Movie Nation

Early returns understated the beat-down “Jumanji” would deliver to “The Last Jedi” this weekend. Granted, everybody’s already seen the latest “Star Wars” movie. And nobody’s seeing it twice.

But the final projected take for this weekend (actuals come Monday afternoon) were even more emphatic.

“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” on its third weekend of release, did a whopping $36 million.

“Insidious: The Last Key,” a new release, earned nearly $30 million.

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” on far more screens than either of those (and in its fourth week of release) plummeted to $23 million. 

Among the potential awards contenders, “Greatest Showman” is showcasing Hugh Jackman at the end of a year when he starred in the critically acclaimed blockbuster, “Logan.” It will be at the $80 million+ mark by the start of next weekend, and should clear $100 million.  Especially if there’s good news on the Golden Globes front tonight, and Oscar nominations next week.

“Molly’s Game” opened at $7 million and shoved “The Shape of Water” out of the top ten. “Shape” added theater and lost audience. Whatever its Oscar chances, audiences aren’t warming to it en masse.

“I, Tonya” almost passed it and is only on a quarter of the screens “Shape” is.

“Three Billboards,” “Call Me by Your Name” and “The Disaster Artist” are doing middling business, with “Name” doing well enough per-screen to merit wider release next week.

“Wonder” may not be an Oscar sleeper, but it is a box office one. It’s over $126 million now.

If you thought “Paddington” was as adorable as a kids’ movie about a talking bear could get, you were mistaken. “Paddington 2” sees your “adorable” and raises it with an “inutterably charming,” an Oscar winner and a couple of other prime Brit and Irish character actors. It’s even sweeter, cheek-pinchingly cute and fun to boot.

The London bear (animated, delicately voiced by Ben Whishaw) named for a train station wants to send the aunt who raised him a rare pop-up book that his favorite London antiques dealer (Jim Broadbent, with an Eastern European accent) has for sale.

But there’s this plummy, aging has-been actor (Hugh Grant, PERFECT) who hears about the valuable book from him, and designs to steal it. Paddington is framed for the crime.

“Paddington Goes to the Pokey” ensues. And that’s where Paddington’s ever-so-proper English manners are put to greatest use.

“My Aunt always said, ‘If we’re kind and polite, the world will be right.'”

Prison food is the pits? Take it up with the cook, Knuckels (sic). He’s a gregarious grouch (Brendan Gleeson) but darned if that sweet-mannered bear and his recipe for marmalade don’t win him and the diverse and brutishly whimsical prison population (Noah Taylor of “Shine” among them) over.

The first Paddington movie had enough promise that the cream of British character acting — Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville (funny) return as his “parents,” Julie Walters as the grandmother — raced to sign up for it. And that’s exploded by leaps and bounds for this sequel. Peter Capaldi is the anti-bear martinet neighbor, Joanna Lumley is an agent, Imelda Stanton and Michael Gambon do the voices of the bears who raised Paddington and Tom Conti is the gruff judge who bears a haircut grudge.

Paddington’s prison sentence is based, in part, “on grievous barberly harm.”

And then there’s the Former Pharaoh of Forelock himself, the esteemed Mr. Grant. He lets loose his inner ham for Phoenix Buchanan, once a Prince of the West End Stage, now reduced to donning a dog costume and doing ever-so-proper dogfood commercials, and opening fairs. Grant wraps his tongue around every locution, every punch-line, most of them puns about plays he’s been in.

“Prison is no laughing matter. And I should know. I spent THREE years in ‘Les MIZ!'”

The delightful bluster of Gleeson is topped only by Grant’s outright glee at playing this old actor who dons costumes for capers, and recites lines (in character) to his Scrooge, Magwitch, Hamlet and Poirot (Take THAT Kenny Branagh!) costumes, which he treats as confidants.

I love the light, intensely likable lilt Whishaw (“Q” in the latest James Bond films) gives Paddington’s line-readings. You forget the bear is animated and that bears can’t talk, and your children won’t even need that much encouragement to suspend disbelief.

The sight gags — bear as window-washer, bear as prison cook, bear on the lam from the law — are of a higher order than the first film. The prison newspaper? “Hard Times.” Its headlines? “‘Get out of Jail Free’ card not not legally binding,” “Dry Cleaner’s Money Laundering Case Being Ironed Out.”

Yes, it’s a little long and the opening — a flashback to Paddington’s cubhood and a quick survey of all the lives he touches in his little corner of London — mean that it takes a while to get going.

But the only worry these delightful movies encourage is that Warner Brothers will keep making them after they’ve run out of Bear Living in London jokes, English sightseeing and English sight-gags. “Paddington 2” promises that is still quite a ways off.

MPAA Rating:PG for some action and mild rude humor

Cast: The voice of Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Grant, Julie Walters, Brendan Gleeson, Hugh Bonneville, Peter Capaldi, Noah Taylor

Credits:Directed by, Paul King, script by Paul King, Simon Farnaby, based on the Paddington books by Michael Bond. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:43

Catching a movie after its hype has peaked is always an exercise in “What’d others see in this?” “Mudbound,” far-removed from Sundance, “The Shape of Water” extracted from its fanboy fawnathon can feel empty, thin and lacking.

Remove the film festival groupthink hype.  Abandon the scenic Italian locations from “Call Me by Your Name,” change the romance from gay to straight and strip away the Jewishness and its rather heavy-handed “ahead of their times” tolerance among the parents of the teen boy who falls for his father’s pretty summer grad student assistant.

What you’re left with is a soapy routine romance, teasing and melodramatic, a boy “discovering” himself and gaining “experience” in a sexual sense over a summer. With its rural Italian vistas, a house set in a fruit orchard with lots of lightly-pretentious people reading French poetry in German, debating the etymology of “apricot” and noting the origins of the water in a particular Italian swimmin’ hole, the term “overripe” enters the judgement.

Because there’s lots of swimming, cycling, shorts and shirtlessness. Of course.

It’s Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” without Liv Tyler or Bertolucci, and being scripted by that languorous period-piece prince, James Ivory (“A Room With a View,” etc.), it’s 85 minutes of story in a two hour and 12 minute movie.

Throw in a curious, horny boy having sex with some of that overripe fruit and you’ve got notoriety, “American Pie” with less…baking.

Michael Stuhlbarg is the archaeologist patriarch of a family of “Jews with discretion,” Americans with a summer home in rural 1980s Italy. Amira Casar is his wife, who inherited the place and counseled their teenage son, Elio (Timothee Chalamet) on the whole “discretion” thing.

And he passes that on to their new house guest, Oliver (32 year-old Armie Hammer), an academic Adonis who’s come to help the professor with some work on ancient statuary newly recovered from the deep. Oliver wears a Star of David and has the confidence of the educated, monied and incredibly handsome.

Elio and Oliver share an adjoining bathroom, and the kid offers to show “the only other Jew to set foot in this town” around, by bike.

The skinny boy in the Ray Bans is an aspiring composer with growing confidence in his own right. He’s handsome and exotic (American) enough to warrant the attentions of a French teen (Esther Garrel) staying nearby, and naive and crass enough to figure sharing his sexual “progress” with her with his parents and their new houseguest is just being “open” and “honest.”

In Oliver’s case, he’s testing the waters. Engendering jealousy? Finding out which way the magazine-model blond swings?

And as “Let’s ride to town together” evolves into “Why don’t you and I take a swim?” he gets his answer, and a summer romance flowers. Kind of.

There’s little of the “forbidden fruit” of your typical gay coming-of-age romance, not with parents who seem not only to tolerate this inappropriate relationship, but to encourage it and even envy it.

They’re all etymologists. Don’t they know Ephebophilia when they see it? Oh, right, they’re in Europe. Draw your own conclusions as to why the author and screenwriter keep underlining their Jewishness.

I mean, it’s not “Summer of ’42” or “The Reader,” but we’re no longer venerating this “lover of experience” initiation ritual, or are we? If the gay community is ending Kevin Spacey’s career (assault, etc.) and we’re all turning our backs on all the literature, film (“L.I.E.”) and folk music (“Ode to a Gym Teacher”) about older lovers awakening/initiating the homosexuality of the young, then why is this affair excepted?

All the pains “Call Me by Your Name” goes to in declaring parental acceptance and having the kid the aggressor and Oliver’s many protests of “I want to be good” and the sun-drenched Italian scenery and age of consent don’t fundamentally excuse it, and actually calls to attention the idea that the filmmakers know “We shouldn’t be endorsing this.”

Last year’s justly-honored “Moonlight” offered the same lessons in embracing who you are and acceptance by adults without the overt, teased-out sexual rite-of-passage included. “Call Me” is rather flatly performed to boot, a gay fantasia of a 1983 when homophobia was abandoned and “bathroom bills” never saw the legislative light of day.

And for all the symbolism of curiosity, raging hormones and expanded horizons that having a boy masturbate with fruit might have had in Andre Aciman’s novel, on screen it’s just laughable, topped with a healthy dose of “ick.”

“Call Me by Your Name” isn’t so much a bad movie as a dull, bloated one, a tale of teen sexual intensity drawn out beyond the point of holding our interest, footnoted with all these spoken (repeatedly, by one and all) provisos — “This is OK because…”

That’s all well and good, but I found it lacking as drama, romance and period piece, a turgid potboiler overheated under the Tuscan sun.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and some language

Cast: Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel

Credits:Directed by Luca Guadagnino script by James Ivory, based on the André Aciman novel. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:12

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” owned the top of the box office charts for three weeks. It made a boatload of cash on a helluva lot of screens.

But unlike say, “Avatar,” it hasn’t turned out to be this phenomenon that grew and grew and then lingered and lingered. There’s a it of an audience disconnect. It lost huge chunks of its opening weekend audience right away, and has dropped off in the 55-60% range every weekend ever since.

So yeah, it cleared a $billion worldwide. But it was dethroned Monday, as “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” opened big and then held audience share week after week.

“Jumanji,” a body-switch comedy starring Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and a self-mocking starlet dolled up like Lara Croft, will collect another whopping $36-37 million when all the cash is counted midnight Sunday. When a movie is connecting with the public, it loses 20-30% of its opening weekend audience every week. “Last Jedi’s” fall-off suggests otherwise.

The poorly-reviewed “Insidious: The Last Key,” with no “name” stars, is opening at $25.

“Last Jedi” may clear $23-24.

Oscar contenders like “Darkest Hour” are adding screens and growing at the box office. “The Greatest Showman” has legs — is collecting $12-15 million every weekend and could, if it gets a Golden Globes boost, suddenly find itself in “too big and ambitious to not get Oscar consideration” territory.

“Molly’s Game,” an Aaron Sorkin talk-a-thon with Jessica Chastain as its Oscar bait star, opens over $6.

“The Shape of Water” added theaters and still fell out of the top ten.  “The Post” has yet to open wide enough to crack that top ten. Tiny awards season pictures like “I, Tonya” and “Phantom Thread” haven’t opened wide at all, “The Disaster Artist” has faded away.

You’ve seen snippets of these videos on the internet, on “Craziest Car Crashes” cable TV shows. And just a few moments of any one of them tells most of us “No, there’s no way to drive safely and sanely in the once-and-future Soviet Union.”

For “The Road Movie,” a Russian director and editor has assembled 70 or so minutes of this stuff to paint a quixotic portrait of the national character, as revealed by the omni-present dashboard camera.

Unblinking dashcams see all and reveal all in this tragi-comic romp through the Wild West of Russia’s roadways. We hear the drivers singing along with their radios, carrying on conversations with their passengers, yelling obscenities at their fellow motorists and reacting with dumbfounded shock at the madness and mayhem that they and their on-board windshield cameras witness.

(Watch the trailer to “The Road Movie” here.) 

A nation of drunks, hotheads, idiots, the devout and the profane, the chivalrous and the murderous, pass before our gaze in Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s film. A reckless fatalism sets in behind the wheel. The national “Best to not get involved” motto is tested by road ragers, wrecks involving “other people,” literal highway robberies and confrontations with lunatics and psychotics wielding guns, hatchets and sledgehammers, all witnessed from the front seat of cars which few get out of to intervene, horrors visited upon their fellow citizens “while Russians do nothing,” as one driver, himself doing nothing, complains.

“Fatalism” implies “resigned to one’s fate,” and if there’s a Russian archetype, that’s it. How else do you explain all this footage of gamblers driving through a forest fire (yikes), blizzards, floods, meteor strikes and mass-pileups on the free-for-all-freeways?

“Crashed in the bum,” one victim mutters after a rear-ending. “Again. And again.”

The singing and chatter of one ride goes on just long enough for one to wonder if the occupants of this car rattling down a curvy country road might be drunk. They crash through a guard rail and plow into a river, and we have our answer.

“We’ve arrived,” the driver snorts (in Russian, with English subtitles).

“We are SAILING,” an unseen passenger giggles as they try to steer their still-floating scow towards the nearest riverbank.

Not all the careening is done by drunks, or so one would hope. But an army of belligerent, aggressive rubes is on the roads, and any affront is an excuse for a brawl. Drivers cause crashes and flee, bait other drivers into attempting to pass, then sucker them into spinouts. Buses and tractor-trailers change lanes with impunity and back up with a homicidal malevolence.

We see robberies and break-ins (a camera in the act of being stolen).

And then there are the village idiots, madmen wandering the streets naked, or worse, jumping on your hood and threatening bodily harm. The lady who flicks her cigarette lighter to see if she’s filled her tank is a special kind of crazy.

“The Road Movie” is not a narrative film. It doesn’t tell a story, even though there is comedy, tragedy, madness and romance amidst all the crashes and explosions. I’m not just talking about the guys haggling over rural hookers’ price-structure. Yes, a damsel left in the lurch by a thieving cabbie is saved from having her cash, purse and luggage stolen by a random knight in shining armor who picks her up when he sees this happen.

“I’m Pasha.” “I’m Dasha!” It was meant to be.

There’s an old Midwestern joke about American drivers having to “re-learn the laws of physics” every winter. The Russians of “The Road Movie” don’t so much forget them in the land of longer winters, as ignore them and expect no consequences for that.

And that’s as telling as the fact that they know and accept this on-the-road anarchy, to a one. That’s why Russia is the dash-cam capital of the world. They know bad things are going to happen. They just want proof, even if they have zero faith that anything like justice comes their way in a system that allows this anarchy to go on.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Assorted random Russians, Belarusians, etc.

Credits:Directed and edited y Dmitrii Kalashnikov. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Running time: 1:09

Just the trailer for this January release is gonzo enough to make me stop typing and put in a call to Oscilloscope Laboratories to be sure to get a screener of this one.

Got it! My review of “The Road Movie” is linked HERE. 

God help me, but I found the climax to “Insidious: The Last Key” to be quite moving.

For a horror sequel, anyway. Sequel-prequel in this case.

Sure, much of what’s come before that, an hour and 40ish minutes of backstory, lulling detail, inane banter and scenes one can only describe as “filler” interrupted by quick-cut soundtrack-amplified SHOCKS, is a bore.

And so much of what Blumhouse Pictures and screenwriter Leigh Whannell are concerned with these days is working each new film (this is  the fourth) into “The Insidious Universe.” Then there’s the job of giving Whannell, a sometime actor who found his true calling with “Saw,” another acting role where he gets to be the nerdy ghostbuster awkwardly creeping on starlets half his age (he’s about to turn 40).

With these other agendas to fret over, is it any wonder these movies have devolved from a clever “Poltergeist” variation into a weary, idea-starved formula was a supporting cast that’s aged past “cute” that can’t find a new fright to save its life?

A prologue shows us the abusive, working class childhood of our ghost-whisperer, Elise (Lin Shaye). Young Elise (Ava Volker) could see and hear the spirits in the Five Keys, New Mexico house she and her fearful brother Christian (Pierce Pope) grew up in. Her mother (Tessa Ferrer) understood. But her brute of a prison-guard dad (Josh Stewart) didn’t like hearing Elise’s vivid descriptions of executions at the prison, which she hadn’t witnessed.

“And his last words were, ‘Go ta HELL.”

Dad beat Elise with a cane. And those spirits in the house? They murdered her mom.

Fifty-seven years later, Elise gets a call from the new owner of the same house. No, she can’t go back there to dislodge the ghosts. She can’t. OK, she will, because otherwise, we have no movie.

She’ll bring along those ghostbusting pals who helped set up Spectral Sightings with her, Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson).

“She’s psychic, we’re the sidekicks!”

They’ll get to the bottom of why this house is haunted and Elise’s lingering guilt over the brother (Bruce Davison plays Christian as an adult) she left behind. Yes, there’s a key, a door to unlock and an emergency whistle a mother has given to her child to recover.

Horror matriarch Lin Shaye, who owes her career to being the sister to New Line Cinema founder Robert Shaye, is a comforting presence at the center of these movies. But in the original films, she was the cavalry, riding to the rescue of whoever was desperate to rid themselves of supernatural problems, a supporting player who only had to make a strong impression in a few scenes. She’s no Helen Mirren and making her carry these movies is a burden she’s not up to.

Park her in a scene with horror vet (“Willard”) Bruce Davison, an accomplished character actor, and he underplays her/charisma’s her right off the screen.

The sidekicks have shown us their entire bag of character and acting tricks. They’re not as brave as Elise, and if she doesn’t make them wear white shirts and ties, they don’t register at all. The novelty’s gone and they’re not cute any more.  Giving them a ghost-busting RV (“The Winnebaghost”) doesn’t help.

The ghosts are the long-fingered ghouls with skeletal faces so popular in the genre these days.

All of which adds up to a movie that has no right to the touching finale Whannell cooks up, a nice payoff to a movie that isn’t really worth sitting through to reach that payoff.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing thematic content, violence and terror, and brief strong language

Cast: Lin Shaye, Bruce Davison, Leigh Whannell, Spencer Locke, Angus Sampson

Credits: Directed by Adam Robitel, script by Leigh Whannell. A Universal/Blumhouse release.

Running time: 1:43

The WGA Nominations can be expected to honor movies (and TV series, movies, etc.) that have a writerly quality — to the dialogue, intricate story structure, character construction.

So while there are some glaring omissions, putting “Get Out,” “Lady Bird,” “I, Tonya,” and such adaptations as “The Disaster Artist,” “Logan” and Aaron Sorkin’s talkathon take on “Molly’s Game” are perfectly defensible.

But, um, no “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri?” Martin McDonagh is the writer’s writer.

No “Wind River?” That’s a smartly structured, hard-boiled and lyrical script.

“Mudbound” kind of wallows in its genre, a weak adaptation where nobody had the good sense to cut scenes and narrow the foucs.

And there’s no much I’d call lyrical about “The Shape of Water.” Not dialogue (Shannon’s lines have bite, but having two mute characters as your leads devalues that), not the fairytale-ish plot.

“Lucky” was a lot more than Harry Dean Stanton’s elegy. “Stronger” was intricate, quotable.

Smaller films in general took a beating, with “I, Tonya” being the only real surprise inclusion.

“The Post” should be in here, maybe “Darkest Hour,” maybe “The Florida Project” sounded too improvised (it wasn’t). I’d even think “Coco” merits a thought. “The Big Sick?” What’s polished about that flaccid, sentimental slop?

“Logan?” OK. The most writerly superhero adaptation not done by Joss Whedon.

Here are their film nominees. The full list, TV etc., is on the WGA website. 

The Big Sick, Written by Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani; Amazon Studios

Get Out, Written by Jordan Peele; Universal Pictures

I, Tonya, Written by Steven Rogers; Neon

Lady Bird, Written by Greta Gerwig; A24

The Shape of Water, Screenplay by Guillermo del Toro & Vanessa Taylor; Story by Guillermo del Toro; Fox Searchlight

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Call Me by Your Name, Screenplay by James Ivory; Based on the Novel by André Aciman; Sony Pictures Classics

The Disaster Artist, Screenplay by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber; Based on the Book The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside the Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell; A24

Logan, Screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green; Story by James Mangold; Based on Characters from the X-Men Comic Books and Theatrical Motion Pictures; Twentieth Century Fox Film

Molly’s Game, Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin; Based on the Book by Molly Bloom; STX Entertainment

Mudbound, Screenplay by Virgil Williams and Dee Rees; Based on the Novel by Hillary Jordan; Netflix

DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY

Betting on Zero, Written by Theodore Braun; Gunpowder & Sky

Jane, Written by Brett Morgen; National Geographic

No Stone Unturned, Written by Alex Gibney; Abramorama

Oklahoma City, Written by Barak Goodman; American Experience Films

It was hard to root for Tonya Harding back when the blue collar “redneck” skater was battling the petite princesses of figure skating in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

She was more “girl next door” than her prettier contemporaries, muscular in a way skating fans didn’t appreciate, unschooled at makeup, unfiltered in her response to feminine and effeminate judges who were loathe to give the woman her due.

And then there was the drama, the crying, the “not my fault” whining, and finally “the Incident.”

“I, Tonya” lets us see her hard life and victimhood through her eyes, as performed by the beautiful and petite Margot Robbie.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl”) and romance screenwriter (“P.S. I Love You”) built “I, Tonya” around “wildly contradictory” and ironically hilarious interviews with the principals of Harding’s life, career and downfall.

And they turned Robbie loose on this fierce, unrepentant “white trash” over-achiever in a performance that is flinty yet self-pitying, two-fisted and bloodied but unbowed. For all those moments where Robbie lets a little of her demented turn as Harley Quinn in “Suicide Squad” flash across her teeth and eyes, it’s a stunning transformation and a fearless performance, every it the equal of Charlize Theron’s transformation from runway model to “Monster.”

We figure her out, early, from that first day her foul-mouthed chain-smoking harridan of a mother (Allison Janney, magnificently hateful) bullies her would-be coach (Julianne Nicholson, perfectly demure) into taking her child, a “soft four” years of age, into her Oregon skating school. Years pass, but the mother-coach bickering never ends.

“She looks like she CHOPS WOOD every morning!”

“She DOES chop wood every morning!”

Robbie/Harding narrates her story.  The great athletes perform with a chip on their shoulders, and Harding’s was a doozy. Rivals are always “little bitches,” from the time she was outskating them as a tyke to her tweens and teens and beyond. She could be fragile, facing death threats and class snobbery at every turn. But she was a fighter.

“I, Tonya”  is interspersed with modern day (middle-age to old age makeup) “interviews” recreated for the movie. So we hear her talk about the unhappy home and violence meted out by her mother, only to see Mom, a pet bird picking at her ear on her shoulder, deny it.

“Oh, I hit her one time…with a hair brush!”

The same is true of her first love and eventually first husband, Jeff Gillooly, played with self-aware resignation by Sebastian Stan. Tonya describes the heated juvenile sex, the beatings, the succession black-eyes she had to hide with stage make-up.

“OK,” Jeff counters in his interview, “I NEVER did this.”

We meet Jeff’s delusional lives-with-his-parents “security and anti-terrorism expert” and future Tonya “body guard” Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser, in a spot-on impersonation), an obese dope who lies like he breathes, with the confidence of a clown who never expects to be fact-checked or disbelieved.

All of which sets the table for “the incident.” Gillespie, Robbie and Rogers do such a good job of building this back-story that we almost forget that’s coming. The movie is that good.

“I, Tonya” flirts with mocking its characters, but Janney and especially Robbie counter that with their unblinking, “not on my watch” performances. Yeah, you have to take what the title character says in her version of events with a grain of salt, but she is not to be dismissed as some hapless rube. Robbie doesn’t let that happen.

Want confirmation of the mountain Harding and women like her have to climb? Read the MPAA rating at the bottom of this review. They were more bothered “pervasive language” than the film’s jaw-dropping “pervasive” domestic violence. The roundhouses hurled at her by her husband, the balled-fist “slaps” delivered by her mother, the shooting a careless cop ignored, it’s straight out of a Tammy Wynette song.

In a year when fierce women are stepping up and demanding to be heard, “I, Tonya” gives them another type of role model. And in an awards season where the fearsome Frances McDormand (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) could simply muscle and menace her way to another Oscar, Robbie’s “never been a girlie girl” Tonya grits her teeth, balls up her fists and announces, with this performance, “Not so fast, sister.”

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, and some sexual content/nudity

Cast: Margot Robbi, Sebastian Stan, Allison Janney, Julianne Nicholson

Credits:Directed by Craig Gillespie, script by Steven Rogers. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:00