The Better Sister, on Prime Video

Statistically, most murders are committed within families. The Mackintosh family is especially suspect, since the late husband was a lawyer and the widow is a journalist. Inevitably, they become prime tabloid fodder, because she married her unstable drug-addicted sister’s late ex-husband. Nevertheless, the estranged siblings must work together to save the young man they both consider their son in co-creators Olivia Milch & Regina Corrado’s eight-episode The Better Sister, adapted from Alafair Burke’s novel, which premieres today on Prime Video.

The murder of Adam Mackintosh is real. The break-in was faked. Unfortunately, the circumstances lead Detectives Nancy Guidry and Matt Bowen to Chloe Taylor’s step-son, Ethan. She is desperate to protect him, but, inconveniently, his biological mother Nicky Mackintosh now has custody. Their reunion is especially tense, because Taylor once agreed to sign her sister into straight-jacket-style rehab, to secure her future husband’s sole custody rights. It seemed like the thing to do at the time, but she starts to regret her decision as she learns more about the circumstances of her husband’s first marriage.

Guidry’s resentment of Taylor’s “privilege” makes her happy to focus the entire investigation on Ethan. Awkwardly, his lawyer, Michelle Sanders, shares her low opinion of the sister-mothers, but she has sympathy for their son and she is very good at her job, so they put up with her. She was referred to Taylor by Jake Rodriguez, her husband’s associate, with whom she was on the verge of having an affair. At the same time, he was closely assisting her late husband’s representation of a dodgy multi-national company, whose specialty seems to be constructing soccer stadiums in the Middle East, with suspicious rapidity.

So, clearly there are a lot of motives and conflicts of interest to untangle. Indeed, The Better Sister has several twists worthy of a Gillian Flynn adaptation, but the tone is way, way trashier. At least in this case, the soapy luridness is also entertaining. If you are looking for a hothouse fully stocked with family secrets and sneaky scheming, you will find plenty here.

Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks fully embrace the spirit of the material, diving head-first into the angst and melodrama. Similarly, Kim Dickens is one-person snark-factory as unabashedly abrasive and defiantly biased as Det. Guidry. Yet, nobody is more flamboyant than Matthew Modine as Adam’s sleazy, ambiguously villainous, and proudly out boss, Bill Braddock.

Signe Baumane’s My Love Affair with Marriage, on OVID.tv

Evidently, the Soviet regime ruined weddings and funerals, because they made them all about Communism rather than the people everyone came to honor. However, Baumane’s pseudo-proxy cannot really blame the old, bad state for the failure of her first marriage. Most of the culpability lies with her selfish ex, and maybe to lesser extent herself, for excusing his bad behavior for far too long. Yet, the real culprit is human biology, because it prompts bad decisions with its dopamine and the like in Baumane’s animated feature My Love Affair with Marriage, which premieres Friday on OVID.tv.

While the film starts on Russian-occupied Karafuto Island, “Zelma” mostly grew up in Latvia, where she didn’t take guff from any of her classmates. Yet, that perversely made her something of an outsider, since girls were expected to be meek. Consequently, it is on a day-trip to Vilnius where she loses her v-status, to Jonas, a much older artist. Of course, the loss of “purity” holds dire implications, even in the USSR. Yet, Zelma navigates such pitfalls better than her roommate, who dies as a result of an unplanned and untreated pregnancy.

Zelma assumes her marriage to Sergei will be the answer to everything, but eventually she recognizes what the audience knew all along. He is a cad and a user. She thinks Bo from Sweden will be different—and he is. Yet, it still doesn’t quite work. Actually, her second marriage is rather sad, because he is not a bad guy. Again, it is just a matter of chemistry, as “Biology” herself explains.

Periodically, the personification of biology narrates interludes that illustrate exactly what is happening to the neural receptors and the brain chemistry of the film’s characters. Think of these slightly surreal segments as if they were industrial films made for 1960s sex ed classes, adapted into animation by Bill Plympton. The first two or three are really cool and funny but the motif loses it potency over time. (Imagine if the Burt Reynolds control room skit in Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know had been stretched throughout the entire film.)

Yes, less probably could have been more, but Love Affair with Marriage is still a distinctive animated film from a refreshingly offbeat animator. Her previous feature Rocks in My Pockets is still the film you should start with, but together they make quite a revealing personal statement.

47 Meters Down: Mandy Moore vs. Sharks

Seriously, why didn’t they just go whale watching? They could have been safely drinking coffee and eating scones on-deck. However, Kate thought her sister Lisa needed to become more adventurous, so she cajoled her into some shark-cage-diving. She might just fix her permanently in Johannes Roberts’ 47 Meters Down (trailer here), which opens today nationwide.

Lisa has just been dumped by her longtime BF for being a fuddy-duddy, so Kate took his place on the vacation her sister had planned. Kate decides a little shark-cage-diving will be good for what ails her, especially since they will be joining two very single fellow tourists on the S.S. Rickety Barnacle, skippered by the Captain Ron-like Taylor. Shrewdly, he doesn’t waste money on extravagantly strong cable, allowing him to pass the savings on to you.

For about ten seconds, Lisa and Kate ooh and ah at fish. Then the cable slips a little and bam—47 meters down, baby. At this point they are in a world of hurt. Good old Taylor just chummed the water so its shark central out there. They only have about an hour of oxygen under the best of circumstances, but it is depleting more quickly due to panic and exertion. Plus, their scuba coms are only in range around the 40-meter mark, so someone will have to swim up seven meters to talk to the boat.

As set-ups go, Roberts and co-screenwriter Ernest Riera put the sisters in quite the pickle. This is definitely a B-movie, but it is still pretty compelling to watch the shark-bait siblings struggle to survive. Although a few scenes are a bit murky, most of Mark Silk’s underwater cinematography is rather spectacular. However, the ending is bound to be divisive. Viewers who manage to emotionally invest will most likely get angry, but those who are only there for the shark show will just say the heck with it.

Mandy Moore and Claire Holt do almost all of their acting wearing diving masks, but to their credit, they are convincingly freaked out. Frankly, as Captain Taylor, Matthew Modine spends so much time explaining the Bends and nitrogen narcosis, he could probably do safe-diving PSAs in his sleep. Roberts opts to keep him largely off-camera as the disembodied voice they hear, so we never see Taylor up-top, worrying about the scathing Yelp reviews the sisters will write if they survive. As for the sharks, they are big.

It is definitely sharks—plural. Unlike Jaws 4: The Revenge, there is nothing personal here. Lisa and Kate are just trapped (and eventually bleeding) amid a whole mess of jabber-jaws. Obviously, it is no accident 47 Meters is opening in mid-June. It is nothing fancy, but it delivers “beach read”-style suspense, without even scaring viewers away from the beaches. Recommended as a drive-in, bonehead-distraction kind of movie, 47 Meters Down opens today throughout the City, including the AMC Empire and the Regal Union Square.