Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
Another Abortion Mill In “Unplanned”
Ashley Bratcher displays realistic, suitable restraint and persuasive agony as Abby Johnson, a Planned Parenthood director (and real-life person). We miss her, in the faith-based Unplanned (2019), every time she is not on screen. Whatever moral merit exists in...
A Serial Killer, Yes: The Movie, “Gosnell”
The Nick Searcy (director)-Andrew Klavan (screenwriter) effort, Gosnell---about the infanticide in Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Philadelphia abortion clinic---has its flaws. For one thing, Klavan's dialogue is not masterly (sarcastically: "You're a ray of sunshine"). But...
A Pleasant “Saturday Afternoon” With Harry Langdon
Saturday Afternoon (1926), a silent Harry Langdon flick, is a little over 26 minutes long and un-tediously endearing. Langdon plays a mild-mannered gent married to a shrew (Alice Ward), probably because of which he agrees to join his portly pal (Vernon Dent) for an...
A Look At The Graphic Novel, “The Death of Stalin”
I haven't been seeing very many current movies, and this even includes The Death of Stalin. But I did read the graphic novel, The Death of Stalin (2017), by writer Fabien Nura and artist Thierry Robin---it "inspired" the making of the movie---and I enjoyed it. The...
The Polish Film, “Ida,” Is One For The Ages
A Catholic nun-to-be, Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska), learns that she is Jewish and that her parents were murdered in an anti-Semitic Poland during WWII. The person who discloses this information is Ida's aunt (Agata Kulesza), a disillusioned former state prosecutor for...
Living On African Time: The “Stanley and Livingstone” Movie
The nineteenth century in Stanley and Livingstone (1939) is much like the twentieth century in that the work that men do takes them far from home and into remote areas, and the men aren't even soldiers. One of them, Dr. Livingstone (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), is a...
Fallen Night: The Movie, “Night World”
In the 1932 Night World, there is an opening montage of night-life naughtiness wherein a shot of a young boy in prayer appears. If the boy is praying for the adults who frequent Happy's Nightclub, they need it. Trouble, like depravity, rises in this spellbinding...
Up With “Way Down East”
A melodrama of pain, disaster and love, D.W. Griffith's Way Down East (1920), a silent film, is an energetic attack on snobbery and hardheartedness. Lillian Gish is quietly sensitive and moving as a country girl tricked into a false marriage by a wealthy womanizer, a...
A Great Subject in the Documentary, “Sound and Fury”
A deaf married couple, Peter and Nita, resist the idea of providing their deaf little girl, Heather, with the cochlear implant she asks for. To Peter's brother Chris and his wife Mari, both of whom can hear but who also have a deaf child, this is a form of abuse....
