Garland's back -- in the interesting Goold/ Edge/Quilter/Zellweger collaboration, JUDY

Judy Garland's legion of fans may be dying off in large numbers these days -- the famed singer/ actress was at her peak from the 1930s thru the early 1960s -- but those of actress Renée Zellweger, despite the latter's six-year disappearance from movies during the 2010-2016 period, are still around and large enough, TrustMovies suspects, to help make the new film about Garland, simply titled JUDY, a moderate success.

As directed by Britisher Rupert Goold (shown below), with a screenplay by Tom Edge (from the stage play, End of the Rainbow, by Peter Quilter), the movie covers the last years of Ms Garland's life during her final and very up-and-down performances in London -- with numerous flashbacks to her early days and career as MGM's most successful musical star.

As a film, this is all pretty standard and mostly downbeat stuff, due to Garland's addiction to drugs and alcohol, along with her either choosing poor marriage partners or not understanding how, nor being able, to make a success of those partnerships.

So Judy proves a mostly glum movie -- it would have to be were it to remain true to the facts of this difficult and sad life. Those rumors of how a certain Mr. Mayer and his minions treated the young Garland are shown via pointed if somewhat obvious scenes.

Meanwhile our adult Judy -- clearly down on her luck and performing daytime shows for little pay with her two younger children (shown two photos below; the movie features but a single scene with her daughter Liza) -- meets her fifth and last husband, Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock, below), whose presence is welcome until Garland's drinking and drug use helps ruin this relationship, too.

Interestingly, we don't hear a lick of Garland's singing until maybe 40 minutes or more into the film. How it is introduced is quiet and clever, too. From that point we get more songs, and Ms Zellweger does a good job of giving us Garland's look and sound, even if, to my mind, no one -- not even Liza Minnelli -- has come close to capturing that unique voice and the enormous range of emotions it contained.

Yet even the musical numbers here are all tinged -- occasionally a good deal more than that -- with sadness and failure to launch. The film does not shy away from the addictive behavior that made Garland's reputation increasingly bleak until almost no one wanted to take a chance on booking her -- for movies or concerts.

Garland had a large gay following, well before homosexuality came out of the closet and when, in England, it was still a crime for which you could go to prison. Yet the single "up" scene in the film involves two gay fans of the singer, waiting to greet her after the show and ending up making her dinner in their flat.

True or not, it makes a lovely few minutes and gives the movie an ooomph that helps it move along, while leading to the kind of feel-good finale, brief as it might be, that makes nice use of Garland's signature song and should put a tear into the eyes of die-hard fans.

The film's production design is first-rate, with sets, costumes and cars all nicely period, and care has been taken to not duplicate exactly but clearly still match the look, style and colors of Garland's attire. And Zellweger certainly recreates the emotional life of the singer -- on stage and off.

From Roadside Attractions and LD Entertainment and running just under two full hours, Judy opens this Friday, September 27, nationwide. Here in South Florida, you can find it in Miami at the Regal South Beach 18, AMC's Sunset Place 24 and Aventura Mall 24 theatres, CMX Brickell City Center 10, Silverspot at Met Square Cinemas; in Fort Lauderdale at The Classic Gateway 4; at the Paradise 24 in Davie; at the Cinemark Palace 20, Living Room Theaters, and Regal Shadowood 16, all in Boca Raton; at the Movies of Delray 5 and Movies of Lake Worth; at the Cinemark Boynton Beach 14; at Cobb's Downtown at the Mall Gardens Palm 16; at the Royal Palm Beach 18; the Cinepolis Jupiter 14; and the Regal Treasure Coast Mall 16 in Jensen Beach. 

The utter hopelessness of today's China: Vivian Qu's noir melodrama ANGELS WEAR WHITE

I'm not sure from where the title of this very dark and unsettling Asian-noir melodrama comes from, but the only even partial white worn in ANGELS WEAR WHITE, the new film from writer/director Vivian Qu (shown below), comes at the film's beginning, as a couple of young schoolgirls check into a seaside hotel, accompanied by an older man who seems just a tad suspicious. After that, we have to wait until the finale of this popular-at-festivals film to finally give us an all-white dress worn by its lead actress, the very good Vicky Chen, who ends this film in an oddball scene that

combines coincidence with a feel-good climax which can be interpreted, I suspect, in several ways: as an escape (but to where?), as the filmmaker's need to give us something positive at last, or perhaps as the old died-and-gone-to-heaven number in which our heroine is now one of those titular "angels."

In any case, how you react to this finale -- which includes, by the way, a marvelous and surprising use of one of Hollywood's most enduring icons -- will probably determine your approval rating for Angels Wear White.

The film tells the tale of the two little girls (above), together with their "keeper," all of whom are checked into that hotel by Mia, an only slightly older girl who, without proper identity papers, is working illegally at the hotel and soon becomes privy to a very bad event that happens there.

The first thing you may notice here, something that continues and only grows worse throughout the movie, is how venal and crooked is almost everyone we see. If Ms Qu is not saying that corruption is a -- probably the -- way of life in China, I'd be very surprised. One can't help but wonder how a film like this got by the Chinese censors. (I'm very glad it did, however.)

As usual, the more powerful are the people shown, the more corrupt and impossible-to-counter they are. This makes cops, top to bottom, the worst of the lot, with the medical profession not too far behind. Women, particularly young girls, are at the bottom of the power chain. Not to say that Ms Qu does not indict women, too. The little girl we get to know best here, Wen, has a mother (below, left) you would gladly rid the girl of, had you the chance.

In the heroics department are just two people, a female lawyer (played by Shi Ke, shown below) who stays on top of the abuse case in the center of the film, along with Wen's up-till-now mostly absentee father, Geng Le (above, right), whom we first imagine to be just another male "rotter" but who slowly takes on surprising depth and emotional strength at the movie moves along.

By the roiling and powerful climax, you'll want to take a semi-automatic to both the police and the hospital doctors. And yet what shortly precedes and then follows this seems sheer folly in terms of filmmaking. When a certain character turns out to be have been badly beaten (instead of being outright murdered, which would make much more sense, given the society we've seen here) and then a short time later appears bruise-free so that she can dress in white (like those titular angels) and give us a feel-good finale, you will wonder if Ms Qu has capitulated to Hollywood -- and not simply because of how she presents that movie-star icon at film's end.

The performances are A-1, especially from the three young girls, as well as that of Ms Shi as the lady lawyer and Mr. Le as Wen's dad. And the director's use of background shots -- as, above, with various wedding photos being taken near the beachside hotel -- speaks volumes about appearance vs reality in Chinese culture. Angels Wear White has much to recommend it. I just wish it had a little more.

From KimStim, in Chinese and with English subtitles and running 107 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, May 4, in New York City at The Metrograph, and on May 18 in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Music Hall 3.