Film Reviews: National Anthem, Widow Clicquot, Skywalkers: A Love Story 

• Variance Films
• National Anthem

National Anthem
American queer cinema has reached the point where the stories can take on a wider variety of shapes, and director Luke Gilford and screenwriter David Largman Murray find something that both makes use of tropes and upends them. Charlie Plummer plays Dylan, a 21-year-old in rural New Mexico who takes day-labor jobs to help support his alcoholic single mother (Robyn Lively) and younger brother, Cassidy (Joey DeLeon). One such job takes him to the House of Splendor ranch, a makeshift family of queer folk including Sky (Eve Lindley), a trans rodeo performer with whom Dylan becomes infatuated. Typically, such a narrative would involve Dylan desperately trying to hide his coming-out from the conservative community around him, but such external conflict is underplayed; this is a world where the answer by Dylan's non-binary friend Carrie (a terrific Mason Alexander Park) to Cassidy's query of whether they're "a boy or a girl" is "neither," and Cassidy responds, "Cool." It's much more a character study of Dylan's emergence into himself, with Gilford employing a few terrific stylized sequences to highlight Plummer's strong performance and capture the wonder of that self-discovery. Things get a little clunkier when Gilford and Murray try to find more traditional "plot point" stuff to drive towards the third act; there's much stronger material when National Anthem takes an angle on its patriotic title and tries to understand who gets to feel like they have a place in this world. Available July 19 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

• Vertical Entertainment
• Widow Clicquot

Widow Clicquot
There's clearly a compelling story to be mined from Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, who salvaged the wine-making operation of her late husband François and created a titan of the French champagne industry; this one feels more interested in signaling "Strong Female Lead" than in fully exploring that story. It opens in 1805, with Barbe-Nicole (Haley Bennett) mourning the passing of François (Tom Sturridge), yet committed to carrying on his legacy despite facing debts and the restrictive wine-selling environment of the Napoleonic Wars. Director Thomas Napper and the screenwriting team flash back and forth between Barbe-Nicole's business efforts and the years of her marriage to François, gradually revealing his unstable psychological state. Yet those scenes, and virtually everything else in the 90-minute Widow Clicquot, often feel truncated to provide only the most superficial sense of the characters and their connections. Bennett's performance suffers most of all, indicating personality bullet points rather than a rich, complex person; the scene where she beds her distributor (Sam Riley) is almost immediately followed by one where she kicks him out of her office, because, you know, Strong Female Character. The tale concludes with Barbe-Nicole on trial for the crime of being a woman running a business, a development that would have provided the framing structure in nearly any other movie of this kind. Here, it's dispatched in a few minutes, because this movie apparently is already sure that we understand our protagonist is a character who is strong and also by the way female. Available July 19 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

• Netflix
• Skywalkers

Skywalkers: A Love Story
A heist thriller crossed with a complicated romance, Skywalkers is the kind of documentary for people who might not think they're into other kinds of documentaries—provided, that is, they don't also have crippling vertigo. Filmmakers Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina spend several years following Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, members of Russia's "rooftopper" community of skyscraper-scaling daredevils who eventually become both professional and romantic partners, parlaying their joint exploits into sponsorship deals. Fortunately, Skywalkers isn't really a movie about rooftopping either as vocation or avocation, though there is more than enough drone and GoPro footage of death-defying feats that it may be almost too intense for some viewers, particularly when we also get glimpses into the unsuccessful climbs that cost people their lives. Instead, it's a terrific character study of a relationship at a crossroads—and the attempt by Angela and Ivan to scale the 2,200-foot-tall Merdeka 118 building in Kuala Lumpur at such a moment—and how their collaborative efforts provide a potent (and not subtle) metaphor for the kind of trust required for a relationship to flourish. The nearly-20-minute sequence chronicling the Merdeka climb is wonderfully tense filmmaking, to the extent that it's hard not to wonder if all the setbacks were scripted. That doesn't make it any less exhilarating to watch, all while you're hoping that the only fall you see Angela and Ivan take is deeper in love. Available July 19 via Netflix. (NR)