The Royal Hotel (Movie)

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares95 Views

    ‘The Royal Hotel,’ ‘Zola’ and More Streaming Gems

    by

    Female-centered buddy comedies, rom-coms and Outback thrillers are among the under-the-radar recommendations for your subscription streamers this month.‘The Royal Hotel’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.Kitty Green’s follow-up to the taut drama “The Assistant” is a feminist riff on the ’70s classic “Wake in Fright,” in which two Canadian tourists who have run out of money in Australia take on a gig as bartenders at a grimy watering hole in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a large mining area,” they’re told, so “you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention.” For 90 tightly-wound minutes, Green mixes bleary naturalism and baked-in dread, as these modern women are exposed to the handsy, winking Neanderthal clientele, and the bar turns into a ticking time bomb. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are empathetic in the leads, while Daniel Henshall is all quiet menace as the establishment’s most boorish regular.‘When You Finish Saving the World’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore in “When You Finish Saving the World.”Karen Kuehn/A24The actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg recently received raves (and an Oscar-friendly fall release date) for his sophomore feature “A Real Pain,” so it’s a fine opportunity to check out his debut film. The “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard is terrific (in, essentially, the Eisenberg role) as a self-important teenage singer-songwriter who tries to get political to impress a girl. Julianne Moore is his mother, a humorless scold whose coldness and impatience are seemingly understandable, as her son is such an insufferable boor. But the more Eisenberg mines the complexity of this toxic relationship, the more we understand and even sympathize with these two difficult people, and lock in on Eisenberg’s exploration of the moral stickiness of trying to do good in a narcissistic world.‘Plan B’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.From left, Victoria Moroles and Kuhoo Verma in “Plan B.”Brett Roedel/HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Pulling Pints and Watching Their Backs

      by

      Two young women struggle to handle the obstreperous patrons of a remote Australian pub in this coolly calibrated thriller.We are barely 12 minutes into Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” before the first C-word is dropped, but it isn’t gratuitous. The film’s language, dominated by the braying of obnoxious, bellies-to-the-bar boozehounds, is both spice and thickening agent in its pervasive mood of clammy menace. Our reward for enduring this relentless churn of apprehension is not the one we anticipate.Teasing expectations — to some viewers’ ultimate disappointment, no doubt — is much of what this keenly calibrated thriller is about, the familiarity of its setup raising our most bloodthirsty horror-movie hopes. Place two young, attractive female backpackers in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport. Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.Until then, we must gnaw our fingernails as Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, both terrific) refresh their finances by working as live-in bartenders in the titular establishment. The hotel’s dilapidation — to say nothing of its grubby, grabby, mostly male clientele — is a far cry from the yacht parties the women were recently enjoying in Sydney. The bar owner (an indispensable Hugo Weaving) is a raging alcoholic, yet his girlfriend (Ursula Yovich) seems kind and possibly protective. And while one regular (Daniel Henshall) is frankly terrifying, another (Toby Wallace) is so clean and cute that his off-color humor is easier to ignore. At what point should the women feel alarmed enough to leave?That question haunts every frame of a movie that persistently taunts us with the likelihood of male violence, its blasted landscapes and aura of desolation pumped relentlessly by Michael Latham’s brooding cinematography. Green, in her second collaboration with Garner (after the similarly themed — if significantly less raucous — “The Assistant” in 2020), is proving a cool chronicler of workplace abuse and the kind of harassment that disguises itself as harmless fun. Sometimes a woman’s only defense is to trust the pricking skin and spasming gut that warns her otherwise.Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is after something more subtle than pure horror. In its destabilizing presentation of men whose motivations appear to shift from scene to scene — the women’s fun-loving English predecessors seem genuinely sorry to leave — it places the audience on a knife edge. This, along with the general drunkenness and the bar’s oppressive gloom, can be exhausting; but Green, filming for the first time in her native Australia, displays such a sure hand with the movie’s tone that even her brief slips into genre cliché (like a surprise snake and a convenient storm) inflict minimal damage. Her overtly feminist climax, though, feels more problematic, a betrayal of the movie’s carefully drawn ambiguities and concern for its more vulnerable characters. Hanna and Liv were never looking for a fight; all they really wanted was to see some kangaroos.The Royal HotelRated R for female skin and men with a skinful. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More