The latest film releases include Argylle, How to Have Sex, Scrambled, and Orion and The Dark. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for the New York Times.
Argylle
This comedy stars Bryce Dallas Howard as a spy novelist who gets pulled into an espionage plot that’s similar to what she’s written about in her best-selling books. The cast also includes Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill, and Dua Lipa. Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) is the director.
Seibold: “I loathe Matthew Vaughn as a filmmaker. He has a weird tendency to make these really brightly-colored, briskly-paced, energetic music-infused action pictures that have absolutely no personality or energy or excitement to them whatsoever. This might be his best yet. We're just not saying much. It's still not very good. … All of these wonderful actors [are] really giving their all into this ostensibly exciting spy story, and you come out feeling just drained and bored.”
Nicholson: “I definitely tuned out a bit when it's going through … how do we get from point A to point B? And it is definitely fair to say that the emotions in the movie could be deeper. But it's a little bit fair also to say: Who cares? … It's not trying to be deep and emotional. It's trying to be lighter PG entertainment.”
How to Have Sex
In this British film, three teen girls are going to Greece for their summer vacation. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is feeling peer pressure to have her first sexual experience.
Nicholson: “Life does happen a little faster for kids in England … 16 is the age of consent, 16 is the age where you're taking tests that set the course of your future. … This whole thing takes place at a resort in Greece. And [the director] shoots it the way that these kids would see a resort in Greece, where you're looking at the pools and … the nightclubs. You don't see a single blue roof and a beautiful white building anywhere in this. It's like a wasteland because these are kids who don't care about culture at all. But what this film is about is … these teenagers amping each other up and all trying to act more worldly than they are. … Nobody wants to be the buzzkill. … So it's about a party that just keeps going long after it stops being fun.”
Seibold: “There's a lot of close-ups of the lead character’s face … she is constantly questioning what's going on. She's constantly sizing her friends up. There's a warmth between the friends, and we can see where that warmth ends over the course of the movie, how she needs a lot more emotional edification, and she's just not getting it. And as she pushes herself to become more of the party girl, she realizes how disconnected she is from all of this. And I think that's a really relatable experience — going to the party and realizing you want to leave, but you can't because your friends are still there.”
Scrambled
In this comedy, Leah McKendrick is the director, writer, and star. She plays a 30-something woman who’s always a bridesmaid, never the bride.
Seibold: [McKendrick] is still figuring out what the tone of her film is going to be — because parts of this film are very broadly comedic. … But then at some point, we start to switch over into how lonely she feels. She feels like her romantic prospects are drying up. She's an Etsy jewelry salesperson, and that's not cute anymore. When you're in your early 30s, you really can't make ends meet in a practical way. … We start to learn more and more about one of her exes … and how when he got away …. that really damaged her, and she was, at first, a little too hip to acknowledge that, but then is starting to realize that wait, there's a lot of complicated emotions she's trying to go through. But then the film was flipped back to something really broad and sexual and slap-sticky in a way that interrupts that bit of emotional arc. So totally, it's a little off balance. But I feel like the emotional frankness really pushes it through.”
Nicholson: “You're rooting for her, I would say, only slightly more than you're rooting against her — this party girl who's realizing, ‘Oh, being a fun train wreck isn't going as well for me now in my 30s.’ It's leaning a bit hard on trying, I think, to capture what this moment is like probably for a chunk of people who are thinking, ‘How do you save money and get ahead in this society?’
… The film opens very strong with a really, really funny wedding sequence. … And then later on, when you do get this one scene where she has this peek into the life that she rejected, I also found that scene, and the complicated feelings it stirs, up really moving. So there's good stuff in here, but … you see a director finding out who they want to be.”
Orion and The Dark
This Dreamworks animated fantasy adventure is from writer
Charlie Kaufman, based on Emma Yarlett’s book of the same name. Orion is a fraidy-cat kid whose biggest fear is the dark, which visits him one day.
Nicholson: “It is a movie made for a very, very, very young audience. … [Orion’s] just a kid who's terrified of everything … from clogging the toilet at school to the nothingness of death. … Then he goes on this adventure with Dark. And for a little bit in this film, you're feeling, oh, is this just riffing in the Pixar mold, where he's meeting characters named Insomnia and Unexplained Noises and Quiet.
But there are bits in here we really see the Kauffman fun come out. … There's a testimony in the middle of the film about how people make stories for kids that keep things too simple, and how can you complicate these? Because even kids know when they're being lied to about the world being an easier place than it is. So while it feels a little predictable, I think there are these clever moments inside of it that I like.”
Seibold: “I really adored this. This is bleak existentialism for kids. Orion is such an interesting protagonist in that he is truly fearful. … He is truly neurotic. And the funny part is, as he has these adventures with this anthropomorphized version of Dark, we learn that Dark itself is also neurotic because everyone is so afraid of him.”