John Powers

Even as Romy says she needs sexual danger, none of her desires take her, or the movie, any place truly dark, or even Fifty Shades of Grey. Now, to her credit, Rain makes a point of not trying to turn us on. She dishes up none of the laughable nudie sleaze found in movies like Nine and a Half Weeks.

Yet, in her fixation on Romy's inner life, whose every throb and flicker Kibben heroically registers, she makes the classic Hollywood mistake of shortchanging everything else. For starters, we have no sense of who Samuel actually is or what he wants. This matters in a film where both Romy and Samuel keep using the word power. Romy may run the company, but she's also an HR nightmare.

Yet, in her fixation on Romy's inner life, whose every throb and flicker Kibben heroically registers, she makes the classic Hollywood mistake of shortchanging everything else. For starters, we have no sense of who Samuel actually is or what he wants. This matters in a film where both Romy and Samuel keep using the word power. Romy may run the company, but she's also an HR nightmare.

Yet, in her fixation on Romy's inner life, whose every throb and flicker Kibben heroically registers, she makes the classic Hollywood mistake of shortchanging everything else. For starters, we have no sense of who Samuel actually is or what he wants. This matters in a film where both Romy and Samuel keep using the word power. Romy may run the company, but she's also an HR nightmare.

Samuel could shipwreck her career with a few well-chosen words. I kept waiting to find out what Samuel is after and what tough choices their dangerous liaison will force her to make.

Samuel could shipwreck her career with a few well-chosen words. I kept waiting to find out what Samuel is after and what tough choices their dangerous liaison will force her to make.

Samuel could shipwreck her career with a few well-chosen words. I kept waiting to find out what Samuel is after and what tough choices their dangerous liaison will force her to make.

That's precisely what happens in Catherine Briand's great new film Last Summer, in which another successful middle-aged woman commits a far greater transgression than Romy, then fights, even cruelly, to get herself out of the mess. There's no such reckoning here. Rain is so eager not to punish Romy for her sexual tastes that the film raises questions of power, only to duck them.

That's precisely what happens in Catherine Briand's great new film Last Summer, in which another successful middle-aged woman commits a far greater transgression than Romy, then fights, even cruelly, to get herself out of the mess. There's no such reckoning here. Rain is so eager not to punish Romy for her sexual tastes that the film raises questions of power, only to duck them.

That's precisely what happens in Catherine Briand's great new film Last Summer, in which another successful middle-aged woman commits a far greater transgression than Romy, then fights, even cruelly, to get herself out of the mess. There's no such reckoning here. Rain is so eager not to punish Romy for her sexual tastes that the film raises questions of power, only to duck them.

Baby Girl's problem is not Romy's desire to be dominated. It's making her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story's sexual politics don't matter. All of which feels out of touch with our post-MeToo era. After all, if a male CEO had kinky sex with a young female intern, I don't think current audiences would give him a pass, just because she made him happier in bed than his wife.

Baby Girl's problem is not Romy's desire to be dominated. It's making her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story's sexual politics don't matter. All of which feels out of touch with our post-MeToo era. After all, if a male CEO had kinky sex with a young female intern, I don't think current audiences would give him a pass, just because she made him happier in bed than his wife.

Baby Girl's problem is not Romy's desire to be dominated. It's making her erotic liberation so triumphant that the story's sexual politics don't matter. All of which feels out of touch with our post-MeToo era. After all, if a male CEO had kinky sex with a young female intern, I don't think current audiences would give him a pass, just because she made him happier in bed than his wife.

Every December, I look at my list of the things that I've read, watched, and listened to during the year. And every December, I come across things that I flat-out loved yet somehow never got around to talking about. Well, I want to share these pleasures now. Although they're a far cry from raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favorite things.

I gasp in surprise at all fours. Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel about a middle-aged artist who leaves her family to drive to New York from Los Angeles, but only gets to the L.A. suburbs before she falls for a young rental car worker, checks into a cheap motel, and spends a fortune redecorating her room there.

All Fours is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's Mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. Perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't stop reading passages to my girlfriend.

It's a one-of-a-kind book about a woman cannonballing into her search for a new self and a new life. you never know where it's headed.

You know exactly where things are headed in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, an inventive documentary about the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, who was killed at the behest of the American and Belgian governments.

This is no grimly realistic sermon, but a jaunty montage film, blending fabulous archival footage, amazing interviews, CIA machinations, and oodles of black music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone. Along the way, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimenprez quotes poet Octavio Paz's line, When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams. Grimenprez's movie unfolds like one of those dreams.

Life has turned giddily surreal in the Hulu series Interior Chinatown, based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Charles Yu. Its high point is the star-making performance by Ronnie Chiang, the Malaysian comedian you may know from The Daily Show. Chiang is uproarious as Fatty Choi, a low-ambition restaurant worker who's suddenly forced into waiting tables.