Jennifer Connelly

Alice Englert

Ben Whishaw

Ana Scotney

Dasha Nekrasova

Karan Gill

Marlon Williams

Alistair Sewell

Beulah Koale

Kahu Wesling MacGregor

Gabe McDonnell

Mel Odedra

Keporah Torrance

Xana Tang

Thomas Sainsbury

Vaishalee Bhana

Bruno Du Bois

Molly Hallam

Robbie Magasiva

Edward Clendon

Perry Piercy

James Cain

Goretti Chadwick

Jane Campion

Anji Kreft

Carmel McGlone

Lara Macgregor

Molly O'Shea

Sarah Munn

Desray Armstrong

Stephen Braun

Matt Henley

Stefan Knight

Cameron McArthur

Heather Hayward

Ryan Algar

Steve Finnigan

Joe Fisher

Alan Kidd

Emily Carter

Simon Price

Kirsty Cameron

Karla Spika

Sadie Wilson

Helen Whiting

Stu Turner

Drama

Comedy

Bad Behaviour

Bee-Hive Productions

New Zealand Film Commission

Fulcrum Media Finance

Images & Sound

Protagonist Pictures

Sandy Lane Productions

Ask Me About My Films

New Zealand

United Kingdom

United States of America

English

former child star

woman director

Manuel São Bento

FULL SPOILER-FREE REVIEW @ https://www.msbreviews.com/movie-reviews/bad-behaviour-review-sundance-2023

"Bad Behaviour boasts an all-in, powerful performance from Jennifer Connelly, but it’s too messy, tonally unbalanced, and narratively all-over-the-place to connect with. It wastes too much time being nonsensical before the mother-daughter relationship gets interesting. Disappointing."

Rating: D+

CinemaSerf

My first solo film of 2024. Just me in a cinema and after half an hour I was beginning to understand why! "Lucy" (Jennifer Connelly) is trying to have a phone conversation with her daughter "Dylan" (auteur Alice Englert) whilst en route to a remote Oregon retreat. She's thousands of miles away in New Zealand and we get the distinct impression that she's not especially interested. That's a feeling that's quite contagious as we all now endure her experience at the spiritual "Loveranch". A supposedly tech-free place run by "Elon" (Ben Whishaw) that encourages people to open their hearts, their souls and their brains to meaningless waffle about finding yourself. Now insofar as this is supposed to be a parody of this kind of rip-off facility, it sort of works - especially with the arrival of model and DJ "Beverly" (Dasha Nekrasova) to whom "Lucy" takes not just an instant dislike but also the leg of a chair! Meantime the daughter has an incident of her own on the whacky film set where she is stunt artist. That results in her losing her job and racing home to be by the side of her now incarcerated mother. If you weren't bored already, then the best is yet to come - a positively nauseating tale of family discord, a suicide attempt involving some pills and the shallow end of a swimming pool and, finally, some meaningful conversations amidst the forest with running water gently trickling a-foot! Can they salvage the relationship? Does it need savaging? Do we care? Perhaps this read better as a script, and there are times when I felt the wrath of "Lucy" emanating from the screen, but for the most part this is the stuff of a really poor stage play that reminded me again that Ben Whishaw is no great shakes at all on the big screen - indeed, I wonder if he was actually acting at all! As "Yoda" might have said - one fun scene does not a movie make.

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Bad Behaviour( 2023)

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A review by Manuel São Bento

Written by Manuel São Bento on Thu Jan 26 2023

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