Film reviews: The Phoenician Scheme, Bring Her Back, and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

The Phoenician Scheme

Directed by Wes Anderson (PG-13)

★★★

Though it's easy to enjoy, The Phoenician Scheme "feels unlikely to be anyone's favorite Wes Anderson flick," said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. "One of his flat-out goofiest movies," filled with sight gags and physical humor, it casts a "perfectly deadpan" Benicio del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a hated 1950s European tycoon trying to reconnect with Liesl, his novitiate daughter, as he tries to pull together a legacy-enshrining infrastructure project. Del Toro and Mia Threapleton are terrific in the father-daughter roles, as are many members of the all-star ensemble cast. Yet it's Michael Cera, as Liesl's awkward Swedish tutor, who "walks away with the film." Zsa-zsa's schemes require that he bounce around a fictitious Middle Eastern country, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire, and each stop is "packed full of too many quotable lines for someone to appreciate them all at first blush." But the scenes "feel like isolated vignettes, more focused on milking a few dry chortles out of their celebrity cameos than in deepening the father-daughter bond."

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The Phoenician Scheme is "the busiest of Anderson's films," but it's also, "at least on first viewing, the least rewarding." Beneath that busyness, however, this "undeniably enjoyable" film "dares to confront questions of mortality," said Peter Debruge in Variety. Having survived multiple assassination attempts, Zsa-zsa has become uncommonly reflective, and Anderson "seems to be directing the movie's meaning-of-life inquiry at himself, as an artist and a father." Introspection serves him well.

Bring Her Back

Directed by Danny and Michael Philippou (R)

★★★

A horror film about grief taken to extremes, Bring Her Back "really gets under your skin," said G. Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle. Two-time Oscar nominee Sally Hawkins stars as a middle-aged woman who adopts an orphaned teenager and his younger sister before revealing an outlandish plan to resurrect her dead daughter. Australian co-directors and twins Danny and Michael Philippou made the 2023 horror hit Talk to Me, and this follow-up shows they're maturing, "both emotionally and as filmmakers." Bring Her Back "has a creepy psychological depth and is filled with disturbing but impressively composed images."

It's also "just about as naked and uncompromising about emotional turmoil as movies get," said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. Hawkins (The Shape of Water) is "one of the best actors we have," and she plays Laura as a pathetic but credibly real person who "just happens to be up to something unimaginably gruesome." And while Bring Her Back is "a slow burn of a movie," it "ratchets dread." That slow burn "eventually turns into a grease fire," said Matt Schimkowitz in The A.V. Club. Though the script's "hackneyed plotting" includes too many late twists, the movie becomes "increasingly brutal" in its final act, and its horrors have a certain power. "Like a punk band turning four chords into pure angst, Bring Her Back turns familiar trauma-based horror into a traumatic experience."

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

Directed by Laura Piani (R)

★★★

The plot of this endearing new French comedy turns on "the kind of sweet, romantic complication we used to get in movies all the time," said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Agathe, a 30-something aspiring novelist from Paris, is torn between Félix, her best friend, and Oliver, a grumpy Mr. Darcy type she meets when Félix helps land her a Jane Austen writing residency in southern England. Fortunately, writer-director Laura Piani relies not on the pat story but the characters to win us over.

In that sense, "the film itself feels out of place and out of time, in the best possible way." Compared with the many Austen-inspired movies that all feel like a single family, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times, this one is "more of a cousin from out of town, a little different, a little more intriguing." For one, it's in both French and English, which presents farcical complications. And as Camille Rutherford's Agathe and Charlie Anson's Oliver progress from mutual hatred to courtship, Piani shows an awareness that her Austen-loving 21st-century protagonist "isn't living, and can't live, in Austen's world."

The story "never gets too messy," said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post. Even the psychological issues that have held Agathe back are handled with "discrete politesse." And yet, while Jane Austen Wrecked My Life proves "considerably tamer" than its title promises, "it still checks myriad boxes with the flourish of a feather-tipped pen."