Film Reviews: We Live in Time, Woman of the Hour, Rumours 

• A24 Films
• We Live in Time

We Live in Time
To the credit of director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and screenwriter Nick Payne, they trust the audience to keep up as their romantic drama slides forward and backward through the lives of its two protagonists—though the title itself ends up doing some of the thematic heavy lifting. Mostly, it touches down periodically in three time-frames for up-and-coming chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and recently-divorced salesman Tobias (Andrew Garfield): the early days of their relationship; the final weeks of Almut's pregnancy with their child; and their shared struggle dealing with Almut's health crisis. Crowley spends plenty of scenes emphasizing clocks—the timer Tobias wears around his neck for labor contractions, countdown clocks for a cooking competition, etc.—as part of a not-particularly-subtle recognition that time moves fast, and that we can't always know the outcome of the choices we make. Fortunately, the story is mostly lighter on its feet than that heavy-handed thesis might suggest, including a restrained approach to a marriage proposal, and a wonderfully chaotic sequence as Almut prepares to deliver their baby at an inconvenient moment. The two leads have the kind of chemistry required to drive a narrative of this kind, with Pugh in particular serving up plenty of her trademark spiky energy. It's not much trouble keeping up with the temporal leaps, and humor leavening the melodrama makes it worth the effort. Available Oct. 18 in theaters. (R)

• NETFLIX
• Woman of the Hour

Woman of the Hour
There's a hell of a lot going on in Anna Kendrick's feature directing debut, provocative in bits and pieces but struggling to pull together into a single story. Kendrick also stars in the fact-based circa-1978 narrative as Cheryl Bradshaw, a struggling would-be actor in Hollywood desperate for face time who takes a spot on The Dating Game—unaware that Bachelor #3 is Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a prolific rapist and serial killer. The game-show set-up takes up a relatively small amount of the running time, as Ian McDonald's script also looks in on Alcala's other crimes, with Zovatto delivering an effectively creepy performance when Alcala's attempts at charm tip over into disturbing, and Kendrick's direction impressively building tension. Yet it feels like this is also an attempt to craft a "here's what happens when you don't believe women" cautionary tale, particularly in the sub-plot involving a witness (Nicolette Robinson) who recognizes Alcala from the Dating Game studio audience. And that's all aside from Kendrick's own role, which feels like an attempt to implicate media expectations of women in Alcala's crimes. A character at one point describes the goal of The Dating Game as figuring out "which one of you will hurt me," and as interesting as that idea could be, Woman of the Hour is just a bit too wide-ranging at trying to investigate it. Available Oct. 18 via Netflix. (R)

• Bleecker Street Films
• Rumours

Rumours
Canadian director Guy Maddin has spent much of his career plundering the aesthetics of silent film, particularly German Expressionism, for his funky deadpan comedies. Here, however—working again with his The Green Fog co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson—he remains squarely in the real world of our present, adding a satirical edge to his singular sense of humor. The action is set at a summit of G7 nation leaders in Germany—including the chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett), U.S. president (Charles Dance), Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis) and British prime minister (Nikki Amuka-Bird)—to craft a joint statement on an unspecified "crisis." But in the midst of their meeting, they become isolated from the rest of the world, trying to understand if they're facing some strange, supernatural event. Those unfamiliar with Maddin's sensibility should come prepared for truly weird stuff like a giant human brain and masturbating zombies. For my money, though, Rumours works best on a lower-key level, like the dramatic music that plays while Blanchett tries to explain the complicated financial scandal facing the Canadian prime minister, or how the filmmakers acknowledge then quickly dismiss Dance's American president speaking with a British accent. The pacing does poke along, perhaps appropriately for a tale in part about performative, dead-end politics. It's just hard to resist a movie where the "swag bag" for the G7 leaders includes an extremely niche magazine called Incumbent Life. Available Oct. 18 in theaters. (R)