At The Movies: JLaw shows off comedy chops in No Hard Feelings, Talk To Me a nifty fright show

No hard feelings (M18)

103 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars

The story: Jennifer Lawrence stars as 32-year-old Uber driver Maddie Barker, who answers an ad offering the right woman a Chevy Regal in exchange for sleeping with a wealthy couple’s (Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick) virginal son (Andrew Barth Feldman) before he heads to college.

The actress JLaw is irresistible, whether as the franchise heroine of The Hunger Games (2012 to 2015) or headlining indie dramas such as Causeway (2022).

The American sex comedy No Hard Feelings has her at her goofiest and vampiest.

And yet, poor, pasty Percy (Feldman) is confused as she comes on to him in a pink mini-dress at the animal shelter where he volunteers.

“Can I touch your wiener?” asks Maddie – presumably in reference to the dachshund Percy is cradling.

The boy is petrified when she later drives him home, thinking she is kidnapping him.

The situation would be prohibitively pervy if gender-reversed.

But writer-director Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys, 2019) leans into the duo’s 13-year age difference to comment instead on how some Gen Z kids, like Percy, experience their entire lives online and have no clue about the real world.

As for Maddie, she has no income. Her car has been repossessed. She will soon lose her house to unpaid property bills, and she is as unprepared as Percy for leaving her New York hamlet home town.

The two help each other grow up in a summer-long romp that turns out more sweet than smutty – Lawrence’s stark-naked fight scene notwithstanding.

On full display, along with the rest of her, are the star-producer’s outrageous comedic chops, and Feldman is a true find as her dorky foil.

Hot take: This frisky tale of seduction has a winning couple who add heart to the ribald laughs.

Talk To Me (NC16)

95 minutes, opens on Thursday
3 stars

The story: A group of teens discovers a way to channel spirits using a creepy plaster hand, ostensibly moulded from the severed arm of a long-dead psychic. The party game soon gets, well, out of hand – terrifyingly so.

The hand in the Aussie horror Talk To Me had promised such fun. Grasp it, incanting “Talk to me” to invite in the undead souls, and then circulate recordings of the infernal possession on social media after ending the seance by blowing out a candle.

It is a viral stunt as dumb and dangerous as the Benadryl and Milk Crate challenges. So, of course, kids in their heedlessness are thrilling to it.

Among them is Mia (striking newcomer Sophie Wilde), though for reasons beyond wanting to fit in. The Adelaide high school senior has established contact with her dearly missed mother who committed suicide two years prior, and the lonely, bereft girl does not want to let go.

Danny and Michael Philippou are the twin brothers behind the YouTube comedy channel RackaRacka, which has 6.7 million subscribers. They have made an auspicious feature debut jointly built upon their familiarity with Internet youth culture and Mia’s personal journey of grief.

Her bestie Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s impressionable tween brother Riley (Joe Bird) and their single mum (Miranda Otto) are Mia’s makeshift family, their shared affection convincing. Every one of these sympathetic characters is drawn into Mia’s intensifying supernatural madness.

The heroine has opened a portal to the malevolent afterlife and crossed over, and there is no longer any way to tell the real from the hallucinatory or the living from the dead.

Hot take: A warning to the TikTok generation, and a nifty fright show for everybody else.