‘The Drama’
Directed by Kristoffer Borgli (R)
★★★
“If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Days before the wedding of a gorgeous couple played by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, the bride-to-be drops a bomb when banter between the couple and two friends raises the question, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” The content of that secret proves to be “half the fun” here, and writer-director Kristoffer Borgli “milks it for all that it’s worth.” The movie also dramatizes the psychic distress of living in a country that’s in denial about its epidemic of gun violence, though the screenplay proves “too vague to fully make good on its best ideas.”
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Beyond that, it’s never “entirely convincing” that Zendaya’s Emma would have undertaken the act she confesses to, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. To a point, that doesn’t matter, because The Drama mostly focuses on the neurotic unraveling of Pattinson’s Charlie, and the actor is “certainly accomplished at moving from twitchy to twitchier.” Borgli wants us all feeling anxious, and “the way he gradually ups the cringe-comedy factor keeps us watching.” We just never fully believe in the root cause of Charlie’s crack-up.
In the end, the particular secret that Emma shares doesn’t even matter, said Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter. Instead of developing into an edgy examination of gun violence, Borgli’s latest devolves into “a simple dramedy of pre-wedding jitters.” Given how perfunctory his treatment of the movie’s big social issue turns out to be, “I wish he’d chosen a totally different worst thing for Emma.”
‘Alpha’
Directed by Julia Ducournau (R)
★★
Julia Ducournau’s new film is “easily her least accomplished,” said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times. Five years after winning the Palme d’Or for the body-horror shocker Titane, the French filmmaker has fashioned a melancholy AIDS parable that “rarely transcends its intellectual trappings.” In an unidentified French city, a 13-year-old named Alpha acquires a crude “A” tattoo during a night out, triggering her mother’s fears that the girl may have contracted a deadly blood disease through contact with an unclean needle. Soon, an addict uncle who’s been ravaged by the disease re-enters Alpha’s life, but all three of Ducournau’s main characters end up “overwhelmed by her grandiose ideas.”
To me, the film’s “stunning” cinematography and the work of its actors combine to achieve “a poignant emotional power,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. “Alpha is at times almost shockingly beautiful in its depiction of the sick as they slowly calcify, their glassy skin marbled with blue veins.”
But while Ducournau’s desire to confront the stigmas attached to disease is admirable, said Katie Rife in RogerEbert.com, “Alpha plays like a Cronenbergian after-school special,” filled with “tone-deaf” sequences that seem lifted from didactic films made decades ago. Odder still, its anti-bias messaging “isn’t aimed at contemporary young people” but at their 1980s counterparts, “creating the impression that Ducournau is nobly combating misinformation that few people believe in anymore.”