The week of December 23rd doesn't have much in the way of new releases, but it does host one potential Oscar hopeful: the Judy Garland biopic Judy, which arrives courtesy of Lionsgate Home Entertainment. As Garland, Renée Zellweger gives the kind of performance that single-handedly justifies movies like Judy. She's magnetic, oscillating between Garland's virtuoso performance sessions and her tremulous emotional states with heartbreaking abandon. If nothing else, Judy acts as a reminder that Zellweger deserved a far better fate than the wilderness that was her career from 2008 until now. Like the title character, she's a star, and one hopes Judy cements Zellweger in the public eye. However (there's always a "however," I suppose), as good as Zellweger is - and she is tremendous - she can't quite compensate for the fact that Judy is about as straightforward a biopic as one could expect. Initially, I thought Judy was going to focus exclusively on Garland's final days. While the majority does, director Rupert Goold and screenwriter Tom Edge cut back just frequently enough to Garland's Wizard of Oz days (here, she's played, and quite well, by Darci Shaw) that the whole film takes on a more conventional patina: we get the whole "highs, then lows" biopic structure yet again. Garland herself was far more complicated than the movie's approach is, and Zellweger is certainly up to tackling her subject's life in a more formally audacious way. You watch Judy and yearn for the movie it isn't.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "while the film attempts to document Judy's obviously self destructive tendencies, it also hedges its bets a little by showing how she was kind of magically able to pull herself together, at least at times, to give stellar performances on stage. And in fact it's this very inconsistency that tends to give the narrative a certain wobble at times. While there are a glut of 'real life' supporting players in the drama, including Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), who famously became Judy's fifth and final husband, the most important relationship in a way in the film is between Judy and her 'handler' in London, Rosalyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley). I frankly had no idea Wilder was another 'real life' personality until the actual Wilder showed up very briefly in the short making of featurette included on this Blu-ray disc as a supplement. The film might have done better to have given a bit more background on Wilder, rather than simply having her show up at various junctures to get Garland ready to perform (a Herculean task on more than one occasion)."
Like Judy, Blumhouse and RLJ Entertainment's Adopt a Highway coasts further than it should on the strength of its star turn. At just under eighty minutes (not counting credits), actor Logan Marshall-Green's directorial debut feels less like a proper feature than a bunch of terse, unformed vignettes all focusing around the same person: Russell Millings, a recently paroled ex-con who faces his freedom with equal parts wonder and terror. He's so quiet and recessive that we begin to wonder if there's even a person there, but then Russell finds an infant left in a dumpster, and the film shifts into a more baldly melodramatic vein. We're not prepared for the mumblecore version of Three Men and a Baby, and Green's script comes perilously close to facile sentimentality. To his credit, he dispenses with the baby narrative after about a couple of reels, only to replace it with three or four similarly undercooked plots as Russell, fearing re-incarceration, hits the road and experiences a series of misadventures. As with the baby stuff, there's little urgency and even less in the way of conflict or resolution, and then Adopt a Highway kinda just stops. Still, I'm tempted to recommend it all the same because Ethan Hawke plays Russell, and he is splendid. With each new role, Hawke makes it seem like he's offering the culmination of everything he's ever learned from a lifetime's worth of performances. Russell lets Hawke bridge two sections from his career: there's the innocent of Explorers or Dead Poets Society (Russell went to prison when he wasn't much older than Hawke's characters in those films), except he's peering out from the grizzled, unsteady rambler of In a Valley of Violence or his great True West Broadway run. The two tones exist in perfect harmony: it's another great turn from the most natural and unaffected actor working today.
Randy Miller III wrote that the film has enough "great material for a moving and effective drama, and Ethan Hawke's central performance is most certainly the glue that holds it together. But there's simply not enough here to fill Adopt a Highway's brief 81-minute lifespan: its central plot point summarized above barely accounts for 30% of the total running time and is over almost as quickly as it occurs. The film's momentum flattens out after Russell trades in illegal fatherhood for a spontaneous bus trip back home to learn more about his late father - an avid stamp collector who died during his time in prison - and only manages to regain its footing once his search concludes. But it's 'too little too late,' as the emotional spark of Adopt a Highway's first half is never recaptured. Although Russell's journey remains compelling due to Hawke's performance, very little else about Adopt a Highway feels as substantial as its misleading synopsis implies."