Sassy girls in olden times edition

Rosaline (PG-13)

Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced.

Before there was Romeo and Juliet, there was Romeo and Rosaline — also a Capulet who was wooed by Montague Romeo in secret. An off-screen character who just rates a mention in the Shakespeare play, Rosaline (Dever), here the center of the story, is so certain of her True Love for Romeo (Kyle Allen) that she makes an extra effort to scare off all the potential husbands brought to her by her weary father (Bradley Whitford), who really just wants her to pick someone and leave the nest already. But Rosaline, when she’s not dreaming of Romeo, dreams of being a cartographer and not so much of being some thrice-married widower’s most recent wife. Rosaline is particularly peeved when one of these forced dates — with actual handsome young man Dario (Sean Teale) — makes her late to the masquerade ball where she was planning to meet up with Romeo.

Rosaline writes letter after letter to apologize for missing him but later learns that he has been spending all of his time writing letters to her young cousin, Juliet (Merced). Rosaline tries to convince Juliet to enjoy the single life and forget about this sweet-talking phony Romeo but, with a kind of Disney princess sweetness, Juliet can’t quit the equally besotted Romeo.

Rosaline is a fun bit of romantic comedy using the familiar story to (lightly) examine romantic heartbreak and the dearth of occupation choices for women in Renaissance-era Italy. Dever is a treat as Verona’s Daria, who doesn’t like to admit when she’s wrong, and Merced does a good job of walking the line between dopily innocent and smarter than people give her credit for. Allen makes his Romeo a goofy but good-natured dude who could be plausibly appealing to two very different kinds of girls. B Available on Hulu

Catherine Called Birdy (PG-13)

Bella Ramsey, Andrew Scott.

Or, if you prefer, Game of Thrones’ little badass Lady Lyanna Mormount playing the daughter of Fleabag’s hot priest/Sherlock’s Moriarty. In this Lena Dunham-written and -directed movie (based on the book by Karen Cushman), Birdy (Ramsey), as Catherine, the oldest daughter of a noble but not terribly flush family in 1290 England, is called, gets her period and finds out that she’s the most valuable asset her spendy father Lord Rollo (Scott) has. Thus is Birdy paraded in front of a series of men, whom she is able to scare off by pretending to be various kinds of unhinged — or just demonstrating that she’s mouthy and willful, which, this being medieval times, is enough to brand a woman unmarriable. But Rollo keeps on — he’s in need of the cash a dowry will bring, what with Birdy’s mother Lady Aislinn’s (Billie Piper) regular (if sadly unsuccessful) pregnancies, his son Robert’s (Dean-Charles Chapman) own marriage hopes and the family manor to run. But Birdy wants to stay at her family home with her nurse (Lesley Sharp), her childhood buddy Perkin (Michael Woolfitt), fellow reluctant-marriage-market-participant Aelis (Isis Hainsworth) and her mother’s brother, Uncle George (Joe Alwyn), a former soldier in the crusades whom Birdy girlishly worships. She sees him as a hero and wishes to either be him or marry him — oh if only he were her cousin and not her uncle, she says with “I know that boy band singer and I would be perfect together” breathlessness.

Catherine Called Birdy sort of straddles the line between being a thoroughly modern story with a medieval setting and being a peek at life in an earlier time. Birdy is sassy and opinionated and often scored with a solid line-up of pop songs that would make Sofia Coppola proud. But she also has only the life options of a 1290s girl. Even as she scares off some suitors, it’s clear that eventually she will have to let one of them catch her and that the rough stuff of childbirth and mothering is in her future, like it or not.

Watching Birdy grow up a little, going from a clearly loved and indulged child to someone who comes to understand more of the balance of bitter and sweet in life, is surprisingly affecting. Beneath all the veils and period dress, we get a lot of frustrated parents trying to help their kids find their way and very teen-like kids trying to balance duty and their own desires. Ramsey does this well, making for a compelling not-quite-kid but not-yet-adult woman coming to terms with society’s limits and how and when she can push them. It’s a sweet story, told with a winning sense of humor. B+ Available on Amazon Prime Video.

The Princess (R)

Joey King, Dominic Cooper.

A princess in unspecified olden times wakes up to find that the jerk (Cooper) her father the king (Ed Stoppard) wanted her to marry has seized the castle and is holding the king, the queen (Alex Reid) and the princess’ younger sister (Katelyn Rose Downey) hostage. She left him at the altar, correctly sensing his tyrannical ways, but now he’s going to force a marriage like it or not. The princess is chained and locked in a tower until the ceremony; good thing her warrior buddy Linh (Veronica Ngo) has spent years teaching her to sword fight with the best of them.

Look, this ain’t Shakespeare or even a riff on a Shakespeare tertiary character, but The Princess is real punchy kicky swashbuckle-y fun. It’s an hour and 34 minutes long and could probably lose another 20 minutes, much in the manner that the princess loses bits of her fancy wedding dress with each fight, becoming more badass with each encounter. We get some training flashbacks, some flashbacks to “girl as a ruler? Preposterous!” from the father-king. But mostly it’s just the princess, kicking and stabbing as she grows more determined to save her family and friends. B Available on Hulu.

The School for Good and Evil (PG-13)

Sofia Wylie, Sophia Anne Caruso.

Besties find themselves at a boarding school for the future heroes and villains of one-day fairy tales in this Harry Potter-y, The Descendants-ish warmed over mash with a strangely good cast.

Behind the scenes: director Paul Feig. In front of the camera: Michelle Yeoh, Rachel Bloom, Rob Delaney and Patti freaking LuPone, all in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit parts, as well as Kerry Washington and Charlize Theron as the leaders of the Good and Evil schools respectively and then Laurence Fishburne as the one school headmaster to rule them all. How? Why? And if you have them, why not give them something interesting to do?

Teenage-y Sophie (Caruso), living in a crummy ye olden days village filled with small-minded ye olden days peasants, is a crackerjack dress designer who dreams of becoming a fairy tale princess and has the talking-to-squirrels skills to back up that dream. Her best friend Agatha (Wylie) is the daughter of the town witch and shunned as a witch herself. When Sophie is dragged off to the School for Good and Evil after making enrollment there her fondest wish-upon-a-wishing-tree wish, Agatha follows her in hopes of keeping her friend safe. They’re dumped off in the school yards — but are they the right school yards? The golden-haired princess-wannabe Sophie finds herself at the School for Evil, where the students are called Nevers. Agatha is in the taffeta nightmare that is the School for Good, where the Evers might be future heroes and princesses but they are currently snotty jerks. Not that the goths at Evil are any better. Why are all these fairy tale folk so awful? Can Agatha save Sophie? Did this movie need to be two and a half hours?

To answer the first and last of those questions: because this is basically high school, and not at all. “People are not all good or all bad” is the message of this movie, but rather than examine this the movie mostly just states it over and over. There are not-bad ideas here about not letting yourself believe whatever arbitrary labels your school or peer group puts on you, but the movie never goes more than half an inch deep. It doesn’t even dig deep enough to be the sort of silly fun that something with Theron as a vampy villain should be. C Available on Netflix.