‘Another Simple Favor’ Review: At SXSW, Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively Return for a Sequel That Has More Twists and Less Fun

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Like a cocktail made of ingredients that aren’t meant to go together, but that stimulate your taste buds in a just sweet-and-tart, gin-and-blood-orange enough way that you keep sipping it, “A Simple Favor” was a movie powered by its singular flavor.

It started off as a bad-moms soap opera, with Anna Kendrick’s polite, perky, less-innocent-than-she-seemed Stephanie, a widowed mother who ran her own homemaking vlog, getting drawn into the web of Emily, a fellow grade-school parent who was about as maternal as Cruella de Vil, and who was played by Blake Lively in a performance of supremely entertaining nastiness.

As these two bonded over martinis and shared secrets (including the revelation that one of them was a “brother fucker” — an example of how blithe the film was about its own perversity), “A Simple Favor” morphed into a murderous mock noir.

Yet even as the twists kept coming, the thriller outline was wrapped in the deadpan camp of desperate-housewives flamboyance.