The Assistant

Thatdirector Kitty Green has a background in documentary filmmaking is not a surprise given the forceful realism she brings to this taut workplace drama elucidating all the micro- and macro-aggressions inherent in a system that can allow a creature like Harvey Weinstein to not just survive but to thrive. Julia Garner, so good in ‘Ozark’ and even better here, inhabits the character of Jane, the abused new assistant to a (never seen) monstrous media mogul whose sense of entitlement and criminal appetites it is her duty to uphold and support. This is powerful, disturbing stuff and filmmaking of the highest order.

‘Green’s gripping #MeToo drama-thriller “The Assistant,” a nightmare of toxic office politics and media misogyny… is a claustrophobic, intimately unsettling movie… Julia Garner is excellent as Jane, a young woman who has swallowed and internalised all the stress and humiliation of this job… [The film] is a shrewd and brilliant look at the second tier of Weinsteinesque wrongdoing: the sexual abuse has to be enabled by assistants, who are often women and themselves subject to bullying…’—Peter Bradshaw, Guardian