Film of the Week: A Simple Favor

The post-Gone Girl mini-boom in airport novel adaptations centred around disappearing women continues with this surprisingly hard-edged thriller-comedy from Bridesmaids director Paul Feig. Anna Kendrick is a perky suburban super-mum and vlogger who befriends Blake Lively’s far cooler helicopter parent, then mounts an increasingly slick investigation when she seems to fall off the planet. The first half is in Feig’s comfort zone, poking plenty of fun at infantilising life in American suburbia, and then it gets a little awkward in the second half as things get nastier, twistier and sexier. It’s a lot softer around the edges than it could be – things don’t get nearly as weird as they could in the hands of, say, a David Fincher, but this is a fun potboiler of the kind that doesn’t get made often enough these days. Times