Run & Jump

Directed by Steph Green

(Not rated)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This small, quiet family drama feels “as real and messy as life itself,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Maxine Peake and Will Forte co-star as a plucky Irish housewife and the American doctor who’s studying her stroke-debilitated husband, and when the two leads develop a mutual attraction, the film “refuses to take the easy route.” Instead of “a standard melodrama of adultery and deception,” we get a grown-up story about two grown-ups dealing with recognizable desires and obligations. Coming off his strong turn as the dutiful son in Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated Nebraska, Forte “reveals himself to be a surprisingly appealing romantic lead,” said Christy Lemire in RogerEbert.com. “The slightly sad puppy-dog look in his eyes” somehow suggests a smoldering fire. But it’s Peake’s “undimmable vibrancy” that ultimately holds the film together, said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News. Whenever the story threatens to stall or turn too mopey, Forte’s studious character turns his research camera back on Peake’s Vanetia, “and like him, we’re smitten again.”