Relationship Goals review – Kelly Rowland and Method Man flirt through breezy romcom

The Valentine’s Day offerings begin with Amazon’s fast-paced, millennial-coded film that’s a fun enough watch even if its messaging is a little suspect On its face, Relationship Goals is a classic romcom, calibrated for viewers of a certain generation. The perennially resplendent Kelly Rowland is Leah, a boss babe morning TV producer in line to replace her retiring boss (the omnipresent Matt Walsh) as showrunner. Just as she’s poised to break the glass ceiling, the network higher-ups stick her in a bake-off with Jarrett, a ringer from her romantic past played with devil charm by Method Man. The promise of one of Destiny’s Children playing the will they/won’t they game with the hunk of the Wu-Tang Clan could well prove too strong a lure to stop the scores who grew up on their music from clicking on the Prime Video thumbnail just out of nostalgic curiosity. It’s a tractor beam made stronger by director Linda Mendoza’s extraordinarily fast pace. I mean, those 90 minutes just breeze by. ...

Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/9U4ZmWw
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton