Danusha_Goska

This version of "Persuasion" ends with a notoriously ugly kiss. But wait there's more. The direction is pitiably bad. Shergold doesn't know where to point the camera or why to point it there. The cinematography is nonexistent. Scenes are too heavily lit or mired in darkness. In key scenes, a key character's face is in shadow, for no good reason.

Sally Hawkins doesn't understand Anne Elliot. Anne is a quiet, humble person, but she isn't the complete nothing that Hawkins is trying, and failing, to play. You never see Anne Elliot here. You only see a 21st century actress who isn't suited to her role and who struggles, right up to that final ugly kiss, to figure out what to do.

Rupert Penry Jones is also miscast. He looks too untouched to have been a sea captain. He'd make a good school teacher.

"Argyle" is a funny, silly, spy spoof. It mocks the conventions of Bond movies. The plot is completely implausible but it all hangs together, kinda sorta. It involves, of course, international spy conspiracies and lots and lots of twists and turns in exotic locales like London and the south of France.

Bryce Dallas Howard manages to play a range of personas of a very complicated character. Sam Rockwell is just adorable as a laid back, super confident, super competent spy. He's surprisingly sexy and romantic. Rockwell is not tall and he's not particularly muscular and he's not super handsome. He radiates scruffy, average guy sexiness in contrast to the tall, muscular, freakishly handsome sexiness of the divine Henry Cavill.

Catherine O'Hara, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L Jackson, and John Cena are all really good as ... well, I can't tell you what they play because that would spoil the outlandish Bond-ish plot. Richard Grant and Ariana DeBose are in the movie only briefly but they are of course wonderful.

"Argyle" is violent without being bloody or gory. Anonymous hitman are killed and the body count is high, but you don't see any blood. There are martial arts fight scenes. Again, this is a spoof and the violence in these scenes is superficial, but yes, there is a lot of shooting. There's a wild shootout scene involving ice skating on a highly unexpected surface - it's not ice. I expected the skater to perform "The Iron Lotus" from "Blades of Glory."

If you are in the mood for pure escapist fare that lets you turn off your brain and you just want to watch stars do their stuff and watch exotic locales and a lead couple with good romantic chemistry, "Argyle" might be just for you.

"Maestro" left me totally cold. I never believed anything I saw onscreen. I never cared about any of the characters. YES you see FILMMAKING so obvious all the FILMMAKING pokes you in the eye. Bradley Cooper impersonates Leonard Bernstein and *works so hard.*

Carey Mulligan also works really hard at impersonating a mid century American actress.

There's black and white cinematography. There's color film. Cooper conducts an orchestra and appears to be sweating a bucket.

There are accents and costumes and lavish sets and IMPORTANT issues you could write a high school essay about.

Cooper as Bernstein kisses a man at a party and Mulligan as his wife walks in on the intimate scene.

A leading character even dies on camera.

I just didn't care.

It's a mystery. Some really tacky, silly movies can move an audience. And big budget spectaculars can also move an audience.

What is it that crosses the boundary between a performance and something that worms its way into your soul and makes you cry?

Darned if I know. I remember crying my eyes out when Alan Arkin, as Singer ... at the end of "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." I just cried and cried. I felt as if I had lost my best friend. And it was just a movie I watched on a tiny black and white TV!

And then there are films like "Maestro" where it is super obvious that everyone is struggling strenuously to create ART in all caps and you just wish the thing would end already.

A very cold viewing experience.

"Anyone but You" has gotten bad reviews. I hesitated to see it, but see it I did, and I'm glad I did. I loved it. I laughed out loud throughout the film. I was touched by the central relationship. I enjoyed the Australian scenery and the light and breezy tone of the film. The leads are gorgeous and they scamper about in minimal, or no, clothing.

Even so, there's very little sex and you could watch this movie with a mother or a daughter. Glen Powell radiates bemused charm. Subtle quotes and a few comic bits scattered throughout the film allude to Shakespeare's "Much Ado about Nothing."

The whole cast seems to be having a good time. Dermot Mulroney, as the father of the bride, is very funny in his intense commitment. GaTa and Bryan Brown are adorable as heavy handed and all too obvious plotters.

"Anyone but You" begins with a very believable dilemma. Bea (Sydney Sweeney) needs to use a bathroom in a coffee shop. Ben (Glen Powell) rescues her by pretending that they are together, so she can occupy his place at the front of the line, and gain quick access to the bathroom key. They click and spend the night together, but it's purely platonic.

A misunderstanding ensues, and they end up hating each other. They are invited to a destination wedding in Australia, and the other guests, just like in "Much Ado about Nothing," conspire to get them together.

I cared about their relationship from that opening scene. I laughed at the physical comedy and the hijinks. I was touched by their easily bruised egos and fear of intimacy. There's a highly unlikely scene where they fall into water and are rescued, and Bea soothes Ben by singing a song she knows he likes. Bea's tender care for Ben touched me.

Romantic comedy / travelogue films like this are not supposed to be realistic except in the broadest sense. We all fear intimacy when we sense that we are vulnerable to someone who is not as taken with us as we are with them. We all have to feel our way and take risks to find the right person.

Is the movie realistic in that we have perfect bodies like this movie's stars? Or live in super slick apartments and do morning ab crunches on spotless Australian beaches? No. That part is pure escapist entertainment, and I loved it.

What could have been better? Ben is a great guy, and the plot gives Bea ample reasons to fall in love with him. Bea is a bit more complicated. She comes across, in Sydney Sweeney's performance, as depressed and lost. Sweeney, as Bea, doesn't smile much and she doesn't have a north star. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life. If these two get together, this viewer worried that Ben would have to devote his life to cheering Bea up.

Bea's mother was a meddling PITA and I wished the movie had delivered a pie in her face, or something. Claudia and Halley, the couple whose destination wedding Bea and Ben attend, are undeveloped and uninteresting. The movie's ending is forced and overdone.

Maybe this film deserves more of a seven out of ten stars than eight out of ten stars, but it was just what I needed on a dark winter's day, so I'm giving it eight, and also to make up for the totally mean-spirted negative reviews from Grinches who can't appreciate the light hearted fun, charm, and physical beauty "Anyone but You" serves up in ample supply.

"American Fiction" is touted as a fearless, incisive critique of white powerbrokers who promote black underclass values and behaviors in order to sell books and movies. Think the white producer behind the provocative black rapper.

That's what you see in the "American Fiction" trailer. That's *not* what you get when you sit through the entire film.

"American Fiction" is for the most part a grade Z domestic melodrama. Shallow, insincere, undercooked, and not at all emotionally engaging. The characterizations are so trite and so shallow I didn't care about any of these characters. There is a death and I just did not care.

Mom has Alzheimer's. Sis works for Planned Parenthood and has a health crisis. Brother is a gay man who married a beard who divorced him and took his money. Dad was a serial adulterer who ended his own life in the family beach house. Monk, the main character, is abrasive and close to friendless. He takes up with a neighbor lady and manages to alienate her.

The one believable character, a lovely, caring woman, is the black maid, who is, alas, all too close to the kind of stereotypical character Hattie McDaniel once played. But, again, this maid is the one character in the movie who cares about other people, so I liked her.

That's the bulk of the movie. The critique of stereotyping is brief and not at all new. Nothing new is said. No new ground is broken. All the white cultural powerbrokers and ridiculous and clueless and too caricatured to make any real point.

No mention of black audiences who buy violent rap or the actual people who live the actual lives described in books like that written by Sintara Golden.

There are so many important themes here that the movie completely ignores or underserves. This emperor is totally naked. The people praising this movie are as bad as the powerbrokers satirized within the film.

"Oppenheimer" 2023. Biopic of "Father of the atomic bomb" J. Robert Oppenheimer. Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Cillian Murphy and an all-star cast and multiple cameo appearances: Kenneth Branagh, Matt Damon, Gary Oldman, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh and her girls, Robert Downey Jr, Rami Malek, Casey Affleck, Josh Harnett, Tom Conti, Jason Clarke, Tony Goldwyn, Matthew Modine, Benny Safdie, and Rin Tin Tin.

"Oppenheimer" is a pretentious film that tries too hard and leads with technique. For this viewer, the film's thudding emphasis on film-making technique, and its rejection of conventional storytelling, was alienating. I noticed how incredibly loud the movie is. It was like being at a rock concert. Some scenes are shot in black and white. Some scenes are shot in color. Each scene is very brief. Who characters are is entirely unclear. Narrative is broken up into bits, juggled, and disjointed. Scenes take place out of time sequence. The film covers Oppenheimer's life from when he was a grad student to his old age. I had no idea why Nolan played the film out of time sequence.

The all-star cast and multiple cameo performances drew a great deal of attention to themselves. That attention, in addition to the film's other technical emphases, completely made it impossible for me to experience any willing suspension of disbelief. I never for one second forgot that I was watching a movie written and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy. I never for one second saw J. Robert Oppenheimer on screen. I saw actor and star Cillian Murphy, who has come a long way from "Red Eye," back in 2005. I kept thinking about Murphy's performance choices as an actor. He doesn't so much hand in three hours worth of acting; he hands in the same performance for three hours. Murphy always speaks in the same flat, monotonous voice. He displays virtually no facial expressions.

When Gary Oldman showed up in a cameo as Harry Truman all I could think was, "Which star is going to show up next? Kim Kardashian as Eleanor Roosevelt?" I recognized Kenneth Branagh but I had little idea of which historical figure he was playing and what significance that historical figure had to the plot. When Tony Goldwyn, in what may have been an extravagant wig, appeared onscreen, I just kept starring at his face thinking, "I know this actor but I can't place who he is."

Florence Pugh plays the part of a snotty and doomed woman who has an affair with Oppenheimer. Pugh is topless in a couple of scenes and bottomless in one more scene. Again, all I could think about while watching these scenes was "Boy, she really wants you to see her girls." I didn't care about any of the so-called "drama" onscreen. I never cared about the character she played, about the real life woman on whom this character was based, or Oppenheimer's affair with this woman. It was all flat, lifeless, something attempting to be drama, but never quite getting there. Oh, and then there was more NOISE.

Read the New York Times review of Oppenheimer. Manohla Dargis praises the film. All she talks about is technique. She talks about writer-director Christopher Nolan. She talks about Nolan's decisions as to how much atomic bomb horror to show onscreen. She talks about how LOUD the movie is. She talks about "complex structure" and "the plasticity of the film medium." "Superb cinematography." "65 millimeter film" "black and white film" Look, if you are fascinated by filmmaking technique, "Oppenheimer" is the film for you.

I would have walked out, but I was with another person, so I had to sit through three hours of utter boredom and, yes, contempt for this pretentious film. Nolan is struggling so hard to create a work of art that approaches the seriousness of the atomic bomb. For me, he failed. I cared less about nuclear annihilation after watching the movie than before I entered the theater.

A quieter, more intimate, more coherent, more old fashioned film could have moved me. Any number of incidents from Oppenheimer's life could have filled a two-hour film and ultimately said more about atomic weapons than this three hour exercise in noisy incoherence. Oppenheimer tried to murder his professor. That could have been a two-hour movie. Oppenheimer confronting the awesome task of developing a weapon capable of destroying the world. What Oppenheimer and others confronted in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Oppenheimer's marriage. Oppenheimer was a womanizer. He was a father who gave his children away when they annoyed him. He and his women liked to drink and smoke and they all seemed pretty lost. Focus on any one of these features could have made a moving film. Instead we get bombast, pretension, and a movie that never lets you forget who made it.

"Ticket to Paradise" is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. The solution here is make creating movies this bad a punishable crime. Anyone who contributed to this drek should be serving time, at the very least, in community service. George Clooney and Julia Roberts should be out there in orange jumpsuits, cleaning the side of the highway.

The rest of the cast was so profoundly mediocre and colorless I won't even mention them.

I love romantic comedies. I like other films with Clooney and Roberts. I like travelogues.

This movie sucked. It was not funny, not romantic, not glamorous. Not a single onscreen moment felt at all true. It all felt like one after another desperate grabs to fill screen time with mindless, soulless, talentless, fluff.

If this movie were a food, it would be Peeps.

Shame on everyone involved.

Affirmation Generation features several detransitioners and also medical experts discussing the transing of children. Many medical articles are featured and quoted. Beautifully and professionally produced. Information you will not find elsewhere. Compassionate. Challenging. The video was censored for a while but is now viewable on Vimeo. Young people, parents, and medical professionals should all watch it It should be shown in classrooms. The filmmakers all identify as "left coast lifelong liberals" The facts presented are not biased, they are just facts. I watched the film twice in order to get all the information on hand. Will watch again.

"You People" is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It's ugly, stupid, thuddingly dull. There is no comedy and no romance. Hill and London have zero romance. They are each other's kryptonite. They make each other worse and harder to look at. I hated every second of this movie. I watched it twice to write a review which is now online. Oh yeah and it is racist and it stereotypes both groups it depicts. I don't understand why the people from the groups involved agreed to participate. Jonah Hill has a documentary out called Stutz. It's a lovely movie He should make a film that incorporates the depth of Stutz, and also its humor and love.

Manipulative soap opera. If you want to cry for two hours, watch this movie. Ove is a Swedish engineer with low affect. He doesn't fit in in society and he dismisses most people as "idiots." He keeps trying to k--- h------ in graphic scenes that were hard to watch. He uses rope, a gun, and a jump in front of a train. He keeps failing.

He sees no point in living because his beloved wife Sonja, who put up with his immature nonsense, has passed away from cancer, and he lives in a world that doesn't want to put up with him.

A Persian woman moves in next door (there is a big Middle Eastern population in Sweden, and it has been a source of much societal tension.)

this woman turns Ove's life around. Suddenly he adopts a cat, allows a gay Persian boy to live in his house, and he saves a neighbor from being institutionalized.

This movie had some really lovely moments, mostly with young Ove interacting with his father, who cleans trains for a living.

It was very poignant watching how young Ove did not fit in in the world, and how he was mistreated by others.

But then one soap opera event after another was piled on, with no real goal except to make the audience cry.

And the saintly Persian woman turning his life around ... not believable in any respect. She wouldn't have done that in real life, and, again, in real life there is a great deal of tension between Swedes and Middle Easterners, and that isn't even hinted at in the movie, which makes the entire project suspect.

But, if you like tearjerkers / soap operas, you may like this movie.

"Spirited" is a wretched film. Yes, the starpower is great. I am a huge Will Ferrell fan, Ryan Reynolds fan, Octavia Spencer fan. Patrick Page, who plays Marley, is awesome. It is for the actors that I gave a zero-star film an extra star.

The problem is the script and the direction, both of which are disastrous. The movie has no idea where it's going. There's terror then weak jokes then the suicide subplot then the online bullying subplot then a so bad it hurts "dance" number in Victorian England with Reynolds' Cockney accent so bad he makes Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like native Cockney speaker Michael Caine.

And, look. If you can't sing or dance, you can't sing or dance. Maybe the musical comedy form is not for you.

'Spirited" takes a classic tale, "A Christmas Carol," puts the plot through a blender, and comes up with the mess you'd expect.

This is just inept filmmaking, so bad I believe that the positive reviews are plants. I can't believe anyone enjoyed this mess, except the mother of the director / script writer, may God have mercy on his soul.

I support gay rights, I love movies, and I love romantic comedies. I wanted "Bros" to be good and to do well. It sucks and it has failed at the box office. Homophobia did not sabotage this movie. This movie's wretched quality sabotaged this movie. Billy Eichner co-wrote the script. He stars as Bobby Lieber. Lieber / Eichner is a pathological narcissist who takes, takes, takes, and demands that his love interest, Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) change to satisfy him.

Lieber / Eichner whines throughout this movie. Everyone is out to get poor, sad Billy / Bobby. He is also abusive and obnoxious.

Luke Macfarlane, the other lead, is not a great actor. He's bland and unmoving. So your eyes go to Eichner and that's not a good thing.

I wanted to walk out. I stayed because I wrote an article analyzing this film. You can find it on the web.

Note I said almost nothing about homosexuality. This movie isn't about homosexuality, not really. It's all about Billy Eichner and what a martyr he is. Yuch.

I'm really surprised that this movie was made. It's a throwback to a different time. It's low key, funny but in a "smile" way rather than a "ha ha" way, although I did laugh out loud a couple of times. It's sweet. It's innocent. I don't think anyone swears even once in this movie. There's no sex. Very little violence. It's pretty to look at and I did find the mystery intriguing.

If you want to see a movie that doesn't hit you over the head, and doesn't promote any political agenda, and is just mild fun, this is the movie for you.

Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan are the leads, two cops investigating a murder of a film director. The action takes place in London's theatrical world. Rockwell and Ronan are very good and they play off of each other very well. They are sympathetic characters.

The set design and costumes, reflecting 1950s London, are gorgeous.

Since it's a mystery, I can't say much more, but Agatha Christie's play "Mouse Trap" plays a role in the plot.

"3,000 Years of Longing" is pretty to look at, and it features Idris Elba, a very charismatic star, but it misses the mark thanks to a weak script.

Warning this review will reveal the end of the movie.

Tilda Swinton is Alithea Binnie, a spinsterish scholar who studies narratives. She was married once, briefly, and was left by her husband. She is alone without family. You get the impression that she is mostly content that way. When a friend touches her in a friendly way, she smacks him. Swinton plays Alithea as a cold woman, and that's not a bad thing. Some people are just not people-people. They value their solitude and find human interaction awkward and draining. They'd much rather devote their time to their books and maybe cats.

Alithea travels to Turkey for a conference. She buys a pretty bottle in a bazaar, takes it home, cleans it with her electric toothbrush, and out pops Djinn, played by Idris Elba. He offers her wishes. She is a scholar of stories and she knows that "wish" stories are always cautionary tales. Wishes often end badly. She makes Elba tell her the story of his life. He complies. They, wearing hotel bathrobes, sit in the rather drab, and drably photographed, hotel room, as Elba tells his tales.

He was in love with The Queen of Sheba, who, he says, was beauty itself. That ended badly and he was thrown into the ocean. Later he served a girl in a harem. This story involves a fat prince who is locked in a fur-lined room with fat, naked women. These scenes were amusing. After that, he serves the third wife of an old man. She languishes in a tower, craving knowledge, knowledge he grants her.

These are all fun stories, and they are photographed very prettily. The style is orientalist. But for this viewer, and many others, these episodes never build to a propulsive plot for the movie itself. I wish George Miller, while saluting stories, had written a good story. Remember, the legendary Scheherazade, who gave us 1001 Nights of stories, didn't just tell one story after another; rather, she existed within a longer story, the story of her trying to save her own life from a king who killed his wives.

I wish the stories Djinn told related to the larger movie's story, that of Alithea falling for Djinn and wanting his love. She finally makes her wish, that is, she wants Djinn's love. They travel together to England. He doesn't do well there. Alithea releases him from his love because she realizes it's not really love if you have to demand it. They remain friends and get together every now and then.

I like Tilda Swinton, but I think she's the wrong actress for this story. I could never believe that Prof. Binnie would want anyone as hot blooded as Djinn in her life. I could see her with a Henry Higgins Rex Harrison type, just as scholarly and cold as she is.

My dream actress for the Alithea Binnie role would have been Deborah Kerr, who was expert at playing women who were very prim and proper until they met the right man, and then turned into warm lava flows of passion.

I also did not think that the movie was making the statements it appeared to want to be making about love and about loneliness and also about the price a woman pays for being a scholar.

PS: The woke will pillory this movie for its orientalism and exoticism. In fact its orientalism and exoticism are its major draws. In spite of the weak story, the scenes of the Djinn's tales are quite beautiful. See the film while you can, before it is banned.

"Vengeance" 2022 is an intelligent, interesting movie that I felt compelled to talk about immediately after it finished. Mind: when I say that "Vengeance" is an intelligent, interesting movie, I am *not* saying that it is pretentious, or that it goes out of its way to be difficult to understand, or that people dressed entirely in black in Manhattan will brag about sitting through it. This is not a movie trying to be intelligent. This is a movie that is intelligent.

"Vengeance" is *not* a chore to watch. I laughed out loud several times, I also had to close my eyes tight during a suspenseful scene, and I cared about Abby, a Texas girl from a very small town who ended up dead. The movie felt so real to me that I wondered throughout if it were based on something that actually happened to the film's writer, director, and star, B. J. Novak.

"Vengeance" includes some plot twists, and it defies genre boundaries, so it's hard to give much information without spoiling it. Abby, a wannabe singer from a small Texas town, dies. Her brother phones Ben, a journalist living in New York City, and invites him to Abby's funeral. Ben travels to Texas and realizes he is in a world very different from the one he inhabits in Manhattan. He decides to produce a podcast entitled "Dead White Girl." His topics and themes will include the big divides in America and the opioid crisis. And much more than that, I can't say.

Again, I laughed out loud several times in this movie. The humor is so deadpan and dry I think viewers not paying attention might not get it. I also cared about how the movie presented the cultural divide between Ben and Abby's family.

The opening scene is two guys talking about their sex lives, which consist of casual hook-ups with no commitment. Novak has said that much of it was improvised, and there is a 17 minute version he will release eventually. Novak's interlocutor is John Mayer, a musician known for having had lots of hook ups. I walked into the theater not knowing much about BJ Novak and knowing nothing about John Mayer and I was able to enjoy this scene.

Ashton Kutcher, as Quentin Sellers - note the last name - a music producer in Marfa, Texas, gives a performance I would sit through the entire movie again to watch. Kutcher is mesmerizing. He gives not one but two speeches I really need to hear again. One is about sound; the other is about ... well just go watch the movie.

Issa Rae, a very beautiful woman, plays the part of Ben's producer. Her role and her performance are weak spots in the movie. She doesn't come across as a hardnosed, demanding, producer/editor. She comes across as the sweet and bubbly, eager to please lead in a romantic comedy, which she may play someday. Ben phones her from Texas; she listens to his recordings. The Academy now requires movies to include a certain percentage of non-white performers to be considered for awards. It's possible Issa Rae is in the film for that reason. That's unfortunate. Her role could have been more sharply written, so that she wasn't just the token non-white woman in the film.

Terry Gross, host of the NPR show "Fresh Air," provides a cameo voice.

"Elvis" 2022 Baz Luhrmann directs, Austin Butler and Tom Hanks star.

YES.

Finally, a movie-movie.

I'm not an Elvis fan. Even after watching, and loving "Elvis," I'm not an Elvis fan. But boy did I like this film.

It's the best Baz Luhrmann film I've seen.

Like Luhrmann's other work, "Elvis" is loud, fast, frantic, dripping with glitz, color, and sweat. If you don't like being overstimulated at the movies, this may not be the film for you.

But Luhrmann's tendency to let the camp overcome the substance is restrained here. There is true heart in this movie. "Elvis" engages serious questions about art, greed, and exploitation.

"Elvis" has a very clear protagonist, Elvis Presley himself, who is depicted as a naïve artist who wants to create great art but who also wants fame and success and is willing to sell his soul to the devil to get both.

Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, Elvis' manager, is a dastardly villain. Hanks is very unlikeable in this role. Despicable. You hate him. He makes your skin crawl. Parker has zero taste. All he has is greed and the cutthroat instincts of a carnival barker. He's also a compulsive gambler. Elvis will underwrite his debt.

In real life, of course, Elvis Presley was a drug addict, a food addict, and a violent man who almost took out a contract on his jilted wife's lover. He was a gun nut, he destroyed hotel rooms, and he directed girls to entertain him in lesbian orgies while he and his friends looked on. So, no, the real Elvis was not the blameless pussycat of the film's Elvis. The film even manages to just about skip over big, fat Elvis. Butler is mostly thin throughout the movie.

As a filmgoer, I don't much care about the disconnect between the film's Elvis and real life Elvis. Austin Butler is amazing as Elvis. It's clear he is taking his art very seriously, something the real Elvis would have benefitted from doing.

Butler is onscreen through most of the movie, often in close-ups. He is charismatic and sympathetic. You believe him and care about him. You want to protect him from Parker and from himself, and you know you can't. Most viewers will feel sad while watching this movie.

Butler's gyrations are expert. Butler must have taken belly dancing lessons, or lessons in some discipline similar to belly dancing. His abdominal and hip control are close to gymnastics.

"Elvis" shows young Elvis imbibing African American musical styles from honkytonks and from church music. The film pays less attention to the white Southern music that also influenced Elvis. The music white Southerners produced is parodied in the movie as lifeless and worthless. This parody is inaccurate. Country music star Hank Snow is depicted as a real loser. Check out some Hank Snow songs on YouTube. He was good. Watching this movie I thought frequently of Hank Williams. Hank Williams was also a country music star who died too young. If I had a magic wand and could extend either Williams' life or Elvis', I'd pick Williams. Hank Williams was a real genius. His life was full of pain, and he died way, way too young - he was just 29. He looked at least ten years older.

"Elvis" isn't a docudrama. The film doesn't plumb the depths of Elvis' art, or his dark side, or his decisions that, for this viewer, prostituted his art and stymied his artistic development. The real Elvis squandered the rich gifts God, and his fans, bestowed upon him. All for cheap worldly lures like banana-peanut butter sandwiches. "Elvis" is a very good movie, though. You love its protagonist, even as he lets you down and makes you sad. And you appreciate his art, even if the real Elvis has never appealed to you.

I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in college and looked forward to this movie. The story is meant to convey deep truths. This movie is a betrayal of the source material. This movie is garbage. I watched every second of this movie, carefully, with a friend (Please forgive me, friend.) I have no idea what the director or screenwriter was aiming at. Like no idea whatsoever. The movie is painfully slow, with nothing happening onscreen for minutes at a time. The "lessons" are cheap ones you could garner from a much better movie. I could go through all the reasons that this film dropped the ball, but I don't want to waste your time. Give it a miss. Spend those two hours of your life doing something, anything, more productive than watching this giant mistake of a film.

Romantic comedies are my favorite genre. I like woman-centered films focused on pretty clothes, witty dialogue, gorgeous sets, and the occasional kissing scene. I kept reading about director Robert Eggers. He sounded like an artist with a vision who devotes intense energy to crafting every frame of his films. For that reason, I really wanted to see "The Northman." I was not disappointed.

I loved this movie. It's violent and amoral, or at least it follows a Pagan morality that is heinous to me. I hated Amleth's, the main character's, quest which drives the film. Also, he is a slaver, and he - true to real life -- was a Viking who enslaved my people, the Slavs (from which we get the word slave.) He kills with abandon and bloodlust. At one point, a character walks into a hut and releases his intestines into an open fire. And that isn't even the most spectacular death scene in the movie.

"The Northman" is what you'd expect from a completely dedicated filmmaker who wanted to make the world's most authentic Viking film. There were, though, Tibetan musical instruments in the soundtrack. At least they sounded Tibetan. The movie begins with a central character's death, and Amleth's search for revenge. There really isn't much of a plot, but there is a plot twist, which completely took me by surprise, and which made the film much better, and darker.

There are throat slicings, beheadings, rapes, human sacrifice, and mistreatment of animals. There is a fight to the death, in the nude, near an active volcano. There are magical beings, including Bjork. There is one belch and one fart, and several howls. There's a game that makes football look like flower arranging.

I had to look away for many scenes, including one kissing scene, for reasons I can't tell you, but believe me, it is one grotesquely inappropriate kiss.

And there are moments that are so foreign to contemporary attitudes that they are unintentionally funny. I can imagine audiences laughing through this movie and yet still respecting its uncompromising grimness.

This movie took me out of surrounding reality for a couple of hours plus, and when it was over I had that great feeling you get when you've watched a good movie. I can't say I liked this movie, and I'm sure I'll never watch it again, but I'm really glad I saw it.

Macbeth is about toxic ambition. A man becomes willing to commit multiple, unjust murders to slake his lust for the crown. He meets an unsurprising fate. His wife eggs him on. I think anyone watching this knows this plot and so you watch a new adaptation to see something new.

What's new is the set design. It's all German expressionism, black and white, emphasis on extreme contrasts between light and dark, minimalist sets.

Actors are filmed from a distance, few close-ups. As if Shakespeare's archaic and wordy dialog didn't push the viewer away enough, the remote directorial style pushes the viewer even farther away.

Denzel and Frances don't seem married. No chemistry. Denzel is a plump, grandfatherly figure and he doesn't convey bloodthirsty ambition.

I was offended by the witch. She's played by an old, ugly, contortionist and we are invited to ogle at her grotesque body and movements, as if she were a circus geek. I saw no real value in such an undignified display. Too close to mocking a handicapped or otherwise defective human body.

I loved the visuals but was bored by the film otherwise. I didn't care about any characters. I felt duty-bound to watch to the end but if I had just stumbled across this adaptation on YouTube I would have stuck around only for fifteen minutes or so.

I'm a big fan of Golden Age Hollywood movies. I've seen so many of them that it's hard for me to find a good one that I haven't already seen, and even more rare for me to find one that I hadn't heard of, and didn't already know the plot to. When you already know the reviews and the plot, even of a movie you haven't already seen, that eliminates the pleasure you get from surprise. The local library had the DVD of "Night Must Fall" from 1937. Not only had I not seen it, I'd never heard of it.

"Night Must Fall" surprised me. It's a murder mystery, so I can't say too much about it, but, yes, it was very worth seeing.

Those not familiar with, and appreciative of, Golden Age movies might dismiss "Night Must Fall" as beneath them. It is black and white, with the pre-wide-screen aspect ratio. That is, the image you see is more of a square than a rectangle. The images don't extend far out to the right and left.

"Night Must Fall" was filmed on a soundstage that stands in for an English cottage surrounded by woods. The viewer knows that this really isn't a cottage, and those aren't really woods. The trees aren't trees and the rivers aren't rivers. It's all MGM magic. When watching a soundstage movie, you must willingly suspend that disbelief.

Star Robert Montgomery, who was born in New York, attempts a weak Irish accent. Connecticut-born Rosalind Russell makes no attempt to sound English at all. Dame May Whitty, making her Hollywood debut at age 72, is clearly English and sounds it. Merle Tottenham, Kathleen Harrison, in minor roles, were both English. Alan Marshall was from Australia but sounded English to me.

"Night Must Fall" is a murder mystery with sexual and perverse undertones, but, given the Production Code, there is no gore and no violence at all. There's very little action. The film consists mostly of talk and significant eye movement. There are hammy moments. The musical score emphasizes points, and actors gasp and stare into space in melodramatic ways.

In spite of all the aesthetic differences between 1937 and 2022, "Night Must Fall" was, for me, very worth watching. I was fascinated to see what the screenplay by John Van Druten would do with the set-up: a woman has been murdered in an English village. The residents of the cottage discuss this murder and go about their quiet lives.

Elderly, wheelchair-bound invalid Mrs. Bramson lives with two domestic serving women and her niece, Olivia. A man name Danny arrives and charms Mrs. Bramson so thoroughly that she invites him to live with her and attend to her needs. The police stop by and ask if the cottage residents have seen anything unusual. There's been a murder and a headless corpse has been found.

I can't really say much more than that so as not to spoil the plot. I can say that Robert Montgomery's character, Danny, as written, is fascinating. It's interesting to know that a screenwriter in 1937 would even conceive of such a character. Montgomery's performance is amazing. I never thought to see such a performance in a B movie made in 1937. In spite of the gore-and-violence-free production, "Night Must Fall" really did give me the creeps and frightened me, especially in its closing scenes. "A critical success, Night Must Fall was named the best film of the year by the National Board of Review. Robert Montgomery also received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role," reports Wikipedia. The film was not a huge commercial success, though. I think it was ahead of its time.

I have actually seen "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians," widely considered to be the worst film ever made. I actually liked it when I saw it, but I was six years old and can be forgiven. But "Santa Inc" is actually worse than my adult opinion of SCCTM. "Santa Inc" is just totally tone deaf. Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman just have no idea to whom their show is addressed. Kids will not get into it and adults will be alienated. Sorry, it really is as bad as they say it is. If nothing else, Rogen and Silverman have made something memorable. Not in a good way, alas.

"Nomadland" 2020 Chloe Zhao, writer director Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, and "real people" stars

"Nomadland" is a low-budget film about displaced senior citizens, almost all white, who live in their vehicles and travel from one low-paying job to another around the West and Midwest.

I have much in common with the folks onscreen. Even though there was much onscreen to love, in the end, I felt betrayed by "Nomadland."

First, what I loved: the real people. "Nomadland" features Linda May, Charlene Swankie, Derek Endres, and Bob Wells, three real "nomads" playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Their authenticity and heart burns right through the screen. All of them brought tears to my eyes. I had to stop watching a couple of times, I was so moved.

I loved the film's willingness to talk about poor, white people, a demographic that is mostly mocked in mainstream media. We are "white trash," "trailer trash," and, of course, homeless poor whites are really the bottom of the barrel. Too, all the main characters have gray hair and, except for the movie-star-handsome David Strathairn, are not particularly good-looking. I loved the attention that the film paid to Charlene Swankie, a plump and creased-cheeked woman in her seventies. She's one of the most charismatic, interesting characters I've ever seen onscreen, and she is no curvy starlet.

"Nomadland" focuses on poor people, living rootless, homeless, isolated lives, working jobs few would want. One job is Amazon factory worker; another is cleaning toilets in a national park; another is harvesting beets. Agricultural labor, which I've done, is backbreaking. I did it when I was much younger and I spent off-hours immobile in pain, waiting for my muscles to recover. What must it be like to do that work in your sixties?

What I wish the film had handled better. "Nomadland" doesn't have much of a plot, script, or character development. It's more of an episodic diorama. Here's Bob Wells, telling his story. Here's Linda May, telling her story. Here's Derek Endres, for his moment in the spotlight. We don't stick with one character long enough to get to know him or her in depth. This episodic approach treats the nomads as if they were freaks in a freak show, rather than deep characters worthy of our investment and time.

These folks all tell tragic tales. There are a couple mentions of suicide, of poverty and despair. I have to ask: would the character who hit the road after a suicide had responded differently if health care or pastoral care had walked the sufferer through the tragedy to the other side of healing?

Have people like Swankie rejected society because of latent conditions like social anxiety, that would respond to treatment, or are they just introverts? Another character spoke of suicide. What if that character had met with a caring professional?

In other words, are they on the road because of mental illness? Because of inborn traits like Asperger's or other issues that make contact with other people difficult?

The movie never convinced me that this was just about economics. If it is just about economics, then why does the film work so hard to make the nomad life look romantic and enviable? If it's a problem of economics, then how about offering some potential solutions? If there are armies of poor, elderly people driving up and down highways, sleeping in parking lots and dreading that knock on the window from a security guard growling, "No overnight parking," then shouldn't we be doing something about it? And why is there such a huge disconnect between rents and what a retiree who has worked all of her life can reasonably pay?

The film never even hints at any answers to these issues. In that way, I do feel that the film doesn't treat its "real" characters as respectfully or compassionately as it might. Rather than treating them as people we should care about, they become superficial curiosities.

I've also gotta say that I didn't like France McDormand. I didn't like her performance and I didn't like her character. McDormand acts up a storm. Her face is a series of twitches, grins, grimaces, scowls, and soulful stares. I had no idea what she was reacting to half the time. Perhaps a private dialogue between her face and her fleas.

I really disliked her character, "Fern." I had no idea what motivated Fern. Her husband died and she lost her home and job when a gypsum plant shut down. These are tough life events, but many of us go through similar events and eventually find a path back to love and a new home. Why doesn't that happen for Fern? The David Strathairn character offers her what appears to be a sincere and appealing alternative to a solitary life on the road. I found Fern's behavior toward the Strathairn character to be completely incomprehensible.

There are a couple of scenes, one, of Fern waving her arms in the Badlands, and another, of Fern walking besides the ocean, that I did not understand at all. The camera focuses, at length, on Fern's face, signaling that something noteworthy is transpiring in Fern's mind. What is that something? Hope? Despair? Pleasure at being in nature? Missing her husband and former life? Worry about the future? Thoughts about what she'll have for dinner? The movie doesn't care enough about Fern to find out, or to communicate its discovery.

Wow. I didn't think this would move me so much. I followed the news accounts and read the dueling op eds. I didn't expect anything new from this series. I honestly thought I'd watch about ten minutes and then move on. I was glued to the screen for the entire first episode. It's honest, detailed, intimate, and devastating.

What gets you is the truth: you are most hurt by people you love and trust.

The haters will tell you that Infidel is a poorly made, heavy handed Christian movie. It's not. It's an international action thriller movie. American man travels to foreign country and is abducted and tortured for his beliefs. His wife works for the State Department and her bosses decline to help. She steps up and tries to rescue her husband.

Infidel contains the action and suspense fans of the genre want.

Yes, Doug, the main character, is a Christian, and he is abducted and tortured by Iranians. Yes, that does happen in real life. In fact persecution of Christians goes on everyday in Muslim countries. The haters are getting their shorts in a wad, not over real life human suffering, but over the depiction of that suffering on screen.

There is no heavy handed Christian proselytizing in this movie. It's not a Bond film, but it's satisfying as a representative of the genre.

Jim Caviezel is, as ever handsome and charismatic. Claudia Karvan, as his wife is charming and lovable, as she should be. Hal Ozsan is very good as the torturer.

I claim that this is the single worst movie I've ever seen. I'm reviewing my memories and chances are I may have said that about another movie, but this is certainly the worst movie I've seen in the past five years. A romantic comedy about colon cancer? Seriously? Do you have any idea what colon cancer does to the body? Why does Kate Hudson have hair? Why is she not in constant pain? Yes, I held the hands of loved ones dying of colon cancer. Yes, I've had cancer myself.

All that aside, the rest of the movie sucks so badly it's hard to sum up its suckage. The script is so awkward, so stupid, so unfunny, so totally without insight, it's painful.

Miss this one.