Confessions of an Invisible Girl (Streaming on Netflix, Sept. 22)
This Brazilian screenplay, adapted from Thalita Reboucas’s YA novel, Confessions of an Excluded, Unloved and (Somewhat) Dramatic Girl, focuses on the trials of 16-year-old Tete (Klara Castanho). When her family falls on hard times, they move in with grandma in Rio de Janeiro. The teen is accustomed to privacy and nicer digs, but changing high schools is an opportunity to shed the bullies who previously made life miserable. Persuaded she’s unlovable and awkward, Tete soon befriends two very different teen boys and begins to emerge from her ugly duckling shell. An original Netflix movie filmed in Portuguese, the platform offers an English-dub. Despite its Brazilian origins, this comedic drama might as well be Disney Channel programming for pubescent girls. (Lisa Miller)
Confessions of an Invisible Girl
Dead Pigs (Film Movement DVD)
What’s interesting about Dead Pigs (2018) is that a satire of contemporary China could be shot in mainland China. Chinese American director Cathy Yan brings together several initially unconnected characters in a gradually converging storyline. There’s the goofy pig farmer obsessed with virtual reality goggles, the unctuous Golden Happiness property developer trying to seize a feisty businesswoman’s home to make way for condos, their nerdy American architect and a young woman in a circle of elites devoted to Cartier and Gucci. Class divisions are rampant and the regime’s Confucian ethos is spoofed against the backdrop of self-help exercises, rampant materialism and environmental catastrophe. Dead Pigs was filmed on location in and around Shanghai. (David Luhrssen)
Dead Pigs
The Starling (Streaming on Netflix, Sept. 24)
A pair of CGI starlings are intended to add poignant comic relief to the film’s themes of love and loss. Lilly (Melissa McCarthy) is grieving in the wake of losing her first baby to SIDS. She plants a garden while her husband Jack (Chris O’Dowd), locks himself away in a perky mental health facility. Alone in their picturesque country home, Lilly seeks advice regarding a pair of territorial starlings nesting in her yard. Help comes from Larry, a therapist turned veterinarian (Kevin Kline), who shares the lessons starlings teach as she and Jack struggle to find one another again. The screenplay dutifully ticks off the stages of grief with about as much depth as a back-of-the-cereal-box instructional. However, this dramadey’s worst miscalculation is commanding where and when we should cry. (Lisa Miller)
The Starling
Tailgate (Film Movement DVD)
The original road rage movie, Steven Spielberg’s made-for-TV Duel (1971), has never been topped. Tailgate (2019) is interesting as a Dutch family drama version. The 30ish dad is an arrogant jerk. His worst tendencies surface, on the roadway with his wife and two young daughters, when stuck behind a slow-moving van. He honks, flashes his brights, tries to pass—and is confronted by the slow driver at the next gas station. Of course, that’s not the end but only the beginning. Trouble keeps coming in the rearview mirror! Best to keep calm on the road, lest you meet a psycho killer with an injured sense of pride. (David Luhrssen)
