Rick Brough

Host and Reporter at KPCW-FM (Salt Lake City, UT)

County reporter for @KPCWRadio, film reviewer, keeper of pop culture facts & celebrity deaths, yardstick of local-ness and funnier than you.

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Articles

Friday Film Review | 'Mission: Impossible-The Final Reckoning'

3 weeks ago | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

In the nearly 20 years of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise, Tom Cruise, as special agent Ethan Hunt, has shown a derring-do and physical endurance that would exhaust Superman. He has defied torture, gravity, electrocution, drowning and hypothermia. And at least once in every film, we glory to see him sprinting across the screen, like a furious little piston, to avert some crisis.
Friday Film Review | 'Thunderbolts*'

1 month ago | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

I haven’t been a devout follower of films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or their rivals at D.C. So it’s not a good sign that, even to this casual viewer, “Thunderbolts*” is traveling familiar ground. The film begins with megalomaniac CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) facing an impeachment inquiry.
Friday Film Review | 'Snow White'

2 months ago | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

Just to be clear, it’s not necessarily a bad notion to take a beloved children’s tale and morph it into a new version of “Les Miserables." But it’s been done before and better — just recently with “Wicked, Part I.”In “Snow White,” a benevolent king and queen preside over a kingdom where the citizens feel a communal loyalty to their rulers and each other.
Friday Film Review | 'Mickey 17'

Mar 14, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

“Mickey 17” is written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho, known for bizarre tales about class division and warfare, such as “Parasite”, which won a Best Picture Oscar for 2019, and “Snowpiercer.”By comparison, though, his new film comes across as a lead-footed disappointment. Robert Pattinson plays Mickey Barnes, who looks like he’s spent most of his life having people step on his fingers.
Friday Film Review | 'Love Hurts'

Feb 14, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

“Love Hurts” is a fast-paced darkly comic martial-arts movie, where just about every major character gets shot, stabbed or pummeled repeatedly. But this is a Valentine’s Day flick, set on February 14.
Sundance '25 Review | FOUR & A HALF SUNS | 'Opus'

Jan 28, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

Mark Anthony Green is the writer-director of a dark, dippy and flamboyant tale about the seductions of fame and the famous. Moretti, a legendary glam-rock figure from the 90s, announces that after many years of reclusiveness, he is releasing a new album. He invites an entourage of decadent media characters to his home. Also on hand is one novice, ambitious writer Ariel (played by Ayo Edebiri). Moretti’s compound/colony is located somewhere in the Southwest.
Sunance '25 Review | THREE SUNS | 'Last Days'

Jan 28, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

Echoing films like “Into the Wild” or the documentary “Grizzly Man," this dramatic film is about an intrepid character who challenges Nature and finds that Nature can bite back hard. It’s based on the true story of the death of John Allen Chau, a Chinese-American evangelical who became obsessed with bringing Christianity to the primitive North Sentinel Island—part of an island chain in the Indian Ocean, characterized in the film as the “Mount Everest” for missionaries.
Sundance '25 Review | THREE SUNS | 'Predators'

Jan 28, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

In the early 2000s, “To Catch a Predator” captivated reality-show audiences with a legendary ritual: A dumpy online seducer walks into a house, eagerly awaiting a nubile adolescent. He’s surprised and interrogated by stern, calm news host Chris Hansen. Fleeing the scene, he’s quickly collared by cops waiting outside. Everybody, it would seem, hates a child molester.
Sundance '25 Review | FOUR SUNS| 'Together'

Jan 28, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

Millie, played by Alison Brie, is eyeing marriage. Tim (Dave Franco) is skittish and fends off commitment with hopes of a musical career. The couple take their frayed relationship to an isolated house in the country. During a walk, they stumble into a creepy sinkhole holding the ruins of a cult temple, and being thirsty, drink from the pool in the cave. (Uh oh!)There’s a supernatural reckoning for Millie and Tim. Let’s just say it’s a bonding exercise like you wouldn’t believe.
Friday Film Review | 'Nosferatu'

Jan 3, 2025 | kpcw.org | Rick Brough

This latest version of the Bram Stoker novel “Dracula” is a mix of the sumptuous and the shocking, and it has a long cinematic lineage. “Nosferatu” was the title of a 1922 silent interpretation, directed by F. W. Murnau, as well as a re-make done in 1979 by Werner Herzog. The vampire here wasn’t your great-grandfather’s Dracula — Bela Lugosi in evening wear. Under the name Count Orlok, he was a white, skeletal ratlike creature.