been blacklisted by every employer for insubordination, because he has an annoying habit of helping his colleagues and suggesting they unionize. Ben’s desperate to pay for basic medicine for his ailing 2-year-old daughter, and from keeping his wife, Sheila (Jayme Lawson), from working double shifts as a strip-club waitress. 

It seems like Ben’s only option to provide for his family is to sign up for one of the dominant TV network’s cruelty-based game shows — and the one with the biggest payout is called “The Running Man,” in which three contestants are depicted as hunted fugitives and are given 30 days to outrun the Hunters, who shoot to kill. 

The contestants earn a sliding scale of prize money based on how long they stay alive, and how many Hunters they might kill along the way. However, the viewing public also can cash in if they report the contestants’ whereabouts. (The currency bears the likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Ben in the 1987 movie version.)

The network’s star producer, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin), the puppet master behind the scenes, goads Ben into signing on, even offering a bonus that can get his child some medicine right away. Ben soon learns, though, that the game is rigged — with a carnival barker of an emcee (Colman Domingo) painting Ben in the worst possible light to turn America against him. 

Wright, who co-wrote the script with his “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” collaborator Michael Bacall, places Powell’s Ben in a series of increasingly close shaves — trying to dodge the Hunters and the ever-present surveillance while staying on the run or finding allies who don’t believe the network’s propaganda. Soon, Ben realizes that he’s not just fighting for his family’s wellbeing, but also as a symbol of resistance against the authoritarian network that controls everything including the game.

The thrills come fast and frequently, with a series of action set pieces where Powell’s Ben is put through a high-tech wringer. The surprises come from the array of characters Ben encounters — a list that includes William H. Macy, Daniel Ezra, Michael Cera and Emilia Jones — as he dodges the Hunters and their camera drones, all orchestrated by Killian for maximum ratings.

There’s a serious theme in here, if you care to look for it, about the numbing effect of mass media — reality TV specifically — and the oppressive motives of those controlling it. But “The Running Man” is more comfortable, and more fun, when it just lets loose with the cinematic mayhem. It’s a dark ride, but a damned entertaining one.

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‘The Running Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 14, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, some gore, and language. Running time: 133 minutes.

Review: 'Nuremberg' pits two Oscar winners as a high Nazi officer and the American psychiatrist who unlocked his mind, in a drab history lesson

The long-debated question about Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime — were they uniquely evil in global history, or can humans anywhere create the conditions that gave rise to barbarous authoritarianism — gets a fresh conversation in “Nuremberg,” a movie that isn’t afraid of putting a thumb on the scale to get its desired answer.

Writer-director James Vanderbilt — in his first time at the helm since 2015’s “Truth” — takes viewers to 1945 and the end of World War II. Hitler has died of suicide in a Berlin bunker, and the Allied forces are gathering up the surviving Nazi high commanders. The highest-ranking official still alive is Hitler’s No. 2, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe).

Göring and the rest are brought to the Allied prison camp in Nuremberg — where the no-nonsense camp commandant, U.S. Army Col. Burton Andrus (John Slattery), must figure out what to do with them. The key consideration is whether executing them without a trial would be as bad as what the Nazis did to millions in the war and, in particular, the concentration camps where millions were put through a systematic death machine.

The man with the unenviable task of creating an international criminal court where one never existed is Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), a U.S. Supreme Court justice who has been told he’s in line to be appointed Chief Justice by President Harry S Truman. He’s told by his secretary, Elsie (Wrenn Schmidt), that taking the job may jeopardize that appointment, because of all of the hurdles that would prevent a court from happening.

While Jackson starts setting up a courthouse in Nuremberg — once the site of Hitler’s hate-mongering speeches — the Allied military decides they need a military psychiatrist to talk to the Nazi prisoners and figure out what makes them tick. That’s how Douglas Kelley, an unorthodox psychiatrist played by Rami Malek, is brought in to get to know the captured Nazis.

It takes a lot of table-setting — with characters describing various historical figures as if they swallowed a WikiPedia entry and had to regurgitate it — to get to what the movie sees as the central conflict: Having two Oscar-winning actors match each other on the screen, the blustering Crowe and the continually inquisitive Malek, does produce the expected fireworks, particularly as Crowe chews the scenery by the yard.

The prison-cell interviews do establish a rapport between the Nazi and the psychiatrist. (“The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is actually the name of Jack El-Hai’s book that’s the basis for the movie). They also show the audience the insidious way charm can paper over our revulsion to even history’s worst brutality.

There are solid performances aplenty in “Nuremberg,” particularly from Shannon, Slattery and Richard E. Grant as Jackson’s British prosecution partner. They are the ones most successful at escaping the clutches of Vanderbilt’s wooden direction and heavy-handed script, and finding something true about the pursuit of justice against the most monstrous of human beings.

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‘Nuremberg’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 7, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for violent content involving the Holocaust, strong disturbing images, suicide, some language, smoking and brief drug content. Running time: 149 minutes.

Review: 'Die My Love' is a dark ride into madness that gives Jennifer Lawrence the grittiest and most compelling role of her career

Director Lynne Ramsay excels at digging into what makes people uncomfortable, and making audiences confront those uncomfortable truths — and in her latest, “Die My Love,” she brings two of our best and most charismatic actors, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, along for the dark ride.

Lawrence plays Grace and Pattinson plays Jackson, a young couple who has recently relocated from an unnamed big city for a house in rural Montana. The house belonged to Jackson’s uncle, recently deceased under circumstances that are not initially divulged. The plan is for Jackson to go to work while Grace, a writer by trade, has time to work on her future masterpiece.

When the two are in the house together, in the beginning, they tear each other’s clothes off. Lawrence and Pattinson eagerly sign on to Ramsay’s vision of this young, stupendously horny couple, creating sex scenes that look as though the jobs of intimacy coordinator and animal wrangler were interchangeable.

The romance starts to stumble when Grace becomes pregnant and, with no obligatory birthing scene, becomes mother to a baby boy. Jackson, when he’s home, notes that Grace’s behavior is often strange, and possibly dangerous to herself and others. Is Grace suffering from a postpartum psychosis — or have the demons been circling long before that?

Jackson is familiar with mothers with issues. His own mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), sleeps with a shotgun — left behind by Jackson’s father, Harry (Nick Nolte). In early scenes, when Harry is alive but clearly in the midst of dementia, we see that Grace has a clearer connection with him than his wife or their son. 

Ramsay — writing with Enda Walsh (“Hunger”) and Alice Birch (“Lady Macbeth”), adapting a novel by Ariana Harwicz — keeps the film tightly focused on Grace, as she walks through this Montana landscape, sometimes pushing a stroller and other times prowling like a wild beast. Even as she centers the action on Grace, Ramsay also spares some attention for Jackson, thinking he’s responsible for holding the family together but failing to recognize the scale of Grace’s madness.

It’s up to Lawrence, with an assist from Pattinson, to follow Grace down that path of mental instability — and keep her fascinating through every step down. It’s one of the most earthy, gutsy and compelling performances Lawrence has ever given, and it nearly makes “Die My Love” a mad masterpiece.

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‘Die My Love’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 7, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and some violent content. Running time: 119 minutes.

Review: 'Bugonia' brings Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos together for more surreal magic, but Jesse Plemons' manic performance is the driving force

In the long history of actor/director collaborations, the pairing of director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor Emma Stone is quickly becoming one of the most fascinating and producing the most astonishing results — which is evident in their new film, the surreal and satirical “Bugonia.”

Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a hard-charging CEO at a multi-national tech and retail corporation called Auxolith, which looks like the result if Meta and Amazon had a baby. She tries very hard to appear like a caring boss, in the double-speak way she urges employees to leave by 5:30 — but only if they have all their work done.

According to Teddy Ganz (Jason Plemons), who lives a solitary life keeping bees and training his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, in a remarkable debut) for an ill-defined apocalypse, Michelle is also an alien. Teddy has developed a deeply complex conspiracy that Michelle is from the galaxy of Andromeda, sent to Earth to destroy humanity — the details get a little complicated. 

What’s more simple is the plot Teddy has devised, where he and Don kidnap Michelle, shave her head — to make it harder for her to transmit to her mothership — and hold her in Teddy’s basement until she confesses that she’s an alien and convinces the Andromedan emperor that their kind should leave Earth at once.

Michelle, trained in self-defense, now must test one of her CEO skills — thinking on her feet — to figure out how to get herself out of the custody of this apparent madman. Part of her escape plan involves learning about Teddy’s ailing mother (Alicia Silverstone), and her connection to Michelle’s company.

Lanthimos and screenwriter Will Tracy (“The Menu”) — who’s written a loose remake of Jang Joon-Hwan’s 2003 Korean comedy-drama “Save the Green Planet!” — ride the bleeding edge between farcical humor and terrifying suspense. What’s happening to Michelle is both horrifying and absurdly funny, a territory Lanthimos has made a second home in his past films (such as “The Lobster,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “The Favourite,” “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness”). 

Stone goes all-in with her performance, revealing Michelle’s intelligence and her ability to find the winning angle in any situation. Stone also commits physically, letting Lanthimos film her getting her head shaved — in case you’re wondering why Stone showed up on red carpets with a pixie cut.

Plemons, though, becomes the driving force of “Bugonia,” as his Teddy channels an array of movie nutcases — from “The Shining’s” Jack Torrance to “Dr. Strangelove’s” Jack D. Ripper — and finds the wounded soul within the fractured psyche. His scenes with Delbis and with Stone allow the audience to learn a useful skill these days: How to dig into the mind of someone overwhelmed by conspiratorial lunacy.

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‘Bugonia’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 31, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody violent content including a suicide, grisly images and language. Running time: 118 minutes.

Review: 'It Was Just an Accident' shows director Jafar Panahi telling a moving story of revenge and doubt, while slyly skewering the Iranian regime

Sometimes the best art comes from struggling against the forces of oppression arrayed against the artist — and few filmmakers have faced as much oppression as the Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and his new film, the suspenseful and absurdist “It Was Just an Accident,” is among the best films this year. (The jury at Cannes believed so when they awarded it the Palme D’Or.)

Panahi has been directing movies since 1995, with his debut “The White Balloon,” a tender and heartbreaking story about a little boy wanting nothing more than a goldfish for the new year. In the decade that followed, Panahi made small, sometimes delicate movies, usually with non-professional actors and often trying to skirt the rules of the strict Iranian authorities. 

When you have time for a movie marathon, find “The Mirror” (1997), “The Circle” (2000) and particularly “Offside” (2006) — which depicted women trying to sneak into a soccer match, and which Panahi filmed partly in secret at an actual World Cup qualifying match.

After that, though, the Iranian regime cracked down. They arrested and jailed Panahi in 2010, and he was sentenced to six years imprisonment (he served a year and a half, then moved to house arrest) and a 20-year ban on making movies. He’s still managed to make six movies since, all of them illegally, sometimes having digital footage smuggled out of Iran. (Previously, my favorite of Panahi’s post-arrest movies was “Taxi,” in which the director played himself as a cab driver in Tehran — with his camera mounted on the dashboard.)

“It Was Just an Accident” starts with Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi), a man driving his pregnant wife and young daughter on a dark road. When Rashid accidentally runs over a stray dog in the road, he has to take the car to a mechanic. It’s in the garage where we learn that Rashid isn’t the main character, though he is the catalyst for all that follows.

In the garage, the mechanic’s colleague, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), hears the squeak of an artificial leg when Rashid walks. He has a chilling realization that Rashid is actually Eghbal, the man who tortured Vahid during his time as a political prisoner. After the car is repaired, Rashid/Eghbal drives his family home, and Vahid follows to see where his one-time tormenter lives.

Vahid isn’t certain that Rashid is Eghbal — he’s going by sound, because Vahid was blindfolded when he was imprisoned — and wants corroboration before killing him. So Vahid kidnaps the man, locks him in a foot locker in his van, and goes in search of others who were also tortured by Eghbal. 

Soon Vahid has filled his van with people who may or may not remember the man who made them suffer. First is Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a wedding photographer who’s taking portraits of a couple. Soon the couple has joined the party, because the bride, Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), is also a survivor of Eghbal’s cruelty. Lastly is another survivor, Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), a hothead who doesn’t want to wait to confirm whether Rashid is really Eghbal.

The way Panahi blends suspense with dark humor is a skill we haven’t seen displayed so skillfully since perhaps the best days of Alfred Hitchcock. Like that old master, Panahi almost intuitively understands how to use humor as a release valve for the unbearable tension he’s building in every scene. Shrewdly, Panahi’s humor doesn’t undercut the suspense but emphasizes it.

The tension builds to a shattering conclusion, where Vahid gets to unload all of the pain, guilt and anger he’s felt for years — all directed at his alleged persecutor. Every word of Vahid’s angry monologue was written by Panahi, and it doesn’t take much to believe that he was channeling something deeply personal.

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‘It Was Just an Accident’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 31, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, violence, strong language, and smoking. Running time: 105 minutes; in Persian, with subtitles.

Review: "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" gives Rose Byrne a role that she rips into, but doesn't provide enough support for her brilliant performance

Rose Byrne gives the performance of her career in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a dark yet weirdly manic drama that never matches what Byrne is giving.

Byrne’s character, Linda, has a lot going on. Her child, who is never named and almost never seen above the neck (she’s played by Delaney Quinn), suffers from some unexplained illness that requires Linda to feed her through a tube inserted in her belly. Linda’s husband is away on an extended business trip, and only a disembodied voice on the phone. (I didn’t look up who the actor was ahead of time, and I recommend you do the same.) 

And, one night, a massive water leak from the apartment upstairs rips a hole in Linda’s bedroom ceiling, and she and her child have to vacate for a motel, feeding tube and medical equipment in tow.

Through this, Linda tries to maintain her child’s medical appointments, and is admonished by the child’s doctor (played by the film’s writer-director, Mary Bronstein) that the child’s weight isn’t enough to allow the next surgical procedure. Linda tries to unburden herself to her therapist (played by Conan O’Brien), who has the office down the hall from Linda’s own practice — where her patients include a young mother (Danielle Macdonald), who seems to be in a worse state than her.

The only person Linda finds she can talk to is James (played by A$AP Rocky), who lives in the hotel and knows how to get weed. Soon the question becomes whether Linda will get a chance to pull herself together, or will she do down the psychic spiral that the hole in her apartment ceiling has come to represent for her.

Bronstein gives Byrne the space she needs to embrace Linda’s pain and anger from the no-win situation she’s been dealt by constantly having to subsume her needs for her daughter, her patients, or whoever is demanding her time in the moment. Unfortunately, it’s a performance trapped in a bell jar, with nowhere to go and no progress to be made. Byrne is magnificent, but that’s in part because she has to build the moments that the script never fully fleshes out for her. 

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‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 31, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and bloody images. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere' forcefully reveals the troubled soul that spurs The Boss's boundless talent

If writer-director Scott Cooper’s “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” was your standard-issue musician biographical drama, it would still be a remarkable movie, mostly for the way its star, Jeremy Allen White, channels the blue-collar persona of rock star Bruce Springsteen — and delivers a strong impression of The Boss’ singing voice.

However, just as Springsteen’s fiercely loyal manager, Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong), remarks that the songs Bruce is creating in this part of his life are reaching into some dark spaces, Cooper’s movie also explores an aspect of the singer-songwriter’s life that a lesser movie may overlooked: Springsteen’s ongoing battle with depression, and how it fueled his music and added obstacles to his personal life.

The story starts in 1981, at the end of Springsteen’s successful “The River” tour. After months of performing “Hungry Heart” and “Born to Run” to thousands of fans, Springsteen needs a break from the world. He rents out a hose in New Jersey, near his hometown of Freehold, and starts working on some new songs.

Being home stirs up some tough memories, of an 8-year-old Bruce (Matthew Anthony Pellicano Jr.) becoming an inadvertent buffer between his abusive father (Stephen Graham) and his long-suffering mother (Gaby Hoffmann). But home also gives him a chance at a new romance, when he meets Faye (Odessa Young), a single mom who was a couple years behind Bruce in high school. But the songs, and the darkness, intervene.

The songs take two paths, and at one point Springsteen makes a note that they could become a double album. Some of the songs are deeply introspective, mini-narratives of people living on the edge of American society. Others are clearly stadium-worthy rock anthems — though one of the ones we hear early, “Born in the U.S.A.,” has lyrics that prove it’s not the patriotic belter its title would suggest. 

(A fun fact mentioned in Cooper’s script, adapted by Warren Zanes’ biography of The Boss, is that the title of “Born in the U.S.A” came from a screenplay Paul Schrader wanted Springsteen to read, both to inspire a song for the soundtrack and perhaps for him to make his acting debut.)

Springsteen recorded his songs on a portable TEAC mini-studio recorder, which created a stripped down four-track cassette tape. Springsteen started out saying he only wanted to make a demo tape, and that the songs would ultimately be recorded in the studio by him and his E Street Band. As he dug in — on songs like “Highway Patrolman,” “Mansion on the Hill” and the ultimate title track, “Nebraska” — he realized that the songs sounded best on the stripped-down demo.

(A personal aside here: I am a Springsteen fan, but I was late to the party, not really getting into his music until the “Born in the U.S.A.” album in 1984. However, my first Springsteen album was 1982’s “Nebraska” — which I bought when my sister signed up for the Columbia House mail-order record club, not knowing she would have to pay full price for records after the eight-for-a-penny introductory deal.)

Strong’s best scenes as Landau showing him talking with his wife (Grace Gummer) about his consternation with Springsteen. And later holding firm against his record label, when Springsteen demanded “Nebraska” to be released without any singles for radio play, without press interviews, and without Springsteen’s face on the cover. 

White’s performance starts with impersonation — he nails the onstage Springsteen in all his sweat-soaked glory — and works his way from there. White captures a man wrestling with his past, his guilt over not protecting his mom and not being what Faye needs of him, the burning flame of an artist’s creativity, and the gnawing feeling that neither talent nor fame can cut through the depression that gripped Springsteen since boyhood.

“Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” succeeds not only as an examination of Springsteen’s songwriting genius, but also as one of the most honest depictions of depression on film. It gets past the cliche of the man who suffers for his art, by showing us that Springsteen’s art was how he channeled his suffering and found refuge from it.

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‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’

★★★★

Opens Friday, October 24, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for thematic material, some sexuality, strong language, and smoking. Running time: 119 minutes.

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.