Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (In theaters on July 16)
This series copies elements of Saw. Past escape room champions are unaware they’ve been gathered on a train where the failure to solve its puzzle will result in their deaths. The pernicious Minos corporation is up to its old tricks, engineering bright and inviting scenarios that will kill you, including a beach and a neon-lit city street (much too clean!). The players bring specific talents: brainy Zoey (Taylor Russell), her compassionate boyfriend Ben (Logan Miller), ex-priest Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel), travel blogger Brianna (Indya Moore) and Rachel (Holland Roden) with her inability to feel pain. Thinly sketched characters are par for the course, but the puzzles shouldn’t consistently lack cleverness. Rather than give viewers closure, this sequel ends by telegraphing a threequel. Perhaps three will be the charm. (Lisa Miller)
Great White (Streaming on FandangoNow & AppleTV, July 16)
Every couple years a new shark film proves we can’t get enough of these fearsome predators. Having found a half-eaten young man on the shores of a deserted isle, two vacationing couples (played by Katrina Bowden and Aaron Jakubenko, and Kimie Tsukakoshi and Tim Kano) dash into the ocean looking for his boat and the survivors. Lacking both proper knowledge and supplies, it isn’t long before everyone lands in a blow-up dingy with two great whites circling in a tightening spiral. The tension prompts bad human behavior, forcing secrets and hidden emotions to surface. Perhaps budget constraints explain showing the sharks sparingly, but only bad judgement can explain why the creatures have been made to growl. (Lisa Miller)
Rose Plays Julie (Film Movement DVD)
Rose (Ann Skelly), shocked to learn that she was adopted, searches for Ellen (Orla Brady), her biological mother. She seems to stalk Ellen at first, but they establish a fragile bond once Ellen reveals what happened. She was raped and although she wrestled with the thought of abortion, gave birth and gave Rose away. Ellen can’t bring herself to say the name of the rapist, texting it to Rose instead.
The emotionally complex film by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor handles Rose’s revenge in ways Hollywood could never contemplate. Turns out her biological father is a well-respected archeologist (ironically seeing his mission as “unlocking the past”). He’s an affable-seeming man but a serial offender who uses his status to exert power.
Separating Rose Plays Julie from a Hollywood #MeToo fantasy is its studied lack of melodrama, using silence in place of hackneyed musical orchestrations. The rhythm of editing is deliberate with a focus on every frame, every thought, and establishes a mood of distance between people, between truth and lies, justice and complicity. With suspense kept at low simmer, the question is: is the archeologist luring Rose into a trap or is she luring him into a trap or …? (David Luhrssen)
