Tag: Amazon Prime

For Love and Life: No Ordinary Campaign

Written by Diana Paul on October 6, 2024. Posted in movie reviews. No Comments on For Love and Life: No Ordinary Campaign

In the extraordinary 2024 documentary, For Love and Life, portraits in courage, we witness ALS patient Brian Wallach as well as his wife, Sandra, as they power through a commitment to fight for a cure. Previously an Obama administration lawyer, Brian and Sandra, also a lawyer, become indefatigable activists for ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease whose prominence and awareness are due largely to the baseball player, Lou Gehrig, and the physicist, Stephen Hawking. Both Gehrig and Hawking had endured the inevitable disabilities which weaken and...

Prisoner–Trapped with No Escape

Written by Diana Paul on May 28, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

In this six-episode Danish prison drama (2024), Prisoner, the action pops in the opening scene. Miriam (Sofie Gråbøl) is a veteran prison guard with some compassion for the inmates, perhaps the only one with human feelings for the incarcerated. Until Sammi (Youssef Wayne Hvidtfeldt), of Danish-Arab ethnicity: a new recruit who desires to support prisoners for the good of society at large. Henrik (David Dencik) is also a veteran prisoner guard, one who has manipulated the prison system for his own self-interest, taking a percentage of the drugs that sedate...

Arctic Circle–Shivering with Fear

Written by Diana Paul on April 22, 2024. Posted in Television reviews. No Comments on Arctic Circle–Shivering with Fear

Set in the Lapland region of Finland, the Finnish-German three-season thriller, Arctic Circle, Nina Kautsalo (Iina Kuustonen), is determined to solve three multiple murder cases, one in each season. Nina is a single mom with a Down syndrome daughter, Venla, who is cared for by her devoted grandmother. Nina, in turn, is supported by an understanding director and her police colleagues. Besides the inevitable struggles to balance work and family, she also has to deal with Venla’s yearning to know her estranged father and also with Marita (Pihla Vittala of “Deadwind”), Nina’s...

Saltburn–Class Wounds

Written by Diana Paul on April 1, 2024. Posted in movie reviews. No Comments on Saltburn–Class Wounds

Saltburn is a 2023 highly original indie psychological thriller written, directed, and co-produced by Emerald Fennell (creator of “A Promising Young Woman”, see my March 25,2021 review). A brilliant middle-class Oxford student with few friends (except for one rather sadistic roommate), Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan from “Banshees of Inisherin”) has little appeal with women, but outsized ambitions to be popular with his fellow aristocratic students. A coming-of-age film this is not! Supernaturally handsome Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), befriends Oliver after Oliver...

Mr. and Mrs. Smith–Trust Issues

Written by Diana Paul on March 26, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. No Comments on Mr. and Mrs. Smith–Trust Issues

The mini-series, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which premiered in February of this year on Amazon Prime, is much more than a remake of the popular 2005 movie starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. While still anchored in a main plot of espionage hijinks, now the drama has been embedded within a rom-com infused by the chemistry between its charming leads, Donald Glover (John Smith) and Maya Erskine (Jane Smith). As two lonely, unemployed millennials, they independently agree to become secret agents for a mysterious organization requiring them to go undercover as a married...

The Burial–Reaching Beyond the Grave

Written by Diana Paul on October 30, 2023. Posted in movie reviews. No Comments on The Burial–Reaching Beyond the Grave

The wealthy almost always have an impact on the financial decisions of the poor and on limiting their options to make informed choices. Combine that with the shameful racist history in the US and we have the new Amazon Prime release: The Burial. Based upon a true story, the opening scene features small business proprietor, Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday. Surrounded by his loving wife and many adult children and grandchildren, all is not well for Jeremiah. His Biloxi, Mississippi funeral home business of eight branches...