John Ehrett

The studio pitch for Hulu’s new direct-to-streaming action thriller The Princess probably went something like this: “What if we crossed The Princess Bride with The Raid: Redemption?” Honestly, though, that logline makes the film sound better than it is. The Princess is a dizzying, hyperviolent spectacle that blends nonstop combat with a decidedly progressive moral vision, resulting in an eminently GIF-able — but emotionally sterile — finished product. The eponymous Princess (Joey King, whose breakout role was Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby), who’s never given a proper name, inhabits a quasi-fantastical European kingdom devoid of magic or monsters on the model of The Princess Diaries’ Genovia.

Delia Owens’s novel was probably destined to be a bestseller. How many books manage to combine a distinctive sense of natural “place” — the marshes surrounding the North Carolina town of Barkley Cove — with themes of survival, romance, and murder? And with a bestseller comes a film adaptation; hence the recently released Where the Crawdads Sing, which is playing in theaters now. When the town’s golden boy Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) is found dead at the base of a rickety wooden tower, blame immediately falls on the enigmatic Kya Clark (Daisy Edgar-Jones, likely best known for her recent starring turn in Normal People), who lives alone in a rickety house deep within the marsh.