Weekend Film Reviews: ‘Teenage Wasteland,’ ‘The Sun Never Sets’

Disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes has made a few curious decisions throughout her life. The most perplexing may be inviting absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder to make a documentary about her in the 34 days before she went to prison for defrauding investors. Film critic Tim Grierson says the result is “a kind of standoff” between Fielder and Holmes, who have something in common: neither are reliable. Holmes “is someone who is playing with reality and truth in ways that are akin to what Nathan Fielder does” in his own work, Grierson says.

Billionaire tech CEOs are villainized in two big releases this week: The Social Reckoning, a dramatization of Mark Zuckerberg’s showdown with a Facebook whistleblower, and Musk, a documentary about Elon Musk. Critics Amy Nicholson and Katie Walsh say that the films, while informative, turn unpleasant men into unpleasant viewing. Zuckerberg is portrayed before “his bro-y makeover,” Nicholson says, “which is sort of sad for Jeremy Strong, who just plays him as this very uptight, solemn, serious, dour, humorless, miserable little man.” According to Walsh, Musk is similarly grating in Musk, but she argues the film has at least some merit. “I do think it’s important that people know how much power he has,” Walsh says. “And how dumb he is.”

It took world-class makeup and prosthetics to turn Tom Cruise into Digger Rockwell, the titular star of Alejandro Iñáritu’s climate apocalypse satire Digger – even though Rockwell happens to be roughly as old as Cruise is in real life. The actor’s dramatic physical transformation is one of many heightened choices in the film, which, according to critic Christy Lemire, makes its arguments too loudly for them to land. “It is frantic, it is shrieky, it is incessantly pitched at the same level for nearly all of its two-hour running time,” Lemire says.

NBC’s hidden camera series, To Catch a Predator, transfixed audiences in the early 2000s. Host Chris Hansen baited suspected child predators with actors playing minors, then intervened at the last second with police. A new film, Primetime, asks whether this was moral. “After the screening, I couldn’t get home fast enough to take a shower,” says Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City. “But Robert Pattinson is excellent” as Hansen. Alison Willmore, film critic for New York magazine, was more impressed by supporting performances from Merritt Wever, as the show’s producer, and Skyler Gisondo, as one of the actors hired to bait potential predators. They’re “terrific as characters who are much more conflicted, and also tragic, in getting swept up in this really nightmarish production.”

What do you know about concrete? Not much, reckons John Wilson, the deliciously awkward filmmaker behind the HBO series How To with John Wilson. That show is an exercise in misdirection: each episode begins as a tutorial, narrated by Wilson, on how to complete a certain task — before meandering into unexpected territory. In keeping with that model, his new film, The History of Concrete, is about more than the building material. “It’s also about the impermanence of things,” says film critic Alonso Duralde. “How nothing lasts forever – certainly not concrete.” Wilson “understands that the mundane isn’t really mundane, it’s part of all our lives,” says film critic Dave White. “His sense of humor sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you’re feeling something.”