‘Maddie’s Secret’
Directed by John Early (Not rated)
★★★★
“The secret of Maddie’s Secret—or maybe it’s the central joke—is that the movie’s creator and star takes the whole thing seriously,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. In this “tricky, one-of-a-kind stunt,” comedian John Early sends up disease-of-the-week TV movies of the 1980s and ’90s while cross-dressing to play the title character, a woman with an eating disorder that’s reactivated by sudden fame. But the Search Party star “treads lightly here,” spoofing a movie genre while taking Maddie’s bulimia utterly seriously. The blend of high camp and deep sincerity works only because Early, while playing Maddie, “wins the audience over so thoroughly,” said Monica Castillo in The A.V. Club. Maddie is thrust into food-world stardom after her husband shoots a video clip that goes viral, but the pressure causes her to unravel. Some scenes in the movie are light and silly, including those pairing Maddie with a lesbian friend, played by Kate Berlant, who clearly loves her. Other sequences “take a deeply serious turn,” even landing Maddie in a hospital.
By then, “Maddie’s Secret has, without any fundamental shift in tone, begun to feel ultra-real,” said Sam Bodrojan in IndieWire. “The film’s climax, which has Maddie confronting her mother about her childhood, is a genuine showstopper, one that can only really work with the trust Early and company have built up with the audience over the preceding hour and a half.” The result is “a film of real kindness” that’s also “one of the boldest American movies I have seen in years.”
‘Rose of Nevada’
Directed by Mark Jenkin (Not rated)
★★★
“In the hands of a conventional filmmaker, this would be a conventional scary movie,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Two strangers in need of money take work on a potentially cursed fishing trawler and discover when they return from two days at sea that it’s 30 years earlier in their village and that the lives they’d known no longer exist. But instead of using that premise to chase scares, British director Mark Jenkin “makes of it something more elusive and complex,” a movie that “feels like a remembered dream” and conjures “the claustrophobia of family and community.”
Co-star Callum Turner brings “an absorbing swagger” to the role of a drifter who suddenly finds himself with a wife and child in his new reality, said Josh Parham in Next Best Picture. George MacKay “makes a much more lasting impression,” though, because he plays a father and husband who loses his family when time mysteriously spins back to 1993. But even though Turner’s Liam and MacKay’s Nick find themselves mistaken for two men lost when the Rose of Nevada vanished in ’93, the story that then unfolds feels more conventional than the filmmaking. Because Jenkin films on grainy 16mm and overdubs his actors’ dialogue, said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times, his movies have a disorienting effect. Fortunately, “everything that the casual moviegoer would consider ‘wrong’ about Jenkin’s approach is what makes his films so transcendently jarring.”