Reviews

I'm not sure why other reviewers have dissed this one, because I found it emotionally gripping start-to-finish. It's a superbly told tale of a young woman, Rachel Albrecht (Dylan Ratzlaff), torn between her Amish upbringing and her awareness of an outside world. Most depictions of the Amish portray them as relatively benign eccentrics - there are even tourists who take trips to Amish country just to gawk at them and their rejection of modern technology like cars and telephones - but in this film they come off as a Christian version of the Taliban. Co-writers. Michael Nankin (who also directed) and Barbara. Nance do a wonderful job of portraying Rachel's culture shock on encountering the non-Amish world, and Ratzlaff's performance is pitch-perfect as a woman torn between two worlds and not sure where she belongs. A rare diamond-in-the-rough triumph for Lifetime!

This film was a remake of Paramount's 1933 programmer "White Woman," directed by Stuart Walker and with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard in the roles played here by J. Carrol Naish and Anna May Wong. Obviously they weren't going to cast Wong as the titular white woman! The story began life as a 1933 play by Norman Reilly Raine and Frank Butler called "Hangman's Whip" (a better title than either "White Woman" or "Island of Lost Men"), and despite John Howard Reid's comment that it might have been better with a stronger male lead, Laughton and Naish seemed to be engaged in a competition as to who could overact more and do more beaver imitations on the scenery. For the first few moments it seems like Anna May Wong might just be getting a more multidimensional character than usual, but she soon sinks back into the usual "inscrutable" sludge that was her stock in trade as the first Asian-American movie star. Anthony Quinn and Broderick Crawford are so much in the typical character-actor mold you'd never guess from this film that both of them would go on to win Academy Awards. Eric Blore is delightful as usual, though it looks like he got lost on his way to the set of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film and would dearly like to get back. The script by William R. Lipman and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" author Horace McCoy is serviceable (without the creativity they showed in their previous script for Wong, "Dangerous to Know," in which they gave Akim Tamiroff a truly complex character instead of an unredeemable boor), and so is Kurt Neumann's direction.

I think the negative reviewers were really being unfair to this film. Director. Darin Scott and writers Jennifer Edwards and. Amy Katherine Taylor delivered an impressive piece of suspense filmmaking with bits of Gothic horror. Tamala Jones is excellent int he role of Jules Baker, an abused wife finny coming out of her shell after losing her husband six months previously, and Lamon Archey is equally impressive as the new man in her life. It's hardly a great. Movie, but it's first-rate within the limits of Lifetime's formulas and the surprise ending is quite credible. I found it entertaining and a lot of fun.

When I first saw this film on Turner Classic Movies' schedule for October 29, two days before Hallowe'en, I wondered, "Why are they showing one of those cheap, terrible Mexican horror movies in Eddie Muller's time slot?" I was wrong on all countsL the film turned out to be more noir than horror, a clever reworking of Fritz Lang's "M," and a film or real quality and power in its own right. Also it's from Argentina, not Mexico. Eddie Muller stressed the feminist aspects of the tale, particularly the appearance of strong women characters (ironically, Lang's "M" contains virtually no women even though a woman, Thea von Harbou, wrote it). Writer-director Román Vinoly Barreto manages to work in references not only to "M" but other classic films like "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "The Third Man," and even "Casablanca" (early on, when they're just starting the search for the child-killer, the police say, "Round up all the usual suspects"), but Barreto ably fuses those movies into his plot so he seems like a director with a true love of his predecessors instead of some kid saying, "Look at how many movies I've seen!" A truly great film, blessedly rediscovered (thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press Association - the much-maligned group that hosted the Golden Globes - for funding its restoration) and ready to take its place as one of the classics of the film noir era.

Despite a title that couldn't help but make me think of Olivia Newton-John, I loved this movie. The best thing about it was it was sex-positive and showed a woman who was fiercely independent and in control of her own destiny freely and unashamedly taking up a career in sex work and doing it as op-enly and proudly as the law allowed. I even liked the fact that welters Margaret Froley and Kelly Fullerton raised the question of whether prostitution should be illegal at all. Given that most Lifetime depictions of prostitution show the girls (and sometimes guys) involved in it as human-trafficking victims or people tricked into it by abusive, exploitative pimps masquerading as boyfriends (a pattern all too common in real life as well), it's nice to see a film that presents sex work as a reasonable choice for a liberated woman. I also loved 41-year-old Jenna Dewan's performance as Sadie; at a time in life when most women are considered past their prime physically, her overall sexiness and clear comfort with her body make her believable as a woman whom some men would freely and happily pay to have sex with her.

"The Glass Wall" is an intriguing and surprisingly timely film about undocumented immigration. With President Biden keeping in place Trump's policies limiting asylum applications, and U. S. Border Patrol agents literally lassoing refugees from Haiti, the plight of Peter Kaban (Vittorio Gassman) seems to have sprung from today's news. I saw this on the TCM "Noir Alley" feature and the hosts, Eddie Muller and Dana Delany, stressed that co-writer and co-producer Ivan Tors was himself an immigrant from Hungary and wrote some of his own experiences into the film. Though some of the incidents are contrived and smack too much of movie coincidence, the film overall is a gripping suspense tale. As a jazz fan, I also liked seeing Jack Teagarden (pushing the slide of his trombone farther out than usual; mostly he played "close to the vest" because he'd learned as a child before his arms were long enough to reach the farthest positions) as well as more modern players like Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre and Shelly Manne. About the one thing the film was missing is a strong leading man: Gassman would have been O. K. in a Fellini movie but he's just not a good enough actor for the lead. It's a pity this film was made two years after John Garfield's death (his last film, "He Ran All the Way" with Gassman's then-wife Shelley Winters, is very similar to this one even though he's a fleeing criminal instead of an immigrant) and a year before the advent of James Dean.

I couldn't disagree more with the earlier reviewer. I found "Saving My Daughter" to be a tightly knit, fast-moving thriller, well worth seeing, competently directed by Michael Feifer and with a complex script by Michael Perronne that gave even the villains understandable motives for their actions. The film's energy flags a bit after the big revelation two-thirds of the way through, but the plot resolution is effective and believable, and Alicia Hayes Willis as Joanna gives us a powerful performance as a revenge-driven woman. This is Lifetime firing on all cylinders and turning in an exciting and fully believable movie - a real surprise coming from as ordinarily a mediocre filmmaker as Michael Feifer.

Orson Welles' æMacbeth" is a rentless run-through of one of Shakespeare's most controversial plays (it's considered such a bad-luck piece in theatrical circles theatre people won't speak its name and just call it "The Scottish Play") that finds a brilliantly effective cinematic style to project the story. Welles was a huge fan of the film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (Germany, 1919) and in "Macbeth" he used stylized sets, costumes and actors' movements to depict and reflect the central character's diseased mind. The most recent time I saw it I wondered if Welles, making it so soon after the end of World War II, was thinking of Hitler and in particular Hitler's descent from rational evil to total madness. There are weaknesses - Welles starts his performance at 11 and moves it up to 20, and given that Agnes Moorehead played Lady Macbeth in the theatrical try-out in Salt Lake City, Jeanette Nolan's performance, though good, comes off like it should have had a note attached that the star was indisposed and the understudy was taking over. But overall it's a formidable film and one of the landmarks of the generally sorry history of Shakespeare on film. When it was released on the heels of Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" it got a lot of negative reviews saying that Olivier had shown how to film Shakespeare and Welles had shown how not to, but I think both films are great: "Hamlet" is better Shakespeare but "Macbeth" is a better movie.

After everything I've read or heard about "Inchon" - including the marvelously loopy account of its making in Harry and Michael Medved's book "The Hollywood Hall of Shame: - I was startled when I finally got a copy of the movie on DVD (bootlegged from the "Good Life TV Program" cable channel back when Sun Myung Moon's organization still owned the network) and found it not a bad movie, just a mediocre one. Like Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" (which when I watched it I could see it was aspiring to greatness and also how and why it was falling short), it's a considerably better movie than its reputation. It's got two genuinely good, authoritative performances (by Ben Gazzara and David Janssen) and a great musical score by Jerry Goldsmith rivaling his Academy Award-winning work on "Patton" (a credit that probably got him this job). What's wrong with "Inchon" - aside from the bizarre interference by Sun Myung Moon, who when he was shown the first version insisted on more gore and bigger crowd scenes, leaving the director clueless about how to match his original footage with the additions Moon demanded - is the writers' seeming determination to cram EVERY stupid war-movie cliché into their script. It also doesn't help that to prep for his role as Douglas MacArthur, Laurence Olivier interviewed MacArthur's aide Alexander Haig (who went on to become Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff and Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State). Haig told Olivier that MacArthur's voice sounded "just like W. C. Fields," and Olivier took that to heart and spoke his lines in the legendary drawl of the great comedian. And after two hours of buildup the final battle takes about 20 minutes and is virtually incomprehensible on screen. But there is enough professional competence behind "Inchon" it doesn't deserve a place on worst-movies-of-all-time lists, even though Sam Fuller's "The Steel Helmet" (a tight-knit, coherent and chilling drama) remains, to my mind, the best film ever made about the Korean War.

I first saw "The Crimson Canary" in the early 1970's when I was getting really interested in 1930's and 1940's jazz and swing, and contrary to dadoun-1's review, the sequence featuring the Coleman Hawkins-Oscar Pettiford band on screen DOES include Hawkins, Pettiford and the other musicians in the group (trumpeter Howard McGhee, pianist Sir Charles Thompson and drummer Denzil DaCosta Best) on the soundtrack as well. The musicians dadoun-1 mentions were actually the off-screen doubles for the white actors playing the members of the band at the heart of the film's story. (These are the only recordings I know of by tenor saxophonist King Guion, whom critic George T. Simon predicted would become a star. Too bad he didn't, as he's quite good even if not at Hawkins' level.) I've been in love with this movie ever since and I only wish Universal Home Video would do a proper DVD or Blu-Ray version instead of the lousy splice-ridden copy I just got from a grey-label source that omitted the opening song, "I Never Knew I Could Love Anybody." And I'm amused that the original ads promised a sleazy exploitation movie - "Rhythm Cults Exposed!" - when the film actually treats the jazz world of 1945 with unusual respect and even love.

There are a few historical errors in the earlier reviews which I'll try to sort our here. R. C. Sherriff's (note the spelling) "Journey's End" was first produced on stage in London in 1928 by the Incorporated Stage Society, one of the so-called "private clubs" formed in the 19th century to evade Church of England restrictions on public performances on Sundays. Laurence Olivier was the first Captain Stanhope, but when director Basil Dean cast him in an adaptation of "Beau Genre: Olivier quit the play after the Society performances and Colin Clive replaced him when the play opened at the Savoy Theatre on the West End of London. Clive continued to play Stanhope on stage in Maurice Browne's Savoy production and the film producers had to pay Browne a loan-out fee to get him (which is why the "By Arrangement with Maurice Browne" note appears before his credit). "Journey's End" as a movie is a powerful reproduction of the play but suffers from Whale's inexperience as a filmmaker and also being saddled with the three-camera technique of early talkies that was out of date by 1930. There's also an annoying performance by David Manners, who would act far more subtly in later films (notably Frank Capra's "The Miracle Woman") but here is way too chipper as Lt. Raleigh and one wonders why Whale didn't (or couldn't) turn him down. On the good side, however, is the naturalistic delivery of Sherriff's dialogue (there's none of the slow pacing and dreadful pausing that makes many early talkies almost unwatchable today) and the absolutely brilliant performance of Colin Clive. After seeing "Journey's End" it's easier to understand why Whale fought Universal so hard to get Clive to play the lead in "Frankenstein."

The success of Victor and Edward Halperin's great indie horror film "White Zombie" got them a contract with a major studio to make "Supernatural" with first-rate actors: Carole Lombard, Randolph Scott, H. B. Warner and the marvelous character villain Alan Dinehart. Warner plays a scientist who's convinced that the souls of particularly notorious criminals survive after their death, inhabit the bodies of other people and continue to commit crimes. He decides to test out his theory by requesting the body of Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne) and trying to trap her soul, but the experiment backfires and Rogen takes possession of Roma Courtney (Carole Lombard), an heiress still mourning the death of her beloved twin brother. Meanwhile Roma is being pursued by fake spiritualist Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart), who breaks into the mortuary where John's body is being readied for burial and makes a cast of his face so he can stage a phony "vision" of John returning from the grave. Despite some technical flaws surprising in a major-studio film from 1933, "Supernatural" is a marvelous movie and a particularly strong showcase for Lombard,.who anticipates Joanne Woodward in "The Three Faces of Eve" and Sally Field in "Sybil" in her ability to portray different personalities within the same body and make you believe in each of them. Though "Supernatural" is far from Lombard's best film, it's probably her biggest acting challenge and makes me wish she'd survived into the film noir era -- she'd have been a great femme fatale!

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a Lifetime movie that's the first in a month-long series called "Ripped from the Headlines!" (though they've certainly done fact-based films before this, some of them quite good), which got shot under the clunky title "The NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Nightmare" and was shown under the even clunkier title "Escaping the NXIVM Cult: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Daughter." The non-fiction book it was based on was simply called "Captive," which would have worked better for the film, and was written by Catherine Oxenberg. She was apparently the product of a minor noble family in Europe who came to the U.S., pursued a career as an actress and got a small but recurring role on the TV series "Dynasty." As the film opens she and her daughter India (Jasper Polish) are living in a large home in Malibu that looks like it was built by someone out of an all-white Lego set, and India's dad is in the picture but Catherine is in the process of divorcing him and raising India and her two younger sisters Remy (Gabrielle Trudel) and Francesca (Isabelle D. Trudel - well, that's one way of making your cast members look like sisters: cast real-life sisters!) as a single parent. She's also trying to break out of acting and into writing by selling a screenplay called "Royal Exiles," and when a neighbor tells her about a new self-help seminar called ESP - which here stands for "Executive Success Program" - Catherine not only goes herself but takes her daughter.

Catherine is put off by the overall air of the event - particularly the veneration with which the people running the seminar speak of the "Vanguard," their term for the CEO of ESP, and the way the people running it wear different-colored sashes to signify how far up in the program they've risen, sort of like the different-colored belts in Japanese martial arts. But India comes out of the program with goop-eyed admiration and within a couple of commercial breaks she's signed up for the $2,500 advanced training available only at the Albany, New York headquarters of ESP's parent company, NXIVM. India gets sucked in farther and farther into what we're beginning to realize is a particularly nasty cult built around Keith Raniere (Peter Facinelli, who previously played an equally slimy 1-percenter on the TV series "Supergirl"), a scam artist and, eventually, a sexual pervert as well. As presented in both the dramatization and the documentary, NXIVM wasn't a "cult" in the sense of offering a religious or quasi-religious belief system, but Raniere seems to have pulled together aspects of a lot of other private mind-control operations, including L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology and the 1970's operation EST. It also uses a tactic from ordinary multi-level marketing: the people in NXIVM were pressured into recruiting their family members, friends and anyone else into the program, and were given a commission on the course fees paid by anyone they signed up. All of this could probably have stayed under the radar of the authorities for years except that, like many a cult leader before him, Raniere started indulging himself sexually, and like such other cult-leading horndogs as Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh and Warren Jeffs, he indoctrinated his top women staffers to think that servicing him sexually was the highest honor he and his organization could give them.

If there's a flaw with "Escaping the NXIVM Cult" it's that a 90-minute Lifetime time slot (two hours less commercials) simply isn't enough for this fascinating story. Writer Adam Mazer and director Lisa Robinson compress the time frame from seven years to two. We really don't get the insight we want into why India Oxenberg fell so hard for NXIVM's line of B.S. - though the one thing they do for her in the real world is buy her a coffeehouse to run after her previous attempt at a home-based muffin-baking business had gone nowhere - and I also found myself wondering how India's two younger sisters handled being increasingly neglected by their mom as she conducted her obsessive quest to bring her oldest daughter back from the cult. (It's probably much the way the non-prodigal brother of the prodigal son felt when the prodigal returned and their dad brought out the fatted calf.) Nonetheless, "Escaping the NXIVM Cult" emerged as strong drama and evidence that cults are functioning now, and they're getting slicker and subtler, locating in and among suburban neighborhoods and blending in instead of living in clapboard houses in the middle of nowhere and wearing robes. Had Ranieri been a bit smarter and less sex-obsessed, he probably could have kept the organization going to the end of his life and even beyond, as L. Ron Hubbard and his successor David Miscavige have done with Scientology.

The first episode of Ken Burns' "Country Music" was in most respects an excellent show. It was particularly interesting to see the heavy African-American influence on country music documented, including astonishing photos of Black and white musicians in the same bands at a time when the races were rigidly segregated through most of the South. Indeed, at times it seems as if all American popular music mixes Black roots with something else. Put Black music together with the white marching-band tradition and you get jazz. Put Black music together with Jewish folk music, and you get Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musicals and the "Great American Songbook." Put Black music together with the English and Irish folk traditions, mix in influences from Latin America and Hawai'i, and you get country music. The portrayals of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers were especially interesting and moving -- including those awesome photographs of Rodgers' funeral train drawing the same mourning and apprehensive crowds that President Lincoln's funeral train had drawn nearly 70 years earlier.

But one important name in the history of country music is virtually omitted: Vernon Dalhart. (His name is briefly seen in a newspaper clipping but he's totally unmentioned in the narration.) He was an operatically trained pop singer who had signed a contract with Thomas Edison's record label in 1916. In 1922 Dalhart recorded for Edison "The Wreck of the Old 97," a song he'd written about a real-life mail train disaster outside Danville, Virginia in 1903. Two years later he remade the song for the Victor label and that version sold over one million copies, the first country record to break the million mark. It was the huge success of "The Wreck of the Old 97" that established country music as a commercial genre and led both Victor and its competitors to seek out more artists in this style. "The Wreck of the Old 97" became a country standard and had many cover versions, including ones by Johnny Mercer, Hank Snow and Johnny Cash. A history of country music that omits Vernon Dalhart is woefully incomplete.

Watcing the third installment of Lifetime's complete adaptation of V. C. Andrews' (and Andrew Neiderman's) Casteel family saga, "Fallen Hearts," is like watching a car crash: you're at once sickened by the situation and revolted at yourself for being gripped by it and unable to turn yourself away. As the writers pile on insanely melodramatic situation on top of insanely melodramatic situation, the actors mostly seem to forget everything they've ever learned about acting: one can almost sense them thinking, "Get my line out ... hit my mark ... turn to the person I'm supposed to be talking to ... get my line out and hit my mark again." "Fallen Hearts" has one genuinely good performance: Jessica Clement as Fanny Casteel, alone among the people in this movie, has found a way to reconcile the aspects of a V. C. Andrews character: her sexuality, her sleaziness, her greed and the traumas she's lived with all her life that have made her that way and shaped her evil. Other than that, the acting in this movie is at a strictly professional level, not downright bad but not particularly good either.

I've long had a theory that actor-directors seem to have a unique gift in getting understated performances out of their casts - even actor-directors who as actors were unmitigated hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles. Among modern-day (albeit getting on in years) actor-directors I've especially liked Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford for not only selecting compelling stories to film for their movies in which they direct but don't act (and sometimes, like Redford's "The Horse Whisperer," in which they direct and do act) but for getting their actors to play in subtle and understated ways. Alas, either Jason Priestley doesn't have the chops in terms of working with fellow actors Eastwood and Redford do or - as I suspect - he realized early on in this project that a V. C. Andrews/Andrew Neiderman story requires a certain amount of scenery-chewing and that trying to get understated performances from his cast would have only made the movie seem even sillier.

No doubt there's still an audience for this sort of Southern-fried Gothic melodrama - Lifetime's first forays into Andrewsiana, "Flowers in the Attic" (based on Andrews' 1979 debut novel) and the sequel "Petals in the Wind" were huge ratings winners for them - but I've found myself alternately infuriated by the movies in the Casteel sequence and drawn to them in a sick fascination, wondering just how low these storytellers can go and how many plot contrivances they can stick on top of each other until Verdi's notoriously nonsensical opera "Il Trovatore" looks like cinema verité by comparison.

The most telling aspect of last night's Lifetime "premiere" movie, "I Almost Married a Serial Killer," was that the production company that made it for Lifetime distribution had the spookily appropriate name "Formula Features," since the film hewed incredibly closely to the usual Lifetime formulae. At first I had thought the film would be about a woman who was courted by a serial killer and fell in love with him and agreed to marry him with no idea of what he did outside their relationship - I was even thinking of jokes like, "I thought everything was wonderful until I saw what he put on our wedding registry and it was all guns, knives and poisons" - but instead of that set of Lifetime clichés it turned out to be the set of Lifetime clichés in which the heroine, Camille (Krista Allen), barely escapes the clutches of the serial killer in the opening act (for someone who's supposed to be experienced in murder he's certainly bad enough at it the woman has an unbelievably easy time escaping!). She testifies against him at his trial and the judge announces she's going to impose eight consecutive life sentences on him, once for each victim the police have been able to identify and charge him with, with no possibility of parole. Then she receives word from the FBI that he's escaped from prison - like the real escapees from New York's Clinton Correctional Facility Lifetime previously dramatized in the film "New York Prison Break," he did so by sexually seducing a female guard and getting her to help him - and until he's re-arrested the FBI is going to insist that Camille and her daughter go into witness protection and relocate from their original home in Philadelphia to a decidedly fictional community in California.

In the meantime the serial killer Camille almost married, Rafael DuPont (Jeremy John Wells), visits a plastic surgeon and has his appearance so dramatically reconstructed that when he emerges he's played by an entirely different actor - and I found myself so resentful of the "cheat" Formula Features' casting people pulled by casting two separate actors as DuPont pre-op and post-op it was hard for me to enjoy the rest of the movie after absorbing such a preposterous gimmick. What they needed was an actor with the extraordinary talent of Lon Chaney, Sr. in being able to concoct so many makeups for himself he could appear as two dramatically different-looking people in the same movie - but Chaney, Sr. died in 1930 and there haven't been that many actors who've developed that skill since. Another option would have been what writer-director Delmer Daves did in the 1947 Bogart-Bacall vehicle "Dark Passage": show all the scenes of DuPont pre-op from his point of view so we never got to see, except in an insert close-up of a still photo, what he looked like. There isn't anything really wrong with "I Almost Married a Serial Killer" but there isn't much right about it, either. As I said as I started this review, the most remarkable thing about it is that the producers called their studio "Formula Features," thereby making it obvious and proclaiming to the world that they were just going to exploit Lifetime's usual formulae, not try to do anything creative with them!

The very title of "Deadly Assistant" is a "spoiler" that carefully undoes the suspense writers Blaine Chiappetta and Nicole Schubert carefully created in their script. It was ironic to be watching this right after a "60 Minutes" segment on "Game of Thrones," since Chiappetta and Schubert carefully depicted the struggle for control of a little yoga studio out in a California suburb with all the High Seriousness of the battle for the Iron Throne in the big eight-year series. The film opens in the middle of a yoga class being led by Lauren Birch (Kate Gilligan) - we're told the studio is being closed pending renovation and a big reopening but Lauren is still leading classes there, and she's recorded a number of motivational tapes (or downloads, or streams, or whatever) which her students use both in her studio and wherever else they may be. The plot kicks off when Lauren's sister Amanda (Jeannette Sousa) arrives in town after a big job in New York just finished and attempts to re-integrate into Lauren's family, which consists of her husband Ian (Philip Boyd), their son Charlie (Keenan Tracey) and the son's girlfriend Maya (Breanne Hill), who also works as Lauren's assistant at the local salon. Three years before Amanda visited Lauren and caught Ian kissing another woman; she reported to her sister that he was having an affair, Lauren didn't believe it, and the conflict between the two sisters over the issue never got resolved. Charlie, Ian's and Lauren's son, had a severe alcohol and drug problem, though he got into a "program" and has been clean and sober for three years. Chiappetta and Schubert throw us a big curveball in the opening since we expect from the usual iconography of Lifetime movies - and the title - that Lauren is going to be the central character and the plot will be about the deadliness of her assistant Maya, and how she stumbles onto the truth about her and what will happen when she does. Instead Lauren is killed in the second act when the studio has its grand reopening, she stammers through her big opening speech, then collapses and dies of a mysterious "heart attack."

One problem with this movie is that once Lauren exits, there goes the one character we actually like - though in an inspired touch the characters continue to listen to Lauren's motivational recordings, thereby giving her a weird ghost-like quality through which she continues to "haunt" the action even in a non-supernatural story. The writers clearly intended to maintain the suspense over which of the remaining principals in the family was trying to do in all the others, but the title Lifetime slapped on their work (replacing an almost-as-revealing working title, "The Protégé") makes it all too obvious to us. The film was directed by Daphne Zuniga, who has 79 credits on imdb as an actress (the one I can remember seeing is Mel Brooks' "Star Wars" spoof "Spaceballs," in which she played the Carrie Fisher role) but only two as director: this film and a documentary on the TED talks. Like a lot of other Lifetime directors, especially the female ones, Zuniga turns in an excellent job but is hamstrung by a script that is sometimes genuinely powerful (I particularly like the way Lauren's recorded voice haunts the other characters via her motivational tapes even after she's gone) and sometimes just silly.

The author of "Hollywood Fiction" above gets much of this show wrong. The correct terms for immigrants are not "legal" and "illegal," but "documented" and "undocumented." This reviewer is almost certainly a political supporter of the current U.S. President, whereas one of the reasons I watch "Madam Secretary" regularly (and, when it was still on, watched "Designated Survivor" as well) is to be reminded of a time when the U.S. was still being run by people with intelligence and common decency, whom I could respect even when I disagreed with them politically, who were obviously working for the common good and not just to aggrandize their own egos and enrich themselves and their friends. I'm a bit more sympathetic to opponents of vaccination than the writers of this show, but the main point about the immigration crisis as it's depicted here is that our leader's willful denial of climate change and reversal of his predecessor's inadequate but right-minded policies to deal with it is just speeding the total destruction of earth's environment as suitable for human life. The immigrants in this program are literally fleeing their homelands because rising sea levels are rendering their homelands non-existent. What, in the mind of the "Hollywood Fiction" author, are they supposed to do -- just drown?

The latest Lifetime movie, "The Wrong Teacher," was billed as a "premiere" even though the date for it on imdb.com was 2018, not 2019, and it already had a review on imdb.com. Directed by David DeCoteau, working from a script by Robert Dean Klein, "The Wrong Teacher" might more accurately have been called "The Wrong Student," since it begins with the titular teacher visiting the City Lights Bookstore (which I found jarring since the only real bookstore I know of with that name is the legendary one in San Francisco, and the extreme long-shots DeCoteau gave to establish his city's geography were of an unending flatness, obviously not the terrain of famously hilly San Francisco!). Her name is Charlotte Hanson (Jessica Morris), and she's currently on the outs with her independent photographer boyfriend Scott (Jason-Shane Scott). She teaches English literature to seniors at Roosevelt High School and in her spare time she's trying to write a romance novel about a young widow in love with an older man, but she's blocked on it. So she goes to City Lights one night and there meets Chris Williams (Philip McElroy, a darkly handsome young man whose great looks and skillful acting should make him a future star).

She's impressed that someone that young is actually hanging around a physical bookstore instead of either not reading at all or ordering everything from amazon.com. She's also turned on by him, and they go out drinking at a bar called Blue (which seems to be the only bar in the entire city, though that's obviously because it was the only set the production company, Hybrid LLC, could afford to build) and then end up having sex in - of all places - her classroom at the high school. Then school starts the next day and Charlotte is shocked that her previous night's kinky paramour is also one of her new students. He assures her that he's just turned 18 and therefore at least she isn't in danger of being prosecuted for statutory rape, but even though she didn't know she was getting it on with one of her students when it happened, she's still liable to be fired and disgraced. Chris demands more from her, and when she makes it clear that she isn't going to have sex with him again he seeks his revenge.

"The Wrong Teacher" is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie, skillfully directed by DeCoteau from an unusually complex and ambiguous script by Klein, and driven by an utterly haunting performance from Philip McElroy. Lifetime has churned out enough of these superficially charming psychos by now that the template for them has become well worn, but rarely has one caught both the surface appeal and the deep-seated psychopathology of one of these characters as well as McElroy has. I can only hope there are enough casting directors at major studios who watch Lifetime movies so they can give this quite compelling (as well as very hot-looking!) actor the opportunities he deserves.

I hadn't expected much from this movie, but as I watched I realized I was seeing some very funny and cunningly designed slapstick sequences. Then I remembered that the silent comedy genius Buster Keaton was still alive when this film was made and had been working at American International, occasionally playing character parts and working out gag sequences for other actors. Though Keaton isn't in "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine," the big comedy sequences, especially the final chase scene through San Francisco, have Keaton's touch all over them. I strongly suspect Keaton was deeply involved with this film's big physical comedy scenes, and it's his work that made this movie far more entertaining than the norm for AIP product in 1965 -- as does the presence of a real superstar, Diana Ross, lavishing her voice on that silly theme song as lead singer of the Supremes.

I'm not sure what the other reviewers were thinking when they criticized the acting in this film. It's true that Jaime M. Callica basically let his ultra-hot bod do his acting for him, but the two women at the center of the story -- Mary Grill as Jess and especially Vanessa Walsh as her "bestie" Katie -- are excellent. The tale is familiar Lifetime stuff but it's done better than average this time, and the switcheroo in the middle is a legitimate surprise even though imdb.com's synopsis is itself a "spoiler" that gives it away.

"Love You to Death" is a profound and powerfully disturbing movie about the relationship between Esmé Stoller (Emily Skaggs) and her mom Camile (Marcia Gay Harden, a far more illustrious "name" than we're used to seeing on Lifetime). Esmé is in a wheelchair, she's bald (there's a fascinatingly cruel scene in which we see her mom shaving her head) and she's been told she has had bone cancer since she was 4. Writer Anthony Jaswinski and director Alex Kalymnikos tell this story from both mother's and daughter's point of view, and the result is a powerful, chilling fable about just how far certain people will go to feel "loved" and "needed." I'm rating it nine stars instead of 10 because the switch from Camile's to Esmé's point of view about a third of the way through is awkward and writer Jaswinski could have had an even deeper and more profound movie if he'd used the "Citizen Kane" narratage technique and told the Stollers' story from the various points of view of the people involved in it. But that doesn't take away from what he, Kalymnikos and their stars (not only Harden and Skaggs but Brennan Keel Cook as Esmé's boyfriend Scott) achieved with a film that's excellent by any standards and especially amazing coming from Lifetime.

GREAT movie, one of the best recent films I've seen lately. The basic situation is reminiscent of "The Bodyguard" -- superstar singer falls in love with the man who saved her life (in this story it's from a suicide attempt) and the two have a touch-and-go relationship -- but this time it's done far, far better. The characters of Noni (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Kaz (Nate Parker) have real depth and complexity, and writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood brilliantly counterpoints their troubled relationships with their parents. Both Noni's mom (MInnie Driver) and Kaz's dad (Danny Glover) have ambitions for them that aren't always what the kids themselves want, and their struggles to get out of their parental cocoons add weight and drama to what otherwise could have been either a sappy romantic comedy or a depressing melodrama. The ending is a bit weak, but otherwise "Beyond the Lights" is a wonderful film, sensitively written, effectively directed and vividly acted. (Who were the idiots at Sony who dumped this project because they didn't think Gugu Mbatha-Raw could play the female lead? She's wonderful!) I caught up with this on a clearance-sale DVD and didn't have much hope for it, but I'm glad I saw it and heartily recommend it to anyone.

In 1933 Monogram made an excellent film called "Sensation Hunters," a beautiful proto-noir with vivid direction by Charles Vidor (13 years before he made a major noir, "Gilda") and an overall atmosphere of gloom and doom. Too bad that when they made this one all they took from the original "Sensation Hunters" was the title (and even that got changed later for TV purposes to "Club Paradise"). It's one of those movies in which the put-upon heroine has to choose between two boyfriends, one of whom is annoying and the other is crooked. The script reads like the writers were on cliché autopilot and the actors (except for Isabel Jewell, who's marvelous in her usual characterization as a hard-bitten woman of the world) seem to be saying their lines, hitting their marks and little more. The ending doesn't work because nothing we've seen in the film before seems to be leading up to it. The reviewers who compared it to Edgar G. Ulmer's magnificent "Detour" seem totally off base to me. The guy who said it would have been a good vehicle for Tyrone Power is closer in that Power actually DID make this movie -- or something close to it -- in 1939: it was called "Rose of Washington Square" and that wasn't a great movie but it was at least entertaining and had some depth missing from this one.