Vicky Krieps isn't your everyday spoiled royal in Corsage; sharp turns elevate Living and I Hate Suzie Too

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

(Streaming now on Netflix)

Leave it to Guillermo del Toro to render a famous fantasy unrecognizably new by making it both more and less realistic. The director's adaptation of Carlo Collodi's original novel leapfrogs Disney as a pure mythweird fantasia, sending the title character (voiced by Gabriel Mann) on an adventure requiring occasional stops in a skeleton-rabbit afterlife. But del Toro's Pinocchio also embeds itself in the history of fascist Italy, complete with an appearance by Benito Mussolini himself.

And did I mention all the Christ stuff? And the new tragic backstory for carpenter Geppetto (David Bradley)? And Cate Blanchett voicing a monkey? I've seen complaints that this stop-motion feature is a bit much: Allied Missiles and Emotionally Distant Fathers and Tilda Swinton Fairies, oh my! I can only speak for myself and my blubbering mess of parental emotions. I started crying around minute 3, and spent the next couple hours gaping between tears at every awe-inspiring setpiece.

Co-directing with animation vet Mark Gustafson, del Toro teases resonance and hilarity out of every frame. The wonder starts with Pinocchio himself, who looks less like a puppet than a freshly carved chunk of demon tree. He could be a horror-movie creature, but Mann gives him a just-right squeak of precocious zest. The effect is never not engrossing: less "Little Wooden Head" than "Eraserhead Sings!" This Pinocchio is learning about the world in the weirdest possible directions. Should he follow the rules of society — or do totalitarian rules deserve to be broken? If he's happiest dancing for a circus audience, does it matter if the ringmaster (Christoph Waltz) is a corrupt monster of capitalism?

The film has a lot of fun with our cultural memory of the Disney version, and its counter-mythic instincts are obvious in the character of Sebastian J. Cricket, a vain and unhelpful wannabe conscience voiced with palpable snazz by Ewan McGregor. But del Toro and his co-writer Patrick McHale also clearly admire the sui generis bighearted grotesquerie of the 1940 film (the only Disney film where boys turn into donkeys and get rescued by nobody). This new Pinocchio is funnier and more obviously mature, insofar as there's a running joke about how Pinocchio keeps dying. But it also exudes a constant sweetness, finding endearing grace notes in even the most malevolent characters. After del Toro's decade of movie-star glamour and Oscar glory, Pinocchio feels like the glorious return of a more uninhibited artist, evoking both the gaudy boozy-singalong pleasures of Hellboy 2 and the erudite horrors-of-everyday visions of Pan's Labyrinth. Grade: A —Darren Franich

Corsage

(In theaters now)

Like astronauts or assassins, royalty tends to take up an inordinate amount of real estate on screen relative to their actual presence in the world. And on the surface at least, Corsage seems to lean into the familiar contours of many gilded biopics gone before — a marvelously costumed, mildly salacious peek behind the private curtain of a very public sovereign.

Filmmaker Marie Kreutzer's woozy reimagining of the life of Austria's Empress Elisabeth (Vicky Krieps) turns out to be something stranger and more subversive than that, though, and more interesting, too: a portrait of the queen as a feminist fever dream. On the eve of her 40th birthday, Elisabeth has become little more than a decorative figurehead, an aging doll to be poured into the elaborate fashions of the day and propped up next to her stern mutton-chopped husband (Florian Teichtmeister, giving layers where there might have been none).

Not that she's immune to the privileges of her station: a rotating portfolio of sumptuous estates for every season; a live pianist to accompany her while she gallops her horses in endless circles around a plush indoor riding ring (oh, to have just one puff of those lavender cigarettes!). But she's also furious at the passage of time and the ever-smaller aperture of her royal duties. Why won't the Emperor let her be a real partner in ruling? And where will she be when her beauty fades entirely?

In the swooning, slippery mold of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Corsage plays with anachronisms (that's not Mozart coming from the court violinists' bows, it's Marianne Faithfull) and the very form of narrative; historical truths are a plaything here, not a guide. In that sense, there's little room for the linear plotting of a conventional drama, but Krieps' performance is its own reward: Moody, imperious, and nearly incandescent with need, she reigns supreme. Grade: B+ — Leah Greenblatt

Living

(In theaters now)

Hollywood actors spend entire careers getting around to what Britain's Bill Nighy has been doing for decades: always quiet, in on some private joke, likely at his own expense. Nighy stole Love Actually with his magnificent tartness, so much so that you wished the whole film were about his debauched wastrel of a rocker. Yet what do we do with him? Put him in a Harry Potter movie.

Because Living is a remake of Akira Kurosawa's magisterial Ikiru (1952), about a bureaucratic paper-pusher awakening to a late sense of purpose, you watch Nighy for the bloom. It's something he's rarely allowed himself, and the performance pushes the veteran into uncharted territory, still gentle but thrumming with a sense of desperation. His Mr. Williams first feels like a piece of furniture, of a part with the production's impeccable post-WWII London, cozy in its final stretch of keep-calm propriety.

But then Nighy's eyes start to shine, especially in the presence of younger people, their passions yet to be beaten down by the years (The Souvenir's Tom Burke does wonders with a scene or two), and you lean into the glow. Exquisite though Living is, you can't help but suspect that the story's rebirth might have been better served by a timelier post-pandemic update, many of us feeling the wasted months. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro douses the screenplay — adapted from Kurosawa's salaryman-era Japan — in the same mood as his Remains of the Day, and it feels like swapping one repressed society for another. He's somehow the wrong guy for the job.

Nighy, though, is unerringly right, even as he pitches his voice to a whisper. Can it be over so soon? Williams drinks, dances, flirts, sings, and makes a final stab at giving something back to a town filled with strangers he suddenly wishes he knew better. And then, as we all must, he leaves. Grade: B+ —Joshua Rothkopf

Women Talking

(In theaters now)

The women in Women Talking talk to each other because it's one of the few things they're allowed to do: Reading and writing have been strictly forbidden, and they've never even seen a full map of the world. Though writer-director Sarah Polley's austere drama never specifies exactly which patriarchal faith they follow or where they live, her screenplay is based on Miriam Toews' bestselling 2018 novel of the same name, a story inspired by real events and set in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia shattered by a series of violent sexual assaults.

Little girls and grandmothers alike wake up in their beds with dark bruises between their thighs and blood in their mouths; what they've just learned in the first scenes is that it's not the work of ghosts or demons, as they've been made to believe, but their own sons and brothers and husbands. The only righteous path, these same men tell them once the truth is out, is to forgive, or risk eternal exile from the kingdom of heaven. But what is forgiveness if it's not freely given? Over the next two hours, the film follows eight of these women as they gather in a barn to deliberate — among them gentle, introspective Ona (Rooney Mara); furious Salome (Claire Foy), who wants to stay and fight; Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who insists with equal conviction that they submit to God's will.

It's a testament to the talent of these actresses that the film works as well as it does; despite the dreamy expansiveness of its pastoral setting — green fields and hay bales, milky-white sunlight — the atmosphere here often echoes the stagier tempos of a play or a chamber piece. The women in their calico dresses and kerchiefs discuss their collective fate and, more obliquely, the savage attacks on their bodies in ways that can seem oddly bloodless, as if it were all some Socratic Method test in a college debate class (though the brief, wordless flashbacks to the immediate aftermath of the attacks are brutally effective).

The rhythms of the dialogue, too, are often stilted and strange — would a girl who can't even sign her own name really throw off the word "frenetic" so casually? — and the movie itself so rigorously self-contained and, well, talky that it's hard to imagine exactly who its wider audience will be. Still, there's a deep vein of humor and humanity that Polley and her actors mine from the text, and something quietly mesmerizing in their world-building. Women is billed in the title card, tellingly, as "An act of female imagination." When it lifts away from its more formal constraints, imagination almost feels like too soft a word for this fierce, sometimes inscrutable film; it's an act of will. Grade: B+ —Leah Greenblatt

I Hate Suzie Too

(Streaming now on HBO Max)

It's been two years since we last saw scandal-plagued actress Suzie Pickles (Billie Piper), but she's right where we left her at the end of 2020: bracing as hard as she can against a downward spiral. In this stunning, three-episode coda to I Hate Suzie, co-creators Piper and Lucy Prebble bring their flawed, ferociously human protagonist to giddy new heights of acceptance while pulling her heart even deeper into the abyss.

After photographic evidence of her infidelity was splashed all over the tabloids thanks to a phone hack, Suzie is now embarking on her future with two goals: Make it through a contentious divorce from Cob (Daniel Ings) without losing custody of their son, Frank (Matthew Jordan-Caws), and rehab her image by winning the reality TV competition Dance Crazee. It's a painfully public way to do penance — every week, Suzie must stand on stage as the viewers' real-time rejection flashes neon bright on the Dance Crazee leaderboard — but the job market doesn't offer many options for disgraced former child stars.

"I have to be perfect," Suzie sobs to her best friend/ex-agent, Naomi (Leila Farzad). "If I'm not perfect, he's going to take my kid away from me!" This conversation takes place in a dark nightclub toilet, as a frantic Suzie rubs MDMA into her gums. I Hate Suzie is clear-eyed in its depiction of a woman who doesn't always exercise the best judgment, and how those mistakes consistently come at a higher price for her as a public figure-slash-working mother. It's this cycle — Suzie copes with enormous stress by acting out; the consequences of those actions then cause her even more stress — that makes watching I Hate Suzie Too such a gripping and emotional experience.

Piper is, once again, astounding as Suzie, fusing heartache with gallows humor and rage with stinging resignation. "I'm not a bad mother, I'm not a bad dancer, and I'm not a bad person!" our heroine frets angrily after another trying night at the Dance Crazee studio. But Suzie is painfully aware that the truth is no match for the whirligig whims of the public, who hold all the power in their slippery hands. As the competition's finale draws closer, Suzie's TV-ready smile slowly shifts from dazzling to demented, and victory begins to look a whole lot like annihilation. Grade: A —Kristen Baldwin

Related content:

• Billie Piper 'horrified' anyone would think she's like her I Hate Suzie character
• Director Sarah Polley gets Women Talking
• Guillermo del Toro explains why his Pinocchio has so much fascism in it