![]() If only the film could deserve her level of commitment. It’s a rewarding experience to watch Izzo thread a tricky line with ease here, emitting both a child-like innocence and gradual steeliness that slowly yet convincingly sharpens and matures. As the long suffering Celina, a Catholic school girl from a conservative immigrant family trying to make ends meet after an unplanned pregnancy alters the course of her life, Izzo delivers a vibrant performance that reinforces her fascinating acting range, building on her bewitching turn in Eli Roth’s home-invasion horror-comedy “Knock Knock” and vigorous emergence as Leonardo DiCaprio’s Italian starlet wife in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Throughout “Women is Losers,” she harnesses a raw and agile kind of screen quality, obliquely bringing to mind the young, vivacious Lindsay Lohan of the early 2000s. ![]() One piece of good news is the pulsating presence of Lorenza Izzo in the lead. But while these are commendably well-intentioned ambitions, “Women Is Losers” sadly squanders the viewer’s goodwill by over-explaining itself at every turn, amid inelegant period backdrops where actors look like they’re playing dress-up, out-of-place needle-drops from the ’80s (like Donna Summer’s “She Works Hard for the Money”) and, in at least one scene, distracting appearances by modern-day cars. It’s obvious that those unnamed and undoubtedly courageous real women mean a great deal to Feliciano, who utilizes her picture’s protagonist - a young, hardworking San Franciscan battling against the period’s patriarchal indignities - as a mouthpiece to give them a retroactive voice, and perhaps even to interrogate how far women’s rights today still have to go in a world where men continue to end up on top. It’s a fitting line to ponder in the context of her over-enthusiastic yet frustratingly clumsy feminist film, which declares “inspired by real women” in its first frame before going on to illustrate their struggles against the era’s routine sexism. ![]() “Men always seem to end up on top,” goes “ Women Is Losers,” the Janis Joplin song that lends writer-director Lissette Feliciano’s 1960s-set feature debut its title.
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