For a brand promoted as the ultimate in couch-cuddling leisure, Netflix’s original films, however thoughtful and rewarding, don’t tend to be wholly entertainment-oriented or go that well with a bucket of homemade popcorn. Up on the streaming service since Friday, The Incredible Jessica James is a breezy exception: a sweet, spry, Sundance-stamped romantic comedy that rewrites no rules of the genre but gets its blithe freshness from the sparky, self-effacing star quality of one Jessica Williams.
A 27-year-old comedian and Daily Show correspondent given ample room to breathe, riff and roar by director Jim Strouse’s script, Williams bounds into the proceedings with unfiltered comic peculiarity as a New York playwright poring over the fragments of her dating life. We’re in the gangly televisual terrain of Issa Rae and Lena Dunham here, but Williams’s persona is disarming entirely on its own terms. The equally off-piste Chris O’Dowd is her unlikely love interest, and their combined skew-whiff charm makes a sunny delight of this loose, lightly plotted ramble.
It’s the week’s most consistently fun film, which isn’t to write off the inconsistent pleasures of Life (Sony, 15), a disastrously anonymous title for an icily crafted Alien knockoff that delivers most effectively when it forgets to feign classiness. The life in question is more powerful than it is precious: on the International Space Station, an unearthly, accidentally acquired organism grows and makes its grisly presence felt, setting its sights on the wan human crew of Jake Gyllenhaal and friends. As long as the film sticks to this simple suspense formula, it rattles ickily along; when it shoots for a more philosophical justification of its title, the air runs out.
Subtler games of uncanny threat are at play in Neither Heaven Nor Earth (Thunderbird, 12), yet another solemn report from the Afghanistan frontline, but given a nippy, teasing spin by French director Clément Cogitore that situates the action very much in the twilight warzone. The ever-sturdy Jérémie Renier is the army captain whose men begin silently vanishing one by one; answers aren’t exactly forthcoming, but Cogitore nonetheless keeps the tension at a cryptic simmer.
Also to be filed under eerie oddities: Robin Swicord’s Wakefield (Signature, 15), an intelligently aloof EL Doctorow adaptation that gives Bryan Cranston his most intriguing film showcase to date. As a well-heeled suburban drone who decides, quite inscrutably, to drop out of life altogether, hiding from his oblivious wife (a fine Jennifer Garner) and children in his own attic, Cranston’s creased Everyman gravitas must quietly sketch in much of the literary psychological shading here. He’s up to the task; the film around him frays and tangles to frustrating effect, but it gets in your head and stays there.
That can’t be said for a number of this week’s throwaway releases: The Boss Baby (Fox, U), a smarmy, plastic cartoon that deals out its single joke in the title, which may still be enough to tickle undemanding preschoolers; The Time of Their Lives (Universal, 12), a low-rent Best Exotic Bungalow that pits Joan Collins against Pauline Collins, as if that’s a remotely fair fight; or Table 19 (Fox, 12), a strained wedding-party farce that sputters to life only when we’re seated between Lisa Kudrow and Craig Robinson.
A gentle diversion with some staying power is Handsome Devil (Icon, 15), a kind-hearted, scruffily witty coming-out-and-of-age study set in the forbidding environs of a rugby-fixated Irish boarding school. John Butler’s debut sticks a bit rigidly to quirky classroom formula, but is limber and honest where it counts, with lovely, supportive-in-all-senses work from Andrew Scott as a sympathetic teacher. Pair it with the glowingly reissued Peppermint Soda (BFI, 12) for an affection-drenched rites-of-passage double bill. Now 40 years old, Diane Kurys’s autobiographical snapshot of French adolescent girls fumbling toward self-possession in the early 60s hasn’t lost any of its crisp, droll insight or tender, painful empathy. It’s not as if growing up has got any easier in the intervening decades, after all.
