Based on a real practice in Japan where a company offers professional stand-ins to clients, Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as a struggling actor living in Japan who is initially hired to be a token white guy for a client setting up their own funeral. Confused, but in need of work, Phillip (Fraser) agrees further roles (most of which are covered in montages while two key roles make up the core of the main story).
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Based on the historical novel of the same name, Hamnet offers a fictionalized telling of William Shakespeare‘s (Paul Mescal) family and the series of events that could (depending on what scholars you believe) have played into the playwright’s finest tragedy. Whether or not the account is accurate, there is no debate that director Chloé Zhao (who co-wrote the screenplay with the novel’s author Maggie O’Farrell) delivers a heartbreaking, yet ultimately cathartic, emotional tour de force that won’t leave a dry eye in the house.
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The latest from writer/director Noah Baumbach, which he co-wrote with Emily Mortimer, is a sentimental look at aging movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney) just entering a reflective period of his life (explored in flashbacks) whose attempts to connect with either of his grown daughters (Riley Keough and Grace Edwards) is hindered by decades of him choosing his career over them.
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Adapted from the novel of the same name, Die My Love is most notable for the standout performance of Jennifer Lawrence whose character Grace falls into postpartum depression following moving into the suburbs with her husband (Robert Pattinson) and delivering their first child. The film often blurs the lines of what’s real and what’s hallucinatory fantasy of Grace including visions of a mysterious man (LaKeith Stanfield) on a motorcycle, conversations with her dead father-in-law (Nick Nolte) who it seems is the only one she ever truly bonded with, a mysterious black stallion, and the film’s fiery conclusion.
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I don’t understand the point of After the Hunt, and, after seeing it, I’m not sure anyone involved in making it knows either. Set at Yale, we get a he said/she said script from the perspective of neither character involved in an alleged assult that happens off-camera.
Instead, our main character is a mostly self-absorbed professor (Julia Roberts) who is the mentor of the a potentially untrustworthy woman (Ayo Edebiri) who we see steal from the professor early on claiming she was sexually assaulted, and at the same time the best friend of notably flirtatious man (Andrew Garfield) who suggests the young woman made up the entire story for attention and to deflect from her largely plagiarized work.
A bit frozen by events, and honestly more concerned about her own illegal drug use and getting tenure, Roberts’ character is given plenty of reason to question what might have happened (although, honestly, I’m not sure she cares).
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