Taking aim at college cancel culture

Ivy League-set 'After the Hunt' raises some interesting questions but ultimately flunks.

- AMY NICHOLSON FILM CRITIC

YANNIS DRAKOULIDIS Amazon MGM Studios

JULIA ROBERTS plays a Yale professor who tries to stay above the fray after her colleague and friend is accused of a sexual assault.

As an ambitious and miserable Yale philosophy professor, Julia Roberts paces Luca Guadagnino’s pretend-provocative noir “After the Hunt” in a prepster uniform of monogrammed tote bag and immaculate white slacks. Alma is secretly sick.

Yet, when she kneels in a campus stall to puke, those white pants remain fastidiously unsullied. The idea is that Alma has practice keeping her image clean.

She'll need it. A student named Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) has accused Alma’s fellow teacher and favorite drinking buddy, Hank (Andrew Garfield), of sexual assault. Hank counters that he’d followed Maggie home from a party because he caught her cheating on her thesis about performative virtue signaling. Is Hank a clichéd creep or is Maggie a middling talent destroying her supervisor before he destroys her? Their dueling he-said/she-said accounts go unreconciled. No one, not even Guadagnino and the screenwriter Nora Garrett, sincerely cares what happened that night in Maggie's apartment. All that matters is the public reaction. Will this dirty business foul up anyone's career?

Guadagnino adores a bold backdrop. Just last year, he set naughty tales in the worlds of competitive tennis (“Challengers”) and Mexican dive bars (“Queer”). The Ivy League is rich with possibilities. His take on New Haven opens with trolling Woody Allen-style credits over the sound of a ticking clock and the nation’s supposedly brightest thinkers airily hashing out this era’s flashpoint question: Is cancel culture legitimate justice?