The Movie Guru: ‘Regretting You’ a mix, while Cillian Murphy phenomenal in ‘Steve’

Regretting You (in theaters)

People who don’t like melodramatic romances will never understand those who do.

This group tends to include most movie critics, which is why melodramatic romance fans have learned to basically ignore reviews. But this is bad for both sides, because the genre doesn’t determine whether a movie is good or bad and fans deserve good movie adaptations of the stories you love. Unless we critics can be fairer to the genre, though, you won’t be able to find them.

On that note, “Regretting You” is kind of a mixed bag. Based on the Colleen Hoover novel, the movie features a charming teenage romance with the combined chemistry of Mckenna Grace and Mason Thames. The mechanics of the book are also still there, so if you’re a fan you won’t be disappointed on that front. Supporting cast members Sam Morelos and Clancy Brown are delightful.

But the script is flat, missing a lot of the emotion from the book, and the adult couple that’s supposed to carry a lot of the story’s emotional weight gets shortchanged. Allison Williams and Dave Franco do what they can to communicate the grief, betrayal and love they’re wrestling with, but the script gives them almost nothing to work with. The center of the movie automatically shifts to Grace and Thames because they’re the stronger pair, but since they’re mostly kept in the dark about the movie’s complicated backstory it can’t restore the balance.

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In the end, there are things to like about the adaptation. But it could have been better.

Grade: Two and a half stars

Steve (Netflix)

There are some actors we love to watch suffer.

Onscreen, at least. They’re so good at portraying pain, fear, anger and anguish that their faces tell the story all by themselves. Whether we’re letting a professional experience our suffering for us or simply enjoying one person enact high drama all by ourselves, their fictional suffering is reliably high-quality entertainment.

Cillian Murphy is among the best of those actors. He proves that again with “Steve,” Max Porter’s adaptation of his 2023 novella “Shy.” The perspective shift from the troubled teenage Shy to the equally troubled, beleaguered headteacher Steve takes away a good deal of the poetry from the novella, replacing it with the fierce, all-too-real desperation of people caught in a broken system. Murphy brings his own poetry, though, his performance enough to make it clear that the difference between him and the troubled teenage boys he’s trying to help is very fine indeed.

The movie is set in a small boys reform school in England in the 1990s, one that will be immediately shut down due to a sudden loss of funding. The struggling staff has just found this out, and headteacher Steve has brought in a documentary crew to try and save the school. There are more problems than Steve realizes, however, including his own rage and alcoholism.

It’s a hard movie to watch, especially if you have any experience in the educational field, but Murphy is phenomenal in it. It becomes achingly clear that he was one of these troubled boys himself, or almost was, and the desperation with which he tries to save the school takes on an even more heartbreaking resonance. Sometimes, fighting is all a person gets the chance to know.

Grade: Three and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society and the Utah Film Critics Association. Drop her a line at themovieguruslc@gmail.com.