The Wife

It's the 90s, and Joe Castleman (Jonthan Pryce) has just been told he's won the Nobel prize for literature. But as he and his wife Joan (Glenn Close) travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, some of the fractures in their relationship start to fizzle - some provoked by a biographer (Christian Slater) who's nosing around for a story.

I found this kinda flat. Oh, it's nice to see the processional elements of the Nobel Prize, and Close and Pryce are great actors. But this really never gets into second gear as storytelling - the secrets between Close and Pryce are hardly particularly surprising, and once they come out the film hurries to an overly abrupt end rather than actually dealing with any of the implications of those secrets. So this feels too simple, obvious and familiar for me - there's nothing here that really gives this life and meat.

The Breaker Upperers

This is a very goofy comedy with most of the emphasis on in-the-moment silliness and minimal on things like thematic depth or deeply thought out characterisation. But for all that it's quite enjoyable entertainment - a simple story about two friends who have an agency to help people get out of miserable relationships through various deceptions and tricks. Stars/writers/directors Madeline Sami and Jackie Van Beek have a goofy Kiwi charm to them that means that we're never particularly in danger of seeing their characters as unforgivably horrible, and it's a very friendly, home-made kinda movie that never is in danger of taking itself particularly seriously. If there's a criticism (and there is, this is a critics blog, after all), it's that it's coasting on charm rather a lot - you never really get the sense that very much at all is at stake. But it is pretty damn charming anyway.

RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsberg is an interesting topic for a documentary, no doubt. She's lived an amazing life, been part of major social changes in the US, and generally is an inspiration to many. However this doco is a little clunky in its effect - the decision to go from birth-to-now means that a more thematic approach that may have yielded more interest is kinda abandoned. There's interesting elements - not only reviews of some of her key cases but also her relationships both with her husband and with other judges on the Supreme Court, and the increasing memefication of her in recent years as she's become a symbol of resistance. But ... and perhaps this is something that's always going to happen when you're doing a biopic about a living famous person who's still doing the thing they're famous for ... it's a little bit of a hagiography, and it would have been nice to get a better glimpse at a few of the warts, just to make her a tad more human.