The four members in the titular book club of “Book Club” are four women who have been meeting once a month to drink wine and talk about a book. They started in the ’70s with Erica Jong’s “Fear of Flying” and have just turned their attention to E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey.” There’s a lot of literary and social history in the span between those two best sellers, which take their heroines from “zipless” adultery to handcuffed monogamy, from elusive liberation to consensual bondage. But this movie isn’t much concerned with the novels themselves. The stories it has to tell about feminism and female sexuality are left mainly implicit in the script (by Bill Holderman and Erin Simms; Mr. Holderman directed) because they are written in the faces of its stars. And much in the way that their characters use reading as a pretext for hanging out and drinking wine — there will be wine in every paragraph of this review, as there is wine in nearly every scene of this film — the filmmakers understand that what will satisfy the audience is time in the company of Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen.

Source: New York Times May 17, 2018 01:00 UTC