Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a film in the style of “Dead Poets Society”. Set in a New England prep school, Barton Preparatory, sometime in the 1970s, the predominantly white students dominate what the school administration can do. A curmudgeonly, lonely instructor, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), draws the...
Two Sides of the Abyss–Cat and Mouse
A disturbing German psychological crime thriller, Two Sides of the Abyss (2023) opens with an obsessive, grieving police officer, Luise Berg (Anne Ratte-Polle), determined to re-incarcerate the murderer of her teenage daughter. Berg is outraged that Dennis Opitz (Anton Dreger) has been released early from...
What Happened to Monday?–A Weekly Menace
The year is 2073,. Overpopulation and limited resources, especially food and fuel, have created a mandatory one-child policy called “The Child Allocation Act”. What Happened to Monday explores what such a world would look like with an autocrat as leader and mandatory enforcement with surveillance required for all...
Woman in the Wall–Imprisonment in the Magdalene Laundries
Set up as a six-episode thriller, Woman in the Wall is based on the horrific exploitation of teenage girls and young women in “the homes for unwed mothers” in Ireland. The scandal of the Magdalene Laundries has damaged the Catholic Church for over a century and a half. This fictionalized account focuses on Lorna Brady...
Year of the Dragon 2024–February 10, 2024, through Jan. 28, 2025
Happy Lunar New Year, everyone! Good luck from dragon fire breathed into your lives with excitement and creativity!
2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon. It is particularly a favorable time for change, growth, and progress. The combination of the dragon’s dynamic energy and the grounding and stabilizing...
My Top 12 Movies and Series for 2023
While we are all going into our fourth year of Covid, many of us craved new content to watch, and felt like there weren’t as many good movies and series to choose from. Certainly, the screenwriters’ strike contributed to the dearth of content. Well, this year I still have twelve to recommend. Some are less well-known...