Critic Reviews

"Misty Green” is put together with so much observational exuberance that it leaves you both daunted and exhilarated.

Eleazar keeps us firmly in Misty’s corner in a bold performance that simultaneously pushes the audience away while pulling us in. The tenderness with which Rock has built this vehicle around character, actress and a milieu he clearly knows intimately imbue the material with an aching depth of feeling that stayed with me for days.

While the story itself will seem very familiar, the undercurrents of contempt will come off as more than a little problematic, and the various subplots orbiting the film’s main narrative will run the gamut from pretty convenient to extremely WTF, Rock has the benefit of a thermonuclear weapon in his arsenal. Her name is Rosalind Eleazar.

We watch Misty Green on the edge of our seats, wondering where she will land even as we can guess at the likeliest trajectory.

Much like its title character, the Hollywood drama Misty Green is angry, a bit of a mess and hard to shake.

Though his character study/industry satire is a sporadically scattershot venture, it proves a breakout showcase for Rosalind Eleazar.

It’s very funny and pretty disturbing and quite entertaining until it starts to run out of gas. And even then, you can forgive it because of Rosalind Eleazar, the British actress best known for “Slow Horses” who has the pride and the pipes and the passion to embody the title character.

This is a movie fueled by the rapid oscillation between Los Angeles’ ups and downs, a movie that gets more traction from being good and bad than it would from being a little more of either, but the prevailing irony that holds “Misty Green” together is that Rosalid Eleazar is never anything less than great.

In the end, the film works better as a portrait of a woman putting herself first than as a reveal of Hollywood’s inequitable games.

It’s to Eleazar’s great credit that, despite this and the increasingly convoluted motions of the script, she’s able to carve out her own space in the film.