The premise

The film rests on Noémie Merlant, who stars as a luxury hotel inspector gathering information about the people and the place with quiet curiosity. She is keen to discover what happens behind the executive decisions made by the immaculately-suited manager Margot (Naomi Watts). There is an elusive visitor at the Rosefield Palace named Kei (Will Sharpe), who arrives, speaks illogical lines like he is “a Frequent International Traveler, a FIT,” and leaves.

For a film that wants to explore female sexuality and agency, Emmanuelle plays it too safe and pristine to warrant any interest in the journey of its lead heroine. Emmanuelle is presented without any backstory, her body framed from closeups, her face lit with a sort of puzzled expression. What is she thinking? What does she want? She does not know it herself, and neither does the viewer.

Merlant looks beautiful in the pixie cut and is styled glamorously, but the actor looks out of place and blanketed. Then there is Naomi Watts, who seems surprised to even exercise that British accent in a totally thankless role. Will Sharpe’s nod is unfit to be a FIT here, and the actor is wasted in a severely underwritten character.

Poor screenplay and dialogue

There’s a puzzling lack of depth in Diwan and co-screenwriter Rebecca Zlotowski’s screenplay, with almost no focus on building this titular character from her encounters and interactions. More interest seems to lie in the production design, with the luxurious hotel lobbies and suites- framed as if Diwan was also making a case for a hotel advertisement. The dialogues are strictly one-note and sometimes illogical at places, especially when they are rendered with such stubbornness amid the elite hotel setting.

Emmanuelle is a strange case of a film which is not aware of what it wants to be. Forget the need for female gaze, there is no gaze at all. Emmanuelle is self-aware of a certain subtext. Still, Diwan’s revisionist approach stops at giving the female protagonist a sense of autonomy without knowing what that truly means for her. It is just too many exquisite hotel shots, luxury food arrangement, and aimless talk to actually mean anything. She barely has an orgasm, and the sex scenes feel like they are shot in some kind of emotional vacuum- devoid of any psychological and emotional burden.

There is too much attention to rhythm, style and proportion in a film that warranted more of a free fall, a stirring anticipation for mess. Emmanuelle is aimless, dramatically inert and a little too safe to invest in.

Emmanuelle is available to stream on Lionsgate Play.

To think that Mike White didn’t know who Lisa was and had reservations about casting her.

The “White Lotus” creator might not have been a Blink right out of the gate, but if he happened to tune into the Sahara tent live stream on Friday night, he’d have seen one of his supporting cast come into solo stardom with full, pyrotechnic force.

“For the White Lotus fans, you might be surprised to see Mook onstage,”Lisa said, laughing at the whiplash between her recent roles. “This is her when she’s not working.”

Blackpink fans saw her on this stage in 2019 and the main stage as recently as 2023, but this is a newly assured Lisa blowing through her own lane. (She did not allow photographers to shoot this performance). Emerging on a monolithic pillar to “Thunder,” Lisa wore a bodysuit rippling with metal claws and singing some of the most virtuosic lead lines and, veering into the heaving trap of “FXCK Up the World,”double time rapping I’ve heard from a K-pop act at Coachella. Of course she’s great at this, but in this new setting, you could really, definitively hear it.

It’s a stock standard solo star move to emerge from a popular group with an edgier set of influences. But when she played the early solo cut “Money” too, a leering rap banger, she showed she’s always had this in her. This set was Blackpink shorn of any typical K-Pop melodic tricks and pivots. These songs have room to breathe, eeriness to spare and new muscle to kick with.

There were tender moments too to show her range like the throwback R&B of “When I’m With You.” And she showed she’s a close study of au courant Gen Z retro hits, slipping into the breezy disco of “Moonlit Floor,” her kinda-cover of Sixpence None The Richer. “Elastigirl” riffed off Ciara’s “Oh,” as did “Rockstar” for M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls,” allusive moves that might be hack if she wasn’t so expert at it. The artfully racy dancing in the latter was enough the leave the crowd howling.

The real smoker was her disco masterstroke “Born Again,” or maybe the drum-heaving “Lifestyle.” But the lighters up, lost-love ballad of “Dream “ was emblematic. In the lyrics she called back to the year of her band’s debut here, maybe the last good year before the world fell apart. K-pop moves so fast that six years ago feels like a lifetime, but Lisa has already evolved enough to have earned quick a look back. Mook would have loved to see it.

I vividly remember Sunday school from childhood, and the animated feature “The King of Kings” is the kind of movie that would’ve been shown in class over two weekends. Distributed by the Christianity-centered Angel Studios, and written and directed by first-timer Jang Seong-ho (a visual effects master from Korean cinema), it is less of a fully satisfying animated feature that works on its own terms than a teaching tool that is clearly intended as such. It’s actually based on a teaching tool from another century: Charles Dickens’ “The Life of Our Lord,” which Dickens based on stories that he used to tell his own children at bedtime.

There’s a framing device wherein Dickens (voiced by Ben Kingsley) tells the story that we’re all watching. It’s sparked by events in the opening sequence in which Dickens’ boisterous son makes an unfortunate scene during a theatrical reading of “A Christmas Carol” by Dickens (a devoted stage performer who remained involved in theater, including as a one-man show performer, long after he became a famous novelist). The boy is obsessed with King Arthur. Dickens informs him and his siblings that the legend of King Arthur is, like so many other stories—including “A Christmas Carol”—influenced by the New Testament.

And then we’re off to the races. The movie sprints through major points in the story, including the birth of Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem, the growth of his “flock” and his increasing notability as a thorn in the side of the Roman occupation, various major and minor miracles, and of course the condemnation to death, the scourging and crucifixion, and the resurrection. Sometimes the story cuts back to Dickens and/or his kids reacting, and other times he and his son will appear as background characters or witnesses to something that’s happening in Jesus’ story, which gets weird when Jesus starts talking back to people like a chatbot asking a website visitor if they need help with anything.

The three-dimensional, computer-generated animation will be familiar to viewers, as it’s got the same stylistic defaults we see in a lot of Disney-Pixar and DreamWorks cartoon features: characters with sticklike bodies and huge Funko Pop heads whose movements are a little too smooth even when they’re supposed to be awkward or frenzied. Thankfully, there’s no contemporary slang to “modernize” the characters, nor are there any nostalgic needle-drops of pop songs that parents and grandparents enjoyed in their youth to keep them from zoning out, so thanks for the small favors.

But things still feel a bit off once we get to the tragic part of the story, and we’re shown an array of images that create—uh, let’s say, cognitive dissonance. A Funko Pop-head Roman centurion takes a flail to the back of Our Funko Pop-head Lord, the worst of the violence thankfully hidden by a whipping post, then puts a crown of thorns on his head and sneers. As in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” the Roman centurions are depicted as sadistic bullies, but the Roman powers-that-be as something closer to full human beings: essentially conflicted bureaucrats. Pontius Pilate is a guy who has no dog in this hunt, as my Midwestern grandpa liked to say, but still has to order Jesus crucified to appease the Hebrews who want him dead. Jesus and other sympathetic characters are gifted with passing-as-Gentile facial features, while the enemies in Jesus’ faith have more stereotypically “Jewish” noses and are generally kind of disgusting from first glance. Pilate is “complicated,” but this bunch is just rotten. A few have faces that verge on the sorts of antisemitic caricatures that used to get people banned from social media.

That all of this is presented to us in the manner of an adorable Puppetoon makes it play all the more strangely. The sense that the subject and the presentation are not well matched continues to escalate, all the way through the moment when Funko Pop-head Jesus is raised up on the cross.

There is, of course, an excellent chance that you’ll see this movie and think, “What a perfect way to teach the story of Jesus to children, even ones who are not especially interested in Charles Dickens,” or perhaps, “This message of generalized kindness is badly needed during this cruel period of history.” There is perhaps also a chance that you’ll think that this material could have been handled with a lot more passion, imagination, and cleverness, as other Biblically-themed animated features (including the classic “The Prince of Egypt“) have already proved.