Fire Island and TV's Irma Vep supply fizz, but French biopic Eiffel fizzles

Each Friday, our critics provide a few quick-hit reviews of the titles that have them giddy and groaning — or, to put it another way, the Musts & Misses of the week.

Fire Island

Streaming now (Hulu)

The generous work of Jane Austen seems to have endless room for adaptations, her 200-year-old stories applied like a master key to everything from marauding zombies to as-if teens. Still, even she could not have had the bandwidth to foresee the queer Pride and Prejudice fantasia of Fire Island, a classic tale of love and class-consciousness dragged kiki-ing and screaming into the contemporary realm of Britney karaoke and buttless bikini briefs.

Actor-comedian Joel Kim Booster wrote the script and stars as Noah, a broke thirtysomething nurse with an Adonis body, a socially anxious best friend (Saturday Night Live's Bowen Yang), and a precious week to spend in a summer share on a legendary strip of land off the coast of Long Island. The house fills up fast with their giddy crew, and so does the drama: There's intrigue with a dreamboat doctor for Yang's Howie, and a terse, handsome lawyer (How to Get Away with Murder's Conrad Ricamora) Noah can't seem to stop sparring with or running into on the docks. (He's called Will, not Mr. Darcy, but you know where this is headed.)

The mere fact of a mainstream romantic comedy centered on gay characters of color — underwritten by Disney, no less — still feels a little bit extraordinary in 2022. Fire's aim is true, though its tone tends to veer wildly, ricocheting from cutting AbFab wit to the kind of broad strokes Bridgerton wouldn't shake a powdered wig at. There's a sitcom-ish tilt to it all that seems scaled for small-screen viewing (albeit with an 18+ parental lock), and the performances range from poignant to blithely cartoonish, often within a single scene. But when the film finds its rhythm, it's nearly impossible not to be charmed. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a very small swimsuit must be in want of a rom-com to call his own; Fire Island sets the stage, messy and sweet, and lets its freak flag fly. Grade: B —Leah Greenblatt

Watcher

In theaters now (and on VOD June 21)

What if Rear Window were gender-flipped and reset in Romania? That's the intriguing if half-realized idea behind Watcher, a gorgeously shot, often glacial thriller steeped in heavy-lidded style and atmosphere. Maika Monroe (It Follows) is a spectral blonde named Julia — she looks like a young, melancholy Gwen Stefani — accompanying her husband, Francis (Love's Karl Glusman), to Bucharest, where he's just been transferred from Manhattan for a job.

While Francis goes off to the office, preoccupied with the crucial business of consumer marketing and bilingual schmoozing with his new coworkers, Julia, a onetime actress, slips into the unwelcome role of bored housewife, her long, directionless days hemmed in by language barriers and loneliness. Or not entirely alone, it turns out: Someone — a stark, still figure in the building across the way — neither moves nor seems to ever look away. Does he have anything to do with the girls who keep turning up on the news with their throats slit, the most recent one reportedly with her head cut clean off?

Writer-director Chloe Okuno has a remarkably sure hand for mood-building in her feature debut, using the winding alleys and tree-lined boulevards of Bucharest to woozy, enveloping affect. But she gives her star so few specific contours that Julia mostly comes off as a beautiful cipher and an increasingly maddening protagonist to root for, seemingly both paranoid and obtuse. There may be some deeper commentary on gender and power embedded here — particularly when the stalkee, spiraling, essentially becomes the stalker — but as Watcher swerves toward its bloody climax, the film sheds its shades of gray, settling for cheaper (if still viscerally satisfying) thrills. Grade: B —LG

Irma Vep

Premieres June 6 on HBO

Twenty-six years after he made Irma Vep, a movie about a flailing attempt to remake the pioneering French silent serial Les Vampires, writer-director Olivier Assayas has made Irma Vep, a TV show about a flailing attempt to remake the pioneering French silent serial Les Vampires. The eight-part HBO series stars Alicia Vikander as Mira, a Hollywood performer bored with blockbusters who agrees to play the iconic titular villainess in a shambolic TV production in Paris. Everyone is messy: The uninsurable director (Vincent Macaigne) on mood stabilizers, the German actor (Lars Eidinger) addicted to crack, the costume designer (Jeanne Balibar) who rails against the "petty bureaucracy" of call sheets, the romantic lead (Vincent Lacoste) who keeps asking for notes on his motivation.

I could go on. I really want to: Did I mention Mira's new assistant, Regina (Devon Ross), who's straight out of film school with massive thoughts about zombie movies and a maybe-lustful eye on Mira's tan lines? Assayas' 1996 film is a perfect masterpiece, and this reimagining is chaotic at best. Although Vikander is an executive producer, Mira makes a less vivid personality than the original's Maggie Cheung, despite having much soapier romantic subplots.

And the show-within-a-show looks plain silly — though maybe that's the point? Certainly, no one does meta with more playfulness than Assayas. So of course Mira admits early that she just feels "like a cheap imitation," and of course a boozy-druggy all-night crew party features an argument about cinema versus content. I don't think the director nails the social-media age the way '90s-Irma fully witnessed its own pop-culture landscape. But after the first three episodes, I've fallen for this French froth. B+ —Darren Franich

Eiffel

In theaters now

There's probably a fascinating story to tell about Gustave Eiffel, the driven, diminutive Frenchman who helped bring the Statue of Liberty to life and created the famed Parisian tower in his name. This soft-focus biopic, alas, is not it. Romain Duris (L'Auberge Espagnole) brings scruffy movie-star charm, but he can't save a script so broadly dramatized that it might have been designed for in-flight entertainment by France's own tourism board. (In fact, the opening credits disclose that the film was underwritten by L'Oréal.)

Like all dreamers and iconoclasts, Gustave is compelled by a vision that few others see: He imagines a monument where all creeds and classes can come together equally, and only he possesses the engineering skills to make it real. Talk of water tables and deep-core compression, however, is mostly subsumed by thoughts of the jeune fille he can't quit: Adrienne (Sex Education's Emma Mackey, whose feral beauty deserves better), a woman he once loved madly and discovers again years later, unhappily married.

Both actors seemed trapped on a studio backlot, so impeccable and dust-free is their Bell Époque scenery, and the romance between them unfolds in equally make-believe beats. (Never mind that 20 years are meant to have passed in the couple's long estrangement; even her bangs hardly seem to have changed.) Eiffel makes better sense, perhaps, as a high-gloss bodice ripper than a history lesson; the rest is lost in translation. Grade: C– —LG

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