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Claire (Jane Fonda) arrives at her best friend Joyce’s funeral with death weighing heavily on her mind. She’s mourning Joyce, of course, but she also has a homicidal eye turned toward Joyce’s husband, Howard (Malcolm McDowell), who wasn’t simply prone to cruelty around his wife of 50 years but also, we’ll learn, was responsible for sexually assaulting Claire back in the 1970s — an act that ruined her first marriage, to the good-hearted Ralph (a wonderful Richard Roundtree), and has continued to have a corrosive effect on the life she subsequently built. Claire has been a guest for what can only be a few seconds before she’s walking up to Howard threatening his life, her stare too withering and her tone too stony for there to be even a modicum of possibility that she’s just kidding around. 

People buying a ticket already know that “Moving On” is a movie reuniting, for the second time this year, Fonda and her longtime collaborator and good friend Lily Tomlin; it’s probably why they’re getting that ticket in the first place. In “Moving On,” Tomlin plays Evelyn, another close friend — and also, it’s revealed, onetime lover — of Joyce who too used to be close with Claire before the assault threw a wrench in their bond. The women haven’t seen each other for something like four decades when they’re bumping elbows again at the funeral. But they fall back into old rhythms again fairly quickly, and soon Evelyn is joining Claire in a vengeful, loosely planned scheme, her initial apprehension about murder slipping when it’s made clear at a reception for Joyce that Howard remains the awful man she’s always known him to be.

Read the full column on South Sound.