Film Picks: The Beanie Bubble, No Hard Feelings, Talk To Me

The Beanie Bubble (NC16)

110 minutes, available from Friday on Apple TV+, 3 stars

Comedian Zach Galifianakis is outstanding as Ty Warner, a toy company boss with all the surface goofiness and warmth that one might expect of a maker of kids’ plush toys.

But the actor blends the man’s charming ebullience with his sinister side to create a seamless whole.

His Warner is how one would imagine a textbook narcissist to be – a monster whose bottomless appetite for love is matched only by his need for control.

In the early 1990s, Americans went wild for a stuffed toy which sold in stores for US$5 each, but could fetch thousands of dollars in the resale market. The product was the brainchild of entrepreneur Ty Warner, aided by three women: his lover and business partner Robbie (Elizabeth Banks), wife Sheila (Sarah Snook) and employee Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan).

This dark comedy is adapted from Zac Bissonnette’s 2015 non-fiction book, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble.

No Hard Feelings (M18)

103 minutes, now showing, 3 stars

American actress Jennifer Lawrence 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.

She 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 Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) before he heads to college.

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.

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

Whang Yee Ling

Talk To Me (NC16)

95 minutes, now showing, 3 stars

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.

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.

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.

Whang Yee Ling