The Preacher's Wife (1996)

  Happy belated May Day.  Here's a Christmas movie.

Reverend Henry Briggs (Courtney B. Vance) can feel everything slipping away: his church, his family, his faith.  Desperate, he prays for help.  And receives Dudley (Denzel Washington), a charming man claiming to be an angel.  Briggs doesn't have time for foolishness but he can't deny that Dudley seems to have a certain way about him, especially with regards to Briggs' neglected wife, Julia (Whitney Houston).  As Julia and Dudley grow closer, Briggs discovers that he might be focusing on the wrong things.

Man, I miss Whitney Houston.  Talk about a generational talent.  

The movie is fine.  It's got an incredible cast including Jenifer Lewis, Gregory Hines, Loretta Devine, and Lionel Ritchie with an uncredited appearance by Shari Headley.  If you like gospel music, the soundtrack is world-class.  It's the kind of easy, light Christmas movie that Hallmark has been churning out in batches for decades, diluting the appeal through sheer volume.  But it's worth tracking this one down.  

Celine and Julie Goe Boating (1974)

  Content warning:  child death, blood

Julie (Dominique Labourier) is minding her own business, learning witchcraft in the park --as one does-- when she sees a woman drop a scarf.  This simple act leads her to meet Céline (Juliet Berto), a stage magician and general pathological liar.  One of Céline's side-gigs is at a mansion in Paris that appears to be abandoned except for the days that she shows up.  She walks inside the house, and then some time later is violently pushed back out, remembering nothing, but with a piece of hard candy in her mouth.  Julie switches places with her one day, and the same thing happens.  Only when she eats the candy later does she remember the events, where two women --Sophie (Marie-France Pisier) and Camille (Bulle Ogier)-- scheme over a recent widower (Barbet Schroeder) with a sick child, Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar).  Julie or Céline find themselves in the body of Madlyn's nurse, Angéle, playing out the same events over and over, unable to stop Madlyn from being murdered.  The women decide that they must do something to save the little girl by figuring out whether Sophie or Camille is the killer.

This movie is 3 hours and 14 minutes long.  Just going to put that out there first.  It is incredibly shaggy, as in you just follow Céline and Julie around for like half the runtime before you even get to the central mystery.  That may put some of you off and I get it.  But if you give it a chance, this movie is incredibly entertaining.  Labourier and Berto are so charming and lively that it's not a hardship to watch them run-around like Lucy and Ethel on the set of a Twilight Zone soap opera.  

It's streaming on the Criterion Channel.

A Shock to the System (1990)

  Here's another one for you ambitious corporate ladder-climbers out there in the same vein as No Other Choice. 

Graham (Michael Caine) is passed over for a promotion at his company in favor of Bob (Peter Reigert), a younger yuppie with grand schemes of modernization.  He realizes that the fastest way to get ahead is to remove the obstacles --Bob-- before him.  But murder is a tricky thing, liable to get way out of control.

This is a pretty decent dark comedy, especially for its time.  There is one scene that could be read as date-rapey, but the movie leaves enough leeway that if you're feeling generous, you can still have some reasonable doubt.  

For whatever reason, Tubi has a very poorly censored version that is not marked as such, so I didn't know until about a quarter through.  There are very few things that immediately spark my ire like an outside party deciding what I'm allowed to hear and see.  So I would suggest finding an alternate viewing medium.

You Were Never Really Here (2018)

  Content warning:  child abuse, child trafficking, blood, suicide

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) finds lost and stolen children while not dealing with years of trauma and abuse.  A senator (Alex Manette) hires him to rescue his daughter, Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), kidnapped by a child trafficking ring.  Joe does, only for the rescue to turn south because --shockingly-- the politician may not have told him the complete truth.  

This was a highly stylized film and I completely understand if people don't vibe with it.  There are a lot of really heavy themes that the movie just asks you to sit with and if you don't want to, that's okay.

Personally, I liked it.  It was hyper-violent and also really short, clocking in at exactly 90 minutes.  I'm not a huge fan of Phoenix as an actor but he did some great work here.  Samsonov doesn't have a lot to do but it's always nice to see a not annoying child actor.  The ever-great character actor John Doman (a "that guy", you'll know him when you see him) also shows up and scream queen Judith Roberts plays Joe's mom and the emotional center of the film.  

It's an Amazon original so that's where you can find it.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

  Content warning:  racial slurs, violence, men being gross about women

Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is facing a difficult choice:  do time for running liquor and cigarettes for the Mob, or snitch to the cops on his underworld associates.

This would make a good double-feature with The Departed, if you wanted to stick with Boston, or Goodfellas if you just wanted crime.  For Mitchum-centric, you should do this and the original Cape Fear.  

For all that, this wasn't my favorite gangster movie.  It felt very predictable and by-the-numbers to me, but that could have just been the mood I was in.  I can't really find fault with it.  It's appropriately grimy for the time period, it's well-shot and well-acted.  I just didn't like it all that much.  It's a little hard to find, but it is available to rent on Amazon or Apple, and you can own the Criterion Collection blu-ray for a cool $31.  

Battle of the Sexes (2017)

  Hey, look, a sports movie.

Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) is at the top of her sport but finds her real competition is the inherent misogyny behind the scenes.  While she is campaigning for equal pay, founding her own women's league, and participating in a national championship tour, former men's tennis champion and current inveterate gambler, Bobby Riggs (Steve Carrell), calls her up with a proposition:  an exhibition match billed as the ultimate battle of the sexes.  

This was pretty fun.  A nice easy watch.  You don't have to know anything about tennis to enjoy it, although I'm sure that would have helped.  Carrell is great as the loud, larger-than-life Riggs, playing against Stone's straight-woman act.  The actual villain is Bill Pullman, who is smarmy and unctuous while being quietly enraged that these broads are demanding to be treated as equals.  And it was nice to see Lewis Pullman in an early role.

It's currently streaming on HBO Max.

Room 237 (2012)

  This movie is proof that being intelligent doesn't actually mean you're useful.

Five "experts" discuss their interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as voiceover interviews play over footage from various archival and other film footage.

These are not dumb people.  They are historians, professors, researchers, and archivists who fall into the trap of very smart people saying very dumb things.  The entire movie feels like an English Literature class in college where you're asked to close read a work for the first time.  The point of the exercise is not to discover the "true intent"; it's to show how varied the interpretations can be.  And yes, if you spend your entire career studying a particular facet of history, like the genocide of the Native Americans in the American West, or the Holocaust, you will then start seeing connections everywhere.  That is how human pattern-seeking works.  It is also how conspiracy theories work, that you've "figured it out" because you're so much smarter than other people, so of course you're going to be persecuted by the Government, as one gentleman dolefully expects to be audited by the IRS as punishment for speaking out about his theory that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 footage of the moon landing.  

I suppose you could find this documentary entertaining in a "Boy, what won't they think of" kind of way but I did not.  It felt a little mean-spirited considering that some of these people seem genuinely mentally ill, while others were infuriatingly condescending.  I don't find that funny.  And the film itself doesn't question or present a point of view of its own, so it just comes off as a bunch of people ranting.  Again, that is not my thing.  If it's yours or you just really, really like The Shining and/or Kubrick and/or insane conspiracy theories, Room 237 is streaming on Shudder and AMC+.