32 Movies Like The Marvels (2023) (Page 3)

Staff & contributors

There’s no way to escape it– the plotline of One True Loves feels like the other side of Cast Away (2000), but instead of focusing on the survival aspect, it focuses on the wife trying to move on with grief. The original novel portrays Emma moving on through reclaiming her past, and learning to appreciate the roots she’s tried to forget with her lost husband. However, the film adaptation falters in depicting the personal, inner world of Emma, as it bungles through the timelines with Hallmark-esque quotes and disarranged scenes. It tries to save the film through its star-studded cast, but their decent performances can’t save the way the film is structured.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Actor: Beth Broderick, Christina Bach, Cooper van Grootel, Gabriella Garcia, Gary Hudson, Jacinte Blankenship, Jay DeVon Johnson, Jessi Goei, Kelvin Hodge, Lauren Tom, Luke Bracey, Michael OKeefe, Michaela Conlin, Oceana Matsumoto, Oona Yaffe, Phillipa Soo, Simu Liu, Tom Everett Scott, Victoria Blade, Wil Deusner

Director: Andy Fickman

Rating: PG-13

Locked In is the latest in a long line of B-movie psychological thrillers that seem to place much more importance on the kind of twisty structures they can pull off, rather than the actual content of their stories. Formal experimentation is just as valuable of course, but when a story like this—that relies on the shock of how these various character relationships turn against each other—can't give us characters with any sort of real interiority, the flashback-heavy narrative just begins to seem like unnecessary noise. Trying to keep up with basic emotional beats shouldn't be this complex, and after a while you begin to realize that these people are simply doing things outside any proper context, suspended in a world with no weight or specificity.

Genre: Thriller

Actor: Alex Hassell, Anna Friel, Famke Janssen, Finn Cole, Karl Collins, Rose Williams

Director: Nour Wazzi

Rating: R