Your weekend preview: What to see (and what to skip) in the thea

It’s Oscar weekend (yea?). In what could be seen as alternative programming, there are a couple of movies opening this weekend with a feminist bent. 

Why so un-serious? The Joker’s ex-girlfriend, Harley Quinn is out to party, and kill bad guys.

On the light side, there’s the first superhero movie of the year, Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (Rating: B-plus), starring Margot Robbie as the former psychiatrist turned hot-mess punk super-villain. This female-centric comic action film is directed by Cathy Yan and features a cast with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ali Wong, with Ewan McGregor as the evil dude.  Our reviewer Thom Ernest says this is a “sheer audacious, comic-book diversion,” that really doesn’t pretend to have a deeper meaning.

On the serious side, there’s The Assistant  (B-plus) which reviewer Kim Hughes praiHses as a milestone in the post-Weinstein era. The film stars Julia Garner (TV’s Ozark) as an assistant to a movie boss who tries to blow the whistle on the abuse of power. Our Bonne Laufer also interviews Australian writer-director Kitty Green, on The Assistant and the conversation about film’s gendered culture.

There are two more dramas about the battle against corruption: Italian veteran director, Marco Bellocchio gives us The Traitor (B-plus), a lavish, if drawn-out, biography of Mafia informer, Tommaso Buscetta, with some sensational court-room scenes. And Citizen K (B) is Alex Gibney’s documentary about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Russian oligarch turned political activist in exile. It’s a grim familiar, reminder of the perfidy of Vladimir Putin. 

Finally, our West Coast bureau chief, Linda Barnard, weighs in on Come To Daddy (C-plus), a comic horror film, leavened by Canadian actor Stephen McHattie’s performance as a weirdo bad dad.