Another year, another “Groundhog Day” rip-off.
Nearly three decades after Bill Murray got stuck in a time loop until he became a better man, the concept has spawned so many iterations that it basically exists as its own genre, mixed and mashed with other tropes to reanimate a familiar routine.
Often, the deja vu of watching these movies mimics the predicaments of their characters, even when they’re halfway decent.
The latest to take the rom-com approach, “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” offers an agreeable kind of breezy, soul-searching variation, but can’t break free of the overwhelming meta impression that we’ve seen this all before.The movie plays like a hybrid of several recent variations: Like 2017’s drama “Before I Fall,” it’s a slick YA adaptation (sci-fi writer Lev Grossman wrote the screenplay off his short), it has some tonal similarities to the horror-comedy “Happy Death Day,
Read full article