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An experienced businessman and a creative newbie factor in the weekend's big studio opening.
The comedy "The Intern" stars Robert De Niro as Ben Whittaker, a retired business executive who takes a low-level job in a fashion-website start-up — and becomes a font of wisdom for the company's founder, played by Anne Hathaway. Writer-director Nancy Meyers ("It's Complicated") creates a picture-perfect Brooklyn landscape for this modern-feminist story to play out. De Niro and Hathaway are charming, which carries the movie a long way.
There's a lot of true stories — or fictionalized versions of the truth — landing at movie theaters this weekend.
The best of the lot is of particular interest to Utahns: "Peace Officer," a compelling documentary that looks at an important issue — the over-militarization of local police forces — through the story of one Utah case. It involves the 2008 death of Brian Wood, killed in a police standoff in Farmington with the Davis County Sheriff's Department SWAT team. Wood's father-in-law, William "Dub" Lawrence, was Davis County Sheriff in the '70s, and founded that SWAT team. Now he investigates his son's death, and that of others killed by police in similar circumstances. The documentary uses Lawrence's obsession with justice as a watchable entry into a thorny national issue.
Another documentary takes a light-hearted approach to romance. "Meet the Patels" follows an Indian-American actor, Ravi Patel (who co-directed with his sister, Geeta), who agrees to use his parents' traditional matchmaking skills to find a prospective girlfriend. Ravi is engaging, but the real stars are his parents, who show through their banter the real meaning of true love.
Two fictionalized takes on 20th Century history open this weekend: "Pawn Sacrifice," a slick but not particularly engaging biography of troubled chess master Bobby Fischer (Tobey Maguire), focusing on his confrontation with Russian champion Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber); and "Stonewall," in which director Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day") buries the story of the 1969 riots that sparked the gay-rights movement under a pile of melodramatic cliches.
The likely box-office champ this weekend is "Hotel Transylvania 2," which brings back the animated Dracula (voiced by Adam Sandler), who's now a grandpa to a half-human, half-vampire kid. The movie was not screened for Utah critics.
Lastly, a few theaters are opening "The Green Inferno," director Eli Roth's gorefest about treehugging college kids traveling up the Amazon and running into a tribe of cannibals. It, unsurprisingly, was not screened for critics.