Review of reviews: Film
Battle of the Sexes
Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (PG-13)
The tennis match that scored a win for feminism
Sometimes the competent woman beats the misogynist buffoon, said Richard Lawson in VarietyFair.com. In 1973, women’s tennis champion Billie Jean King walloped a well-pasthis- prime Bobby Riggs in a hugely hyped televised exhibition match, and this rousing dramatization of the story “has a righteous kick that excuses a lot of its hokier qualities.” Emma Stone plays the “steely, unshowy” King, and she’s as strong in that role as Steve Carell’s Riggs is cartoonishly (and fittingly) annoying, said Benjamin Lee in TheGuardian.com. King is shown battling to win women players paydays commensurate with men’s, but “things truly come alive” when she develops a same-sex relationship that could destroy her marriage and career. After a “slightly saggy” middle section, the movie picks up again in time for the climax. A few surprises await, said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. “The showdown in Houston, for instance, comes across as tacky rather than triumphant,” and Riggs is cast as a clown—a distraction from women’s more powerful foes. When King confronts the head of the pro tennis circuit, his condescending smile speaks volumes. Peek behind it, and “you sense a rocklike prejudice that will be no easier to break than a champion’s serve.”
Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Directed by Matthew Vaughn (R)
Eggsy and friends battle an evil monopolist.
“It’s rare to see so much thrown at the screen and so little sticking,” said Chris Nashawaty in Entertainment Weekly. Two years after the first Kingsman film launched an action franchise that made a wry joke of wild plot twists and over-the-top violence, the “massively disappointing” follow-up proves even maximalism can go too far. “The movie has its moments,” said Bilge Ebiri in The Village Voice. Taron Egerton is back as Eggsy, a young British superagent, while Julianne Moore shows up as a chipper drug-queen villain who’s created a 1950s-inspired mountain lair where (the real) Elton John is forced to perform for her. And after she kills off most of Eggsy’s Kingsman colleagues and he teams with a squad of American superspies, the picture “manages to deliver a couple of interesting fights.” What’s missing, now that Eggsy is no longer an unlikely agency recruit, is an underdog to root for, said Ethan Sacks in the New York Daily News. Instead, “there are too many supporting characters, too many gadgets, too many plot holes instead of twists, and too many Oscar winners”—Moore and Halle Berry among them— “giving mostly Razzie-worthy performances.”
Dolores
Directed by Peter Bratt (Not rated)
A candid portrait of a pioneering activist
Peter Bratt’s new documentary offers “a fascinating corrective to 50-plus years of American history,” said Lora Grady in The Washington Post. Too often, the late Cesar Chavez gets virtually all the credit for founding the United Farm Workers and winning the union’s breakthrough early victories on behalf of America’s lowest-paid laborers. But the group’s co-founder, Dolores Huerta, played a central role for years, and this “exhilarating, inspiring, and deeply emotional” documentary finally gives the 87-year-old former California schoolteacher her due. “It’s no hagiography. Its subject wouldn’t stand for that,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Though Bratt brings in plenty of celebrities who praise her work, Huerta gets screen time, too, and she proves “a tough-minded truth teller” who doesn’t sugarcoat anything about her life—from the beatings she endured to the suffering she caused some of her 11 children because she put her activism first. The film’s first half, before interviews with her adult children take over the story, feels “in need of one more edit,” said Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle. The movie soars when it shows the personal price Huerta paid for her achievements. It’d make “a fine double feature with Wonder Woman.”
Melinda Sue Gordon, Giles Keyte/Twentieth Century Fox, George Ballis/Take Stock/The Image Works ■
