One-on-one theater
Theatre for
One “boils drama down to essentials,” said Naveen
Kumar in
TheDailyBeast
.com. In the current Covidera edition of the New York City–based project, one actor and one viewer are paired in a twoway video call during which the actor performs a topical 10-minute microplay, each one “taut, vivid, and charged with feeling.” In two-time Pulitzer winner Lynn Nottage’s strong entry, a black woman recalls a teenage misadventure, and though she never mentions current protests or Covid-19, they’re “pulsing between the lines,” said Maya Phillips in The New York Times. Still, Nikkole Salter’s Here We Are proves to be the showstopper. As a foulmouthed, charismatic space-farer (Russell G. Jones) marvels at a planet he’s approaching, we, too, “find a whole world from behind a glass screen.” bfplny.com, weekly through Oct. 29; registration is free
if any, have focused so much on the sexual abuse black women suffered under slavery, said Jourdain Searles in The Hollywood Reporter. But instead of seriously examining that cultural trauma, Antebellum “goes for a third-act twist of M. Night Shyamalan proportions that threatens to swallow the movie whole, devouring any sense of subtlety and shading in order to drop an anvil of obvious social commentary.” Wasting its potential to reveal how black women have experienced and continue to confront racism, the movie “functions mostly as a B-side to Get Out, covering the same themes with more brutality and much less nuance.” ($20 on demand) R
into a “spiky free spirit” who gathers family one more time before dying of assisted suicide, and Mia Wasikowska and Kate Winslet “do their considerable best” as her bickering daughters. A late revelation seems unnecessary, though, “like an extra hurdle planted at a track-race finish line.” ($14 on demand) R
The Broken Hearts Gallery
“A good bad movie,” this new rom-com gathers various peripheral pleasures around a hollow center, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Its 25-year-old star, Geraldine Viswanathan, is “among the most talented performers of her generation,” and she brings glittering wit to the joshing dialogue as her character, a recently jilted art-gallery assistant, bounces back by finding a new guy ( Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery) and hits a nerve by starting an exhibition space for artifacts from failed relationships. ( In theaters and $20 on demand) PG-13
Red, White, & Wasted
The self-described Florida rednecks in this documentary “simply want to be left alone to take their trucks out to a mud pit on a glorious afternoon, have a few beers, and cut loose,” said John Fink in TheFilmStage .com. If you don’t like guns, Confederate flags, Trump devotees, or twerking, you might not enjoy their company, but the quiet central figure is a compelling character, a loving father to two daughters who are in their own ways struggling, too. ($10 on demand) Not rated