At The Movies: Materialists is pleasing but predictable, Dead To Rights memorialises Nanjing Massacre

Materialists (NC16)

116 minutes, opens on Aug 28
★★★☆☆

The story: Professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), so confident at engineering marriages for the elite clients of her New York City agency, wavers when it comes to her two devoted suitors.

Materialists is Canadian film-maker Celine Song’s sophomore feature, a love triangle like her critically adored Past Lives (2023), albeit filtered through cold hard economics.

Matrimonies are mergers and acquisitions to Lucy. She is the risk analyst, crunching data on age, status and body mass index to find singles their mates.

Song herself had a side hustle as a matchmaker while she was a struggling playwright. Hence, this American dramedy offers sardonic insights about men wanting only women below 30; and women, including glamorous Lucy, stipulating their men be tall and high-income.

Charming private equity manager Harry (Pedro Pascal) checks all her boxes. He wines and dines her luxuriously after they meet at a society wedding, where he is the groom’s brother – and where her old flame John (Chris Evans) reappears as the catering waiter.

Lucy had left John five years earlier because she was sick of how poor they were, and he is still broke, at 37, and yet, their connection is immediate.

Should they get back together? Or does Lucy love Harry’s US$12 million penthouse apartment more?

The calculating cynic will learn that a person’s value cannot be quantified by algorithms.

But there remains the reality check on whether any romantic relationship can survive without financial security.

In place of uncomfortable answers is a predictable ending. Song ultimately surrenders to the sort of Hollywood fairy tale she had set out to critique, not that it isn’t a pleasing diversion with a reflective undertow and three easy-on-the-eyes stars.

Hot take: There is a sadder and more introspective movie inside this date flick.

Dead To Rights (NC16)

137 minutes, opens on Aug 28
★★★☆☆

The story: A-Chang (Liu Haoran) is trapped when Chinese capital Nanjing falls to the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II. China’s current cinema blockbuster is an account of the young postman posing as a photo technician for the enemy forces during the occupation, and sheltering Chinese civilians in his studio.

Some 300,000 Chinese were killed and raped during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre.

Chinese auteur Lu Chuan’s City Of Life And Death (2009) was a humanist masterpiece that experienced the horrors through both a Japanese sergeant and a Chinese officer.

Dead To Rights conversely distils a nation’s trauma into the survival ordeals of A-Chang and the half-dozen hiding in his claustrophobic basement: the family of the studio owner (Wang Xiao), the opera diva mistress (Gao Ye) of a morally conflicted translator (Wang Chuanjun) and a wounded soldier (Zhou You). The chamber drama from writer-director Ao Shen (No More Bets, 2023) is partisan in focus.

And it cannot help but turn jingoistic as the ensemble evolves from self-preservation to self-sacrifice, inspired by their love for their “beautiful motherland”.

The melodrama is unnecessary because this detailed historical re-enactment, which has grossed 2.7 billion yuan (S$483 million) domestically, already has much to stir popular sentiment, not least its release on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war.

The actors, including Daichi Harashima as a Japanese army photographer, are persuasive, and there are chilling scenes of arson, torture and dead bodies.

The story of A-Chang risking his life to smuggle out images of the savagery, thereby exposing to the world Japan’s crimes against humanity, is even based on actual events.

In the age of deepfakes, this movie is most potent for remembering photography’s capacity to bear witness to and preserve the truth.

Hot take: One of history’s darkest chapters is memorialised with film-making craft and politburo-pleasing nationalism.

Correction note: An earlier version of this story mis-identified actress Wang Zhener in the caption. This has been corrected.