Unhealed Wound – Page 7 – Unhealed Wound

“Promising Young Woman” –Breaking Over and Over Again

Written by Diana Paul on March 15, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound. 1 Comment on “Promising Young Woman” –Breaking Over and Over Again

Promising Young Woman, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, is a revenge thriller on a brutal topic–Don’t let the title mislead you. Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a 30-year old former medical student, is now a barista living with her parents In the opening scene we see a very inebriated Cassie barhopping and wandering the city streets at night. The viewer doesn’t know why this bright and attractive woman is engaged in such risky, dangerous behavior. To say much more about the film’s artistic and courageous story would ruin it. But this is an...

“News of the World”–A Gift for the Heart

Written by Diana Paul on February 1, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound. 5 Comments on “News of the World”–A Gift for the Heart

News of the World is based on the Paulette Jiles’s bestseller by the same name. The story follows a sixty-something curmudgeonly widower, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a traveling newspaper reader. Captain Kidd entertains and informs townspeople–some of whom are illiterate– in small communities all over Texas: for the price of a silver dime. The year is 1870, five years after Reconstruction, and Texans still are disgruntled by their defeat after the end of the Civil War. In the opening scene a Black man has been lynched and a ten-year-old...

“The Reagans”–Truth At Last

Written by Diana Paul on January 18, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound. 4 Comments on “The Reagans”–Truth At Last

A four-part Showtime documentary series, The Reagans excoriates the epic failure of journalism to reveal the Reagan White House as it really was, not the fairy tale of near-sainthood of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan, Jr., the only son of the Reagans, is the primary source for details about his parents’ most private moments and their secrets behind closed doors. One of his more frankly understated comments: “My father was a strange fellow to be president of this country.” How the carefully curated story becomes the reality is the emphatic warning of The...

My Top 30 Movies and TV Series for 2020

Written by Diana Paul on January 4, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews, Unhealed Wound. 2 Comments on My Top 30 Movies and TV Series for 2020

Looking for your next movie to watch? While we all hunker down during this sheltering-in-place, many of us crave new content to watch, some less well-known and under-the-radar. Well, this year I watched more movies and television than ever before, so I have thirty to recommend, instead of the usual 15-20. Here are the reviews I wrote this past year with the criteria that they were available online since movie theaters were either shut down or offered very limited screenings. Of the 52 reviews, here are my favorites. Yet another difficult...

“Retribution”–Karma is a Beast

Written by Diana Paul on December 7, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews, Unhealed Wound. No Comments on “Retribution”–Karma is a Beast

Retribution ( a 2016 BBC production originally titled “One of Us”) opens with a horrific double murder, which will tear apart the lives of two families, the Douglases and the Elliots. They are friends who live side-by-side in the isolated Scotland Highlands hamlet of Braeston. The atmospherically remote Scottish scenery is reminiscent of Nordic noir landscapes. Events soon take an even more brutal turn when a badly injured man arrives at the Douglas family’s doorstep after his car careens off the road – a man who...

“Hinterland” —The Remote Interior of the Mind

Written by Diana Paul on November 1, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews, Unhealed Wound. 1 Comment on “Hinterland” —The Remote Interior of the Mind

An original Welsh-noir murder series on Netflix (in three seasons, 13 total episodes), Hinterland is for those who love this genre. The main character, DCI Tom Mathias, is a deeply troubled unsympathetic detective who, together with his more mature and brilliant partner Mared Rhys, travels around a small hamlet in Wales solving at least one murder per episode. The dark, forboding, and gloomy landscape rivals that of the best Nordic noir raising the same question: how can there be so many murders in such a...