One of the most compassionate films you'll ever see about how being poor sets up a potential avalanche of financial consequences for attempting to do something to better your situation through moving. There is a cost attached to every moment. For that to register, though, the entire film rests on Michelle Williams performance and she succeeds.
I want to share a story because it overlaps so much with this film, down to the very year and route. In 2008 I…
Morvern Callar has one of the bleakest cold opens of any film. We see the titular woman (played by Samantha Morton), as she wakes up with her boyfriend dead from suicide on the floor and a computer screen that says "READ ME." The note instructs her to "be brave" and to send his novel to various publishers he's listed. That's the plot portion of the opening, before we even get there we lay with Morvern on the floor, her fingers…
I love 1930s cocktail hour acting but Bette Davis takes it to a whole new level here when she holds the house band hostage for her play it again, Sam moment. (Really want to watch a movie of just Humphrey Bogart horse training opposite Davis' horse rider; the illness angle wasn't revving me up like their horse-flirting interactions.)
When rock critics hear Queen’s improbable hit single “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the first time, Bryan Singer’s film (of the same name) flashes a bunch of dismissive critical quotes. One quote outstretches all the others and ends the sequence, that’s “perfectly adequate” and it perfectly describes the adequate rock biopic of aha musical moments, backstage drama, and 15-year reflections from backstage framing. But the problem is that where it isn't perfectly adequate and vanilla it's actually painfully safe and somewhat erasing,…
