The Movie Guru: ‘Here’ more experiment than movie, while ‘Woman of the Hour’ a little too ambitious

Here (in theaters)

“Here” is more of an experiment than it is a movie.

Unfortunately, it’s not even a terribly successful experiment. A movie version of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, it turns what was boundary-breaking for the comics medium into a stagnant, play-like montage of scenes that never gel into any real story. It also falls victim to director Robert Zemeckis’s long-running obsession with cinematic technology, with AI attempts to change the lead actors’ ages feeling more like distracting masks than technological magic. Though there are a few enjoyable moments scattered throughout the film, they get lost in all the flawed technique.

The movie’s stated ambition is to chronicle what happens in one single spot over a huge swath of time, from the dinosaurs to modern day. In reality, that mostly means on the lives of two disappointed white couples, with the son of the first marriage growing up and marrying himself. The limited focus on a single room and the massive amount of time being covered means that their lives are reduced to a series of angsty marriage cliches, tired enough that even Tom Hanks and Robin Wright cannot make them enjoyable to watch. 

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The face-aging technology, though somewhat better than what’s come before, is asked to do too much. Yes, Hanks can move his face more effectively, but even the best CGI cannot turn a 68-year-old man into a 22-year-old one.

It’s tragic that this storyline gets all the attention, because pretty much every other group given token lip service by the script hints at something much more interesting. The best is David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond as a fun-loving, childless couple from the 1940s, bringing a necessary humor and charm to every scene they’re in. If only there had been more of them.

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Grade: One and a half stars

Woman of the Hour (Netflix)

Anna Kendrick does a lot of good things in her first movie out of the gate, but both she and the script try to do a little too much.

“Woman of the Hour,” which tells the stories of a handful of victims and potential victims of a serial killer from the 1970s, has the admirable goal of highlighting their stories rather than the killers. Director Kendrick also manages to create a tense little thriller out of the middle section, where she plays a woman who encounters the serial killer as a guest on “The Dating Game.” If the movie either focused more on her, or took a wider lens and did a more thorough job of covering the way women kept trying to draw attention to this killer, it could have been a fantastic film.

But as it is, the stories of three women get abruptly jump-cut together, while a fourth is squeezed into Kendrick’s portion of the movie in a way that might have blossomed given more time. It leaves all of them feeling squeezed, or like they’re missing something, and it takes away from all the good things the movie does. It’s admirable to want to tell all these women’s stories, but this wasn’t the best way to combine them.

Grade: Two and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society. Find her on Twitter at @wardellwriter or drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com.