Producers: Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen   Director: Karen Maine   Screenplay: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber   Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, Sean Teale, Kyle Allen, Bradley Whitford, Minnie Driver, Spencer Stevenson, Christopher McDonald, Nicholas Rowe, Nico Hiraga, Alistair Toovey, Alhaji Fofana and Lew Temple   Distributor: Hulu

Grade: C

The zig-zags, chronological and geographical, involved in “When You Were Mine,” Rebecca Serle’s 2012 YA riff on “Romeo and Juliet,” and its film adaptation are enough to cause whiplash.  Serle moved her different-perspective slant on Shakespeare from fourteenth-century Verona to twenty-first century California, and now Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have moved it back, while keeping the modern sensibility.  But the now-retitled “Rosaline” merely proves that neither the novelist nor the screenwriters are a patch on Tom Stoppard, who pulled off a similar take on “Hamlet” in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” with an intelligence this dopey picture utterly lacks.

In “Romeo and Juliet” Rosaline is never seen, but is an important character nonetheless—the niece of Lord Capulet with whom Romeo is initially besotted.  It’s the hope of encountering her that leads Romeo to crash the Capulet ball where he first sees Juliet.

In Shakespeare, however, Rosaline has “forsworn to love.”  Here, as played by Kaitlyn Dever, she’s a shrewd, independent-minded girl secretly cavorting with bumbling Romeo (Kyle Allen), though when he expresses his love for her, she declines to reciprocate—or to seriously consider any of the candidates for matrimony her exasperated father (Bradley Whitford) is proposing. 

In fact it’s an ill-fated boat ride with the latest candidate, a handsome but impecunious soldier named Dario (Sean Teale), which prevents Rosaline from attending the ball.  When she finds out that Romeo has abruptly switched his affections to her ingénue cousin Juliet (Isabela Merced), daughter of Lord Capulet (Christopher McDonald), whom he met at the party, she’s furious, and aims to sabotage their relationship.

So the screenplay moves along on two tracks.  One is centered on Rosaline’s attempts to “instruct” the supposedly unsophisticated Juliet in the feminine arts, with the real purpose being to sidetrack her romance with Romeo.  It doesn’t work, because though young, Juliet is smart and likable—so much that Rosaline eventually changes her mind and promotes the very relationship she was trying to subvert, helping the two kids work their way through the convolutions of Shakespeare’s last act and sail to Cyprus alive and well, even if a coda suggests that their future together might not be entirely idyllic.

Rosaline’s change of heart is connected to the script’s second track—her growing attraction to Dario, as strong a personality as she is.  There’s more than a touch of “The Taming of the Shrew” at work here, though this modern version of Kate doesn’t capitulate to the obviously right man so completely—she is a modern, liberated sort after all.  In fact, as the film progresses, the story of Rosaline and Dario dominates that of Romeo and Juliet.  The movie’s entered “10 Things I Hate About You” territory.

Neustadter and Weber use secondary characters to add to the jokily contemporary feel, despite the cheesy period trappings of Andrew McAlpine’s production design and Mitchell Travers’ costumes (though they’re colorfully rendered in Laurie Rose’s cinematography).  Paris (Spencer Stevenson) is transformed into a gay best friend, and Rosaline’s harried nurse (Minnie Driver) repeatedly confirms her competence in medical matters by insisting that she’s “registered.”  But the worst offense in that regard is a guy called Steve the Courier (Nico Hiraga), an inept slacker type who always messes up his message deliveries.  His multiple appearances drag the movie into the comedic dregs, not to mention that they’re slackly paced and terribly unfunny—the most painful evidence that Karen Maine’s direction isn’t very rigorous, a trait that didn’t much matter in her previous films, “Obvious Child” and “Yes, God, Yes,” but is here a distinct impediment.  So is the overly cute score credited jointly to Ian Hultquist and Drum & Lace.

Among the cast Merced makes a lovely Juliet and Allen a goofily slapstick Romeo.  But they play second fiddle to Dever and Teale.  The former gets the intensity of Rosaline, although in the early going she’s rather strident, with the “man girl” attitude sometimes slipping into something very like obnoxiousness.  But Teale’s combination of swagger and sensitivity is just about perfect.  The supporting cast is generally fine—though Alistair Toovey’s Tybalt is as over-the-top irritating as Hiraga’s message-carrier.  One’s spirits rise every time Driver shows up with some brittle remark, but Whitford can do little but shrug and sigh as Rosaline’s put-upon dad.

One might point out that for a movie directed at a younger audience, “Rosaline” contains some awfully rough language parents might object to—presumably the result of a decision to seek a PG-13 rating so as not to come across as kids’ stuff.  But that doesn’t keep it from being a pretty puerile reworking of Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers.

Producers: Ryan Murphy, Jason Blum and Carla Hacken  Director: John Lee Hancock   Screenplay: John Lee Hancock   Cast: Donald Sutherland, Jaeden Martell, Joe Tippett, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Cyrus Arnold, Colin O’Brien, Thomas Francis Murphy, Peggy J. Scott, Thalia Torio  and Daniel Reece   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C 

The mellow, meditative, melancholy side of Stephen King is on view in John Lee Hancock’s adaptation of a story from his 2020 collection “If It Bleeds.”  Comparisons might be drawn to “Hearts in Atlantis” (Scott Hicks’s 2001 film, not the 1999 story with that title), which like “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” is centered on the bond that develops between a boy and an old man.  A supernatural element is introduced, but for the most part it’s the human side of things that dominates.  Hicks’s film is superior to Hancock’s, but then it remains one of the better King adaptations, if a very loose one.

The protagonist in “Phone” is fourteen-year old Craig (Colin O’Brien), who lives with his widowed father (Joe Tippett) in the small town of Harlow, Maine; the time is the early 2000s.  The richest man in town, Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland), hears Craig read a lesson in church and offers him a job reading to him from books in his library several hours a week, since his eyesight is failing.  (In “Atlantis,” Anthony Hopkins’ Ted similarly pays Anton Yelchin’s Bobby to read him the papers.) 

The two get to know one another during their reading sessions, which extend over some years until Craig (now played by Jaeden Martell) goes off to high school in a neighboring town, where he quickly catches the unfriendly eye of Kenny (Cyrus Arnold), the campus bully and drug-dealer.  Harrigan, a powerful finance mogul, impresses on Craig the necessity of dealing harshly with enemies, but the boy’s understandably intimated by thuggish Kenny.

In the course of their friendship Harrigan has given Craig lottery tickets as presents, and eventually one proves a winner.  His father has given him a newly-released iPhone as a Christmas gift, and he uses part of his winnings to purchase one for Harrigan as well.  Despite initial resistance, the old man becomes as addicted to the device as Craig and his fellow students, although he prophesizes about the dangers it poses (and, as many now realize, has caused). (Oddly, the theme of addiction also plays a role in King’s “Atlantis” story, though there a group of young men get hooked on a card game, with disastrous effect.)

When Harrigan suddenly dies, a stricken Craig places the dead man’s phone in the coffin; and when he’s beaten up by Kenny, he texts his deceased friend about it.  When Kenny dies in an accidental fall soon after, Craig wonders whether Harrigan is responsible.  Later, when Craig’s favorite high school teacher (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) is killed by a drunk driver (Daniel Reece) who gets off with a short stint in a luxurious rehab center, he asks another favor of his dead friend and benefactor, but not without misgivings.

King’s story is a pretty slight piece, which might have better served as the basis for an episode in a TV anthology series.  (In fact “The Twilight Zone” did a couple of half-hour episodes about phone message from the grave, “Long Distance All” in 1961 and “Night Call” in 1964.)  Perhaps as a result, Hancock and editor Robert Franzen adopt a solemn pace that brings the tale to feature length, but at the expense of sluggishness.

 As the comparisons with “Hearts of Atlantis” indicate, moreover, it traffics in familiar King tropes (the schoolyard bully appears in innumerable King works), and though the smartphone gambit adds a new touch, it comes with some caveats—is it really credible that in 2008 or so, high school kids would segregate themselves in the cafeteria based on which brand of phones they had, and spend all their time staring at the screens while their phone-less classmates stood outside the room, jealously watching them from the hallway through a glass partition?  (Perhaps this is intended to hit an amusing note, though it’s ponderously presented, and the rest of the picture is conspicuous for its lack of humor, save for the Tammy Wynette “Stand by Your Man” ringtone Craig installs on the phones.) Moreover, the monitory comments Harrigan, and at the end Craig, make about the pernicious powers of the devices are crushingly obvious.

Still, the film remains watchable, due to an unobtrusive period look (production design by Michael Corenblith and costumes by Daniel Orlandi), elegantly understated cinematography by John Schwartzman, and a typically cunning performance by Sutherland.  When he leaves the scene, unhappily, the requirement of carrying the film passes entirely to Martell, who seems a nice enough young man but not a terribly compelling actor; here he underplays morosely throughout, even when he gets a date for a dance with his crush (Thalia Torio); he does match up fairly well, though, with O’Brien, who’s equally subdued.  The supporting cast is merely okay, with Tippett making little impression while Arnold makes too much.  Javier Navarrete’s score doesn’t come on too strong.

Among the innumerable movies made from King stories, this one is middle-grade, neither as appalling as some nor as memorable as others.  It’s like a number that you see on Caller ID that you recognize, but waver before answering.