Fresh Prince: COMING 2 AMERICA

In 1988, Prince Akeem of the small fictional African nation of Zamunda came to America, hoping to find a wife. It resulted in an amusing-enough culture-clash comedy that benefited from a star turn from Eddie Murphy at the early height of his powers, and the big budget Hollywood gloss that makes any even halfway decent comedy from the days of shooting on film look just a little bit better than the digital non-style style that passes for big screen comedy these days. Now it’s the latest 30-year-old comedy to get a belated sequel in Coming 2 America. Although this time it’s shot bright and flat like a sitcom, returning screenwriters Barry W. Blaustein and David Sheffield (with an assist from Black-ish’s Kenya Barris) have retained the original charms while dialing back some of the raunch and retrograde gender politics. Director Craig Brewer (not for nothing a better director than the original’s John Landis) finds a mellower key for a surprisingly sweet goof that flips the dynamics in clever ways.

It finds Akeem is now King of Zamunda, but without a male heir. In this male-dominated monarchy, that might cause some trouble about lines of succession, even though his hyper-competent and confident daughters are clearly some fine royal specimens capable of leading. For one thing, they’re all excellent fighters — his oldest is even The Old Guard’s KiKi Layne, so you know she can take care of herself. Still, the King’s hopes for a son are answered by the revelation that he fathered a son off-screen during the last movie. Surprise! (His best friend (Arsenio Hall) vaguely remembers the details.) So the movie’s about a thirty-year-old from Queens (Jermaine Fowler), with mom (Leslie Jones) and uncle (Tracy Morgan) in tow, turning up in the palace somewhat ready to claim his place in the royal family. (Some Princess Diaries crash courses might apply.) Though it threatens to become a loud romp, the movie is more interested in a mellow, low-key vibe, letting family dramas just sentimental enough ring out in a comic key surrounded by some good gags, and even a few musical numbers.

The cast keeps it as pleasant as the design of Zamunda — in retrospect a Wakanda spoof avant la lettre — is pleasing to the eye. They’re decked out in Ruth E. Carter’s finest patterns and styles, a little Black Panther here, tribal patterns, flowing fabrics, and elaborate jewelry there. That these comic performers carry out their silly little bits of business and amusing patter in this stunning wardrobe adds to the charms. Above all, it’s nice to see Murphy back in a comedy that plays to his strengths. It’s a perfect blend of the wilder energy of his early roles and the gentler family fare he aged into. There’s some impish sparkle in his eyes (especially in his under-makeup multiple roles reprising the barbershop jokesters from the first film), and a comfortable fatherly cuddliness to his paternal interests in the plot. And it’s poignant to see his dawning awareness of a need to push back on the patriarchy that forces him to ignore his wonderful daughters in favor of a son he barely knows. Yet best of all, perhaps, is his willingness to cede some of the spotlight to Fowler’s Prince Lavelle Junson of Queens, an appealing performance that’s in a slightly different register from Akeem. He plays the culture clash here, bringing a New York swagger to the formality of the palace. He gets a more earnest rom-com plot as he’s torn between a stunning princess (Teyana Taylor) from neighboring country Nexdoria (maybe too lightly treated for being run by a peacocking warlord (a game, energetically goofy Wesley Snipes) and his child soldiers), a match that might make good political sense, and a more relatable court stylist (Nomzamo Mbatha), who might be better for him personally. It's serious, but cute.

The whole picture is uneven, with some jokes flat and a few conceits a tad under-cooked, but the project has enough charms that I found it hard to resist. Brewer keeps the tone on track, with the simple sitcom staging inviting enough emotional investment without stamping out laughs, which in turn keep the more serious geopolitical allusions at bay. This is a character piece, not a world building endeavor or cultural argument beyond the softly insistent gender balancing. The ensemble is on the same chill wavelength, resisting overt farce for something more relaxed, an amusing and amiable consideration of generational conflict wrapped up in semi-serious stakes for this never-quite-believable kingdom. It honors the original in its throwback appeal—a reminder of a time when a movie could be a couple good star turns, some funny supporting roles, and a simple high concept executed well enough.

Family Matters: LET HIM GO

The most frightening aspect of the exceptionally taut thriller Let Him Go is the bloodlust it whipped up in me. I can’t remember the last time I was so involved in one of these that I was on the edge of my seat rooting for the painful punishment of its villains. But there I was, by the end of the picture, hoping against hope that Diane Lane or Kevin Costner would get to that shotgun and blast Lesley Manville and Jeffrey Donovan away. This is a masterfully manipulative bit of moviemaking, the kind of clean, spare, simple story — a sort of mournful melancholy Magic Hour midcentury western — that gets its hooks in early and pulls tighter as the suspense simmers and you just know the only way out will be bloody. Lane and Costner bring a leathery goodness and low-boil righteous anger to their roles as rancher grandparents whose only child has died. His widow (Kayli Carter) remarried a man who, it is quickly clear, is abusing her. When the new husband suddenly up and moves to North Dakota, absconding with his new wife and her son, our leads’ beloved grandson, the older couple decides to track them down and make sure they’re all right. They’re so not. The abusive husband, turns out, comes from a whole family of abusers, a manipulative, controlling bunch held together under the domineering watch of a cruel matriarch (Manville), her creepy brother (Donovan), and her gaggle of large adult sons. When our sympathetic leads finally get their way to their grandson — the way there winding, and full of long sighs and pregnant pauses and weary pulp wisdom like “that’s all life is: a list of what we have lost” — it’s sadly apparent that the new in-laws are not about to let the grandson or her mother out of their sight. By the second half of the picture, it’s become a tense battle of wills between the new and old in-laws, and we’re on Lane and Costner’s side every step of the way. It’s clear they need to save their grandson and former daughter-in-law from the clutches of this awful family, but how to navigate such an extrication is trickier by the moment. As danger rises, it’s clear there’s no easy way to loosen these villains’ grip.

Thomas Bezucha writes and directs with a keen eye for simple, direct emotion, clear and crackling spare dialogue, and classic widescreen staging. He’s composing shots to tighten disconnection between our leads and their foes, or to allow the blocking to heighten the danger of encroaching ill intentions, while balancing the vast open spaces that make this mid-20th-century western landscape look every bit the inheritor of the traditional family feud western. And he trusts his cast to imbue the underpinnings and subtext of scenes with weight and pain, allowing Lane and Costner the easy empathy and tough decisions that the shark-like maneuvering and twisted logic of Manville and her brood lack. It’s a balance of control the cast plays out, confident and still, gentle with a spine of steel, inevitable in trajectory but alive in the moment. And it all serves the crisp plot that slides into place with a cast iron weight and a dried-meat snap. Bezucha builds the desire for revenge so achingly that it somehow uses the barest layer of sentimentality to crack open the most intensely felt rage. These sweet grandparents simply must be reunited with their grandson and save him from the cruelties of his new stepparent. Buzucha, whose previous films are the 2005 ensemble Christmas comedy The Family Stone, and 2011’s sparkling G-rated girls’ vacation lark Monte Carlo, usually does fine work with family dynamics. Here he adds Eastwood-inspired filmmaking: direct, plain-spoken, uncomplicated, and driven by a small-c conservative vision of domesticity and safety. It has a relaxed confidence of vision and bone-deep understanding of character that makes its grip all the tighter. Its gripping finale and explosive desire for a righteous reckoning is hard-fought and well-earned. This is a terrific, expertly crafted thriller.

Scare Tactics: THE EMPTY MAN and FREAKY

Due to the vagaries of 2020 releases and corporate rejiggering, Disney ended up barely releasing Fox’s long-shelved horror movie The Empty Man last fall. It was only in theaters with no promotion and no critic screenings in the middle of a raging pandemic at a time when most exhibitors were closed and the few that weren’t were mostly empty anyway. So of course it went almost entirely unremarked upon and certainly barely seen. That’s a shame. The movie is strong stuff, the feature debut of David Prior, previously a creator of DVD features who now proves himself a filmmaker of style and distinction. I hope he makes it a habit. The film stretches over two austere hours. It’s patient with widescreen compositions, understated sound design and softly insinuating score as it takes a standard missing persons setup and grows weirder and more haunted by the scene. In approach there are echoes of David Fincher or Ari Aster in the bold use of deliberate tone and exquisite punctuation of editing and titles. It’s the sort of picture that’ll boldly declare “Day One” during a deeply creepy extended, mostly unrelated, tone-setting curtain raising sequence that ends with the film’s name followed by the introduction of our main character nearly 20 minutes into the feature. Prior quickly conjures a thick, mesmerizing atmosphere in which the tingling possibility of the physically uncanny and psychically unwell grows heavier with well-earned portent.

This is a confidently unsettled mood that matches the exhausted collapsing temperament of its lead character. James Badge Dale stars as the type of mournful lonely guy who’d get dragged into a mystery in these sorts of stories. He has a tragic backstory slowly unraveled for us, but from the instant we see him alone in a chain restaurant, sipping beer and sadly trying to slip the waitress a “Free Birthday Meal” coupon, we know that he’s a pitiable, sympathetic figure. And because we’ve felt the genre tremors and we’ve seen the mysterious going on in the opening — as, years earlier, three hikers meet a spooky fate lost in the mountains of Bhutan — we know that his friend’s runaway teen daughter is mixed up in some bad stuff. The movie takes on shades of Richard Kelly as an elaborate subterranean paranormal conspiracy starts to unravel, with the dark corners and quiet alleys Dale sleuths down getting him entangled with a rash of disappearances and suicides possibly connected to a creepy cult with a doughy wild-eyed leader (Stephen Root) who worship (or are maybe possessed by, or drawn to, or working for, or all of the above) the Slender Man-like figure of the title. It builds to unusual crescendos of shivery compositions preyed upon by heavy hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck-tingling moments. It arrives at its scares earnestly, not in jumpy jack-in-the-box trendiness, but through stillness and insidious simmering unease.  

Another satisfying 2020 horror film lost in the pandemic shuffle is Freaky, a giddy jolt of a slasher riff that grafts a Freaky Friday twist onto the old hack-hack-hack kill-kill-kill tropes. It comes to us from Christopher Landon, whose Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2 U took Groundhog Day for a similar ride. All three are hugely enjoyable crowd-pleasers with exuberant set-ups and payoffs that know how to wring out a clever hook for all it’s worth. They have the tone of Craven’s Screams without imbuing the characters with those films’ teasing self-awareness. They can figure out the big genre conceits well enough, but don’t turn to each other and monologue about horror tropes. They just run through them energetically and enthusiastically. (One guy running from danger shouts, “You’re black! I’m gay! We are so dead!”) Where Freaky one-ups Landon’s previous pictures is in the gore, with several bloody shock moments of bodies cleaved in two or smashed apart. They’re of a piece with the slasher tradition, and deliver the did-I-just-see-that? gross-out glee of the genre’s best. And it somehow doesn’t tip the balance of what is a weirdly sweet and very funny teen comedy, complete with booming pop music and vibrant colors, surrounding the kills.

It has a mousy, unpopular, insecure high school girl (Kathryn Newton) nursing a crush, commiserating with two best friends, and dealing with family problems, and who finds all that taking a backseat to the main event: the serial killer (Vince Vaughn) who, through a simple use of a magic dagger, switches bodies with her. It gives Vaughn his best role in years, and he rises to the occasion playing a petite high schooler in his lumbering middle-aged bulk, convincingly matching the girl’s energy and able to play scenes opposite her crush or her friends in ways that aren’t condescending and track the emotional stakes. Similarly, Newton’s performance takes on a skulking dangerous swagger and, though it might stretch credulity that the maladjusted creep would have such a good sense of style, he seems to enjoy the easy access to vulnerable teens this great disguise gives him — and isn’t that all any slasher film villain wants? Like any good body swap comedy, it gets a lot of mileage out of its terrific lead performances, who take it seriously while understanding the lark of it all. And then the slasher beats get layered upon it, and the whole thing is a finely proportioned, sugary satisfying genre parfait. The film runs through its paces quickly and enjoyably, never swerving too far into the unexpected, but serving up the expected with style. Landon clearly enjoys delivering so thoroughly on a high concept premise, there’s no way he’d let it go to waste.

Self-Aware: BOSS LEVEL and KEEP AN EYE OUT

Boss Level is only the third film in ten years from Joe Carnahan. As more a fan of his work than not, it’s frustrating that, of all his potential major projects that don’t get off the ground, this is his second in a row that’s basically tossed off and ignored. His last film, the loopy, uneven one-crazy-night crime comedy Stretch, was unceremoniously dumped direct to DVD just before its supposed theatrical bow all the way back in 2014. This new one — yet another Groundhog Day riff, this one with assassins at its core — has slipped onto Hulu with a shrug. Sure, it doesn’t work as well as his grimy Detroit cop thriller Narc or steely survival thriller The Grey does. It’s not even quite up to his cartoony guns-blazing action extravaganzas The A-Team or Smokin’ Aces. But there are car chases and sword fights that prove he still has a terrific sense of pace and space, cooking up overheated action in simple broad strokes across a wide frame. Yet the final balance is underwritten and too snarkily exaggerated to really land. It stars dependable man of action Frank Grillo as a ripped guy who finds himself in a time loop wherein he’s murdered by assassins. So many assassins. (It’s an eccentric ensemble which somehow accommodates both Michelle Yeoh and Rob Gronkowski.) Our lead starts his day with a machete swung toward his bed. If he survives, a machine gun tears up his apartment. If he survives that, he might be gunned down in the street or decapitated on an escalator. You get the idea. Eventually, he realizes it has something to do with his ex (Naomi Watts) and her dastardly boss (Mel Gibson). There’s also a subplot involving a moppet (Grillo’s actual son) who needs a positive male role model in his life. Turns out, the real Boss Level…is fatherhood. So the movie is stuck in two modes, outrageous flippant jokey gory violence on the one hand, sweet stuff about reconnection and growth on the other. The movie is far too bloody for the sentimentality, and far too sentimental for all the blood. It has flashes of teasing genre fun, but trudging through a wobbly smirking tone to get there is a bit much to ask.

Speaking of directors with careers I’m puzzling over: idiosyncratic French auteur Quentin Dupieux. He’s an original for sure. Read about one of his movies and you know it’ll be odd. The experience of watching one usually has identical pleasures to reading the log line. You hear Rubber is a bone-dry slasher satire about a sentient tire that rolls around exploding human’s heads. Watching the movie back in 2010 or so, the main thought I had was: yep, that sure is what this is. Ditto his most recent, Deerskin, a movie about a man who becomes a serial killer at the behest of his new jacket. Yep. That sure is what that is. I like his work in theory, but in practice it wears a little thin on my patience. Just now arriving on our shores in virtual cinemas is the most consistent fun I’ve had with his work: his 2018 film Keep an Eye Out. It’s a loony Möbius strip of a comedy set almost entirely in a police department office where a blustery detective (Benoît Poelvoorde) is taking a statement from a man (Grégoire Ludig) who found a corpse. The cop pecks out the statements on a clattering typewriter, casually smokes, and stalks the room, at least when he doesn’t step out for a family thing for a few minutes. The other officer in the room is a nice one-eyed dope. (Hence the double duty title, ha.) The film is one long digression, squeaking out to feature length, as an unspoken tension (the result of an early splash of slapstick violence imperfectly stowed away) simmers softly under flat-faced absurd roundabouts of dialogue. The pedantic detective keeps falling down rabbit holes of irrelevant questions and details as the suspect’s exceedingly boring story slowly develops. Flashbacks reenact the night in question, but even the characters in these past moments get tired of the immediate details and start having conversations bouncing off other elements of the film’s narrative. (We’re in a flashback, a man explains to a woman he won’t meet until later, which is our earlier.) Dupieux plays it straight, which makes it all the funnier as the casual silliness accumulates. As the spare plotting and simple staging backs itself into a narrative corner, the movie pulls back the curtain in a meta flourish that pulls the whole thing together in a most pleasingly nonsense way. The experience productively riffs on and extends from Dupieux’s interest in fictions and stories within stories and the exchange, the unspoken agreement, between a storyteller and an audience. And it’s just plain funny on a line by line basis, too. Take an early moment: when the suspect is asked how he could tell he saw a dead body if he’d never seen one before, he responds, he’s seen live bodies before, so he just compared.

Talkin' Bout Revolution: JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

A key sequence in Judas and the Black Messiah is a rally in which a charismatic leader of the Black Panther party, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), has the audience totally in his control. It’s the moment to which all emotional and dramatic through-lines in the tough, serious, and sensitive historical picture have built, and it’s the moment from which all of the major players are soon in position for the inevitable tragic end. His speech is a work of impassioned rhetoric, powerfully incantatory, delivered in commanding staccato and deep rumbling righteousness, sweat beading on his brow, building to climactic call-and-response. “I am! A revolutionary! I am! A revolutionary!” The crowd erupts, awoken with fiery political fervor renewed and refreshed. Among their number: Hampton’s pregnant fiancee (Dominique Fishback), his head of security (Lakeith Stanfield), and the FBI agent (Jesse Plemons) who has already put in motion the events that will, with information from a mole in the Panthers, bring this whole chapter to a bloody end. Told with the high-gloss appeal of any Hollywood true-story epic animated by politics, social upheaval, and startling tragedy — swooping camera, copious period detail, polished historicity, patient accumulation of cause and effect — director and co-writer Shaka King illuminates this pivotal moment in gripping characterization and mournful engagement.

It’s a Civil Rights story shorn of the usual white lenses that come with telling these stories at a level of studio prestige. (Not since Spike Lee's Malcolm X, really.) This film is alive with the particulars of injustice from the clear and angry perspective of the oppressed. Drawing the story in vivid recreation, King builds a portrait of a time through small spaces — intimate meetings, quiet dialogues, tense strategizing — as the Chicago headquarters of the Illinois Panthers slowly builds power. We see persuasive speeches, attempts to grow their base by teaming up with other mistreated groups in the city, time spent building programs for free breakfast for kids and free healthcare for seniors. We also see the growing suspicion of law enforcement, who somehow see the group as a challenge to their power — a reflection of violent racial and political prejudice. The film then positions itself at a point of view in the crucible between these poles. Caught impersonating an FBI agent in order to steal a car, a troubled young man (Stanfield) is hauled into the bureau’s local office and given an ultimatum: become a paid informant or go to prison for years. He takes the job. Thus he’s the bomb under the table, in the Hitchcockian sense, as he’s at first reluctantly, but then quite legitimately becoming a member of the Panthers. He was told they’re dangerous, but he sees the good they do and grows increasingly conflicted, torn between his growing political convictions and his sense of self-preservation.

As the film builds to its wrenching finale, King keeps the performances central to the powerful effect. We see the yearning for justice in the young men and women who are drawn into Hampton’s project. We see the older-than-his-years confidence of Hampton’s powerful presence; it’s easy to see why so many would place their confidence, their hope in him. We see, too, how he was made a scapegoat, how dogged the feds were in making him another figure to be brought down. Even if you don’t know your history, you know this story is moving nowhere good. With great clarity, the film consistently brushes past a legacy of easy historical assumptions and cliched Black Panther portrayals. King lingers generously in soft moments—a romantic interlude, an impromptu community restoration project, a poem gently read—before smashing into cruelty—a shootout with vindictive cops, or a vise-tightening moment of casual prejudice between high-ranking agents. The film is convincing in every moment, the ensemble so uniformly tuned into the tone of the endeavor. Its prestige pleasures of crackling design and grainy cinematography — Sean Bobbit catching beauty and grit with equally dexterous use of shadow and light — extend to a parade of great character turns in even small parts, like Lil Rel Howery in a fur coat like out of a blaxploitation classic as a shady dealer, or Alysia Joy Powell as a grieving mother. By centering the humanity of all the major players, and extending that grace to even one-scene figures, this becomes a film of impeccable craft that’s more than a reenactment; it’s an embodiment of these interpersonal stakes that exploded into something momentous for a movement.

Florida, Man: BARB & STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is silly. Just plain silly. They don’t make them this loopy and loony and freewheeling good vibes nonsensical every day. It stars Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, co-writers, too, reuniting ten years after their hilarious Bridesmaids. That movie was a hilarious escalation of comedic scenarios in a conventional character-based way, a look at women’s friendships in a pressure-cooker of milestones. This one is more like an all-human Muppet movie with Austin Powers energy seeping in around the edges. It’s flat-out absurd in every second. Yet, it’s still about women, about best friends navigating aging and life changes. Barb and Star are melodiously accented Nebraskans fired from their jobs at a chain furniture store who decide to shake things up with a trip to a middle-aged paradise resort on the Florida coast. There they both fall in lust with a strapping secret agent (Jamie Dornan) who happens to be working for an underwater supervillain (Wiig in pasty pale makeup and a tragic hairdo) plotting to attack the local shrimp-based beauty pageant with killer mosquitos. So that’s going on, but really it’s just as much about: getting blackout drunk and dancing to a club remix of “My Heart Will Go On,” buying tacky seashell bracelets that are a little too sharp, sneaking out a window onto a pool raft and drifting past your friend practicing her calligraphy on the porch. Wacky developments, goofy voices, random asides, and daffy design abounds, with time for both funny background signs (a dumpy motel advertises “Some TVs”) and colorful dance sequences. (Dornan, freed from Fifty Shades, cuts loose with a ballad he addresses to some random seagulls, the highlight of the picture.) This jumble of nonsense is carried along simply by the strength of the fun the performers themselves seem to be having, a sense of wanting to keep the good times rolling just because everyone involved can effectively communicate just how enjoyable they find their own nonsense. It plays like one of those sui generis oddities — a Hot Rod, or Cabin Boy, or Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion — where comedic voices are given free reign to just do whatever. If you can get even a little bit on the wavelength it’s mostly a blast, even as it starts to wear a little thin in the back half. Wiig and Mumolo are confident enough in their own sense of humor to pull it off.

Washingtons State: THE LITTLE THINGS and MALCOLM & MARIE

No Denzel Washington movie is all bad because, no matter what, at least it has Denzel Washington in it. His latest, The Little Things, tests the thesis a little. It is a slow, dreary murder mystery that’s yet another movie of cops with flashlights tromping around scenes in which corpses of young women are splayed out surrounded by inscrutable clues and a stringy-haired creeper lurks in the margins as the obvious suspect—or is he? The thing is a procession of cliches — interrogation scenes, press conferences, stakeouts, cat-and-mouse games, solemn autopsies, and crime scene photography, and all the while detectives frown and sigh and triangulate — propped up by workmanlike filmmaking craft from John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) with nary a surprise. Even the twists arrive with a dull thunk as the plot gears turn. 

 But then there’s a bit of an acting class going on in the center, in which Washington single-handedly puts the entire movie on his sturdy shoulders and almost makes the thing work. He seems to be doing very little—sitting still, talking slowly, moving deliberately. He quietly murmurs his lines. He’s interior to the point of flat. And yet he’s such a confident, capable Movie Star, that even tamping down his megawatt charisma, he holds every frame every moment he’s on screen. We’re told he’s a detective who dropped out the LAPD after a particularly troublesome case. Now his replacement, a buttoned-up serious investigator (Rami Malek), is looking into unsolved murders that point back to that case. It’s a nagging open wound for the both of them. The movie takes its simple stock premise and noodles around a character study at the margins, though we never learn overmuch about these men, and the ultimate question boils unsatisfyingly down to: does a tough case make a tunnel-visioned weirdo out of these guys, or are tunnel-visioned weirdos drawn to tough cases? Either way they pick at the faintest loose ends, pretty quickly zeroing in on a grade-A creeper of an appliance repairman (Jared Leto) who sure seems guilty. He’s so perfectly off in all the right ways; but so, too, is the case against him. What a conundrum. The shame, then, is that the whole lousy project goes pretty much nowhere and takes its sweet time getting there. What remains fascinating is how much Washington can do with so little, and how actors like Malek and Leto work so hard throughout and still have no chance of catching up.

Perhaps John David Washington has an unfair advantage in the department of younger stars hoping to follow in the great man’s footsteps and capture some of that natural charisma. He is, after all, the legend’s son. There’s something totally captivating about his screen presence, and malleable as he can be both full of wily bravado (like in BlacKkKlansman) or suave and coiled (like in Tenet). He’s so close to great. But there’s also a sense he’s not fully done cooking; he has the confident physicality of an athlete, and the soulful stares of a thespian, but he’s yet to have the exact right part to unlock his appeal. Seeing him in Malcom & Marie proves that maybe big meaty theatrical dialogue might get him there yet. The film teams him with Zendaya in a two-hander shot in grainy black and white for an authentic small-scale indie feel. It’s set over the course of a night as a young couple of Hollywood up-and-comers start off bickering and soon end up in a full-blown romantic argument that rumbles and rattles in long tangles of overwritten prose. 

 That the performers are two of the most promising new movie stars to come along in some time carries the movie — small, self-conscious, puffed up — much further than it deserves. Zendaya is a stormy, smoky inscrutable stunner in a gorgeous dress or less as she casually unravels her critiques and complaints about her swaggering, self-important director boyfriend. The film’s first twenty minutes or so are crackling with unspoken resentments and relational misjudgments expertly teased in these tense and sensual performances, the relationship’s flaws tensely embodied in unspoken shifts of weight and design. Alas, unlike the intensity and escalation of a John Cassavetes or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? argument, which are clear inspirations, this film’s bickering and bantering gets awfully tiresome and repetitive, failing to illuminate by minute 80 or 100 more than we’ve groked in the first flush of interest back in reel one. Writer-director Sam Levinson, who pulled off a much better two-hander in the great recent Zendaya-starring Special Episode of his otherwise overripe HBO show Euphoria, here finds moments of tight squirming intimacy, but ultimately can’t keep the novelty from wearing off fast. It becomes a case study of two fantastic performers easily outpacing their material. That it almost works anyway is to their credit.