Leading off this week’s top picks is the wonderfully dark, dark comedy The Death of Stalin. I’ll be writing about it tomorrow. I’ll also be writing about another dark comedy that I liked very much, Thoroughbreds, about two teen girl sociopaths.
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story is the riveting biopic of a glamorous movie star who invented and patented the precursor to wireless technology; that’s amazing enough, but Bombshell delves deeply into how Lamarr’s stunning face, her Jewish heritage and mid-century gender roles shaped her career, marriages and parenting. Top notch.
The Leisure Seeker is an Alzheimer’s road trip dramedy with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Mirren and Sutherland are excellent, possibly enough to see this in a theater.
These Oscar winners are still in theaters:
- The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro’s imaginative, operatic inter-species romance may become the most-remembered film of 2017.
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri a powerful combination of raw emotion and dark hilarity with an acting tour de force from Frances McDormand and a slew of great actors.
- Pixar’s Coco is a moving and authentic dive into Mexican culture, and it’s visually spectacular.
- I, Tonya is a marvelously entertaining movie, filled with wicked wit and sympathetic social comment. I just watched it again with The Wife!
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, a family learns that there are some things you just can’t get past. Force Majeure was Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. It is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and Xbox Video.
On Sunday, March 25, Turner Classic Movies will air I Want to Live! Susan Hayward’s performance as a good-hearted, but very unlucky, floozy won her an Oscar. It’s about a party girl who takes up with a couple of lowlifes. The lowlifes commit a murder and pin it on her. There is a great jazz soundtrack and a dramatic walk to The Chair.
