madame Bovary HHHHH out july 9 / Rated M / dIReCtoR SOphie BartheS / CaSt Mia WaSiKOWSKa, ezra Miller, rhyS ifanS
a literary classic it may be, but the story of Madame Bovary is also leaden with angst, making for a dour experience. that’s not to denigrate the quality of Barthes’s adaptation, which is high, but no amount of artistry can make the miserable bones of a story more palatable. as the pining, daydreaming Madame of the title, caught in provincial marital torment, conspicuous consumption and a spiral of lovers, Wasikowska is spirited and suitably irritating. Ifans relishes his role as her merchant tempter of finery.
jim mitchell
Leslie Knope would pay for trying to use the night shift to fill in the Dino Pit.
the odd couple baCK TO The ’80s
Noble HHHHH out july 30 / Rated M / dIReCtoR Stephen Bradley / CaSt deirdre O'Kane, Sarah Greene, Brendan COyle
Director Colin Trevorrow based the relationship between Owen and Claire on the characters played by Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing The Stone (1984).
“an Irish gutter is the same as a Vietnamese gutter,” says Christina Noble (a brassy o’Kane), tireless advocate for the homeless children of Ho Chi Minh City. the parallels of narrative in Bradley’s biopic of Noble are clear — her depicted childhood of poverty on dublin’s streets from 1955 directly correlates with her work caring for the young of Vietnam in 1989. But Bradley’s approach is too episodic and cursory for an inspirational story, which should have been made more powerful with more panache. jm
August 2015
39
