Unhealed Wound – Page 18 – Passion for Art, Movies, and Culture

Colors of Evil: Red—Blood and Rage

Written by Diana Paul on August 18, 2024. Posted in movie reviews.

The Netflix film Colors of Evil: Red (2024) is adapted from a novel by Polish author Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak. This Polish police procedural opens with the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and mutilated, washing onto the beach, surrounded by police and the forensic doctor. The circumstances of her death indicate Monica was the...

Mary & George–Lust for Power

Written by Diana Paul on August 12, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

In the Starz historical drama, Mary & George, we see the fiercely ambitious Countess of Buckingham, Lady Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore), groom her extraordinarily handsome son, George (Nicholas Galitzine) to be the boy-toy of King James 1 (1566-1625)(Tony Curran). This is not your usual mother-son relationship! Lady...

Holdovers–No Home for the Holidays

Written by Diana Paul on August 4, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound.

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

Written by Diana Paul on July 29, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

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...

The Sympathizer–Displaced Sympathies

Written by Diana Paul on July 22, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

Based upon the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer opens in April 1975, during the fall of Saigon. This American War– or Vietnam War, depending upon perspective,– unflinchingly depicts the ignominious and callous withdrawal of American troops and their Vietnamese aids on...

Gentleman in Moscow –Rules of Civility

Written by Diana Paul on July 14, 2024. Posted in movie reviews.

Based upon the bestseller by Amor Towles, Gentleman in Moscow tells the story of an aristocrat whose status makes him an enemy of the state, namely, Bolshevik Russia in 1918. Count Alexander Rostov (Ewan McGregor) is sentenced to a lifetime as a resident in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, narrowly escaping execution during Stalin’s...