- TIFF 2026: Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been, Edward Said: Between Worlds, The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs (September 19, 2026)
It’s always risky to opt for documentaries that rely on well-known figures. Too often, the film rests on its subject’s laurels, giving you crowd-pleasing reminders of the figure’s importance without much to think about. But these three films at TIFF surpass those low expectations, placing the identity of a well-known person at their center and becoming indelible surveys that inspire you to learn more and admire more.
There’s no way you can watch Barry Avrich’s empathetic documentary “Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been” and leave without infinite respect for its legendary subject.
The detailed chronicling of the talented singer whose voice powered several generations worth of hits recalls the best of these types of music profile documentaries: “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the Tina Turner documentary “Tina,” “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” and “20 Feet From Stardom.” Darlene Love was an integral part of the latter survey of backup singers whose tantalizingly close proximity to center stage defined their careers. Love, who by that point had already experienced a career resurgence through her role in the “Lethal Weapons” series and her recurring holiday appearances on the “Late Show with David Letterman” performing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” was an exception to her backing peers. But her road to attaining greater prominence was long.
“I Know Where I’ve Been” is a loving, endearing tribute to the best voice of her generation. It tells her story through two methods. One occurs via sit-down interviews, which allow her to recount her partnership and falling out with Phil Spector (this film’s charting of his varied absurd appearances is a hilarious punchline), her difficult marriages and romantic relationships, and her continual ups and downs in an industry that took far too long to uplift her. The film’s second storytelling method comes from her live studio performances of some of her biggest hits, like “I Know Where I’ve Been” from “Hairspray” and “He’s a Rebel,” which was released under the Crystals moniker despite featuring none of its members. Listening to these songs reminds you not only how many pop hits Love shouldered, but also how few times she was directly credited for her efforts.
Love is an intoxicating presence with a hearty laugh. Both are tools she needs to wield when sharing her most painful memories. She freely recounts her two youngest sons’ incarcerations (she has three sons in total), her failed relationship with Righteous Brothers singer Bill Medley, and other personal tribulations. That doesn’t mean Love bears it all; she knows how to use humor to deflect Arvich from going deeper. But boundaries don’t mean she wants a hagiographic portrait of you. Love is actually quite brave in what she does share, a kind of courage that makes it easy to see why she possessed the stamina to return to the music industry after hearing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the radio as she scrubbed floors as a cleaning woman.
If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know who Darlene Love is, Avrich’s heartwarming film about her will make you appreciate that we’ve all lived under her tenacity and talent and heard her voice fill our days.
Maiken Baird’s “Edward Said: Between Worlds” reminds one that the oppression of the Palestinian people hasn’t been a recent phenomenon. It traces back to 1947 and has only grown more dire since. And while it’s become far more common today to openly support Palestine’s liberation, it wasn’t always that way. For nearly all of Edward Said’s adult life, he batted away Zionist slings to become a necessary conduit between America’s anti-Arab fears and the plight of his homeland through his appearances on broadcast television, his work as a speaker, writer, and thinker. Baird’s film is an essential primer for those who want to know about Said.
On its face, Baird might seem like an odd directorial match for this subject matter. She’s previously helmed “Ghislaine Maxwell: Filthy Rich” and “Venus and Serena.” But her career as a producer tells a different story with credits like “All That’s Left of You,” “Orwell 2+2=5,” “The White House Effect,” and the Academy Award-winning documentary “Icarus.” Her sweep through Said’s life and work is as effective as the heights of those films. She weaves in archival interviews, excerpts from his writings, and his appearances in documentaries, on the nightly news, and in talk-show spots to intertwine his remarkable story with Palestine’s dire history.
Though it’s been decades since his 2003 death from Leukemia, Said remains an engaging speaker. He eloquently explains his perpetual otherness. He’s a man whose parents hailed from Jerusalem and Nazareth, and whose lived experiences span the upper echelons of American society and the middle-class spaces of the Arab world. Both experiences shaped him. Baird traces Said’s leap into public thought, beginning with the publication of “Orientalism,” approachable without being obvious.
And while you’d probably get even more context by simply reading Said, “Between Worlds” wisely doesn’t sell itself as a comprehensive one-stop-shop documentary about him. This film is meant to inspire viewers to revisit or discover his work, and it’s quite effective at that.
As I alluded to earlier, I always hope a documentary’s style matches its subject’s personality. Èlia Gasull Balada and Matteo Norzi’s “The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs,” which follows Indigenous painter Sara Flores as she advocates for her Shipibo-Konibo community’s rights, is as spirited as the artist’s advocacy. The Peruvian Indigenous artist, known for her Kené textiles, has risen from modest beginnings to exhibit her work in galleries worldwide and even design items for fashion brands.
Balada and Norzi know they have an irresistible subject. Despite her diminutive height, Flores stands tall through her infectious sense of humor, the warmth she shares with her daughter, and the fire she shows when fighting outside industrialists cravenly angling to deforest the Peruvian Amazon. Because the filmmakers are so enamored with her, they perplexingly don’t explain why she’s pursuing certain partnerships. Near the beginning, for instance, she agrees to design handbags for Dior. If you didn’t know that Dior has actually set baselines to achieve sustainability in the near future, you wouldn’t understand why she’d be interested in putting her name in tandem with a fashion conglomerate.
Still, the film moves with enough narrative fluidity, accomplished through a sleek edit and Flores’ immeasurable presence, for one not to be too agitated by what isn’t fully articulated. The work also carries a late-fame bittersweetness. In the winter of her life, Flores has finally gotten the global and nationwide recognition she’s richly deserved. Seeing Flores try to maximize her newfound celebrity for widespread change is galvanizing; seeing her fight wrist pain to produce enough work to not only maintain her artistic spirit but also keep the commerce of supporting herself and her family is sobering.
The documentary takes quite a few intriguing turns with the latter hurdle. Many suspect that a jealous neighbor might’ve cursed Flores. The filmmakers don’t necessarily pursue this thread. They instead present the idea, follow her pursuit of spiritual cleansing, and then leave the subject alone. Did they ever attempt to talk to those living next door to Flores? We don’t know. But once again, Flores and the film are so committed to their aims that it’s easy to ignore what might be perceived as glaring gaps.
As Balada and Norzi wind toward filming Flores’ Lima exhibition, her first in her home country, it thankfully does become more political, passionately supporting the Indigenous force working to protect the Amazon. “The Hummingbird Paints Fragrant Songs,” a rebellious cry on behalf of an artist whose reach, ability, and political voice can’t be contained, is a lovely introduction to one of the world’s great artists.
- ‘Youth” is a Portrait of Midlife That’s Anything But Mid (September 18, 2026)
The first episode of Sharon Horgan’s “Youth” opens with a montage of significant women thriving in middle age—Maya Angelou, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill—accompanied by a voiceover about the importance of the menopausal and post-menopausal years. “No decade moves faster than 50 to 60,” the narration says. “You have to make every second of your time count.”
Cut to Alex, a woman in her fifties who’s currently spending every second of her one wild and precious life scrolling through frivolous clips on social media. She only stops when she suddenly receives a text from her teenage son, causing her to drop her phone smack on her forehead.
As a woman in her fifties, it is tempting to say that I feel seen by this sequence. But that is an inadequate way to describe what it’s like to watch Horgan, the creator of “Youth” and the actress who plays Alex, spend valuable moments of her remaining vital years getting hypnotized by videos of birds with funny haircuts and women with disastrous plastic surgery. It’s more accurate to say that I’m on the verge of calling the police on Sharon Horgan because clearly she has been illegally spying on me for the past two years (at least) and is now broadcasting the details of my existence on HBO and HBO Max.
Alex faces the pressures that weigh down so many Gen Xers who must tend to children, aging parents, and the demands of their careers while trying to figure out when, exactly, they’re supposed to find sparks of joy before the proverbial game clock expires, and it’s time to check into assisted living. Even when things are going well, Alex doesn’t entirely trust herself to recognize it. “I’ve never had it all before,” she remarks at one point. “It’s usually more like having some, or having none.”
As the season begins, Alex, a book agent living in London, is specifically grappling with her son Ruari (Aran Murphy, a physical replicant of his father, Cillian Murphy), who has impulsively decided to drop out of university and move back home; her raging narcissist of an ex-husband (Owen McDonnell), who announces that he’s moving to Canada for an acting gig, along with his much younger partner; and a job where she always feels a couple of steps behind and desperate to earn praise from her boss and closest friend Sam (Sharlene Whyte). She also tries to go on dates, including one with an eager-to-please gentleman who insists that she let him pleasure her for as long as it takes until she climaxes. “I don’t know you well enough to be selfish in bed,” Alex blurts out.
It’s a great line, written, like all of “Youth,” by Horgan, who again proves that she is an incisive, nuanced and darkly hilarious observer of human behavior, especially when that behavior is exhibited by frazzled women on the verge of nervous breakdowns. She has done this before in series such as “Catastrophe” and “Bad Sisters.” But “Youth” should cement her status as TV’s premier chronicler of the upper-middle-class, middle-aged female experience.
Other series have obviously focused on characters like Alex and their concerns about aging, sex, parenting and pursuing their ambitions, but few have done it with such intelligence and verve. Horgan holds up a mirror to the experience of 21st-century mature womanhood, then whips out a microscope so we can see the most discomfiting parts up close. “Youth” is the kind of show that “And Just Like That…” wanted to be, but didn’t have the courage or audacity to become. You could also, perhaps, say the same thing about “Divorce,” the underrated HBO series that starred Sarah Jessica Parker and initially felt like a follow-up to “Sex & the City” before the official one came along. “Divorce,” by the way, was created by … Sharon Horgan.
While “Youth” sometimes uses hyperbole for comedy, its details ring so true that it can be both pleasurable and painful to watch. The dynamic between Alex and Ruari veers between loving and completely distant; often, he doesn’t take out his earbuds long enough to hear what his mother just said to him, which, if you have a college-aged child, is so relatable it leaves bruises in its wake. One of Alex’s former boyfriends, Patrick (Rupert Friend at his most charming), also becomes a central character; his chemistry with Horgan is charged and absolutely lovely. Their relationship reminds us that even grown adults can still relate to each other like the middle school kids they still secretly are, talking past each other instead of communicating more directly.
Patrick: “I don’t want to be an added stress in your life. You have a lot of things to concentrate on.” Alex: “So you think I’m being a bad parent.” Patrick: “How did you hear that with what I just said?” (Note: I totally understand how she heard that.)
While the general milieu of “Youth” may be familiar, some moments feel a little groundbreaking. In the third episode, Alex suddenly gets her period after not having menstruated for a full year, which convinced her that her cycle had definitively ended. (Menopause: it’s always full of surprises!) The series actually shows Alex discovering that she’s bleeding again, which may be a small detail but comes across as revelatory in a cultural landscape where menopause talk still unfolds mostly in whispers.
Concerned, Alex messages an online menopause forum. After explaining that she is having heavy bleeding after no periods for a year, she types: “Is that normal/a worry/cancer?”
Which captures exactly what it’s like to be a woman of a certain age in an era where we have access to so much digital information, yet still can’t always find the answers we seek. We want to know if everything is normal/a worry/cancer, and we also want to make sure every second of our time counts.
Seven of season one’s eight episodes were screened in advance for critics.
- TIFF 2026: Furies, Re/Pair (September 17, 2026)
At RogerEbert.com, we try to assemble dispatches of three films around forms like documentary, specific programs like Midnights or Galas, or even themes like theatre and youth. What happens is that there will inevitably stragglers: Films that don’t have dance partners but still deserve coverage. This is one of those, a partnership between two films with nothing in common other than I saw ‘em and thought you might want to know if they’re any good. They are.
Actually, one of them is great. The Lebanese heist drama “Furies” is one of the more confident and riveting debuts of 2026, a story of two sisters fighting back against a broken system. It’s got incredibly strong visual language that works to amplify the tension of a story that never stops moving. Director Rami Kodeih has made a movie that’s a clever inverse of the standard heist formula in that it’s not about taking someone else’s money; it’s about getting your own back.
In 2019, the banking system in Lebanon collapsed, which meant that people couldn’t get their own money, funds they earned to put a roof over their heads and food on their tables. Imagine being homeless because a bank essentially lost your money. Kodeih sets his backdrop with a harrowing scene in which a man walks into a financial institution, douses himself in gasoline, and threatens to immolate if he can’t get his money. That’s the environment in which this story will unfold, one that moves like a thriller for over two hours.
“Furies” takes place in 2022—so three years into this national nightmare—and Dalia (Maria Nakouzi) has been diagnosed with uterine cancer, which she can’t afford to treat because of the financial crisis. Her sister Maro (a mesmerizing Rym Mroue) lives in perpetual rage as well, being told she can’t get into her savings account to help her sister. It won’t matter that they caught Dalia’s cancer early if they can’t pay for the treatment to stop it from spreading. It’s an original addition to the ticking clocks we so often see in heist movies: In this case, it’s to stop a cancer from growing.
After a confrontation in the bank, Dalia stumbles into the life of a concierge (Hadi Bou Ayash), who just happens to share a wall with the hallway that leads to the vault. Dalia almost instantly starts planning a heist. They’ll break through the wall, and run off into the night with the money that’s actually theirs anyway. They find a pair of co-conspirators in men named Sunshine (Issam Bou Khaled) and Hamza (Hasan Akil)—the former a melancholy foundation for the quartet, and the latter a wild card who seems the one most likely to mess it up. To the film’s credit, all four characters feel distinct and genuine, never getting lost in the heist machinations, but it’s the perfectly sisters you’ll remember.
And, man, are those machinations fun. A sequence in which the two men stage a fight in the street to distract from the noise being made by the destruction of the wall is breathtaking, one that feels like it could spin out of everyone’s control in an instant. It helps a great deal that Kodeih and his team find a sweaty, shaky visual language to the film. Even in conversations, the camera is always slightly moving, as if it’s too restless to stay still. It’s too furious.
Finally, there’s Lacey Schwartz Delgado’s effective documentary “Re/Pair,” a film with an engaging concept: Conversations between Black and Jewish people about the ties and divides between their communities. As is naturally going to be the case with a project like this one, some of these pairings are more effective than others (some feel like they should have been cut entirely), but most people seem engaged by Delgado’s project, often speaking personally and honestly about stigma, history, and personal revelation.
The truth is that connections between the Black and Jewish communities have been crucial to world history—just look at how entertainment and politics have been shaped by them for a place to start—but the 2020s are a unique time to take this snapshot, from the wake of what’s happening in Gaza to responses to BLM to even Kanye West. To its credit, most people here don’t avoid the tough subjects, even it sometimes feels like there are too many of them to be thoroughly addressed in a feature film. This is the stuff of 400 pages of the written word in a dense book, but it does feel like Delgado recognizes that these conversations are starting points and not conclusions.
Delgado pairs 38 people across 19 conversations. Some are instantly recognizable like W. Kamau Bell, Van Jones, David Schwimmer, Matisyahu, Rhymefest, and Ashley Jackson, daughter of Jesse (and, yes, they do get into his “complicated” relationship with the Jewish community). To the film’s credit, this is not an oppression competition, although the conversation does hit a lot of historic moments from the last 100 or so years. Of course, not all participants are created equal, although the batting average for eloquence is impressively high. There are only a few where one might have hoped for a back-up.
“Re/Pair” is at its best when it’s at its most personal. Hearing Matisyahu speak on how he was attracted to the music of Bob Marley because he used words that were being said in synagogues (like “exodus”) is a fascinating cultural detail, and he’s partnered well with the great Rhymefest in discussing how Jewish and Black music have intertwined. Robert Klein does great commentary on the history of Jewish humor and just consider how many impactful stand-ups have been Black or Jewish.
Delgado allows for some conflict and criticism—one interesting chapter discusses how many attacks on DEI came from Jewish writers—but “Re/Pair” ultimately feels a little afraid to really break the skin. To her credit, however, she’s not preaching unity and forgiveness either. This is not a “let’s all get along” documentary as much as a call to question the impact of what it means when we don’t.
- TIFF 2026: The Debut, Elsinore, Closing Night (September 17, 2026)
All the world’s a stage. The art of performance is directly unpacked in two of the more acclaimed films of the 2026 festival season, while a third film centers a dying actress while playing like an ode to the stage divas that have been so beloved for generations. One of them is among the best films of 2026 so far, while the other two reveal how even some of the best acting need the right formal choices around it to have the desired impact.
The best of the three is Jesse Eisenberg’s sharp “The Debut,” a movie that first plays like that episode of “The Simpsons” where Marge gets cast in a musical version of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” However, this is not the predictable “Star is Born” narrative that its previews and set-up might lead people to expect. As he was with his remarkable “A Real Pain,” Eisenberg is interested in something deeper, something that captures the complexity of acting in a way that we haven’t really seen before. While also being one of the funniest films of 2026, “The Debut” asks unexpected questions about what it really means to get lost in a character. There’s a reading of it that might even be anti-method acting. What if you get too lost to come back?
The core question of “The Debut” to this viewer comes down to a classic tenet of acting classes around the world. (FYI, this critic was a theatre major and director years ago, so I know my zips from my zaps and zops.) Every actor has been taught to bring themselves to their characters, finding sense memories or personal traits that can connect their actual lives to the fictional one they’re playing. At the root of “The Debut” is a captivating idea: What happens when someone has nothing to bring?
Julianne Moore does some of the best work of her career as Mona Friedman, a New Jersey housewife who auditions for a local play, Nosy Neighbors, which is an entirely original musical written by Eisenberg, who has somehow crafted original songs that sound completely genuine just to show how multi-talented he is. Mona competes for the part of Miss Danielle with none other than Bernadette Peters as the most famous actress in the New Jersey regional theatre scene, Serena Cherry. Of course, she doesn’t get it, but Serena leaves the show after a month, and, well, Mona was the only other person who tried out. Why not give her a chance?
Eisenberg sketches Mona’s homelife in ways that verge on satirical. Her husband barely talks to her; her twin children literally forget she exists. In one of Moore’s several heartbreaking beats, she tells a story about how she would go out to dinner with her parents and be left outside with the dogs. She’s been ignored her entire life. And so, the affection shown her by fellow actors (including Halle Bailey) feels like warmth to which she’s unaccustomed, and even the direction of the intense Jerry Blankenbuehler (Paul Giamatti) is attention she’s not used to receiving. He pushes her to bring something real to Miss Danielle, leading to a workshopping scene that’s so incredible that it has produced applause at fest screenings.
From here, you would think that “The Debut” is a story of a woman who didn’t know she was a star until she found her voice in the spotlight. It’s not quite that movie. Without spoiling, Mona gets lost in Miss Danielle in a manner that’s truly, hysterically unpredictable.
Everyone is good here—rarely has anyone been more perfectly cast than Giamatti—but Julianne Moore reminds one how undeniable she can be in the right material. This is the Moore of “Safe” and “Boogie Nights,” a performer willing to take incredible risks with a part that teeters between reality and caricature. What’s so impressive about “The Debut” and Moore’s work in it is that this is never a film that takes the easy route. Here’s where a critic would say something about how we can all see a bit of ourselves in Mona, but that’s not really what this movie is. We see Mona. It’s more complex, daring, and, therefore more rewarding.
The power of the stage is also central to the story of “Elsinore,” which captures the last months of the life of Ian Charleson, star of “Chariots of Fire,” played here with devastating honesty by Andrew Scott. After Daniel Day-Lewis walked out of a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989, director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) tapped Charleson to replace him, not knowing that the London actor was dying of AIDS. Against the advice of his doctor (played by a subtly perfect Olivia Colman), Charleson insisted on taking the part, pouring everything he had left into arguably the best role an actor can ever play.
“Elsinore” works as a testament to Scott’s incredible range as a performer. He makes so many funny, moving, genuine choices as Charleson, refusing to play him as a symbol for how much we lost in the war on AIDS but getting to that point, nonetheless. It’s impossible to watch this film and not think about not only what Charleson might have gone on to do with his career but how many other masterpieces simply never happened because of this horrible disease. At its core, “Elsinore” is about what was “not to be,” a story of loss framed in that of an exceptional triumph.
Sadly, director Simon Stone doesn’t trust his audience, burying Scott’s breathtaking work in both one of the most aggressive scores of all time from Stefan Gregory and hyperactive editing by Valerio Bonelli. The last act of “Elsinore” is infuriating, even more so when one considers how Charleson complains about his career being defined by the unforgettable score of “CoF”. As Scott finally reaches his big moments on the stage, everything he’s doing is undercut by the form around him. Imagine the big emotional stage show of “Hamnet” quick-cut together with flashback beats from the rest of the movie and a score so loud that you can’t even hear all of the words being spoken. It’s so antithetical to the truth that Charleson sought through the immediacy of the stage and that Scott is so capable of finding through the camera.
Ultimately, Scott is so moving here that people will forgive how often the film works against what he’s doing, but they might not forget.
Finally, there’s a film that’s not directly about the theatre but comes from a theatrical love of the diva, nonetheless. Ryan Murphy regular Cody Fern makes his directorial debut with the interesting “Closing Night,” a movie with such old-fashioned degrees of melodrama that some people in Toronto compared it to Douglas Sirk. As a huge fan of Sirk, I pushed back because Fern doesn’t yet have that visual language—Sirk knew how to use color like no one else—but there is something to be said for a director who so clearly loves acting and actresses, using his production budget to elevate Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, and Dianne Wiest with showy, meaty, memorable roles.
Co-written by Devon Bostick, “Closing Night” opens with the famed Broadway star Sandra Vale (Paulson) inviting her family to the opening night of her new play, a revival of Mother Courage. (Already this movie is so catnip to NY theatre lovers.) The problem is that Sandra hasn’t spoken to her estranged sister April (Watts) in years, the two torn apart by how one slept with the other’s boyfriend back when they were teenagers. April’s son Theo (Toby Wallace) has been secretly having lunches with Aunt Sandra as he prepares to start his own family with his girlfriend Lucy (Odessa A’zion). When Sandra is diagnosed with early on-set dementia, skeletons come tumbling out of closets, some of them put their by Sandra and April’s hysterically cynical mother Diane (Wiest).
With basically only five speaking roles and most of the film taking place in an apartment, it really feels like “Closing Night” could have started life as a play, where Paulson’s work might have won her a few awards. She is fearlessly driven here, chewing on Fern and Bostick’s caustic, wounded dialogue. As the film gets more maudlin in the final act, I missed that bitter interplay of the film at its best. I also wished the film had a stronger visual language to match its performers, but there’s something to be said for young creators who value the great actresses of film and television that came before. Murphy has long-done this in his TV work, and it’s nice to see Fern take that shared admiration to a cinematic platform. There’s every reason to believe the next film will be more visually and narratively ambitious. Let’s hope it also has a trio of actresses this willing to play to the entire house.
- TIFF 2026: Evil Genius, Prima Facie, The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd (September 17, 2026)
Three high profile, star-studded dramas premiered in Toronto this week and they all produced the same response from this critic: “Great performances, but…” It’s a trio of films with actors giving their all to films that just aren’t willing to give enough to their audiences. They’re also all bleak, disturbing movies about extreme, awful violence. It’s a dark time in 2026, and this trio of disappointments reflects that state of things that everyone can feel in the air.
The best of the three is Courteney Cox’s “Evil Genius,” a tight telling of the stranger-than-fiction story of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Bill Rothstein. If this all sounds familiar, this crazy tale was chronicled in a docuseries of the same name on Netflix in 2018. Whereas that series took four hours to unpack all of the details of one of the oddest bank robberies in history, Cox and writer Courtenay Miles are forced to rush through this complex tale with around a dozen memorable characters. The result is a film that often feels like it’s punching down on a group of oddballs that it never takes the time to really consider as human beings. The people behind the “pizza bomber” case used Brian Wells as part of their plan, never really thinking about his wellbeing, and the film about this incident has an oddly similar disconnect, despite the work by two of its stars to add depth to the rushed screenplay. It’s possible that this is a tale that just can’t be told well in a feature, but this sort of cynical approach certainly wasn’t the best way to try.
“Evil Genius” opens with Rothstein (David Harbour) considering taking his own life before going to the cops with a shocking revelation: There’s a body in a freezer, and it was put there by Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong (Patricia Arquette). At first, Rothstein claims that the body has nothing to do with the currently-under-investigation “pizza bomber” case, but that’s a weak argument. Obviously, it does.
From there, Miles’ script bounces back and forth between one of the most unforgettable bank robberies in history and the bloody aftermath. For a very brief window, “Evil Genius” allows for a little back story as we meet a young Marjorie and Bill, back when life was better. Harbour plays Bill like someone who had a healthy dose of unrequited love for Marjorie from a young age, and Arquette balances that by sketching a character who knows that she can get this burly man to do whatever she wants. Arquette’s work here is unimpeachable, disappearing into an abrasive whirlwind of a character, someone who manipulates everyone around her with alternating promises of glory and compassion-seeking sob stories. She’s so good (and Harbour is excellent as well) that she almost saves the entire movie.
She can’t quite get around the flaws that emerge from this film’s breakneck pacing. It spins through the details of the heist, starting with how Marjorie was convinced that PNC Bank in Erie, PA had essentially stolen her inheritance. She devised a plan with Rothstein and a menagerie of quasi-criminals played by Garret Dillahunt, Michael Chernus, Danielle Macdonald, and Owen Teague that ended up with them kidnapping a pizza delivery driver (played by director Tom McCarthy in a fun casting choice), strapping a bomb to his neck, and sending him into the bank to get the cash. The root of the idea is a little “genius”: robbing a bank that you never enter. Everything after that was pretty dumb.
“Evil Genius” moves so swiftly through the beats that there’s never really enough pause to justify telling this story again, especially if one has seen the Netflix series. Yes, Arquette and Harbour make smart acting choices here and there, but even they get swept up in a film that never really seems interested in understanding these people as much as laughing at them. A movie based on a true story needs more than “Can you believe this shit happened” as its guiding artistic principle.
Of course, the story at the center of Susanna White’s “Prima Facie” is disturbingly believable, but the problem here is in the way it’s told. Adapting her award-winning one-woman show of the same name, screenwriter Suzie Miller has expanded the themes of that to a multi-character piece and lost so much of the impact of the original. A story of a woman who discovers that the “law’s not fit for purpose,” this film is one of those that values message over character. The message is urgent in a society that still doesn’t believe women as often as it should, but it’s conveyed with such blunt didacticism that it drains it of its power. Stuck in this truly disappointing film is Cynthia Erivo, a great actress forced to play a theme instead of a person for way too much of this drama.
The “Wicked” star plays Tessa Ensler, a rising star in the barrister class of legal wunderkinds in England. She has made her mark threading the needle of cross-examinations, more excited about winning a case than pausing to question if her tactics actually served justice. The idea that someone could get this far in the legal profession and not have the moral conversation with themselves about if they’re actually doing what’s right is ludicrous, but it’s required suspension of disbelief for what happens next.
Tessa begins a romance with a colleague named Julian Brooks (Daniel Ings). One night, after a successful date, Tessa feels ill and falls asleep on the bathroom floor. Julian picks her up, takes her to bed, and, despite her strong protestations, he has sex with her. He writes it off as a drunken night when it was very clearly rape, the kind of horrible behavior that Julian has probably done before. He’s the kind of guy who takes what he wants with a smile, and, to his credit, Ings plays him well, avoiding the caricature for the kind of monster that feels all-too-real.
Tessa decides to report Julian, which, eventually, leads to her being on the opposite side of the cross-examination game she played so well. Erivo is very good here, but the whole project hammers its messages in a way that makes it seem like they don’t trust their viewers. It’s a film that opens with the message that cases have been tried on this spot at the Old Bailey since Medieval times, which means that they work on a legal foundation shaped by men for centuries. The very core of the legal process undeniably favors powerful men, but “Prima Facie” is too thin to have anything to say about how to fix that or what to do about it. And draining it of what made it so powerful originally—one character being vulnerable and brave on the immediacy of the stage—leaves “Prima Facie” as little more than factual testimony. Its messages are righteous, but they’re not conveyed cinematically enough to be a star witness.
There’s a similar disconnect between message and storytelling in Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” an exercise in how much an audience is willing to take. This is one of the most brutally violent films in a very long time, a bleak character study that features murdered children, battered women, and capital execution. Nelson’s refusal to soften the horrors of this reportedly true story is admirable, but there’s a saying that a film has to earn its brutality—there needs to be a reason to spend two hours feeling kicked around by a story, whether it’s powerful themes, character work, or even just rich storytelling. “Shedd” has two great performances from a pair of the best actors working today, but they’re lost in everything the movie does wrong.
Scoot McNairy, so good in “Furious” this summer, plays the title character, a criminal introduced through a writing class being taught by a woman named Karen (Amanda Seyfried). Wilson is a “Phase 4” convict in an Oklahoma prison who is drawn to this beautiful teacher who speaks of Dickinson and Hemingway. McNairy finds a really smart balance of menace and intellect. He’s clearly one of the smartest men in the room, but there’s a simmering violence under the surface that he can barely hide. He begins to send Karen letters through his writing assignments, and she sees a way out from a life with her abusive husband. She’s going to help Wilson break out and they’ll run off together.
Nelson structures his film in a manner that shows the folly of this endeavor, jumping around three timelines. There’s the Karen/Wilson burgeoning relationship that serves as the foundation, but the film also cuts regularly to what’s clearly the next two formative chapters in Wilson’s life: His escape and his death. In the former, Wilson and two other convicts kill their way through the South, taking out a cabin owner who stumbles on them before running into a nice family that includes a doomed dad played by the totally wasted William Jackson Harper. In the latter, Wilson prepares for his end by lethal injection, allowing Nelson commentary on how a state killing a man is just about one of the worst things that anyone could ever see in person.
McNairy is powerful and Seyfried is subtle, but “Wilson Shedd” stumbles almost everywhere else. The structure is infuriating, attempting a sort of novelistic style (Seyfried’s character even teaches a class about “story structure,” believe it or not) that doesn’t serve the material. And, again, it’s a film of truly intense violence. From Karen’s bloody face to Wilson’s ultimate end, it feels like Nelson is challenging viewers to truly look at the impact of domestic violence and capital punishment without asking what we’re supposed to take away from the vision. Yes, these awful things happen every day in the world, but a film needs to place human horrors in cinematic context for them to matter beyond sheer provocation.
