Film Reviews: Between the Temples, Good One, The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat 

• Sony Pictures Classics
• Between the Temples

Between the Temples
Director/co-writer Nathan Silver and co-writer C. Mason Wells mix a little quintessential Sundance quirk into their throwback New Hollywood vibe, resulting in a dramedy that's enjoyable, awkward, and enjoyably awkward. Jason Schwartzman plays Benjamin Gottlieb, a cantor for an upstate New York synagogue who has lost his will to sing—and much of his will to live—after the death of his wife. While nursing his sorrows in a bar, he runs into Carla (Carol Kane), his widowed childhood music teacher, who decides to re-embrace her Jewish heritage by preparing for the bat mitzvah she never had. Harold & Maude provides the most obvious touchstone, and Silver aims for an aesthetic that evokes grainy 1970s film stock and jagged editing rhythms that capture the chaos of Benjamin's life. The narrative does get a little over-stuffed with business at times, as though the writers are looking for individually funny scenes—like a visit to a Catholic Church, or an ill-fated J-Date encounter—even if they don't particularly serve the central relationship. Schwartzman and Kane do have a nice chemistry, though, building to a shabbat dinner where the overlapping dialogue and increasingly frantic pacing build to an impressive crescendo. Maybe it's a little on the messy side, but then again, the kind of movies to which it's paying homage were never about being neat and tidy. Available Aug. 23 in theaters. (R)

• Metrograph Pictures
• Good One

Good One
Here's Exhibit A in why I don't like to insta-react to Sundance screenings: It took a little time for me to fully wrap my head around what writer/director India Donaldson was aiming for in this restrained character study. That central character is 17-year-old New Yorker Sam (Lily Collias), who's taking a holiday-weekend camping trip that's initially planned to be with her remarried-with-a-toddler father (James Le Gros), her dad's long-time friend/underemployed actor Matt (Danny McCarthy) and Matt's own teen son, but takes on a different dynamic when Matt's son bails on the trip. What follows has been compared to the work of Kelly Reichardt—not surprising, given the part of the premise that resembles Old Joy—with a subtle, observational vibe rather than big, dramatic plot points. Donaldson emphasizes the way Sam's feminine energy affects the dynamic of the trio, while also making it clear that she's the most competent and level-headed of the three of them. My initial reservations were that such qualities gave Sam too little of a character arc, but the realizations Sam comes to over the course of the trip, particularly about her father and how much he can be trusted with her hard truths, feel even more insinuating without being underlined. Collias offers up a lead performance that's charismatic without ever being showy, finding a simple strength in deciding that the sob stories of the men in her life don't have to drag her down. Available Aug. 23 at Broadway Center Cinemas. (R)

• Searchlight Films
• The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat

The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
In the age of streaming-service limited series adaptation of novels, it's worth asking why some books are turned into feature films when their premise just doesn't lend itself to that approach. This adaptation of Edward Kelsey Moore's novel by director/co-writer Tina Mabry (with a script co-credited to a pseudonymous Gina Prince-Bythewood as "Cee Marcellus") follows a trio of Black women friends—Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Clarice (Uzo Aduba) and Barbara Jean (Sanaa Lathan)—from their teenage years in 1960s Indiana until the verge of their 50s, as they deal with health scares, relationship difficulties and grief. The three main actors are predictably solid, as are their younger counterparts (Kyanna Simone, Abigail Achiri and Tati Gabrielle, respectively), digging into the melodramatic storylines in a way that doesn't feel simplistic or exploitative. The problem is that this is a concept based on the idea of decades spent building a history together, something that's much easier to accomplish in the pacing of reading a book; here, the filmmakers have to race from one plot development to the next, and back and forth in time, in a way that doesn't give those developments any time to breathe or build an emotional resonance. This is a story that begs for an episodic structure, so that individual life milestones can have their moment of focus, and the way these women support one another through those milestones can be the story, rather than moving immediately to, "Okay, now it's my turn to have a crisis." Available Aug. 23 via Hulu. (PG-13)