"Wouldn't hurt you to smile a bit," is a wince-inducing line. Its variations are known too well to most, if not every, woman on earth, and Kitty Green makes ample use of it in her latest excavation of toxic male culture.
Yet where her narrative debut, The Assistant, takes place in the shiveringly cool office of a Weinstein-esque producer, The Royal Hotel simmers with the heat of oppressive testosterone at a pub in the Australian Outback. That is, until it boils over with cathartic female rage.
