Review of reviews: Film & Stage ARTS 25
Eric Zachanowich, Amazon Studios, Aleksandr Dudarev/Sony Pictures Classic, Joan Marcus
“Family game night never
looked so brutal,” said Scott
Mendelson in Forbes.com. In
this “delicious bit of late-summer
nastiness,” rising star Samara
Weaving plays a newlywed
trapped in a deadly rite after her
in-laws inform her that anyone
joining the family must take
the clan on in a game, and she
draws the dreaded Hide & Seek
card. To win, she must survive a night in the family
mansion while the others try to kill her. Sound wacky?
“It’s trash, to be sure, but it’s high-quality trash.”
And because Fox Searchlight, the studio that made
Ready or Not, is now owned by Disney, “we should
savor its ilk while we still can.” Andie MacDowell,Henry Czerny, Adam Brody,
and Nicky Guadagni play the
bloodthirsty billionaires, who
wield antique weapons, including
a crossbow that they’ve forgot-
ten how to load, said Alonso
Duralde in TheWrap.com.
Though the script should have
committed even more fully to its
black comedy, “there’s an audac-
ity to Ready or Not that makes
it feel one-of-a-kind.” And Weaving, an Australian
actress playing a surprisingly rounded character, is
“the glue that holds this whole ridiculous movie
together,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire.com.
“It’s delightful to find a potentially star-making
performance in such an unexpected place.”Jillian Bell has deserved a movie
like this, said Leah Greenblatt
in Entertainment Weekly. A
hilarious scene-stealer in Rough
Night, Workaholics, and vari-
ous other comedies, the actress
uses her first lead role to bring
“a real, messy humanity” to
a brash but insecure party-girl
character who’s warned by a
doctor that she has to shed
55 pounds fast. And Bell’s commitment pays off,
because this “whip-smart” film “manages to deliver
genuinely funny uplift without ever swerving away
from its dark side.” First-time writer-director Paul
Downs Colaizzo based Brittany on his real-life best
friend, and his screenplay “successfully walks a fineline between inspiration and cau-
tion,” never presenting its pro-
tagonist as merely a clichéd case
of underappreciated inner beauty,
said Tomris Laffly in Time Out
New York. Somewhere along the
line, though, the movie’s humor
“ends up being replaced by a
cloying earnestness,” said Todd
McCarthy in The Hollywood
Reporter. We root for Brittany
when she starts running, meets new friends, and
decides to train for the New York City Marathon. But
the new, more confident Brittany is “quiet, reflective,
and short on a sense of humor,” and for no good rea-
son. Up until that transformation, “Bell is a wonder
in the role—funny as hell and deeply sympathetic.”Ready or Not
A wealthy family
hunts down the new bride.++++
Directed by Tyler Gillett
and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
(R)Brittany Runs
a Marathon
A party girl turns her
life around.++++
Directed by
Paul Downs Colaizzo
(R)Weaving: Enemies everywhereBell learns to reach deep.Most playwrights follow
W.C. Fields’ famous coun-
sel against working with
animals or children, said
Jesse Green in The New York Times. But
Bess Wohl “likes to make things difficultfor herself,” and so the entire first
half of her new drama is popu-
lated only by children. The unsu-
pervised Conlee siblings, ages
5 to 12, are playing house in an
attic playroom, but “what at first
seems to be a nostalgic comedy
of underparenting” soon turns
more provocative. Or such was
the intent, said Sara Holdren in NYMag
.com. In the play’s second half, threeConlees reunite 32 years later, all bearing
scars “easily traceable” to their free-range
youth. Though we’re meant to be moved,
every tug at the heart feels rote, except
when Carl, the youngest, howls in agony
just as he did when he was 5 and pre-
tending to be a dog. Actor Brad Heberlee
“commits entirely to that howl,” and in
this otherwise too-tidy melodrama, the
moment hints at “something bigger, more
fearsome, and more fascinating.”Make Believe
Second Stage Theater,
New York City, (212) 246-(^4422) ++++
This unique documentary is
“nothing like what you might be
expecting,” said Kenneth Turan
in the Los Angeles Times. Its
subject is water, which might
sound unexciting—until you
see it as the protean force it
becomes in a portrait “as terrify-
ing as it is beautiful.” The film,
shot at 96 frames per second to
create incredible visual clarity,
opens with a “heart-in-mouth” scene of crisis, said
Guy Lodge in Variety. A car has fallen through thin-
ning ice on a deep, vast lake in Siberia, and as the
camera records an arduous rescue attempt, another
speeding vehicle in the distance plunges through the
surface with a motorist trapped
inside. From there, the nearly
wordless, nonlinear film shows
us calving icebergs, lashing
storms, and cresting monster
waves as it migrates to, among
other places, the crumbling
glaciers of Greenland and the
palm-lined streets of Miami
during 2017’s Hurricane Irma.
Except for its bombastic “cello-
metal” soundtrack, Aquarela proves “overwhelming
in all the right ways.” The words “global warm-
ing” are never uttered, said Joe Morgenstern in The
Wall Street Journal, “yet the message could not be
clearer—we are all of us living on thin ice.”
Aquarela
An ode to the awesome
power of water
++++
Directed by Victor
Kossakovsky
(PG)
A ship cuts through a fjord in Greenland.
An adult-free zone