For a movie that's only 87 minutes long, Beatriz at Dinner is very slow and depressing and I hated the ending. Glad I paid only $1 to see it at the second-run theater's last day of showing it.
Beatriz is a Mexican-American massage therapist who gets stuck at her rich client's house when her car won't start. The client asks Beatriz to join the dinner party at the house while Beatriz awaits a friend to pick her up.
There are very awkward discussions at dinner (on purpose) about destruction and construction of property. The much-poorer Beatriz is angry, but you don't realize how depressed she is until the end of the movie.
I guess you would call The Beguiled a Gothic horror move rather than a historical drama. It takes place in the American South during the 1860s Civil War in a huge antebellum mansion.
Nicole Kidman plays the headmistress of a girls' school which has only five students left because of the war. The girls range in age from about 6 to 17, plus there is an assistant teacher. There is also one other temporary resident, a wounded Union soldier.
The assistant teacher, Edwinna, and the oldest girl, Alicia, are both attracted to the soldier, who isn't as kind as he first appears. I can't say much else without giving away the plot.
I enjoyed the movie although it is very slow. I want to warn you that it gets more gruesome in the second half.
The House movie is bad. Sometimes raunchy R-rated movies can be very funny, but this wasn't one of them. I was cringing during many scenes. I don't think setting a man on fire is funny, even if it is a gangster in a comedy.
It's about a couple who learns that the scholarship they planned to use to send their daughter to college is no longer available. So they and a friend open up an illegal casino in the one man's home to raise money.
The title is a pun. Not only does it refer to the home itself, but also to a casino being called a house, as in "the house always wins." It was the only thing clever about the movie.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the best movie I've seen this year. It's exciting, it's beautiful and it has an unusual plot.
Hundreds of years in the future, a huge space station is inhabited by hundreds of species, including humans, from all over the galaxy. Two soldiers, Valerian and Laureline, have been recruited to find out why there is a dead zone in the middle of the station where any creature that goes there dies.
At least, that's one of the plots, there are others, including the inevitable government cover-up.
The movie kept my interest, I liked all the characters, the special effects were gorgeous and I can't stop thinking about the film. I was very impressed. The only drawback is that the ending isn't entirely happy.
Sometimes you have to see a pleasant little movie that has no bad guys and no unlikeable characters. If you want such a movie, see All Saints.
This is the story of an Episcopalian priest in Tennessee who is briefly assigned to a church that is going to be closed due to lack of membership. However, a group of refugees from Karen in Myanmar has moved into town, and suddenly the congregation has tripled in size. The refugees were raised Anglican by British missionaries and were looking for a similar place to worship in their new home.
The first half of the movie is slow but the pace improves in the second half. I was near tears at the end.
You will learn a lot about the area of Karen, which I had never heard of.
I think Steve Carell deserves an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for playing Bobby Riggs in Battle of the Sexes. I'm not a Steve Carell fan, but his sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-pathetic role as the tennis player was well done and very empathetic.
I really enjoyed this movie about the 1973 matchup between Riggs and Billie Jean King and the conflicts they faced with their families and managers for going on professional tour. Although I remember most of what happened, I wasn't aware that prior to the match the women had started their own tennis league so that they could earn more money at the matches.
It was SOOOOO nice to see an old-fashioned adventure film, one without bad guys and superheroes and computer special effects. The Mountain Between Us is just about a couple trying to survive the elements in the Northern Rockies. Mountain is about a man and a woman, Ben and Alex, who are strangers who hire a private plane when all the regular flights leaving an airport in Idaho are cancelled because of an incoming snowstorm. The flight on the little plane goes well until the pilot suffers a stroke and the vehicle crashes on top of a mountain. The passengers and the pilot's dog are injured and the pilot dies. The couple must find their own way down the mountain.
Intense, but not really nerve-wracking, although a few scenes make you jump. The one detail in the movie that puzzled me was about eating chocolate. The survivors had some candy and I know you aren't supposed to give dogs chocolate, but it's never explained why Alex won't eat it. The book is based on a novel and I wonder if it is explained in there.
If I were producer Roland Emmerich and film company 20th Century Fox (who together made Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, plus Sony (who backed Emmerich in 2012), I would be suing Dean Devlin (who used to work with Emmerich) and Warner Bros for plagiarism.
Devlin made the new disaster movie Geostorm. There were so many scenes and characters stolen from the other three movies that I lost count. The plot was complicated and I didn't understand all of the technical jargon. The premise is that the space station had seeded clouds to prevent superstorms and it worked for three years, but now someone has sabotaged the equipment and the equipment is causing the storms itself.
The only actor in the movie I recognized was Ed Harris, and he and all the other actors seemed stilted.
You will recognize the 1970s animated specials The Night the Animals Talked and Nestor, the Long-Eared Donkey in the new computer-animated movie The Star. All three have the same basic plot--the viewpoint of the animals of the birth of Jesus. The Star is a beautifully done if sometimes awkward movie about the marriage of Mary and Joseph and their trip to Bethlehem, interspersed by the tale of their impatient donkey Boaz, who dreams of working with the royal caravan. I always get caught up in one or two details of a computer-animated movie, and this time it was the hair and facial features of two of the characters. I loved Joseph's young face and brown curls and Mary's long unruly black hair and, of all things, her freckles!
My sister and I agreed that The Man Who Invented Christmas is a slow but entertaining movie about Charles Dickens and the writing of A Christmas Carol. It takes place in the 1840s in London, where Charles is overwhelmed by the responsibilities of his large family, his house being remodeled, his recent novels which were flops, his lack of money and his need to write a new book.
The movie is educational in showing how Dickens got the ideas for his characters for Carol, although I don't know how much was poetic license. There was one piece of trivia in the movie that I remember learning in junior English literature--that Dickens collected odd names that he later used in his books. My one complaint about the movie is that it is very dark, and I mean that literally. The interiors of the buildings, all being candlelit, are hard to see.
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