What’s new to VOD and streaming this weekend
Including Let Them All Talk, The Wilds, A Suitable Boy and Wolfwalkers
By Norman Wilner
Courtesy of Bell Media
NOW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of December 11. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
Let Them All Talk
(Steven Soderbergh)
Soderbergh and Meryl Streep follow 2019’s The Laundromat with a lighter and considerably less problematic project. Streep plays celebrated author Alice Hughes, who takes the Queen Mary II to pick up a literary prize in England, bringing along her nephew (Lucas Hedges) and two old friends (Candice Bergen, Dianne Wiest) – and decades’ worth of baggage. Deborah Eisenberg’s script builds a farcical structure out of everyone’s resentments, jealousies and perceived betrayals, with the lofty Alice fussing at its centre and Bergen fuming at its outer points. Wiest coasts blithely through it all and Hedges fumblingly courts Alice’s agent (Gemma Chan), who’s using him to gain intel about Alice’s next book. All the while, Soderbergh amuses himself by shooting aboard the QMII during an actual crossing and treating the ship like one of his Ocean’s casinos, fixating on angles in the architecture and patterns in carpet design. As always, his technical choices are inventive and perfectly suited to the subject matter. But he’s also hiding the story’s real dramatic arc in plain sight, and it’s one that pays off surprisingly well. Full review here.