Review: 'Mr. Nobody Against Putin' captures a teacher's journey down the slippery slope of authoritarianism, and shows us how to avoid the same march

We try to tell ourselves that when authoritarianism comes along, we’d recognize it. The Oscar-winning documentary “Mr. Noboy Against Putin” is a timely and chilling reminder that fascism won’t bang on the door, but slip past in the disguise of patriotism and “helping” the children.

Pavel Talankin, who goes by Pasha, teaches at the Karabash Primary School No. 1, in a small town in the Urals in Russia, a few hours’ drive east of Moscow. It’s a dreary place, best known for some of the worst pollution in the world, but for Pasha it’s still home and he loves it. He brings flowers to his mother, the librarian, and gives his students space to speak freely about whatever troubles them.

Pasha has two jobs at the school: He’s the event coordinator, which means he organizes Cake Day and other happenings; and he’s the school’s videographer. That second job takes on added importance in February 2022, when Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, begins what Russian media euphemistically calls “special military operations” — and the rest of the world calls the invasion of Ukraine.

Soon, all the schools in Russia are given a new directive, called “the new federal patriotic education policy.” Now, in addition to their daily math and reading lessons, the students must recite patriotic songs and speeches, and read poems about Russia’s “glorious victory” over Ukraine. And Pasha must dart from class to class, capturing it all on camera. He must then upload the footage to a federal database, to prove that the school is complying with the new directive. 

In Pasha’s video footage, we see teachers reading prepared scripts that tell of the “neo-Nazis” who dictate Ukrainian policy, or arguing that the French are paying exorbitant prices for a tank of gas because of their country’s support of Ukraine. Pasha’s camera also captures how some teachers are reading unenthusiastically from the government script, while others embrace the message and are happy to spout propaganda rather than deliver some hard facts.

After first opting to resign on principle, Pasha decides he should stay, to make a video record of everything that’s happening — and the slow, inexorable descent into full-blown fascist misinformation. The capper, in Pasha’s mind, is the day the Wagner Group, the mercenary military force Putin hired to fight in Ukraine, comes to school to give weapons demonstrations.

Pasha also captures his coworkers’ frustration with the changing rules, and his students’ growing despondency at both the lesson plans and the fact that friends and siblings are headed off to fight in Putin’s war — and, in many cases, not coming back.

The teacher, Pavel Talankin, shares directing credit with David Borenstein, a veteran of PBS and New York Times documentaries. The movie shows how they started working together, meeting via Instagram – and the fact that the two men don’t meet in person until the events of the film are over. The movie’s prologue shows Pasha getting ready to make a getaway out of Russia, when it becomes too dangerous to stay.

Talankin’s footage, and his to-the-camera confessionals from his tiny apartment, show the gradual descent toward authoritarian rule — from the rote learning to the crony system that rewards the government suck-up over the teacher the students actually like and respect. The movie also shows how exhausting it is for Pasha to keep up the pretense, to document events for us while pretending to document events for the government. It’s a harsh reminder of what our country could soon experience, if it isn’t there already.

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‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and descriptions of war violence. Running time: 90 minutes; in Russian, with subtitles.

Review: 'The Pout-Pout Fish' is an amiable, colorful and completely unremarkable animated tale of a grumpy fish on a quest

The animated tale “The Pout-Pout Fish” tells of a grumpy fish on a quest near the coral reefs of Australia — and if it wasn’t for a certain Pixar film in a very similar setting, you might not notice how pedestrian this movie is. 

Based on a series of children’s books by Deborah Diesen, “The Pout-Pout Fish” starts with Mr. Fish, who is voiced by Nick Offerman, in the most on-the-nose voice casting since Lewis Black voiced anger in “Inside Out.” Mr. Fish swims through his town on the coral reef, looking glum day after day, despite the regular efforts of his neighbors to cheer him up.

One day, a little sea dragon named Pip (voiced by Nina Oyama) enters Mr. Fish’s house, thinking the shipwreck-looking abode is a junkyard, and starts rummaging around for supplies he can take back to his own home. In the ensuing argument between Mr. Fish and Pip, Mr. Fish’s house breaks apart and falls on top of Pip’s house. Now, suddenly, they’re both homeless.

Mr. Fish wants to get to work rebuilding, but Pip has another idea. They have to find Shimmer (voiced by Jordin Sparks), the legendary and elusive rainbow fish who, the legend goes, can grant wishes. Mr. Fish starts looking for Shimmer, reluctantly taking Pip along for the trip. Also on the trail is Benji (voiced by Remy Hii), a cuttlefish who wants to use Shimmer’s wish (she can only give one at a time, we’re told) to help save the cuttlefish homeland from permanent darkness by encroaching kelp.

The journey sets Mr. Fish and Pip on encounters with stinging jellyfish, a wayward baby whale, and a trio of pink dolphins (all voiced by Amy Sedaris) who talk like characters from “Mean Girls.” None of this, as presented by director Ricard Cussó and co-director Rio Harrington, is exceptionally funny or exciting, but the movie glides from one episode to the next pleasantly if not memorably. 

I could imagine “The Pout-Pout Fish” as acceptable entertainment for little children, as it provides pleasant colors and an undemanding story with some nice life lessons about confidence and friendship. Anyone who’s seen a fair share of animation will likely get bored and want to go find Nemo.

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‘The Pout-Pout Fish’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 20, in theaters. Rated PG for mild action and rude humor. Running time: 91 minutes.

Review: 'Reminders of Him' centers on a grieving ex-con in a romantic weepie that never feels authentic

Fans of Colleen Hoover — the novelist who has turned generational trauma into airport-ready reading material, like “It Ends With Us” and “Regretting You” — will likely latch onto this new movie adaptation, the romantic weepie “Reminders of Him,” even as its many cliches don’t mix into anything cohesive.

Our heroine is Kenna Rowan (played by Maika Monroe), who’s back in her home town of Laramie, Wyoming, after six years in prison. She was sentenced to seven, for vehicular manslaughter, but got time off for good behavior. She gets a fleabag apartment and must secure a job to pay for the rent, which she manages to do only after a day of rejection. 

For a hard luck case, Kenna manages to luck into some beneficial situations. For example, she walks into a bar because it used to be a bookstore where she and her boyfriend, Scotty (played in flashbacks by Rudy Pankow), used to hang out. The bar’s owner is Ledger (Tyriq Withers), who was Scotty’s best friend growing up — but Kenna never met him during her and Scotty’s courtship. 

The second Kenna realizes the bar owner is Ledger, she gets out of there. We soon find out the reason why: Kenna went to prison because of her role in Scotty’s death. What’s more, Kenna was pregnant at the time, and has never seen her 5-year-old daughter, Diem (Zoe Kosovic), who lives with Scotty’s parents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford). Ledger lives across the street from Diem’s grandparents, and is a surrogate uncle to her. And none of them want Kenna coming around, for fear she’ll try to take Diem away.

Kenna, though, is trying to do things the right way, earning her way back into society and, eventually, into custody of her daughter. That effort gets complicated, first by attempts to stay out of sight of Grace and Patrick — and, since this is a Colleen Hoover book, by romantic sparks with the hunky Ledger.

Director Vanessa Caswill — who directed some of the 2017 “Little Women” miniseries with Maya Hawke as Jo — understands the assignment. That’s to bring together characters who are broken, yet impossibly good-looking, for cathartic confrontations and and some safely PG-13 sex scenes. The problem is the script, by Hoover and co-writer Lauren Levine, which puts the actors in situations that only happen in bad movies that bear no resemblance to real life.

Withers is an appealing male lead, as he tries to give some weight to scenes where he’s asked mostly to take off his shirt. And Monroe, whose best-known credits are in horror (“It Follows,” “Watcher,” “Longlegs”), shows a bit of range as the tearful heroine in a romantic drama. Their charms carry “Reminders of Him” a bit farther than the material does, but not that far. 

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‘Reminders of Him’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, strong language, drug content, some violent content, and brief partial nudity. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'Sirāt' is an intense movie experience, a life-or-death drama set to the beat of rave culture

French director Oliver Laxe’s existential thriller “Sirāt” has qualities in common with the rave music that serves as its soundtrack: It’s hypnotic, energetic, propulsive and raises the tension to almost unbearable levels. 

The action starts at a rave somewhere in northern Africa. It seems less like a commercial concert than a communal group happening. People set up a wall of speakers, then dance and gyrate together in a shared ecstasy of togetherness. If you don’t go to Burning Man regularly, the opening minutes of this movie may be the closest you get to feeling that.

Luis (played by the Spanish actor Sergi López) is not there for the music. With his young son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez), in tow, Luis is searching high and low for his missing daughter, Mar. Luis meets one group of ravers who travel from one event to another, who tell him they might have met Mar — and that she might be at the event where they’re going next. Luis decides to follow this group, even dodging military police to get there.

On the road, Luis and Esteban are soon accepted into the family of oddballs — a group all played by nonprofessionals chosen in street-casting by costume designer Nadia Acimi, who is a former raver (and Laxe’s ex). But the route becomes more treacherous, and something happens (no spoiler here) that turns the trip into something darker and more tragic.

Laxe, who co-wrote with Santiago Fillol, takes us deep into the world of rave culture, then takes that world and plunges it into the desert of Northern Africa — a place where life and death are close companions, and danger is a constant. Luis and these nomadic ravers experience that danger, and it both bonds them and divides them. 

It’s hard to be more specific about the plot, because this is a movie that rewards those who don’t know too much when the lights go down. “Sirāt” is an intense, gripping movie about the end of the line, and the choices that have to be made when these people get there.

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‘Sirāt’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for language, some violent content and drug use. Running time: 114 minutes, in Spanish, French and Arabic, with subtitles.

Review: 'Undertone' is a satisfyingly dark thriller about guilt and death that plays best on the ears

What you hear is what you get in “Undertone,” an effective horror-thriller from Canada that gets its biggest scares in its sound mix.

Evy (Nina Kiri) has a lot going on for someone who almost never leaves the house. She’s a full-time caretaker for her mom (Michèle Duquet), who’s laid up in bed and approaching the end of her life. She is co-host of a podcast, “The Undertone,” playing the skeptic to her unseen audio partner Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco), the believer in the supernatural doings they talk about. As we go into the story, we suspect she’s nursing some feelings about an ex, dealing with some guilt as a lapsed Catholic, and trying to maintain her sobriety.

Evy always records the podcast at 3 a.m., we’re told to accommodate the London-based Justin’s schedule, But it’s also a fitting witching hour for spooky things to go bump in the night, or for intrusive thoughts to play on Evy’s heart and soul. Then Justin introduces a collection of 10 audio files, sent by an anonymous podcast listener. As they start listening to the files, in order, Evy and Justin try to talk through what they’re hearing — something about a young couple trying to sleep with a new baby in their lives — until it becomes … nope, can’t give away more than that.

Writer-director Ian Tuason, making his feature debut, shows a flair for composition. He sets up perfectly creepy shots that frame Evy on one side, her noise-canceling earphones eliminating distractions, and a darkened part of the house on the other, from which might come something bad. 

All the best scares, though, are in the sound mix, whether it’s from Evy hears from those videos or the strange noises coming from upstairs where her mom is sleeping. “Undertone” could almost be effective a scream generator as an audio presentation, but then you wouldn’t get Tuason’s strong visuals or the chance to watch Kiri, who’s a dynamic young actor I think we’ll see more of.

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‘Undertone’

★★★

Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 94 minutes.

Review: 'Slanted' is a body-horror thriller with some shocks and a painfully obvious message about race and assimilation

First-time writer-director Amy Wang has some good ideas floating around “Slanted,” a body-horror drama about race and assimilation taken to the extreme. One wishes Wang had gotten a couple movies under her belt before biting off so much here.

Joan Huang is a first-generation Chinese-American girl, having arrived in the States with her parents, Roger (Fang Du) and Sofia (Vivian Wu), when she was 7. Now 17 (and played as a teen by Shirley Chen), Joan is obsessed with being the all-American girl — personified in the pursuit of becoming her school’s prom queen.

When the odds-on favorite for prom queen, Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber), drops out because she’s landed a role in a TV show, Joan sees her opportunity — and even bleaches her black hair blonde to try to impress Olivia’s circle of friends. Olivia, who’s not above using Joan to get discounts at a Chinese-run nail salon, isn’t buying it. “I can see your black roots. Ew,” Olivia tells her dismissively.

That’s when Joan walks into Ethnos Inc., a storefront that offers a unique medical service: Making anyone of color look and sound white. “If you can’t beat ‘em, be them,” intones Dr. Willie Singer (R. Keith Harris), who tells Joan that he used to be Black before inventing the process. (The premise sounds like a variation on a “Saturday Night Live” sketch from the ‘80s, when Eddie Murphy put on makeup to appear white, and learned that without Black people around, white folks give each other stuff for free.)

Without getting into too many spoilers, Joan takes the Ethnos treatment — and soon everyone at school see a new student, Jo Hunt (played by McKenna Grace). 

Wang’s story plays like an old “Twilight Zone” morality tale, or a grotesque mash-up of “Mean Girls” and “The Substance.” The pacing is slack, however, and the dialogue — like when Joan’s parents see what she’s done to herself — is trite and obvious. And the third-act reveal, when Joan/Jo realizes something’s gone wrong with the treatment, doesn’t hit as hard as it could. 

Watching “Slanted,” I wondered what a director like Jordan Peele might have done with it — applying some subtlety and sly wit to Joan’s rejection of her Chinese identity in order to fit in with white America, and discovering how shallow that pursuit is. But one sees in Wang’s flawed film the potential for something more biting on her next film.

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‘Slanted’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language, some sexual material, teen drug use and brief violent content/bloody images. Running time: 104 minutes; in English and in Mandarin with subtitles.

Review: 'Hoppers' is Pixar's delightful return to form, a glorious mix of strong animation and lots of humor in the animal kingdom

Whew. Pixar, you had us worried there for a little while, with a string of not-so-amazing movies — “Elio,” “Inside Out 2,” “Elemental” and “Lightyear” — and some great movies, like “Turning Red,” “Luca” and “Soul,” relegated to streaming during the pandemic. But “Hoppers,” the first great Pixar theatrical movie since “Toy Story 4” in 2019, is worth the wait.

The central figure in “Hoppers” is Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a lifelong animal lover who at 19 spends more time crusading against Mayor Jerry (voiced by Jon Hamm) and his habitat-destroying freeway project than actually attending her college classes. Then she learns that her professor, Dr. Sam (voiced by Kathy Najimy), is running a secret project where she’s built robot versions of animals into which she can insert human consciousness.

Or, as Mabel says when she sees it, “It’s just like ‘Avatar,’” to which Dr. Sam insists, “It’s nothing like ‘Avatar.’” It took a multi-billion-dollar merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox to make that joke happen, and I’m here for it.

Of course, Mabel sneaks in and uses the technology, in an effort to communicate with the mammals in the habitat Mayor Jerry’s plans could destroy. Mabel learns some hard lessons at first — namely, that the animals are accepting of their fate in life, particularly as prey to other predators. Mabel befriends George (voiced by Bobby Moynihan), the beaver king of the mammals, and discovers there’s a whole council of kings representing birds, insects and other categories of animals, and they don’t always get along.

Director Daniel Chong and screenwriter Jesse Andrews (who wrote “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) create an elaborate world of creatures with fur, fins and feathers, and their complicated interactions with each other and those naked apes known as humans. They also mine those interactions for a great deal of humor, to create a more gut-busting movie than Pixar usually makes — while still packing an emotional punch and one of the wildest finishes an animated movie has delivered in a long time.

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‘Hoppers’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, March 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/peril, some scary images and mild language. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'The Bride!' nearly falls to pieces, but Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley create monsters with beating hearts

After proving her directing skills with the tricky material of Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal takes on one of the classics of literature and film — the bride of Frankenstein — in “The Bride!”, and the results are never boring.

They are a lot of things — brash, striking, perplexing, emotionally intense, often ill-conceived and narratively all over the damn place — but “boring” is not one of Gyllenhaal’s attributes.

Gyllenhaal reimagines the classic monster story as part tragic romance, part gangster drama and part, I don’t know, “Moulin Rouge” spectacle. Set in the 1930s, the story starts in Chicago with Ida (Jessie Buckley), a bar-hopping party animal who mouths off about a local gangster’s dirty dealings. So it’s no surprise that two of the gangster’s underlings (John Magaro and Matthew Maher) rough Ida up, and end up sending her tumbling to her death down some stairs.

Meanwhile, the creature sometimes called Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) has also arrived in Chicago, seeking help from Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening), an acolyte of the monster’s deceased creator. Frank wants Doc to help him achieve a dream: Building a female counterpart of himself, to be his mate. Doc takes some convincing, but soon Doc and Frank are digging up a potters’ field for a corpse to reanimate — and they find what’s left of Ida.

Here, Buckley — who’s just over a week from getting an Oscar for “Hamnet” (I don’t think this movie will cause Academy voters to have a “Norbit”-style reconsideration) — plays both the bride but also Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.” That’s meant as a cheeky nod to director James Whale’s 1935 “The Bride of Frankenstein,” where Elsa Lanchester was credited for playing Mary Shelley in the prologue, and was uncredited as the bride in her Hostess cupcake hairdo. Alas, it’s more obvious and less thought-provoking than Gyllenhaal likely intended.

The movie is littered with similar references, and you’re invited either to groove with or groan at the attempts — which include, and I kid you not, Bale and Buckley leading a musical number to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” evoking the holy memory of Peter Boyle and Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein.”

Gyllenhaal also calls in some favors. She casts her brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, as a ‘30s Hollywood movie idol who’s Frank’s idol. And she casts her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, alongside Penelope Cruz as a pair of detectives following Frank and his amnesiac Bride on a cross-country killing spree that Bonnie & Clyde would have envied.

So “The Bride!”, with its proto-feminist narrative and gimmicky pacing, throws a lot of spaghetti at the screen, and only some of it comes together as anything coherent or compelling. Thankfully, two of the most arresting parts are Bale and Buckley, who put a lot of conviction in their renditions of screendom’s most enduring monsters. For all the mismatched parts of Gyllenhaal’s fever dream, the leads are the beating heart that keep the movie alive.

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‘The Bride’

★★1/2

Opens Friday. March 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong/bloody violent content, sexual content/nudity and language. Running time: 126 minutes.