FLIX AT HOME
‘THE SOCIAL DILEMMA,’ ‘I AM WOMAN’ AND ‘THE BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY’ AMONG TOP MOVIES COMING THIS WEEK
Audiences’ choices are limited as movie theaters in additional markets reopen this weekend, with only one new studio release, “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” joining highprofile holdovers “Tenet,” “The New Mutants” and “Unhinged” on megaplex marquees.
Meanwhile, limited releases are getting better exposure than usual, as indies and docs (such as “All In: The Fight for Democracy” about voter disenfranchisement and Stacey Abrams’ recent non-election) grab screens that might normally be crowded by blockbusters.
Streaming services HBO Max and Netflix are keeping subscribers flush with options. For those worried about what all that screen time is doing to their heads, Netflix serves up eyeopening doc “The Social Dilemma,” one of the better-reviewed films out of Sundance.
Here’s a rundown of those
films opening this week.
In theaters “The Broken Hearts Gallery”
Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a soulfully flip 26-year-old New York art gallery assistant with a problem. She’s so invested in her romantic relationships that each time one of them ends, she holds onto the mementos from it. She’s a hoarder of lost-love nostalgia. Director Natalie Krinsky has a witty and spirited commercial voice. Watching the film, you know you’re seeing an unabashed spawn of “Girls” and “Sex and the City,” a kind of anthropological Williamsburg careerist rom-com set, in this case, in a woke wonderland of post-feminist awareness.
“All In: The Fight for Democracy”
This documentary has been constructed around the 2018 race for governor in Georgia, where the Democrat, Stacey
Abrams, who would have been the first African American woman elected governor in the U.S., lost by a thin margin to Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State. But Kemp wasn’t just running for office. He was overseeing the election.
“All In” uses what went on in Georgia as a prototype for what could happen in the upcoming presidential election. One of the film’s overwhelming themes is that voter suppression works.