Movie Reviews: New Releases for March 15 

• Focus Features.
• American Society

The American Society of Magical Negroes
Writer/director Kobi Libii concocts the kind of satirical premise that easily could have tipped over into pedantic self-importance, but emerges with a deft enough touch to end up both entertaining and urgent. The prospects for Aren Mbondo's (Justice Smith) career as a visual artist appear to be vanishing, when he is approached by Roger (David Alan Grier) to join the titular secret society—a group of Black people dedicated to the proposition that solving White people's problems and making them comfortable is the best way to keep their own lives safe. There's a charming romantic-comedy angle in Aren's relationship with a co-worker (An-Li Bogan) of his first White "client" (Drew Tarver), and a great (though under-used) character in Rupert Friend's disconnected-from-reality tech CEO. But Libii understands how to keep the focus on the tension between the Society's goals and the idea that White people don't have an inalienable right not to be uncomfortable, even figuring out how to provide a climactic thesis-statement speech that doesn't feel like a climactic thesis-statement speech because it's so well-integrated with comedic chaos. It does feel like Libii doesn't fully exploit the opportunities for actual magic in his premise—perhaps for budgetary reasons?—and pokes kind of obviously at examples of the trope in The Green Mile, Driving Miss Daisy and others. The result is still an engaging way to walk a tightrope between its two contrasting ideas: not making White people feel bad, while still asking them to listen. Available March 15 in theaters. (PG-13)

• A24 Films
• Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding
Where writer/director Rose Glass tried to walk a line between horror and psychological thriller in her 2019 debut feature Saint Maud, here she fully embraces exploitation cinema with more than a touch of the surreal. In 1989 New Mexico, Lou (Kristen Stewart) is running a small-town gym where she meets new-girl-in-town Jackie (Katy O'Brian), an aspiring bodybuilder. The two quickly begin an affair, which is complicated by steroids, the FBI, Lou's gun-running criminal dad (Ed Harris) and the abusive husband (Dave Franco) beating Lou's sister (Jena Malone)—though not necessarily in that order. Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska aren't shy about getting graphic with either the sex or the violence in their story, and they fill the periphery with grimy details like Anna Baryshnikov as a brown-toothed girl obsessed with Lou, and Harris's stringy-haired creep having an obsession with big bugs. It's all over-the-top absurdist fun—up to and including the roid-rage hallucinations experienced by Jackie, which sometimes seem to bleed over into the real world—and that makes it a bit less effective when Glass tries to play the plot machinations for straight suspense, or when Stewart's earnestly intense performance seems to belong in a different movie. When both filmmakers and audience can surrender to the scuzzier aesthetics, it's much easier to pick up what Love Lies Bleeding is laying down. Available March 15 in theaters. (R)

• Bleecker Street Films
• One Life

One Life
At the outset, the true story of Nicky Winton feels like it might be something akin to Schindler's List if Oskar Schindler had already been a saint at the outset—a narrative about atrocities without much of a character arc to pursue—but director James Hawes' drama eventually carves out its own unique tale about the aftermath of a large-scale rescue effort. It opens in 1987 England, with Winton (Anthony Hopkins) going through old mementos and flashing back to 1938, where as a young stock broker (Johnny Flynn), he travels to Prague to begin arranging transport to England of refugee children from Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Those flashback sequences do find Winton already a socialist do-gooder, and the focus on logistics doesn't exactly lead to high drama (although Helena Bonham Carter does get a great small role as Winton's mother). The better material comes in Hopkins' portrait of a man whose moral compass is so driven by his mantra that "it's never enough, is it" that he finds himself focused on where his efforts fell short, rather than on those he could save. The tear-jerker of a finale works as a reminder that those with the strongest sense of justice will always be thinking about the "more" they should have done, perhaps requiring others to remind them of what they have accomplished. Available March 15 in theaters. (PG)