Women on the brink

Women naturally deserve 50 percent of movie-screen time, so it's with moderate to great fanfare that cinemas welcome the latest entries into the "Oops, sorry we ignored you, ladies" sweepstakes. Starry awards bait comes in the form of the Reese Witherspoon-produced adaptation of controversial wildlife scientist Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing, while the moderate entry, Fall, ironically, soars to higher highs.

Crawdads smacks of Witherspoon's own white-lady privilege in its story about an abandoned girl who raises herself to be a bestselling author. In the American South of the 1960s, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) at one point explains how hard her life is, and why she can't take her troubles to the police — to the black store owner. In today's world, director Olivia Newman and writer Lucy Alibar left that in.

Tone deafness aside, Crawdads is a predictable, languidly photographed (by Polly Morgan) young-adult romance, in which Kya finds herself on trial for murder when one of two identical-looking men who can't get enough of her, Chase (Harris Dickinson) — the other being Tate (Taylor John Smith) — winds up dead. Did she do it to extricate herself from the cycle of violence that trapped her mother? Was it a jealous Tate? Will the jury of sneering townsfolk overcome its blind intolerance and look at the facts?