Sundance review: 'Jihad Rehab' profiles former Al Qaeda members trying to restart their lives — and, again, led astray by unfulfilled promises

Are former members of Al Qaeda beyond redemption? That’s what Meg Smaker’s documentary “Jihad Rehab,” and the Saudi facility to which she gains access, ask — and the answers are uncomfortable and illuminating.

Smaker got, for awhile, extraordinary access to the Mohammed Bin Naif Counseling and Care Center in Saudi Arabia. It boasts of being the only rehabilitation center for men accused of terrorism. And the three men Smaker follows through the system are all former members of Al Qaeda, recruited when they were teenagers.

The three men are all from Yemen, and arrive at the center after being released to the Saudis by the United States government — because these three were imprisoned at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

There’s no doubt, from their resumés, that these three were trouble. Nadir was a bodyguard for Osama Bin Laden, while Mohammed and Ali were both training at Al Qaeda camps. When Smaker introduces us to them, they have been in U.S. captivity for the last 15 or 16 years — and when they were released, they weren’t allowed to go to Yemen, which is being decimated by a civil war in which the Saudis have taken sides, using American-made arms.

The three are part of a 12-month program in which teachers try to root out the terrorist mindset and introduce the men to basic life skills they might have missed as an Al Qaeda trainee or Gitmo prisoner. The program boasts an 85% success rate in keeping graduates from returning to terrorism — which sounds good, until you think about the havoc the 15% could be creating.

The twist in Smaker’s narrative comes near the end of these ex-terrorists’ 12-month stint, when the center’s namesake — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif — is overthrown by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who consolidated power and cracked down on dissidents and non-Saudis in the country, including the Yemenis we have been following.

Smaker’s interview subjects, both the former Gitmo detainees and the center’s staff, set some sort of personal record for most “would you look at the time?” Interview walkouts in a single movie. Even when they do talk, they’re not particularly forthcoming as they dodge questions about what they were doing before and immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

“Jihad Rehab” becomes less about the psychological training offered these men, but about the way the promises made to them — first by Osama bin Laden, and now by the Saudi government — are pulled out from under them by shifting politics. Whether they deserve what’s happening to them is for each viewer to decide.

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‘Jihad Rehab’

★★★

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably PG-13 for images of war and terrorism. Running time: 112 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Nanny' mixes reality and mythology for a dark thriller of an immigrant mother watching someone else's child

Mythology and motherhood collide in “Nanny,” a gorgeously rendered and chilling psychological thriller that asks “Who’s watching the children?”

The title character is Aisha (played by Anna Diop, from DC’s “Titans”), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant who takes a job as nanny for a well-off Manhattan couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector). Their little girl, Rose (Rose Decker), hits it off with Aisha immediately — Aisha’s Senegalese food is tastier than the bland stuff Amy orders from Whole Foods or wherever. But Aisha witnesses that the marriage is fractured, with Adam away covering uprisings around the world and Amy trying to get promoted in her company.

Aisha doesn’t have time to worry about her bosses’ problems, though. She’s trying to earn as much money as she can to send to Dakar, so she can bring her 6-year-old son to America. Aisha also starts up a romance with Malik (Sinqua Walls), the doorman in the family’s building.

While Aisha is occupied with thoughts of Malik and making sure Amy pays her properly, she also starts having nightmares — visions of water and evil mermaids and the spider trickster Ananzi. She tries talking these out with Malik’s grandmother Kathleen (Leslie Uggams), who’s rather attuned to the spirit world. The spirits, Kathleen says, “bless us with resilience. But the spirits’ tools are not always kind.”

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu neatly blurs the lines of reality and myth for Aisha, until she’s not entirely sure what’s up or down. Employing a rich color palette and disorienting set design for Amy and Adam’s apartment — big props to cinematographer Rina Yang and production designer Jonathan Guggenheim — Jusu makes space for Diop to take the character to the edge of madness and back.

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‘Nanny’

★★★1/2

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably R for violence, bloodshed, nudity and a sex scene. Running time: 98 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Descendant' gives a thoughtful, powerful look at a slave ship's voyage and the people still living in its wake

It’s not easy to inject nuance into a two-hour documentary, but director Margaret Brown does so carefully and beautifully in “Descendant,” a look at how one crime of the past creates echoes in our present.

The launch point for “Descendant” is the Clotilde, believed to be the last slave ship to deposit kidnapped Africans in the United States. The importing of slaves was abolished in 1808, and the Clotilde legendarily brought 105 souls from Africa (what is now the country of Benin) in 1860 — because, it’s said, of a bet that Alabama businessman Timothy Meaher made that he could violate the law and bring Africans to be sold into slavery. The ship arrived in Mobile, the Africans were taken to land, and Capt. William Foster then burned the ship to hide the evidence.

Brown, a Mobile native herself, traces the efforts, aided by the National Geographic Society, to find the Clotilde. She talks to a diver who tells of having “to listen to the ancestral voices” of those who were carried in those ships. She talks to a folklorist who keeps the tapes of descendants of the Clotilde’s captives, which kept the story alive when many in Mobile wanted to keep it quiet.

Most importantly, Brown airs the voices of the current residents of Africatown, the community near Mobile founded by those descendants. They speak, in interviews and town meetings, of their mixed response to the possible discovery of the Clotilde — which could bring tourism to the town, but also another chance for the white Mobile population to sanitize history all over again.

One of the more stirring parts of “Descendant” are the scenes where Brown asks some of those descendants to read passages from “Barracoon,” the long-lost work by author and anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston. In 1927, Hurston interviewed the last survivor of the Clotilde, Cudjoe Lewis, and wrote his recollections down in his own dialect. The book was finished in 1931, but remained unpublished until 2018 — a sign of how incendiary the history of slavery has been and still is.

Brown addresses the current concerns of Cudjoe’s descendants — including the industrial wasteland that has grown up around Africatown, and how the Meahers (who declined to participate in the film) remains one of Mobile’s leading families. 

That’s a lot to pack into 108 minutes, and Brown does it with precision and empathy. She does it by letting Cudjoe’s kin tell the bulk of the story, letting them reclaim their shared legacy from those who might try to spruce it up and present it without rough edges or uncomfortable truths. “Descendant” becomes, then, not just a vital account of history, but an example of William Faulkner’s maxim that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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‘Descendant’

★★★1/2

Premiered Saturday, January 22, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Monday, January 24, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably PG-13 for descriptions of slavery and racism. Running time: 108 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Watcher' takes a page out of Hitchcock, and serves up a stylish thriller all its own

In her feature debut, “Watcher,” director Chloe Okuno delivers a straight-up suspense thriller that is all killer and no filler.

When Francis (Karl Glusman) gets a promotion and a transfer to Bucharest, his fiancee Julia (Maika Monroe) moves there with him. She doesn’t understand Romanian, but listens to language lessons to try to pick up a few phrases. She is a bit at loose ends, trying to figure out how to spend her days while Francis at work — and how not to freak out when the TV news talks about a serial killer in the area.

One night, Julia notices a man in the building across the street, apparently looking at her. (Julia and Francis’ apartment has ridiculously large windows and inadequate drapes, by the way.) The next night, it happens again. She tries to call Francis’ attention to this, but he’s sure there’s an innocent explanation. When Julia thinks the same guy (Burn Gorman) is following her in a grocery store, Francis suggests he looks creepy because Julia’s been acting creepy toward the stranger.

That’s as simple a thriller premise as you can get, and even Okuno acknowledges her debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.” (Hey, if you’re going to steal, steal the good stuff.) And while Hitchcock’s influence, along with that of a few other filmmakers, can be felt throughout, Okuno (who co-wrote the script with Zack Ford) adds enough of her own touches to make the suspenseful moments realistically chilling.

Okuno’s ace in the hole is Monroe, who made her horror-thriller rep starring in “It Follows” in 2014. Monroe has to carry Julia’s swirling emotions — loneliness, apprehension, paranoia, and anger that Francis doesn’t believe her — and does so with grace and fury. Monroe’s perfectly dialed into Julia’s character, which lets us feel the gaze of “Watcher” like lasers to our skull. 

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‘Watcher’

★★★1/2

Premiered Friday, January 21, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Sunday, January 23, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably R for strong violence and bloodshed, nudity and sexual content, and language. Running time: 91 minutes.

Sundance review: In 'Master,' horror meets social commentary, as microaggressions build along with the tension

Microaggressions gradually turn macro in “Master,” which melds elements of horror thriller and social commentary about subtle and not-so-subtle racism on a prestigious college campus.

At Ancaster College, Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) has just taken the position of house master (an unfortunate title that writer-director Mariama Diallo says only recently was altered at her alma mater, Yale) for one of the dormitories — the first Black woman to hold the post. Moving into this dorm is Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), a Black freshman from Tacoma who is eager to get good grades and fit in with the mostly white student body, including her roommate Amelia (Talia Ryder).

Jasmine and Amelia have been assigned to what upperclassmen refer to ominously as “The Room.” Room 302, we’re told, is where young women have either jumped out the window or hanged themselves — always at 3:33 a.m. on December 4. That date is significant, as it’s when a woman in the town, Margaret Millet, was hanged as a witch in the 1700’s.

Jasmine starts seeing things, and hearing things, that make her think the legend of the witch has some validity. Away from home and struggling in school and socially, Jasmine feels increasingly isolated — a problem exacerbated when she challenged a grade given by her literature professor, Liv Beckman (Amber Gray). Prof. Beckman, who is Black and one of Gail’s only friends on campus, has her own problems, as she’s up for tenure and battling the entrenched all-white faculty (led by Talia Balsam).

Diallo sets up her film beautifully, as the three Black women — Gail, Jasmine and Liv — try to deflect the small instances of insensitivity dealt to them by the college’s predominantly white populace. As those microaggressions grow larger, and for Jasmine and Gail take on a menacing supernatural element, Diallo builds the tension to a peak. But that peak hits a bit early, and the finale stumbles a bit as subtext becomes the text.

Renee is a welcome discovery, hitting every step perfectly in Jasmine’s descent into possible madness. Gray (who appeared on Barry Jenkins’ “The Underground Railroad”) brings a spiky edge as Liv challenges the college’s status quo. And Hall (“The Hate U Give,” “Girls Trip”) gives a powerful, yet neatly internalized, performance as a woman whose battles haven’t produced the victory she sought. That trio of performances gives “Master” the emotional punch that stays with viewers well after the credits roll.

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‘Master’

★★★

Premiered Friday, January 21, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Sunday, January 23, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. (It starts streaming March 18 on Prime.) Not rated, probably R for violence, sexual content, and language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Sundance review: 'The Exiles' lets filmmaker Christine Choy tie up loose ends, and speak truth to power about the Tiananmen Square massacre

The documentarian Christine Choy has always spoken her mind from behind the camera — with such classic films as “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” — and in “The Exiles,” she’s just as in-your-face when the camera is in hers.

What filmmakers Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, both New York University class of ’16 and making their first feature film, start out to make is a portrait of their favorite NYU professor. Choy is a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, vodka-drinking Chinese/Korean immigrant who will unload her opinions at every opportunity. She’s also been assigned, by her former students, to watch her old movies — which she says is “better than therapy.”

But soon Choy is confronted with the documentary she never finished. In 1989, after the Chinese military’s massacre of (deliberately) uncounted numbers of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Choy drew an assignment to shoot footage of a group of protesters who escaped China and were exiles in the United States. With a sound engineer along for the ride, Choy filmed these exiles at their first U.S. news conference (in Battery Park, with the Statue of Liberty in the background), at a convention in Chicago for Chinese students living in the U.S., and to an undisclosed location on Long Island where several of the exiles were living two months after the massacre.

And, then, nothing. Choy had reels of negatives, but no money left to finish the project. 

And so the reels sat, until Columbus and Klein started going through them and showing them to Choy. What happens next is a quest, to follow Choy as she meets three of the exiles — a charismatic college student, a political scientist and China’s then-biggest tech CEO — to talk about what 30 years away from home has done to them.

The stories of the exiles today are all absorbing, and Columbus and Klein deftly balance the archival footage and the new material (both shot, it should be noted, on Kodak film) to show how much they have changed with age and wisdom.

But the star of “The Exiles” is still Choy, as cantankerous at the end of this journey as she was at the beginning, acerbically noting that China couldn’t get away with killing potentially thousands of its young people without some complicity from international leaders — starting with George H.W. Bush and Henry Kissinger trying to dismiss the massacre as a local issue, and continuing through every president since. 

Choy, who turns 70 this year, acknowledges that she will likely never be allowed back into China, where she was born, after “The Exiles” comes out. She also appears to believe, without regret or nostalgia, that it’s a fair price to pay for speaking the truth.

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‘The Exiles’

★★★1/2

Premiered Friday, January 21, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Sunday, January 23, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably PG-13 for language and images of bloodshed. Running time: 95 minutes; partly in Mandarin with subtitles.

Sundance 2022, day one: A study in sound, and some words from Robert Redford

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival kicked off Thursday night the way the 2021 festival did — from people’s living rooms and laptops.

With COVID-19 case counts prompting the Sundance Institute to cancel this year’s in-person Utah screenings, festival attendees were back to the online experience — starting with a special presentation in Sundance’s virtual gathering place, The Spaceship.

The movie playing in the New Frontier section, in The Spaceship’s Cinema House, was “32 Sounds,” documentarian Sam Green’s multi-faceted look at how sound works in our ears, our brains and our souls — with a range of interview subjects, from Foley artists to Phillip Glass.

The screening was supposed to be preceded by a welcome message from the big guy, Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford. A technical glitch kept people tuning in through the Cinema House from hearing the message — which was posted on the festival’s website, and is worth a listen.

Read my account of Sundance’s first day at sltrib.com.

Sundance review: 'Emergency' is a college buddy comedy with a stinging message under the laughs

Smuggling a lot of importance under the guise of a college buddy romp, director Carey Williams’ acidic comedy “Emergency” generates laughs, tears and a bracing look at the continuing perils of being Black in America.

Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) are roommates and best friends about to graduate from college. Kunle has his future well in hand, with graduate school at Princeton and a budding career as a biologist. Sean is more laid-back, more interested in vaping and drinking than in getting his thesis done. On this Friday night, Sean is determined to get Kunle to join him for the “Legendary Tour,” a run through all the parties at their school’s seven Greek houses.

Sean and Kunle’s party plans hit a snag when they notice a white girl passed out in their living room. Kunle’s first instinct is to call 911 — but Sean vetoes that idea, predicting that the cops would automatically think the worst. Instead, Kunle and Sean, with their dorky third roomie Carlos (Sebastian Chacon), load the vomit-stained girl into Sean’s minivan, to take her to the hospital, and hoping they don’t get pulled over first.

The plan goes awry, thanks to DUI checkpoints and Sean’s pre-function buzz. Also, there’s the matter of the girl’s older sister, Maddy (played by pop star and former Disney Channel icon Sabrina Carpenter), who notices her sister’s missing and goes in hot pursuit, with her BFF Alice (Madison Thompson) and hunky Rafael (Diego Abraham) along for the ride.

Williams (whose “R#J” premiered at Sundance last year) and screenwriter K.D. Da’Vila expanded this story from a short of the same name that won a special jury award at Sundance in 2018. This version has its share of wacky mix-ups — like a gag involving a spiked energy drink — and frenetic bickering among the main characters. But there’s a sharp undertone at work, too, as Kunle, Sean and Carlos (who’s Latino) must deal with the ever-present danger of life of being, as Sean puts it, “darker than a brown paper bag.”

Cyler (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) and Watkins pair up strongly, as their harrowing night reveals their characters’ contrasting attitudes and a few secrets the friends have kept from each other. For all of its sly humor and observations about race in America, “Emergency” is at its heart a buddy picture, and these two make that friendship feel like the real thing.

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‘Emergency’

★★★1/2

Premiered Thursday, January 20, in the U.S. Dramatic competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Saturday, January 22, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. (The movie will have a limited theatrical run starting on May 20, and stream on Prime starting May 27.) Not rated, probably R for language including racial epithets, some violence, drug use and teen drinking. Running time: 104 minutes.

Sundance review: 'Fire of Love' tells of a combustible romance of two people and the volcanoes that fascinated them

Director Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love” is one of those movies that had to be a documentary — because no one would believe a narrative film with such a strange story and such compelling characters.

Maurice and Katia Krafft were in love, though the details of their first meeting have fallen into the level of myth. It might have been on a park bench at their college, or at a movie screening, or a blind date. Whichever it was, the subject of volcanoes came up at some point, and the two realized they were kindred spirits.

The two became inseparable from then on. They conducted their first expedition in 1968, getting grant money and a donated car to check out volcanoes in Iceland. Two years later, they were married in a small ceremony in their home province of Alsace, France — and vowed not to have children, because they would be too busy traveling the globe to study volcanoes.

The timing was perfect. The Kraffts started their joint career just as the theory of plate tectonics — the idea that the Earth’s crust is a series of interlocking plates, and the seams are where volcanoes and earthquakes occur — was becoming accepted science. Though Maurice espoused his belief that every volcano was different, he and Katia broke down volcanoes into two main groups: “Red” volcanoes that produce lava flows, and “gray” volcanoes that explode with torrents of ash and rocks.

Maurice and Katia said the color designations could be explained by plate tectonics. “Red” volcanoes occurred when two plates pulled apart, allowing magma to rise to the surface as lava. “Gray” volcanoes were the opposite, the result of two plates pushing against each other, forcing material upward explosively.

At first, the Kraffts mostly studied the “red” volcanoes, and did so by getting breathtakingly close to the lava. They called it a “calculated risk,” but invaluable for getting good data and, more importantly, great footage — and it’s that footage that makes “Fire of Love” such a beautiful and intense movie.

The couple switched to studying “gray” volcanoes after Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980, killing 57 people nearby and spewing ash for hundreds of miles (including on my house in Spokane when I was a sophomore in high school). It was Katia’s ambition to create a warning system for active volcanoes, something that could save lives if people evacuate in time.

Dosa has pored through hundreds of hours of the Kraffts’ footage, much of it astonishing in its beauty and danger level. She also compiles the couple’s writings and TV appearances — their daring exploits made them stars in France — into a running narrative, written by Dosa, Shane Boris, Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput. The narration, delivered by filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July, is tender and poetic.

Dosa’s film paints an aching portrait of two people who adored each other and the adventure their lives had taken. “Fire of Love” is among the most passionate, and most tragic, love stories you’re likely to see in a long time.

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‘Fire of Love’

★★★1/2

Premiered Thursday, January 20, in the U.S. Documentary competition at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Saturday, January 22, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Not rated, probably PG-13 for images of disasters. Running time: 93 minutes; partly in French, with subtitles.

Sundance review: 'The Worst Person in the World' is a touching and funny look at a 20-something trying to make sense of her life

Director Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” arrives in America (both with an Oscar-qualifying run and a slot in the 2022 Sundance Film Festival’s Spotlight section) with a strong tailwind of praise, including a Best Actress win at the Cannes Film Festival for its young star, Renate Reinsve.

I’ll add to the pile of praise: This is a funny and touching comedy-drama, and Reinsve is outstanding as the sorta-title character, who’s not that bad but still figuring things out.

Reinsve’s character, Julie, is 27 and not sure where she’s going in her life. Flashbacks of her college life find her switching her majors from pre-med to psychology to photography — and not fully satisfied in any of them, leaving her to toil in a job at an Oslo bookstore. It’s because of the job that he meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, a frequent Trier collaborator), an abrasive comic-book artist about a decade her senior, and soon they become lovers.

But there’s something missing in the relationship, something Julie can’t quite describe. It’s clear when she leaves Aksel’s book-signing party early, and on her walk home ends up crashing a wedding — where she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a nice guy whose personality is the opposite of Aksel’s. The scenes of Julie and Eivind at the wedding, talking and flirting into the morning but never so much as kissing, are heartbreaking in their pure impact.

Trier and his frequent writing partner, Eskil Vogt, send Julie into some visually stunning flights of narrative fancy. In one, she leaves one man for another — with every human between them frozen in time. In another, a dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms has her imagining a reunion with her estranged father, among other wild visions.

Trier — whose output has ranged from addiction drama (“Oslo, August 31st”) to psychological horror (“Thelma”) — and Vogt wrote this film specifically for Reinsve, and it’s a perfect fit. Julie isn’t the worst, though she sometimes does things that make her feel that way, which just makes her human. Reinsve finds the humor and pain of living in those in-between stages of life, when someone thinks their close to figuring it all out, and having the epiphany that nobody ever completely figures it out, but it’s the attempt that makes life interesting and meaningful.

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‘The Worst Person in the World’

★★★1/2

Screened Thursday, January 20, in the Spotlight section of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again on the festival portal, Saturday, January 22, for a 24-hour window starting at 8 a.m. (The film is set to open in Utah theaters on February 18.) Rated R for sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language. Running time: 127 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.