Kristen Stewart

Spencer

  • Title: Spencer
  • IMDb: link

Set at Christmas of 1991, Spencer offers a peek into the holiday with the Royal Family during a tumultuous time between Diana, Princess of Wales (Kristen Stewart), and her husband Prince Charles (Jack Farthing). With her husband’s affair and her marriage at a breaking point, Diana is forced into the traditions and expectations of the holiday which she begins fighting in her own way to try and avoid a death of one-thousand cuts.

The movie is most notable for the lovely performance of the fragile Diana feeling trapped on all sides and even haunted by Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), whose similarities to her own situation have become a bit of an obsession. Stewart is perfect here in a role that requires a tremendous amount of vulnerability to carry a film with very little actual plot through until the end.

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Happiest Season

  • Title: Happiest Season
  • IMDb: link

Happiest Season movie reviewHappiest Season puts a twist on your typical meet the parents film as Harper (Mackenzie Davis) invites her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) home with her for the holidays. However, on the road, Harper reveals her conservative parents (Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen) don’t know that she is gay or that Abby is her girlfriend. This leads Abby to play the role of roommate in need of a place to stay over the holidays. It doesn’t take long for the role to weigh heavy on Abby as the film’s romcom shenanigans also give Harper’s parents the wrong impression of her.

The set-up of a strong conservative patriarch with a family too scared to tell him the truth reminded me of Merry Happy Whatever with Stewart playing a combination of the Brent Morin and Ashley Tisdale characters. Although the film is primarily centered on Harper, her sisters (Alison Brie and Mary Holland) also have their own secrets and resentments. The cast is further filled out by Dan Levy as Harper’s support line, Aubrey Plaza as Harper’s secret high school girlfriend, and Jake McDorman as Harper’s high school boyfriend who Harper’s parents are cluelessly trying to set-up with Harper over the holidays.

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Charlie’s Angels

  • Title: Charlie’s Angels
  • IMDb: link

Charlies Angels Blu-ray reviewCharlie’s Angels is a sequel (of sorts) to both the 70s television show and the movies from the early 2000s, Charlie’s Angels and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. The Townsend Agency has gone global, there are now Angels in offices all around the world (and for reasons never explored, each has a support agent all of whom use the codename of Bosley). The team the film focuses on is made up of former heiress and thief Sabina Wilson (Kristen Stewart) and former MI6 agent Jane Kano (Ella Balinska) who are assigned to help programmer Elena Houghlin (Naomi Scott) who has uncovered some dangerous truths about her company’s new technology. After extraction, Elena’s skill set proves useful and she soon becomes one of the team.

The movie highlights some of the goofiness of the original television show in terms of disguises and planning, it also ratches up the action quite a bit. There are plots and subplots here, some making the main story more convoluted than necessary and others simply used as filler.

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