Sundance review: In 'Dick Johnson Is Dead,' a daughter explores what it means, for herself and her dad, to be alive

‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 89 minutes.

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 31, 11:30 a.m., Egyptian (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 12:15 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City).

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Director Kirsten Johnson’s intimate, funny and vital documentary “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is a living testament to a daughter’s love for her dad and the best “hug your family” message one can imagine.

Dick is Kirsten’s dad, and he’s not dead yet. But he’s in his mid-80s, and showing the signs of Alzheimer’s, and Kirsten knows it’s only a matter of time that Dad will be gone, mentally and then physically.

What does a filmmaker do with this heavy information? Fake his death. Over and over again. With her dad’s willing participation, a few make-up artists and some stunt doubles to make it look realistic.

The filmmaker also stages a funeral for her dad’s friends to pay their respects while he’s around to hear them. And she creates, on a soundstage, a version of heaven for him to enjoy — complete with dancers, confetti, and his favorite easy chair and ottoman.

In between the fabricated moments are real, raw and honest conversations about what it means for the Johnson family to watch their patriarch slowly fade away, to be gone before he’s gone. That happened with Kirsten’s mom, Katie Jo, and Dad knows that the same is likely for him.

Still, if one has to go — and dying is the one thing we’re all going to do someday — going in a fun way like this, surrounded by happy grandkids and lots of chocolate cake, is the nicest way to go. It’s the supreme irony of “Dick Johnson Is Dead” is that it shows how, in spirit, he’s never been more alive.

Sundance review: In period romance 'Sylvie's Love,' Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha burn up the screen

’Sylvie’s Love’

★★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 114 minutes.

Screens again: Thursday, Jan. 30, 8:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 3 p.m., PC Library (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 3:15 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City).

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Everyone deserves a swoon-inducing, deeply felt romantic melodrama, especially if it’s as refined and emotional as writer-director Eugene Ashe’s “Sylvie’s Love.”

The always radiant Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, who in 1957 is working in a New York record store, owned by her father, known to all as Mr. Jay (Lance Reddick). She knows a lot about music, especially jazz, but her real passion is television. 

Sylvie is also engaged to a young man serving overseas, which makes things complicated when Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) walks into the store, looking for a Thelonious Monk album and a job. Robert is a promising saxophonist, the engine of the quartet he’s in, made up of the musicians he grew up with back in Detroit. 

Despite her better judgment, Sylvie falls in love with Robert, and vice versa. But Robert’s musical ambitions, boosted by a benefactor who calls herself The Countess (Jemima Kirke), send Robert to Europe just as Sylvie learns she’s pregnant. Sylvie marries her fiancé, Lacy (Alano Miller), has a daughter, and that would be that — until five years later, when Sylvie, working on a TV cooking show, sees Robert by chance.

Ashe and cinematographer Declan Quinn get the period details perfect, from the cars to the smooth jazz music that gives way to rock ’n’ roll. We also feel the sting of racism, though subtly, like when Sylvie learns Lacy’s prospective new clients are bigots. And we experience the march of history, obliquely, when Sylvie’s cousin Mona (Aja Naomi King), a civil-rights activist, calls in discussing her exploits.

Much of Sylvie and Robert’s love story is told through music, both in the precision of the needle drops and in a lush score by composer Fabrice Lecomte that is as full as the main characters’ hearts.

In an ensemble cast that includes Eva Longoria as a jazz scene den mother and Wendi McClendon-Covey as the cooking show’s host, this movie belongs first and foremost to Thompson and Asomugha. Their chemistry together is sizzling, and separately they convey both the longing of their lost loves and the need to create that fuels their ambitions. “Sylvie’s Love” seems destined to be one of those timeless romances that we’ll be talking about years from now.

Sundance review: 'Minari' neatly captures life for a Korean farm family in '80s America

‘Minari’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 115 minutes. In English, and Korean with subtitles.

Screens again: Thursday, Jan. 30, 2:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 6 p.m., Rose Wagner (Salt Lake City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 8:15 a.m., Egyptian (Park City).

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Culture clashes and family struggles are at the heart of “Minari,” an emotionally resonant drama from director-writer Lee Isaac Chung.

Jacob Yi (Stephen Yuen, formerly of “The Walking Dead”) and his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), are a Korean-born couple who have left California for Arkansas in the mid-1980s, to pursue Jacob’s dream of running his own farm. With them are their American-born kids, Ann (Noel Kate Cho), who’s about 11, and 7-year-old David (Alan Kim), who gets extra pampering and worry from Monica because he has a heart murmur.

Jacob is enthusiastic about the fresh start, from buying a new tractor to hiring Paul (Will Patton), a local laborer who practices his own eccentric brand of Christianity. Monica is less thrilled about the single-wide pre-fab home they are living in, though her spirits pick up when her mother (Youn Yuh Jung) comes to live with them, bringing Korean chili powder and a penchant for playing cards. David is reluctant to befriend Grandma, whom he’s never met, but they bond over planting seeds of minari, a Korean plant and on-the-nose metaphor that fares well wherever it’s sown.

Chung’s script runs the Yi family through hardships, both financial and marital, while also displaying David’s child’s-eye view of life in the South. Chung’s direction captures the details of life in Reagan’s America, of Sunday church services and summer heat waves. And the cast, particularly Yuen and Han as the couple struggling to stay together through hardship, is exceptional.

Sundance review: Small-town despair is sharply drawn in 'The Evening Hour'

‘The Evening Hour’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 115 minutes.

Screens again: Thursday, Jan. 30, 10 p.m., Redstone 2 (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 5:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 3 p.m. Resort (Sundance).

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A sharply specific sense of place permeates director Braden King’s “The Evening Hour,” a solid tale of small-town suffering in coal country.

In a Kentucky town, Cole (Philip Ettinger) works as an assistant at a senior-living center and is studying to be a nurse. But where Cole makes his real money is a side hustle, buying excess painkillers from his elderly neighbors and selling them to addicts. Cole sets some rules, like never taking pills from the patients in the center, and staying away from the real action of the town’s ruthless drug lord, Everett (Mark Menchaca).

The equilibrium in Cole’s life, which includes a sexual relationship of sorts with the somewhat shady Charlotte (Stacy Martin), is disrupted by several things at once. His grandfather (Frank Hoyt Taylor), a snake-handling evangelical preacher, dies after a long illness. That brings Cole’s wayward mom, Ruby (Lili Taylor), back to town. Also back in town is Terry (Cosmo Jarvis), an old high-school friend of Cole’s, who has plans to sell hard drugs and horn in on Everett’s trade.

King (who was at Sundance in 2011 with “Here”) and first-time screenwriter Elizabeth Palmore, adapting Carter Sickels’ novel, land all the details of Cole’s Kentucky town, where the mining company looms over the double-wide trailers and the town bar is the extent of the social scene. The bar is also where Cole’s old crush, Lacy (Kerry Bishé), is working again, having recently dumped her husband. It’s a place where everyone wants to get away from, but few ever do.

The setting doesn’t make up for a familiar storyline, the one where a guy riding the edge between legal and illegal finds he can’t keep the balancing act going indefinitely. Ettinger is engaging, but can’t quite make the character unique.

Sundance review: 'Nine Days' is a heartbreakingly beautiful movie about the pluses and minuses of being human

Nine Days’

★★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 124 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, 9 a.m., The Ray (Park City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, 3 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Thursday, Jan. 30, 8:30 p.m., Prospector (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 6 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City); Saturday, Feb. 1, noon, PC Library (Park City).

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Bold in its vision and heartbreaking in its humanity, writer-director Edson Oda’s “Nine Days” is a brilliant, beautiful story that asks the simplest and hardest question there is: What does it mean to be human?

In a house in the middle of a severe alternate reality — OK, really, in the middle of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats — a man named Will (played by Winston Duke) spends his days watching a wall of dozens of TV screens, each of them showing the point-of-view of someone living on Earth. Will dutifully keeps journals and tapes of what’s on these screens, and puts them a file cabinet.

On these screens, Will and his friend Kyo (Benedict Wong) watch entire lives play out — including a bride-to-be, a man in a wheelchair, and a high school kid being bullied. Will’s favorite screen shows Amanda, a violin virtuoso about to perform in an important concert. Then Amanda dies in a car crash, possibly a suicide, and Will is at a loss for explaining why someone with such promise could be dead.

Will has a more pressing problem: He has a screen to fill. So he brings in a handful of souls, for want of a better word, who are applying for the opportunity to be born as a human being. These souls come to the house to start a 9-day selection process.

The applicants are an eclectic bunch, including a happy-go-lucky party type (Tony Hale), a sensitive artist (David Rysdahl), and a ruthless pragmatist (Bill Skarsgard). But Will becomes most intrigued by a late arrival, whom he dubs Emma (Zazie Beetz), who takes an optimistic and artistic approach to being a potential human — the same traits that made Amanda a perfect choice and may have doomed her, and possibly the ones Will possessed in his years-ago stint as a human.

Oda has created an endlessly inventive movie, one that embeds the great philosophical question about what a human being is into a wealth of thoughtful visual signals. He claims Hirokazu Kore-Eta’s “After Life,” Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” as influences, and they’re definitely all here. And, heeding the rule that the greatest filmmakers steal from the best, there are shots that mimic classic images from “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Searchers.”

The ensemble cast is endlessly sharp, with Hale’s comic performance lightening what could be a somber tone. But it’s Beetz and Duke who shine brightest in “Nine Days,” as they engage in a running tete-a-tete about the answers Will expects and the ones she’s willing to give. From bleak beginning to triumphant end, “Nine Days” is an artful and tender examination of humanity’s worst fears and highest aspirations.

Sundance review: 'Charm City Kings' is a fast-moving, high-octane throwback to classic gangster dramas

‘Charm City Kings’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 129 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, 9:30 p.m., Rose Wagner (Salt Lake City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, 9:45 p.m., Eccles (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 12:15 p.m., The Ray (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 8:15 a.m., The MARC (Park City).

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Deftly combining the elements of a crime thriller, a coming-of-age drama and a morality tale, director Angel Manuel Soto’s “Charm City Kings” is a riveting ride through the subculture of Baltimore’s motorbike scene.

That scene, featured in Lofty Nathan’s 2013 documentary “12 O’Clock Boys” (which this movie credits), involves dirtbike riders popping wheelies until the bike is practically at a perpendicular axis to the street — in the 12 o’clock position. It’s popular in some segments of Baltimore, and ridiculously illegal, which is why this movie has something most Sundance movies don’t: A high-speed chase.

Mouse (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) is a 14-year-old who’s obsessed with the dirt bike scene, in particular the Midnight Clique, the most bad-ass riders in Baltimore. They’re led by the charismatic Blax (played by the rapper Meek Mill), who is recently out on parole and trying to stay away from the criminal element — i.e., his old crew, who use their bikes as a courier service for drug deals.

Mouse, whose older brother was killed in a dirtbike crash some years back, idolizes Blax and wants to get a vehicle of his own. Blax, who’s trying to go legit as a mechanic, lets Mouse work in his garage, and tells him that if he can rebuild a dirtbike from available parts, he can keep the bike.

Mouse’s obsession with the street bike scene fascinates Nicki (Chandler DuPont), a girl who’s recently moved into the neighborhood. But that obsession also worries the two adult role models in Mouse’s life: His overworked mom (Teyonah Parris), and Det. Rivers (William Catlett), a cop who has been Mouse’s mentor for the last four years.

Soto and screenwriter Sherman Payne — with story credit shared by three writers, including “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins — neatly balance the movie’s action elements, which focus on the bikes, with the hard dramatic beats, as a battle for Mouse’s soul breaks out between Rivers and Blax.

In a solid ensemble cast, Meek Mill stands out in a role reminiscent of bad guys trying to be a good influence for kids in old Warner Bros. gangster dramas. But young Winston gives a strong central performance as a kid trying to figure out which path, and which person of influence, he should follow toward adulthood.

Sundance review: Documentary about Natalie Wood aims to shift focus to her brilliant career, away from her tragic death

‘Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind’

★★★

Playing in the Documentary Premieres program of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 100 minutes.

Screens again: Wednesday, Jan. 29, 9 p.m., SLC Library (Salt Lake City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 3:30 p.m., The Ray (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 10 p.m., Redstone 2 (Park City).

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Laurent Bouzereau’s documentary “Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind” aims to hit the reset button on the public’s perception of the late actress — to think more about her stellar career and less about her tragic drowning death in 1981.

The prime mover here isn’t Bouzereau, the director, but the film’s executive producer, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Wood’s daughter and the onscreen interviewer of Wood’s first (and third) husband, and Natasha’s stepdad, actor Robert Wagner.

Bouzereau does a solid job of compiling ample clips of Wood’s acting career, from her days as a child star (“Miracle on 34th Street” being her most famous pre-teen role) to her adult stardom in “Rebel Without a Cause,” “Splendor in the Grass,” “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice” and many others. He also collects plenty of interviews from her friends and co-stars. (Robert Redford credits Wood for jump-starting his early movie career, by endorsing him for roles in “Inside Daisy Clover” and “This Property Is Condemned”).

Two of Wood’s leading men are notably absent: Warren Beatty, her co-star in “Splendor in the Grass” with whom she had a romance after ending her first marriage to Wagner; and Christopher Walken, her romantic lead in her final movie, “Brainstorm” — and the other passenger on Wagner and Wood’s yacht on the night Wood disappeared near Catalina.

The meat of the documentary is Gregson Wagner interviewing Wagner about what happened that night in 1981. Fighting tears and years of reticence, Wagner talks about an argument with Walken before Wood went to bed for the night — and how she wasn’t in her cabin when Wagner came to bed. The interview also covers the years of tabloid speculation about Wood’s death, and the recent reopening of the case.

There’s no doubt that Gregson Wagner believes fervently that her stepdad didn’t kill his wife. The documentary won’t end such speculation, but it makes a clear argument for the Wagners’ side while reminding movie lovers of Wood’s gifts as an actor and a friend to many people in Hollywood.

Sundance review: 'The Killing of Two Lovers,' filmed in central Utah, a stark and beautiful look at a marriage in crisis

‘The Killing of Two Lovers”

★★★1/2

Playing in the Next program of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 85 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, 6 p.m., Temple (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 3:30 p.m., Redstone 1 (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 8:30 a.m., Prospector (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 12:30 p.m., Rose Wagner (Salt Lake City).

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Writer-director Robert Machoian’s “The Killing of Two Lovers” is as stark, intimate and beautiful as the small town, nestled along Utah’s mountains, where the movie takes place.

Describing the movie’s opening scene would be a spoiler, but suffice it to say that the main character, David (Clayne Crawford), is contemplating doing something unspeakable. The rest of the movie spools out from that decision, as Machoian considers whether David can atone sufficiently for those early moments.

David is going through a rough patch. He’s recently separated from his wife, Nikki (Sepideh Moafi), and has moved back in with his ailing dad (Bruce Graham). He’s trying to pick up odd jobs around town, while also navigating the weekends where he has custody of his and Nikki’s four kids — a moody teen daughter Jesse (Avery Pizzuto) and three rowdy small sons (played by Machoian’s real kids, Arri, Ezra and Jonah Graham).

David is working hard to win back Nikki, and gets frustrated when a planned date night is derailed when Jesse’s temper prompts Nikki to want to keep a close eye on her. David becomes even more agitated when he learns Nikki is dating a guy from her office (Chris Coy), which he takes as an assault on his manhood and a step backward on the path toward reconciling his marriage.

Machoian follows David in long, fluid takes that capture his place amid the foreboding mountains around his small town. (The movie was filmed in Kanosh, Utah.) Machoian’s penchant for letting scenes breathe leads to solid performances, especially from Crawford and Moafi, as they create deeply felt moments that are almost too perfectly real to bear.

Sundance review: Radha Blank declares herself in 'The 40-Year-Old Version,' a comedy that's all over the place

‘The 40-Year-Old Version’

★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 129 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, Resort (Sundance); Friday, Jan. 31, 12:15 p.m., Eccles (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 11:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City).

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Watching “The 40-Year-Old Version,” is hard not to fall a little in love with its writer-director-star Radha Blank, and to wish her debut feature worked better than it does.

Blank plays a character not unlike herself, a Brooklyn playwright trying to get her career on track. The play she’s writing is a tough-minded work about the effects of gentrification on married Harlem shipowners, but her options for producing it are a barely paying black theater or a rich white producer (Reed Birney) who will want her message watered down for rich white theater patrons.

Meanwhile, Radha is frustrated by her work teaching theater to high-school kids, while she’s facing 40 with no significant other and avoiding the pain of dealing with her late mother’s belongings.

What to do? Why, become a rapper, of course. She puts her anger into verse, and it sounds pretty good, if she says so herself. (The wry fourth-wall-breaking look at the camera tells us that.) She finds a DJ who goes by D (played by hip-hop musician Oswin Benjamin, in his acting debut), to lay down some beats for a potential mixtape — an idea that horrifies Radha’s agent Archie (Peter Kim), who has been Radha’s best friend since they were prom dates (she was his beard).

Blank aims to stuff so much into her movie that the elements work against each other. A subplot about a surly student (Imani Lewis) never pays off, for example. And the movie’s second half extends the joke about Radha’s compromised play far longer than is necessary. Maybe another pass through editing would tighten up the slack.

But there’s a lot to admire about “The 40-Year-Old Version,” from the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography to Kim’s funny supporting performance that puts a new twist on the sassy gay best friend. Blank herself is charismatic, witty and funny, and it’s too bad her movie blurs the line between self-empowering and self-indulgent.

Sundance review: Chilling atmosphere of 'Amulet' puts premium on dread over shocks

‘Amulet’

★★★

Playing in the Midnight section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 100 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, 11:30 a.m., Prospector (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 11:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 11:59 p.m., Tower (Salt Lake City).

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Mixing a brooding atmosphere and a sly feminist spin on the horror genre, “Amulet” is a solid statement debut for actor-turned-filmmaker Romola Garai.

Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) is a homeless immigrant in London, finding odd jobs in construction — when a kindly nun (Imelda Staunton) finds him work as a live-in handyman in a rundown house. Living in the house are Magda (Carla Juri), a lonely young woman who cooks and cleans, and Magda’s ill mother, living unseen in the attic.

Tomaz is urged never to venture upstairs, even when he hears what sounds like Magda being abused, verbally and physically, by her mother. The longer he lives there, the more Tomaz becomes attracted to Magda — but a guilty secret from his past, when he was a soldier at a wartime border post in some unnamed country, weighs on his conscience.

Garai (you may remember her as the adult Saoirse Ronan in “Atonement,” or as Diego Luna’s dance partner in “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights”) has a good eye for creepy detail, and every spot of mildew or peeled paint in Magda’s house adds to a feeling of festering rot. She doesn’t traffic in cheap jump scares, preferring to build the dread gradually — that is, until some cunning twists in the final half hour that pack a gut-punch. 

“Amulet” shows that Garai knows what she’s doing behind the camera, and I’m curious to see what she does next.