Film reviews: ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,’ and ‘Sirat’
An inconvenient love torments a would-be couple, a gonzo time traveler seeks to save humanity from AI, and a father’s desperate search goes deeply sideways
‘Wuthering Heights’
Directed by Emerald Fennell (R)
★★
“Wuthering Heights is Emerald Fennell’s dumbest movie,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. “It also happens to be her best.” In her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, the director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman “throws off the burden of trying to say
something significant” and instead makes the legendary romance of Catherine and Heathcliff simply the story of two drama whores who can’t quit each other. “Fennell has an incredible talent for extravagant scenes that bypass all higher thought functions to spark a deeper lizard-brained pleasure,” and she leans fully into that talent here.
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To me, Fennell’s “gleefully self-conscious” film style proves “an awkward fit for Brontë’s roiling, tormented saga of passion, cruelty, and doom,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. Her “Cathy” and Heathcliff aren’t doomed to unrequited longing. Instead, even after Cathy marries for money and security, she and the poor-born Heathcliff “get down and dirty in bedrooms, carriages, and out on the moors,” squandering the talents of co-stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and reducing the tale
to “florid, horny, juvenile fan fiction.” This is a movie that “should sell heaps of tickets,” said Daphne Merkin in Air Mail. “Influenced by the aesthetics of soft porn and high fashion,” it aims to win over Gen Z viewers, and in its own “edgy, stylistic” way, “it works.” Still, by allowing the lovers to act on their hunger for each other and by leaving out Catherine’s post-mortem haunting of Heathcliff, Fennell’s Wuthering
Heights turns out to be “a less radical rendering of the otherworldly desire that Brontë captured almost two centuries ago.”
‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’
Directed by Gore Verbinski (R)
★★★
“There’s zero doubt, watching this film, that it was made by a madman,” said Eric Vespe in The Film Stage. From the moment Sam Rockwell bursts into a busy Los Angeles diner as a wild-eyed character claiming to be a time traveler from a grim future, “it’s clear you’re not in for a movie
made by committee.” Instead, the ride you’ve strapped in for is the first from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski in nearly a decade, and though the 134-minute adventure runs long, “it’s never dull, in part because it’s so hard to predict what’s coming next.”
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Nothing in Verbinski’s sci-fi action comedy would work without Rockwell, said Peter Debruge in Variety. The Oscar winner’s crackpot interloper
announces that he needs help to avert AI’s future uprising against humanity, and as he picks his team from the diner’s patrons, a routine he’s ostensibly carried out 117 times before in precisely the same location, Rockwell “makes a great avatar for the cavalier stance that nothing
matters when you get endless lives.” Soon, the mission team includes Juno Temple’s single mom and Haley Lu Richardson’s sad-eyed punk, and we’re treated to a “virtuoso” orchestration of Everything Everywhere
All at Once–style time-travel anomalies. The screenplay lacks the sharp teeth that would elevate Good Luck to a high-concept classic, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Still, “Verbinski’s flair for kinetic action set pieces make it a reasonably entertaining entry in the canon of gonzo sci-fi comedies.”
‘Sirat’
Directed by Oliver Laxe (R)
★★★★
“You might have a few reasonable guesses where this story is headed. They’re probably wrong,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Spain’s “punkish, prankish, and strangely existential” contender for the Best International Feature Oscar opens with a rave in the
Moroccan desert at which we see a father and his young son asking the whacked-out revelers whether any have seen the boy’s missing older sister. The party is then broken up by soldiers bearing the news that something like World War III has broken out, and suddenly, Oliver Laxe’s “taut and riveting” drama is tracking the father, his son, and a break-off group of ravers racing farther into the desert.
Though the movie “begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair,”
said Justin Chang in The New Yorker, its narrative “takes off like a shot” and never flags while its “mysterious” power emanates from the makers’
“tough-minded understanding” that human kindness is “rare yet persistent,” even in the direst circumstances. “Laxe offers a much too
literal takeaway during the film’s final moments,” said Natalia Keogan in the A.V. Club. “But as the cliché advises, it’s the journey Sirat takes us on that merits appreciation.” And if the world is truly ending, “maybe one last party, one last dose of serotonin, isn’t such a bad send-off.”