John Early’s ‘Maddie’s Secret’ feels like an attempt to outrun irony. In the comedian’s directorial debut — a strange, delightful homage to TV movies — he plays a food influencer with an eating disorder.
Maddie’s Secret is to TV movies what Far From Heaven is to Douglas Sirk — an homage to the flatly lit morality and cautionary tales of the ’80s and ’90s that approaches their small screen seriousness as though it were a walled-off kingdom that direct... [4715 chars]