Red Sparrow is a 2018 spy-thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence who worked with Jennifer Lawrence (the star here) on a couple of the Hunger Games movies, but this is a very different beast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova (in, it has to be said, a not entirely convincing Russian accent), and Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenarts and Charlotte Rampling star as the film's secondary characters. This one is a pretty big departure from what Lawrence has done in the past, although it has to be said that she's making some pretty bold career choices. I'm not the first one to say that, and for a good reason: it's true. After last year's Mother! it appeared as if she was trying purposefully trying to appear in more "mature" films, and believe me, it doesn't get much more mature than Red Sparrow. The film plays out like one of those schlocky exploitation from the seventies, in that there's sexual violence, sex, violence, torture, and all manner o...
Home Again is a 2017 romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon, Nat Wolff and Michael Sheen, and was directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer. It tells the story of Alice Kinney, the daughter of a famous chauvinistic yet very successful film director. She is recently divorced and the film begins on her 40th birthday. She is unhappy, however her life gets far more complicated when she meets a group of twenty-something film-makers who end up staying in the guest room of her house.
I was pretty surprised by this film. Before going to watch it, I saw the trailer and I wasn't expecting a lot from it. That isn't to say the film is great, but it is at least serviceable. The entire cast is fine in the film, and the script is fine. However, that's the problem with the film - everything is just fine. They haven't taken any risks here, and nothing in the film seems fresh or original. It has some charm, a couple of mildly funny jokes, and is very inoffensive.
Which brings me to the first problem. Home Again is clearly designed for a mainstream audience, but the average cinema goer wants to see something fairly fresh or thought-provoking. There's none of that here. From the minute the film starts, you can pretty much tell what will happen at the end. The stuff in-between the beginning and the end is fairly entertaining and breezy enough, but it's not the kind of thing which you'll remember in a couple of weeks.
If I was to name any problems, I would say that some of the dialogue is a bit inauthentic. I won't quote it here, because it might spoil some of the plot points, but it sounds like Hallie Meyers-Shyer thought it would sound casual and relatable. In practice, it sounds a little robotic and unrealistic.
The second problem is that the film has incredibly reductive gender politics. Hallie Meyers-Shyer seems to believe that there are some personality traits which can only exist in females, and some which can only exist in men, which to me is pretty old-fashioned.
That's the film in a nutshell. It's fairly predictable, breezy and entertaining, but doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny. The gender politics are quite bad, the jokes are mildly amusing, and the characters are fairly likeable for the most part. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but for people who are looking for a romantic comedy to pass the time, you could do much worse.
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