WINNER (no distrib): Yes, this sounds familiar. Last year, HBO aired Tina Satter’s Reality, which told the story of the young jailed NSA leaker Reality Winner, and now filmmaker Susanna Fogel has taken the other half of that memorable name for her version of the tale. (The Reality title was more evocative.) Their approaches are different: Reality used the actual transcript of Winner’s initial interview by the FBI in nearly real time for an intensely focused drama, while Winner is a more conventional biography with an unexpectedly lighthearted tone. Fogel (writing with Kerry Howley) portrays Winner (Emilia Jones, who’d worked with Fogel on Cat Person, and here steps into Sydney Sweeney’s Reality shoes) as determined and principled to the point of alienating those around her. She can barely tolerate her suburban mother (Connie Britton) and sister (Kathryn Newton), although she has a soft spot for her pothead dad (Zach Galifianakis), and she’s unable to make a go of her relationship with her long-term boyfriend (Danny Ramirez). When a cause troubles her, she jumps in with both feet, whether it’s a mistreated dog, targeted drone bombings in Afghanistan, or ultimately her discovery of classified evidence that Russia was in fact trying to tamper with American elections. Jones hits the desired note as Winner, both admirable and difficult, and the supporting cast is strong. Fogel’s movie is absorbing and even enjoyable, but the decision to lean into humor makes Winner feel inessential. It lacks the rigor of Reality, and doesn’t have the vision of a film like Melvin & Howard, which took a true(-ish) story and made it a captivating tall tale. Winner is good enough to watch and yet not enough to remember.
KRAZY HOUSE (no distrib): It seems fair to say that by the time Marvel is using the device of a faux-multicamera sitcom that cracks open to reveal the trauma and grim truth inside, that trick is no longer cutting-edge. The Dutch writer/directors Steffan Haars and Flip van der Kull are trying so hard to shock and outrage us with Krazy House that it all starts to seem rather sad, like watching a little kid who doesn’t realize that by the twentieth fart, it’s not funny anymore. The movie’s particular odor is wafted toward religion, and specifically Christianity (there’s no secret about this even before Jesus makes a cameo appearance, since the family at the center of the story are the Christians). The first chunk of Krazy House‘s very long 85 minutes is in full overlit sitcom mode, complete with the roaring laughter of an off-screen audience. Dummy dad Bernie (Nick Frost), his somewhat more poised wife Eva (Alicia Silverstone, somehow), pretty daughter Sarah (Gaite Jansen) and smart son Adam (Walt Klink) go about their day, until blundering Bernie causes a water leak. But he’s got an idea: he’ll call the menacing Russian workmen who’d abruptly appeared earlier in the day, and ask them to fix the problem. This turns out not to be a great idea, and the visual format shifts to movie mode as things become increasingly deranged and violent. (There’s yet another aspect ratio for our glimpses inside Bernie’s fevered brain.) Weirdly, even though Haars and van der Kull seem mostly to be obsessed with throwing anti-clerical atrocities at the audience, from exploding heads to instant meth addictions, from crucifixion to the disgusting arrival of a new family member, they do take the trouble to establish a plot–there’s actually a reason the Russians have come to that house. Otherwise, Krazy House is chaos for its own sake, unfunny and not even accomplished enough to be offensive. It’s an amateurish cult movie that’s unlikely to find its cult. The actors should be grateful they survived, and perhaps question their representation.
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