The latest offering from famed producer/director Ryan Murphy, Jodie Foster’s new film and “Bridgerton’s” new season top our look at this week’s new shows and movies.
“The Beauty”: Comparisons to the gross-out body horror film “The Substance” are inevitable for co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson’s 11-part horror series. But parallels can also be made to such classics as Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and others. Like those, it scours our culture’s incessant preoccupation with physical beauty, both the lusting for it and the lengths we will go to get and keep it. But “The Beauty” possess a mind of its own as it expounds on rich themes that Murphy’s been interested in, mixing humor with black humor while he comments on sinfully glamorous lifestyles and the dark side of human nature and desire. It opens with a bang in Paris as an extra-thirsty European supermodel goes on a rampage and then explodes. That bit of carnage propels hottie FBI agents, and causal lovers, Cooper Madsen (Evan Peters) and Jordan Bennett (Rebecca Hall) to spearhead an investigation where they soon discover there are more beautiful people going kaboom and it looks like a virus is partly to blame.
Their snooping leads them to romantic places, including Venice, and takes them down unexpected blind alleys both personally and professionally. Coinciding with that storyline are two others. One follows Jeremy, a sex-obsessed Jersey hothead who lives with his mom and is the butt of jokes and so wants to be hot so that he can get women. A special lovemaking session enables him to become sexy Jeremy (Jeremy Pope). The other storyline involves a sleazy and mysterious billionaire figure (Ashton Kutcher, well cast) who bullies and holds court wherever he goes, including on his yacht with his disgusted wife (Isabella Rossellini, arching her eyebrows with classic style) who sneers at him. At his beck and call is The Assassin (Anthony Ramos, flexing his magnetism, particularly in a monologue about the singer Christopher Cross). He likes to play music while he works — aka carves up bodies I caught eight episodes and am impressed at how “The Beauty” takes a razor to a culture that worships and praises beauty and form that creates monsters who, as one character observes, believe that no rules apply to them. As with all Murphy productions, the production values heighten the experience and the costumes and gruesome deaths are all stylishly assembled and disassembled while the guest appearances from Vincent D’onofrio and Peter Gallagher amongst others popping in, raise the bar too. It’s a better and more cohesive series than Murphy’s “Grotesquerie” and slams home a harsh point — that we are all to blame when it comes to worshipping beauty since we’re all so willing to do anything at any cost to be craved and desired, not for the person we are inside, but how good we look with and without our clothes, and that, in the end, true beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder but within ourselves. It might get tripped up by its own aspirations at time, but it’s one of Murphy’s better series. Details: 3 stars out of 4; three episodes available on FX/Hulu/Disney+, with a new episode dropping every Wednesday.
“A Private Life”: Few actors have the dexterity and talent to make a nuanced character like eminent and beyond-reproach psychiatrist Lilian Steiner not only relatable but likeable even when she’s, well, being human and not always doing the right thing. But Jodie Foster works magic like that onscreen and presents us with one of the most fully developed, certainly fascinating characters you will likely encounter this year in director/ co-screenwriter Rebecca Zlotowski’s French noirish black comedy. Zlotowski is a bit of magician, too, and plays on audience expectations that are ingrained in the film’s twist-promising premise. In lesser hands, this character study would have turned into a gotcha exercise with Lilian investigating the unexpected death of one of her client. While that is the premise, “A Private Life” detours from the psychological path trod by “Gone Girl” and weighs into metaphysical matters, along with motherhood, career and our overreliance on needing to be perfect. We even get a bit of hypnosis that sends us twirling back to the reign of the Nazis. It all works as Lilian enlists the aid of her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil) as she grows more and more convinced that her client Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) was murdered. Zlotowski and cinematographer George Lechaptois pay homage to noir throughout and while the supporting cast — Mathieu Amalric, as her exasperated son and newborn father, Vincent Lacoste as her client’s hostile husband and Luàna Bajrami as her client’s daughter — is incredible, its is Foster, speaking French, who moves the chess pieces throughout and gives us a wonderfully capable and wonderfully flawed protagonist, one whose tears have been blocked by her own uber capability. Details: 3½ stars; opens Jan. 30 in theaters.
“Bridgerton Season 4”: Could it be that the “Bridgerton” is getting stuck in a rut? Possibly. Given that Netflix is offering only four of eight episodes for review, it’s looking like this treasured romantic staple needs to mix things up in the second half of the season (which is due out Feb. 26). The first four episodes sew with the same pattern, and while that’s comforting, the seams are starting to fray. This particular “Bridgerton” matchup raised expectations and promised something different since it’s focused on that rascal Benedict (a dashing Luke Thompson), a creative, artistic sort with diverse sexual appetites. His often exasperated mother (Ruth Gemmell, an underrated player in the series) wants him to settle down and stop being a player.
As we left Benedict in Season 3, he was embracing his bisexuality or pansexuality. That aspect of him gets put on the back burner as he falls under the spell of a mysterious masked woman (Yerin Ha) at a ball. He becomes so besotted that he searches everywhere for this “Cinderella” (Season 4 pays homage to that fairy tale in an enormous way), but she’s elusive since she’s not from high society per se nor deemed a legit part of a well-heeled family. She’s a maid named Sophie and is treated poorly by a wicked stepmother and wicked stepsisters who don’t like that she’s around. The fit-and-start romance that ensues between Benedict and Sophie takes its own sweet time to strike a match. While viewers wait for the mutual attraction to heat up, time gets well spent with the extra-needy Queen Charlotte (the divine Golda Rosheuvel) and the extra-on-the-ball Lady Agatha Danbury (consistent scene-stealer Adjoa Andoh). Their tricky relationship/friendship is, in fact, more interesting than the contortions of the two lovebirds. New showrunner Jess Brownell does spice things up a little in other ways, including the bedroom activity of Francesca Bridgerton (Hannah Dodd) and John Stirling (Victor Alli) along with the sweet romance between Violet Bridgerton (Gemmell) and Lord Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis). Those side characters and their stories are the support beams propping up Season 4, which needs more to add some sizzle and take more risks with its two main lovers. Hopefully that’ll happen in the next four episodes. Details: 2 stars; four episodes drop Jan. 29.
“Arco”: Director/screenwriter Ugo Bienvenu, a French graphic novelist and a force in animation, imagines a plausible climate-change-challenged future in this enjoyable animated adventure that is polished and beautiful to behold, reminiscent of the wonderment on display in a Studio Ghibli feature. (In other words, take the kids and see it in a theater.) An inquisitive and impatient 10-year-old boy named Arco stealthily ditches the future so he can scope out the cool dinosaur past, but he’s not so swift at navigating time travel and plunks into 2075 suburbia, a time when earthlings are combating storms and fires. Pre-teen Iris’s parents (dubbed voices of Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo) are preoccupied and away and it’s her responsibility to help the family robot tend to her baby sister. Lonely, too, Iris takes Arco under her wing. Told with charm and emotion, “Arco” is always engaging and free of extra padding except when Bienvenu leans too liberally on the Three Stooges-like foibles and fumbles of a trio (American dubbed voices of Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg and Flea) shadowing the boy’s every move. It gets too repetitious and sometimes throws the film out of whack. But “Arco” gets you where it counts, putting a lump in your throat and even offering a ray of hope. Details: 3 stars; in theaters Jan. 30.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
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