Whether you’re standing in the theater lobby or curled up in bed, deciding what to watch next is often the most difficult part of any pop-culture junkie’s day. And with dozens of films in theaters on any given weekend, plus virtually endless layers of streaming purgatory to sort through in search of your next binge-watch, there’s more out there—and tougher decisions to make—than ever.
Fortune‘s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into three distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.
SEE IT: ‘Richard Jewell’ (In theaters)
Clint Eastwood’s never directed a totally apolitical film. But, now 89 (and still charging ahead with the energy of a filmmaker half his age), he’s grown increasingly masterful at executing stories that rather than signaling a clear ideological tilt instead glower like prisms, capable of absorbing the white light of a news story and refracting it to reveal an array of agendas and social schemata, many contingent on what biases a given audience member brings into the theater.
Is his American Sniper a hunk of jingoistic propaganda or a mythic deconstruction of the same, neocon pandering or one of the more enigmatic anti-war films to emerge from the War of Terror? Is The Mule one last ride for his old-school cowboy persona or the filmmaker’s ultimate refutation of it, absurdly self-indulgent or impressively damnimg? Yes. Eastwood’s late-career bloom has been as a maker of political Rorschach tests, films that parse their charged subject matter with a slippery ambiguity, as well as a propensity for muddying their stories’ thematic waters through dialogue that is coarse, leathery, and contrarian.
With its spirited defense of the everyman and righteous fury toward the mainstream media, Richard Jewell is certainly not a straightforward biopic; one senses Eastwood’s disdain for the myth of even-handed treatment throughout. In presenting the media circus that enveloped Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser)—a heroic security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics who thwarted a bombing only to become a suspect in the ensuing investigation— Richard Jewell in some senses attempts to set the record straight, telling the truth about a man whose reputation was wrongly sullied in the rush to judgment and action that often follows a tragedy.
As played by Hauser, Jewell is a man of simple and single-minded intention. He wants to protect people, to be the good guy fending off bad guys. It’s as simple as that. He may have grown up watching Eastwood’s Westerns. Often awkward and off-base in his reading of social cues, not to mention heavy-handed in his approach to work (as a campus police officer before an Olympics security guard), Jewell is still at his core a well-intentioned and honorable man. When he’s able to mostly prevent significant loss of life after uncovering a backpack loaded with pipe bombs beneath a bench, Jewell doesn’t want the credit. But he also doesn’t anticipate what comes next: a swarm of reporters and FBI agents, at first eager to hail him as a hero, then convinced he had a hand in planting the backpack.
Some will see Richard Jewell as right-wing propaganda, atypically premium-grade fuel for a shadow war against destructive media and government entities, as well as against those who’d malign the reputations of white men with wrongful accusations just to break a story. Others will sense in its depiction of the ruined Jewell a more liberal-leaning fantasy of virtuous, upstanding citizens dragged down into the muck of modern politicking, determined to embody a better world but stymied by those who bend the rule of law toward their own prejudices. Both are fair readings.
“I fear government more than I fear terrorism,” reads a proudly libertarian sticker in the office of attorney Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell), who defends Jewell mostly because he’s an old friend. There’s a telling moment when Jewell, stunned by his treatment, has to be bullied by his lawyer into standing up for himself. There’s a cynical, cross-cutting political calculus at work in Richard Jewell, and it feels like an extraordinarily timely work, coming at the end of a year in which public faith in both media and government institutions has cratered.
That Jewell’s name was unfairly maligned is beyond question. The court of public opinion ruled on his guilt weeks before authorities confirmed his innocence, and the psychological turmoil of that experience is the main dramatic grist of Eastwood’s film. As media outlets swarm around Jewell’s house, harassing his helpless mother (Kathy Bates) and turning his life inside out, Eastwood’s grim control of the camera suggests a further removed spectator, a near-divine presence silently judging the whole, depraved affair. He likes to play God, that is to say. Richard Jewell, with its streamlined perspective on these events and deeply symbolic treatment of its characters, can be construed as a religious text as much as a narrative one, morose with meaning and full of wrath.
That brings us to the film’s depiction of Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (played as an inhuman, cackling harpie by Olivia Wilde), whose stories were among the earliest to name Jewell as a suspect. One of the most crucial scenes of Richard Jewell unfolds in a bar, as Scruggs meets with a federal agent (Jon Hamm) and pumps him for information about the bombing’s perpetrator, whom she’s heard the FBI is circling. “You couldn’t fuck it out of them,” he asserts, a leery provocation in his voice. “What makes you think you could fuck it out of me?” Scruggs leans in close and turns on the charm. Shaw, aroused, leaks to her Jewell’s identity. Scruggs smiles wolfishly. “Should we go to a hotel, or just my car?”
It’s a damning, infuriating moment—most of all because those who knew Scruggs maintain it never would have happened. She died in 2001 from an overdose of pain prescription pills, and friends have alleged the stress from the bombing and subsequent legal fallout was a contributing factor in her death. That Scruggs isn’t alive to defend herself only further toxifies Eastwood’s treatment of her. This is a film about the harm that false allegations can wreak that is, in the process of dissecting one, imposing another.
The implications of this go a long way toward destabilizing the thoughtfully ambiguous politics that govern Eastwood’s film. As a director, he’s never made a truly bad movie and always offers something of interest, even when (as in this case) the story is straightforward enough to sometimes deaden his entreaties toward deeper meaning. Here, it’s the performances—especially from the Oscar-worthy Hauser, as an idealist ground down to dust by systems he barely knew were there—and the exploration of how soulless processes of law must be counterbalanced with human compassion if there’s to be any hope of justice. There’s plenty to chew on in Richard Jewell, even if most of it is wont to get stuck in your teeth.
STREAM IT: ‘I Lost My Body’ (Netflix)
In the strange and beautiful I Lost My Body, a young man vies for the affections of a girl, convinced fate is responsible for the initial intersecting of their paths. What would it take to keep them aligned, he wonders. Meanwhile, a severed hand—possessed of its own free will—escapes a medical refrigerator and braves the streets of Paris, determined to return to its owner.
To pizza delivery guy Naoufel (Hakim Faris in the original French/Dev Patel in the English dub), little is of more importance than connection. He feels adrift and truly alone in the world, a victim of circumstances, ones he can’t help but reimmerse himself in through a recording device he used in youth to track certain memories. When he delivers a pizza to the wry and sensible Gabrielle (Victoire Du Bois/Alia Shawkat), hearing her voice over the intercom, Naoufel’s smitten, as much by her compassion for him as anything else. He soon embarks on a series of misguided romantic gestures aimed at coaxing that initial spark into a flame.
All the while, that hand makes its way across Paris, displaying remarkable persistence as it leaps from building ledges, escapes the gnashing teeth of subway rats, and (in an especially jaw-dropping sequence) crosses a busy road. As it stoically traverses the city’s long night, flashbacks to Naoufel’s past enhance the emotional subtext of the hand’s single-minded mission.
These two stories are told, by first-time feature director Jérémy Clapin, in lyrical parallel, and they unfold like dreams overlapping in the subconscious. The two journeys are heavily symbolic, tales of lost individuals feeling their way through the dark, and they accrue a rich significance by leaning less on exploratory dialogue than a rich sense of place and tone. The film becomes, most of all, a meditation on the philosophical notions of determinism and free will, interrogating the idea of fate as it can exist to those filled with hope or dread for uncertain futures. There’s pain in Naoufel’s past, leaking into his present, and I Lost My Body is profound in tracing the manifestations of this trauma, how it drives his actions and clouds his judgment. Some may dismiss his arc given the admittedly creepy and entitled manner in which he pursues Gabrielle, but there’s still an authenticity to his searching that makes him relatable if not morally right.
Moreover, on a level of craft elevating story, I Lost My Body is impeccable. A house fly’s meandering path through the narrative, a lighter holding the dark at bay, a wooden igloo on a rooftop—these images linger in the brain, compositions of solitude and exquisite beauty that feel life-affirming. There’s a sense in the animation world that hands are some of the hardest things to draw, let alone animate, and Clapin’s team does the seemingly impossible in sketching theirs with such skill as to give it emotional range and depth. At first skittering along like something out of The Addams Family, the hand becomes a near-heroic figure by film’s end, richly metaphoric but itself dynamic. One small scene, in which it tenderly retrieves a fallen pacifier for a baby in a crib, is so rich and achingly felt that it causes a sob to rise in the throat. There are many such moments in I Lost My Body, which is both the best animated feature of the year and one of its most thoughtful articulations of philosophical meaning in any medium.
SKIP IT: ‘Bombshell’ (In theaters)
A Hollywood abomination jerry-rigged over a real-life atrocity, Bombshell repositions the ousting of Roger Ailes from Fox News as salacious, brassy stuff while elevating the high-ranking Fox News anchors who eventually reported his sexual misconduct into empty vessels of feminist empowerment, never facing their complicity nor this particular story’s myriad contradictions.
A resultingly pointless and dismayingly careless dramatization of its subject matter, it is as tonally disastrous as Green Book and more intellectually repugnant, power-washing away the moral complexity of Fox’s on-air peddling of lies and half-truths in an effort to make a story about workplace harassment inexplicably svelte and breezy. Why such an approach was even selected by director Jay Roach (Trumbo) and writer Charles Randolph (The Big Short) speaks to a fundamental mismatch of creatives to material; why two men were chosen to take point on the first major-studio work to reflect the #MeToo movement speaks poorly of all involved.
Centering three women at Fox—Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), and a fictional character named Kayla Pospisil (Margot Robbie)—Bombshell sees Ailes’s downfall through their eyes. This is not, in of itself, a bad framing for this story. The chamber politics at any major network are complex and tangled, power dynamics often predicated on a basis of quid pro quo that can turn abusive. But the film is too clumsy and ham-fisted by half to bring much authenticity or wit to the measure of these women’s experiences. Roach gives the affair all the visual style of HBO TV movie (he’s directed several, including Game Change and All the Way), but the more egregious miscalculations come from Randolph’s script, which begins with a fourth-wall-breaking address from Theron’s Kelly, one that choreographs cutting commentary without offering much, and only curdles more in its splashy but witless approach as the story unfolds.
This film thinks so little of its audience’s intelligence—and frankly supplies so little of its own—that, in introducing a Murdoch spawn, it has to show him toying with a chain of dominos, knocking over one at random. That it delivers a voiceover monologue about Roger Ailes’s construction of Fox News in which his conservative information apparatus is attributed near-entirely to his parents’ divorce. That it takes a conversation between two characters in which one unloads the weight of the harassment she’s suffered and promptly twists it into an incoherent rant about power ending in the phrase, “Look around, snowflake!” Writ large, the film’s use of such politically charged language feels artificial, co-opted, like thin cover for a film that wants to exist in the political conversation without adopting a real point-of-view within it.
Bombshell may not offer the year’s best ensemble, but it could certainly be handed something for “most ensemble.” Hot on its three leading ladies’ heels is a clown car overflowing with Fox caricatures. Allison Janney, Connie Britton, Holland Taylor, and Alanna Ubach (as a deeply detestable Jeanine Pirro) are all to varying degrees playing women complicit in perpetuating Ailes’ reign of terror. Kate McKinnon pops up as a reprehensible Fox colleague of Kayla’s who’s both a lesbian and (gasp) Democrat in hiding. Malcolm McDowell, curiously, plays media magnate Rupert Murdoch with confusing notes of integrity, while Richard Kind gets a few laughs slipping into the snake-skin of Rudy Giuliani.
What works about Bombshell is to the immense credit of its lead actresses. Theron, particularly, disappears into the role of Megyn Kelly, her icily fixed expressions never more visibly a form of armor. Her transformation, accomplished with the help of prosthetics, is impressively uncanny, but it’s Theron’s uncomprising performance that really sells the portrayal. (Whether you can accept a Fox News anchor fired last year for defending blackface on air as the film’s hero is another question entirely.)
Comparatively, Kidman’s take on Gretchen Carlson feels a little lacking, though her efforts to vein the character with a mordant comic streak, particularly as she attempts to promote feminism by not wearing makeup on air, are welcome. Carlson’s the one who first lit the fuse under Ailes, so it’s strange that she’s largely sidelined by the story after being fired from Fox.
Robbie is stronger than either of them in her heartbreaking depiction of a woman turning inward to survive the trauma inflicted upon her. The character of Kayla is a curious gambit, a fictional composite who the filmmakers claim speaks for women still bound by confidentiality clauses about what horrors they endured at Ailes’s hands. Robbie, with her searching eyes and innate magnetism, banishes any doubts about the character’s pertinence to the piece; she’s Bombshell‘s lone note of humanity, and the best thing about this bad film.
The Best of the Rest
On Hulu and Amazon Prime, the distinctly magical superhero saga Fast Color is now streaming. Largely buried upon its theatrical release, this genre gem explores the ties binding three generations of black women as they navigate superhuman abilities and face threats from both scheming scientists and looming environmental catastrophe. Boasting powerhouse performances from Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Belle), Saniyya Sidney (Fences), and Lorraine Toussaint (Orange is the New Black), it’s the kind of film that Hollywood should be making more of, a thoughtful and ambitious discovery shot through with perspective and vision by its director, Julia Hart (Miss Stevens).
In theaters, Jumanji: The Next Level (not reviewed) offers more body-switching, safari-swinging adventures from the likes of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan, all returning as video-game avatars on an epic quest. The first film (also by writer-director Jake Kasdan and returning scribes Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg) was a surprisingly sturdy piece of blockbuster entertainment, coasting on the easy charm and comedic energy of its stars without forcing them through too many narrative hurdles. With the likes of Awkwafina, Danny Glover, and Danny DeVito joining in the fun this time around, one hopes it’ll still be a game worth playing.
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