‘Women Talking’ Review: Sarah Polley Takes on the Patriarchy in This Powerful Act of Nonviolent Protest

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In the DC Extended Universe, it’s not the villains who have identity issues, but the heroes. Bruce Wayne watched his parents get murdered, adopted a teenage sidekick and now spends his nights cosplaying as the creature everyone associates with vampires. Kal-El also saw his parents die and goes through life trying to pass as the earthling Clark Kent, wearing spandex under his work clothes, just in case. These are not the traits of well-adjusted normies, and as such, there’s enormous subversive appeal in seeing trans artist Vera Drew turn such iconic characters inside-out in the illicitly made marvel that is “The People’s Joker.” Coming from a place of deep fan love and equally profound institutional mistrust, Drew’s anarchic feature-length parody impishly treads the line of fair use, so much so that the helmer pulled the film from the Toronto Film Festival after its raucous Midnight Madness premiere, citing “rights issues.” But what did she expect? The irreverent underground project reimagines the Joker’s origin story as a queer coming-of-age/coming-to-terms narrative, using a mishmash of styles: mostly crude live-action of the kind you expect from public-access programming (shot against greenscreens, then composited with rudimentary CG sets), embellished with various forms of homemade animation.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic One of the greatest mysteries that ever faced investigative reporter Irwin Maurice Fletcher (“Fletch” to his friends) is why there haven’t been more movies featuring the character. Gregory Mcdonald’s popular Fletch novels, of which there are 11, were practically all dialogue. The author’s breezy style of repartee — which owed more to Hollywood’s screwball comedy tradition than film noir — should have lent itself well to screenplays, but only two ever got made: Back in the ’80s, we got a couple that positioned Chevy Chase as a goofy sleuth with a penchant for disguise, and others (including Jason Lee, Ben Affleck and Chris Tucker) have been trying to revive him ever since.

Over a career that has taken her from child actor to the director’s chair, Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley has spent enough time on set to have a feel for the standard rhythms of a shoot.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Fresh off its enthusiastic world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, the Viola Davis-led historical epic “The Woman King” will touch down in 3,700 North American movie theaters over the weekend. The domestic box office desperately needs a boost, but will U.S. audiences be as receptive as festival-goers in Canada? Touted as the real-life “Black Panther,” Sony’s “The Woman King” is aiming to collect at least $15 million in its domestic debut. Independent box office observers are optimistic that opening weekend returns could reach $17 million to $20 million. Yet Sony, who co-financed the movie with eOne, is projecting $12 million, in line with 2018’s “Widows,” which also starred Davis. Replicating those ticket sales, even with tempered pandemic-expectations, would be tepid-at-best since “The Woman King” carries a $50 million price tag.

Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, and Rooney Mara hug it out with director Sarah Polley at the premiere of Women Talking during the 2022 Toronto Film Festival at Princess of Wales Theatre on Tuesday (September 13) in Toronto, Ontario.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic English novelist E.M. Forster never married, and why would he? The author of “Maurice” and “Howards End” was gay, reportedly maintaining relations with a much-younger police officer over the span of four decades. That man did marry, and history has it that his wife knew their secret. In “My Policeman,” this unconventional arrangement lends itself quite nicely to one of those slightly stuffy yet respectable period pieces of the kind that Ismail Merchant and James Ivory have made of Forster’s novels, jumping back and forth in time between the sexy stuff (featuring Harry Styles, fully embracing the ambiguity of his queerbaiting brand) and the maudlin way it resolves itself so many years later.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic No director has done more to deconstruct the myth of the suburban American family than Steven Spielberg. Dissertations have been written and documentaries made on the subject. And now, at the spry young age of 75, Spielberg himself weighs in on where his preoccupations come from in “The Fabelmans,” a personal account of his upbringing that feels like listening to two and a half hours’ worth of well-polished cocktail-party anecdotes, only better, since he’s gone to the trouble of staging them all for our benefit. Spielberg’s a born storyteller, and these are arguably his most precious stories. From the first movie he saw (“The Greatest Show on Earth”) to memories of meeting filmmaker John Ford on the Paramount lot, this endearing, broadly appealing account of how Spielberg was smitten by the medium — and why the prodigy nearly abandoned picture-making before his career even started — holds the keys to so much of the master’s filmography. More similar to Woody Allen’s autobiographical “Radio Days” than it is to European art films such as “The 400 Blows” and “Amistad” (the more highbrow models other directors typically point to when re-creating their childhoods), “The Fabelmans” invites audiences into the home and headspace of the world’s most beloved living director, an oddly sanitized zone where even the trauma — which includes anti-Semitism, financial disadvantage and divorce — seems to go better with fresh-buttered popcorn.

Ethan Shanfeld Can Zach Cregger’s slasher film “The Barbarian” scare up enough ticket sales to top the domestic box office? Though it is a quiet week, with only one other major release — the Indian Hindi-language action-adventure “Brahmastra Part One: Shiva” — the horror film edged out box office mainstays on Friday as “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Bullet Train” fought to retain their hold at the top of the charts. “Barbarian” took home $3.8 million on Friday, with a projected $9 million over the weekend. Trailing behind is “Brahmastra,” which opened with $2 million, a number that is estimated to grow to $3.6 million by Sunday.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic It’s 2022, and a Hollywood studio has just made a movie in which two men fall in love and can’t figure out what to do about it. No one dies of AIDS. No one gets tire-ironed on the side of the road. Judd Apatow produced the thing, so you know it’s funny. And yet, somehow, “Bros” doesn’t feel like that big a deal. Sure, it’s a well-budgeted, wide-release, R-rated gay romcom, and that’s historic (if you put enough qualifying adjectives in front of it). But one of those had to come along sooner or later. Oddly, it feels like there already have been others, and there’s no question more are coming, considering how hard Hollywood has been working to include gay characters.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic “If we got rid of every gay man in the military, there would be no military,” a sympathetic officer tells Marine recruit Ellis French in “The Inspection.” That’s an exceptionally open-minded take on the United States’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, seeing as how pretty much everyone else French encounters at boot camp is openly hostile to there being a gay man among them. But writer-director Elegance Bratton made it through the system — like the character, he’d been lost and homeless for a decade before enlisting — and this deeply personal narrative debut is one gay Black man’s way of showing how he not only survived the experience, but was strengthened by it. “The few, the proud,” as they say.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic At the end of “The Swimmers,” you could be excused for thinking that Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini won an Olympic gold medal. She didn’t. That’s not to detract from everything she and her older sister, Sara, went through to escape the Syrian civil war and reclaim their dreams of competitive swimming. It just means that director Sally El Hosaini and co-writer Jack Thorne didn’t know how else to wrap this inspirational true story, which is ideally suited for one of those 40-minute Oscar-grubbing documentary shorts but is stretched over three times that length (and then some) in this feel-good Toronto Film Fest opener. At a bloated 134 minutes, it’s not enough that co-leads (and real-life sisters) Nathalie and Manal Issa have great chemistry on-screen, or that the story reminds you of last year’s “Flee” and a dozen other true-life refugee stories. The gratuitous running time tells you something right off: There’s more than enough movie here even without the trip to the Rio Olympics, where Yusra placed 41st out of 45 in the 100-meter butterfly. But stretching it out this long is still liable to make your brain start to prune, the way fingers do when they spend too much time in water.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic You’ve heard the expression, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Well, “The Grab” makes the case that society had best brace itself for disorder, since certain parties are gobbling up the world’s food and water resources while the rest of us are distracted by other things. Produced in association with the Center for Investigative Reporting, “Blackfish” director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s astonishing, eye-opening doc hits us with the idea that the next world war won’t be fought over ideology, oil or border disputes, but basic resources like meat, wheat and water, none of which should be taken for granted. Experts call this field “food security,” and the entire system is more fragile than it looks. World populations are climbing while water resources are dwindling, which has led countries such as Saudi Arabia and China to seek farmland on other continents. Among its myriad examples, “The Grab” focuses on a 15-square-mile expanse in La Paz, Ariz., an arid desert locale where there’s no limit to the amount of water landowners can pump from the aquifers. Arizona’s policy of unrestricted access means Saudi investors can legally tap into the water table to grow fields of hay, which will be shipped home to feed their cattle, even if it means draining the wells of local farmers in the process.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In early 2021, while Americans were focused on the transfer of power back home, daredevil director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) assembled a crew and flew to Afghanistan to check in on the status of America’s longest war. At that point, Osama bin Laden had been dead a decade, the Taliban was weakened but not defeated, and the U.S.-trained Afghan Army was holding its own fairly well — and yet, nearly 20 years in, there was still no end in sight for American involvement. That changed almost as soon as Heineman arrived, as the Biden administration made plans to pull out. In that moment, what might have been another business-as-usual desert war doc — with routine patrols, precisely targeted drone strikes and soldiers expressing their ennui — shifted to something audiences hadn’t seen before. The title, “Retrograde,” refers to the process by which military forces extricate themselves from conflict, removing or otherwise rendering useless the equipment they’d used to engage the enemy. For Heineman, that meant capturing all kinds of cinematic sights: A brawny soldier smashes a heap of computer monitors, helicopters airlift vehicles out, and things go boom as a team tosses all remaining ammo into a trench, douses it in gasoline and lights the pile with a well-aimed rocket. The Taliban won’t be using these bullets.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Imagine showing up for an Airbnb rental, only to discover that another guest is already there. What would you do? Check in anyway and hope for the best? Or take the mix-up as a sign and get the heck out? In “Barbarian,” Tess (Georgina Campbell) makes the wrong decision. It’s already late, and she decides to stay — this despite the fact that the stranger sharing the house is played by Bill Skarsgård (the actor who embodied Pennywise in the recent “It” remake). For audiences, this casting is a clue Tess is in for a scary stay. But it would be wrong to think you have “Barbarian” figured out. For Tess, there are plenty of other red flags in the way her unexpected roommate behaves. Should she really believe they double-booked the same place in a derelict Detroit neighborhood? Or is there another reason he’s there? What if he’s some kind of rapist or axe murderer? Is the flimsy lock on her bedroom enough to protect her should he turn violent? Tess does have certain survival instincts (she’s sharp enough to decline a drink from this guy, who calls himself “Keith”), and she has empathy, too, which will become kind of a defining characteristic later on, when things get super-crazy and you just want her to get out of town as fast as possible.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Just how polished does a career-spanning documentary about the anarchic underground filmmaker behind “Greaser’s Palace” and “Putney Swope” need to be? If you’ve seen any of Robert Downey’s films, the answer is obviously: not very. You might even say, the scrappier the better. So goes the thinking behind “Sr.,” a loose seemingly seat-of-your-pants portrait of the antiestablishment director (perhaps best known for siring “Iron Man” star Robert Downey Jr.) that sneaks up on ya, emotionally speaking, seeing as how it doubles as a kind of farewell exercise between the two generations (plus grandson Exton) in the months before Downey succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease.

Rooney Mara and Claire Foy join their co-stars for a special event at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival over the weekend in Telluride, Co.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Most of the time, documentaries don’t get sequels, which is strange. Unlike their scripted fiction counterparts, the story doesn’t end when the cameras stop rolling. If you’ve ever attended a filmmaker Q&A after the screening of a great documentary, you know the first question from the audience is almost inevitably either “What’s happened since?” or “Where are they now?” Bryan Fogel must have heard that more times than he can count in the five years since his game-changing Russian sports doping doc “Icarus” won the Academy Award. “Icarus: The Aftermath” is his response, a daring and sure-to-be-divisive movie that’s even more shocking than the 2017 original, even if the big news is already out of the bag.

The women in question here belong to a secluded rural religious order on unidentified prairieland and the talking they do throughout Sarah Polley’s immaculately made, intellectually adventurous and politically incisive new film consists of an ongoing debate that will determine the futures of these mostly young women.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic In the era where content is king, Sam Mendes still believes in moving pictures. “Empire of Light” is the proof. While the world was in lockdown these past couple years, Mendes let his imagination run to his happy place: a grand old English movie palace he dubbed the Empire Cinema. Thousands pass through its Art Deco doors seeking escapism, but Mendes is more interested in the employees — the projectionist, the ticket-takers, the box office attendant and so forth, who collectively form an ersatz family — whose stories, he senses, are every bit as interesting as the ones they show. And so he put them up on screen where they belong. But “Empire of Light” is more than just Mendes’ homage to an endangered art form — in fact, it spends a lot less time valorizing the medium than you might imagine. He has assembled a terrific cast, trusting that these performers can go deeper than their dialogue makes explicit, whether it’s Olivia Colman (who can do anything) as the romantically frustrated theater manager Hilary or relative newcomer (and “Blue Story” breakout) Micheal Ward as Stephen, Mr. Ellis’ latest hire (in an unusually sleazy cameo, Colin Firth plays the boss).

Sarah Polley, at the Telluride Film Festival for the world premiere of Women Talking, her latest film as a director, acknowledged how lucky she was as an actress to have worked with so many female filmmakers. They told her to be “fierce” when they saw that she wanted to work behind the camera.