This week, I’m featuring two psychological thrillers with powerful endings and a comic heist documentary.
OUT NOW
- Beast: Jessie Buckley is a force of nature in this psychological thriller.
- First Reformed: Ethan Hawke stars in this bleak, bleak psychological thriller with an intense ending.
- American Animals is funny documentary/reenactment of a preposterous heist.
- RBG is the affectionate and humanizing biodoc about that great stoneface, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
- A Quiet Place is as satisfyingly scary as any movie I’ve seen in a good long time. Very little gore and splatter, but plenty of thrills. I’m not a big fan of horror movies, but I enjoyed and admired this one.
ON VIDEO
My Stream of the Week is the very funny and sentimental The Last Movie Star with 82-year-old Burt Reynolds and Ariel Winter (Alex Dunphy in Modern Family). You can stream it on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
Faithful readers know that I revere the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood/Ennio Morricone spaghetti westerns. On June 13, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the three great Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All star Clint Eastwood and feature wonderfully idiosyncratic scores by Ennio Morricone.
Eastwood’s character in the trilogy is referred to in film literature as “the man with no name”. But actually, the character is named Joe, Monco and Blondie in the three movies, respectively.
Here’s Morricone’s theme for A Fistful of Dollars.