Voicemails for Isabelle — Netflix
Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson star in this romantic comedy in which Deutch’s character, Jill, copes with the death of her sister Isabella by leaving voicemails on her phone telling her about the struggles of daily life in San Francisco. When an enigmatic real estate agent begins to receive Jill’s message, the inevitable love game is afoot. Directed by Leah McKendrick, it’s a sweet, entertaining and breezy film whose romance is driven by authentic emotions and performances that give it enough bittersweet reality and gentle humour to stand out in the Netflix pond of cookie-cutter genre fare.
No Sudden Move — Netflix
The quietly prolific director Steven Soderbergh made this neo-noir crime caper in 2021. It’s darker and perhaps less successful than some of his previous crime outings, but the twisty thriller about a group of thieves in 1950s Detroit hired by a mysterious client to steal a document has a stellar cast that includes Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle and Jon Hamm. When the job goes horribly south the gang are forced to work together to figure out who hired them, what’s going on and why a simple document is causing them so much distress.
12 Monkeys — Prime Video
Director Chris Marker introduced the 12 Monkeys idea — a man travels back in time to stop a deadly virus from destroying the world — in his film La Jetée in the 1960s. Maverick surrealist Terry Gilliam then adapted the idea for his dark comic 1995 adaptation starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. This 2018 series adaptation ran for four seasons and offered a solid reinterpretation for our conspiracy-obsessed age.
Not a Pretty Picture ― Mubi.com
Pioneering feminist director Martha Coolidge used her own experience of being raped by a man she thought was a friend when she was a student to create a unique experimental pseudo-documentary in which actors re-enact the incident. It’s not always easy to watch, but it is necessary. Seeing how Coolidge deals with her own trauma as she directs shows how deeply buried the scars from sexual abuse can be.
Elle — Prime Video
Unlike many others, I do not have a strange obsession with the Legally Blonde comedies from the early 2000s, starring Reese Witherspoon. Prime Video has created this series of Elle Woods’ pre-college years for the army of fans of Witherspoon’s legal student turned legal eagle.
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