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    ‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ Review: Girlhood, Interrupted

    Lana Wilson’s documentary blossoms in moments of cultural commentary, where it builds a mood of reminiscence gone rancid.In the 1978 Louis Malle drama “Pretty Baby,” Brooke Shields plays a child whose virginity is auctioned off in a New Orleans brothel. She was 11 at the time of filming. That film’s title gets reappropriated in the director Lana Wilson’s absorbing documentary, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” which emulsifies its biography of Shields with lucid insights into the culture that shaped her.Posed before a calming gray backdrop, the 57-year-old Shields seems preternaturally well-adjusted and is an enthusiastic chronicler of her own career. But like many tidy celebrity portraits, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” (on Hulu) hits its stride when cinematic memoir takes a back seat to cultural commentary.Before Shields even hit puberty, the media had taken to framing her as either a Lolita or a demure darling — a Catch-22 that Wilson, through interviews with journalists and other actresses, positions within a history of Hollywood exploitation. Trapped in this binary, Shields failed to crystallize her identity until college, and the film’s second half traces her road to self-realization thereafter.The documentary’s most absorbing ingredient by far is its excellent collage of archival footage. “I knew it was going to be done in good taste,” a precocious preteen Shields is shown to say of Malle’s film in an interview around its release. Assembled alongside analysis, this clip and others build a mood of reminiscence gone rancid and suggest a generation of women transformed by the prototypes society boxed them into.Pretty Baby: Brooke ShieldsNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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    ‘A Castle for Christmas’ Review: Deck the Halls With Expensive Tartans

    Charming locals in Scotland can’t save Brooke Shields and Cary Elwes from the script of this formulaic holiday rom-com.In “A Castle for Christmas,” the best-selling author Sophie Brown (Brooke Shields) had the gall to throw a favorite character down a staircase in her latest novel. Now her fans are furious. Even the talk-show host Drew Barrymore — played by the talk-show host Drew Barrymore — is critical of Sophie’s actions.After an on-air meltdown, Sophie heads for Scotland, in part to flee her readers’ ire, and in part to find writerly inspiration. Her father was a spinner of yarns, Sophie’s daughter reminds her on a video call. His vivid stories about a Scottish castle where his parents were groundskeepers were particularly rich.In Dunbar, at a quaint bed-and-breakfast, Sophie is welcomed by a kind group of locals who gather to knit. She also encounters Cary Elwes, who plays Myles, the duke of nearby Dun Dunbar castle. Thanks to his rambunctious dog, Hamish, he and Sophie meet cute in town. Impulsively, Sophie decides to purchase Myles’s castle and he becomes its cranky tenant with a plan to get the estate back.Likeable stars with little frisson, Elwes and Shields are also saddled with a formulaic script. It also doesn’t help matters that Elwes, whose last lead in a romantic comedy was “The Princess Bride,” does not look at ease. The supporting cast is more relaxed (particularly Andi Osho as Maisie, and Lee Ross as Thomas, Maisie’s former sweetheart and Myles’s servant). But no one’s happier for their close-up than the pup who portrays the dogged matchmaker. It’s tempting to say, he puts the ham in Hamish, but then isn’t that an Easter dish?A Castle for ChristmasNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More