Missing

"9-1-1, what is your emergency?"
"My mom never came home from her trip. I don't know where she is."

There have only been two occasions in my life where I walked out of a movie and could truly say that I had never seen anything like it before. The first was Inception. This was the second.

86: Season One

"What kind of dumb ass hangs himself just because he knows he's going to die tomorrow? Even if you have no choice but to walk to the gallows, you can still choose how you're gonna climb the steps."

Quick math quiz: what do you get when you add bushido, fatalism, racial discrimination, spiritualism, fratricide, ethnic cleansing, bystander apathy, and self-deception on a national scale to an anime mecha series? The correct total is 86.

Five Interesting Short Films

Welcome to what you might call the Doux Reviews Short Attention Span Film Festival. I present here for your consideration five shorts which I recently discovered and found particularly interesting. I won't go so far as to claim they are the five best short films out there, but one is my personal favorite, and each is definitely worth your time. (The title links to the film.)

Hanna: Season Three

"Marissa, even if you gave me the life I've always wanted, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I only know how to fight."

Like most young people in her age range, Hanna is in the process of figuring out what to do with her life. Before she can do that, however, she has to first re-infiltrate the Utrax program, derail the planned series of assassinations, take down a rogue faction within the CIA, and manage not to get herself killed in the process.

The Vast of Night

In a twilight zone one step beyond the outer limits of motion picture production, there is a distant land without major studios or A-list directors, where film budgets have no more than six digits to the left of the decimal point. Travelers to this land experience a close encounter with some of the best filmmaking ever seen. There's a signpost up ahead. You have just entered... The Vast of Night.

Please Stand By

"Some dialogue is in Klingon, but there will be subtitles."

Fan fiction, the final frontier. This is the voyage of Wendy Welcott. Her three-day mission: to deliver a 500-page screenplay to Paramount Studios... to seek out the $100,000 first prize in a Star Trek writing contest... to boldly tell a story that no one has told before!

Crazy Rich Asians

Eleanor, Nick and Rachel

"I thought I was here to meet your family, go to your best friend's wedding, eat some good food. Instead, I feel like I'm a villain in a soap opera who's plotting to steal your family fortune."

A young man takes his girlfriend home to meet the family, and his strong-willed mother disapproves of her. It's the premise of several hundred thousand romantic comedies, heirs to a tradition stretching from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing to whatever Meg Ryan is doing this week. However, you've never seen a romantic comedy quite like this one.

History Nerd's Review: 1917

"There is only one way this war ends. Last man standing."

1917 follows two British soldiers, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), as they cross no-man's land to deliver a vital message to a battalion that has lost contact with the rest of the army. The story is told in what appears to be one continuous shot. It's a stunning technical achievement--but how does it stack up as a History essay?

History Nerd's Review: Radioactive (2020)

"I'd rather be someone that hopes the world full of light than fears for the darkness out there, wouldn't you?"

Radioactive, released on Amazon Prime, is a film biography of Marie Skodlawska Curie (Rosamund Pike), the two-time Nobel Prize winner who discovered radioactivity in partnership with her husband Pierre (Sam Riley).

Five More Great Films You've Probably Never Seen

As the saying goes, life ain't fair. In the world of the dramatic arts, not everything that's popular really deserves the adulation, and many great works never achieve the success they should have, or fade into undeserved obscurity after a short stint in the spotlight. In the spirit of celebrating forgotten favorites and overlooked gems, we once more present for your consideration five great films that you probably haven't seen and (except for the first one) may not even have heard of.

The Widow: Series Review

"What have you done with my husband?"

Georgia Wells (Kate Beckinsale) has lived alone in a cabin on the desolate Welsh moors for three years, ever since her husband Will (Matthew Ne Levez), who worked for an international relief agency, died in the crash of an airliner in the jungles of the Congo. On one of her rare visits to town, in a doctor's waiting room, she catches a glimpse of a TV news report on civil unrest in the Congo, and is shocked to see her husband in some of the footage of a riot, looking very much alive.

The Case for Bingeing Hill Street Blues

"Let's be careful out there!"

It is often proclaimed that we live in a new golden age of television, one in which storytelling has been raised to a high art. An age of sophisticated, serious dramas unafraid of moral ambiguity and darker themes, of long story arcs and complex characters, and production values rivaling high-budget prestige cinema. The age of Game of Thrones and The Americans and Mad Men and Lost and Person of Interest and so many others.

Hanna: Season Two

Clara and Hanna on a grocery run.

"It's not difficult to pretend to be someone else. I've done it before."

Who are you? For most of us, our identity starts with our parents and immediate family and the place where we grew up, and develops through our life experiences and choices.

Hanna: Season One

Hanna

"You're unique. That's why we want to look after you."
"'Unique' just means 'alone.'"

In the late winter of 2019, a young Polish lumberjack named Arvo was cutting trees in Romania's Bukovina Forest when he encountered a teenage girl, dressed in grimy clothes, who seemed surprised to find him there and unsure of how to hold a conversation. She never told him her name, but she said she lived in the forest with her father.

Hanna

Season Reviews | Cast |

Hanna was born in a secret CIA orphanage in Romania where babies were genetically altered before birth. She was stolen from the orphanage and raised in isolation, intensively trained in combat and survival skills. When she finally emerges into the wider world at age sixteen, she is hunted by the CIA as she tries to figure out where she came from, who to trust, and what to do with her life.

Hanna is an Amazon Prime series created by David Farr, an expansion of the story told in his script for the 2011 action movie of the same name. Season one was released on March 29, 2019, season two on July 3, 2020, and season three on November 24, 2021.

Baby M covered this series with season reviews.

Season Reviews

Season One
Season Two
Season Three

Cast

Esme Creed-Miles (Hanna)
Joel Kinnaman (Erik Heller)
Mirelle Einos (Marissa Wiegler)
Justin Salinger (Carl Meisner)
Rhianne Barreto (Sophie Qatri)
Khalid Abdalla (Jerome Sawyer)
Yasmin Monet Prince (249/Clara)
Aine Rose Daly (242/Sandy)
Dermot Mulroney (John Carmichael)
Cherrelle Skeete (Teri Miller)
Gianna Kiehl (Jules)
Ray Liotta (The Chairman)
Chloe Pirrie (Brianna Stapleton)
Sam Swainsbury (Ethan Williams)
Adam Bessa (Abbas Naziri)
Leann Hannon (Nadiya Naziri)

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Series Review

"There can be no peace without the truth."

Meet Jack Whicher (Paddy Consadine), a London police detective (one of the first seven hired when Scotland Yard was established) who later becomes a freelance "private enquiries agent." By 1860, he is generally regarded as the best detective in London, if not all of England, a man with a solid sense of right and wrong who pursues the truth relentlessly, no matter where it leads or who it inconveniences. At the same time, there's an air of melancholy about him. Is it just the cumulative effect of a career spent seeing the worst the human race has to offer, or is there something dark in his past he hasn't yet come to terms with?

History Nerd's Review: Der Untergang (2004)

"Life never forgives weakness. This so called humanity... is just priests' drivel. Compassion is a primal sin. Compassion for the weak is a betrayal of nature."

Der Untergang (Downfall) chronicles the last days of Adolf Hitler (Bruno Ganz) and the Battle of Berlin, mainly as seen through the eyes of his personal secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara). It's an intense and disturbing look at one of the most evil people who ever walked the Earth. It's also the source material for all those "Hitler rant" parody videos you've seen.

History Nerd's Review: The Wind and the Lion (1975)

The Raisuli (Sean Connery) and
Eden Pedicaris (Candace Bergen)

"Why would anyone want to cut out a man's tongue?"
"Perhaps the previous owner had nothing pleasant to say."

The Wind and the Lion is one of my all-time favorites.

History Nerd's Review: Apollo 13 (1995)

"Gentlemen, at this moment, I want you all to forget the flight plan. From this moment on, we are improvising a new mission: How do we get our people home?"

Apollo 13, the third manned moon landing mission, nearly ended in tragedy after a defective oxygen tank exploded and disabled the command service module. The three astronauts, Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton), and Jack Sweigart (Kevin Bacon), were forced to use the lunar module, designed to support two people for two days, as their refuge for the four days it took to get back to Earth. With the aid of the flight controllers and engineers back in Houston, they modified and repurposed the equipment on hand into enough of a spaceship to get them back safely.

History Nerd's Review: Gallipoli (2015)

"Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die."

World War One's Gallipoli campaign was an offensive undertaken by France and Britain to capture the Bosporus and Dardanalles and the city of Constantinople (Istanbul), opening a supply line to their struggling Russian ally and knocking Ottoman Turkey out of the war. Like most World War One offensives, it did not end well. A mixed force of French, British, Australian, and New Zealander units landed on the mountainous Turkish coast on April 25, 1915. After eight months of costly, futile trench warfare, they were withdrawn, having never gotten more than a few miles inland.