Friday’s new releases are scant and few. No big studio movie is set for release until November 10th, when “The Marvels” is unveiled. There are a few indies coming out on Friday, but they’re not really worth your time.
There’s George C. Wolfe’s “Rustin,” an overcooked civil rights biopic starring Colman Domingo. Jessica Yu’s “Quiz Lady” is a road trip comedy with barely any laughs in it. Meanwhile, Meg Ryan’s “What Happens Later,” with David Duchovny, is her directorial debut and acting return to the romcom genre. It still hasn’t been screened for press, always a bad sign.
If you’re itching to catch something this weekend, I say take a risk and watch a film that came out earlier this month, and barely got any attention. If you consider yourself to be an “adventurous” moviegoer, then, by all means, go check out Rodrigo Moreno’s “The Delinquents.” I caught up with the Argentinian Cannes title in September and it’s this wonderful character study masquerading as a bank heist movie.
The film, driven by an infectious jazz score, starts off like a bank heist thriller. Morán (Daniel Elías) and Román (Esteban Bigliardi), two bank employees questioning their mundane lives, commit the crime. They succeed, but Morán purposely surrenders himself to authorities, as he was the one who stole the money on-camera. He tells Román to hide the cash, and he’ll be out of jail in a couple years and will be able to recoup his share of the loot.
This is a treatise on the nature of freedom; when can we finally consider ourselves unshackled by life’s tedious obligations? Morán and Román try to find out, with mixed results, but it’s the journey that matters — in order to find this freedom, you might have to get lost along the way.
The way the story is told digresses, the more it goes along, the more it deepens into this complex narrative. Moreno has mentioned in interviews that he was interested in flipping the way modern-day movies are told, and he’s achieved that with a film that has some major risk-taking.
Moreno’s film is one of the most delectably unpredictable surprises of the year. It asks questions about choosing to work your whole mundane existence or opting to abandon everything for life’s open-ended mysteries. The deadpan comedic touches, the subverting of genre cliches and the risk-taking are abundant in every frame.
“The Delinquents” only has 15 reviews logged in on Metacritic, but an 86 score. It deserves to be seen by a wider audience.