Omni Loop

Zoya and Paula in the lab

Sci-fi or is it? Omni Loop certainly doesn’t look or feel like a sci-fi movie. In fact it’s all about human foibles, regrets, the life lived rather than the life that could have been lived. But its ostensible story – a woman reliving the last week of her life over and over again thanks to a magic time-travelling pill – has sci-fi written all over it. Groundhog Week, you could call it. The action sets out from the point where Mary-Louise Parker’s Zoya Lowe is given a terminal diagnosis. Heading home from the hospital to die with the family, instead of breathing her last with them at the decisive moment she takes one of … Read more

Bottoms

Josie and PJ

How do you follow Shiva Baby, a breakthrough comedy of exquisite embarrassment? Bottoms is the answer. Put another way – you don’t follow Shiva Baby, you head off in a different direction. So Emma Seligman, who wrote and directed Shiva Baby, has made a high-school comedy this time around, with Rachel Sennott now as a co-writer and again as her star and Ayo Edebiri drafted in, who you might know from the TV show The Bear. All three were friends together in their New York University days. Sennott and Edebiri play PJ and Josie, a pair of lesbian best friends who also happen to be very unpopular at school. Not because they’re gay … Read more