The View From The Mountain

The Housemaid (from 2025—not to be confused with the 2010 film of the same name) is based on the first book in a psychological thriller series by author Freida McFadden. Sydney Sweeney stars as Millie Calloway. a young woman down on her luck who’s struggling after being released on parole from jail. While living in her car, Millie applies for a live-in maid position with a wealthy family, Nina (Amanda Seyfried) & Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) Winchester, and their young daughter, Cecelia (Indiana Elle) and—to her delight—she gets the job. But, of course, once Millie starts working her maid gig, that’s when the real horror show begins. Despite acting like she was in Millie’s corner in the beginning, Nina deliberately creates problems for Millie that make her look bad. It turns out that Nina is a whack-job who’s served time at a mental facility for trying to kill her own daughter when she was a baby, and now Nina’s got Millie in her sights. If The Housemaid sounds like some ...

It’s always a joy to watch someone who’s a master at their work, whether it’s a musician, an artist, or an actor. Most great actors make it look easy--which is not to say that I think acting is an easy job. I know from personal experience that acting is very hard. It’s a skill that the talented make look very easy, and one of the most talented actors working today is Paul Giamatti. If you’ve watched some movies over the past few years, chances are very good that you’ve already seen Paul Giamatti. He was the jittery earthquake expert in San Andreas , the sympathetic police chief in The Illusionist , and as the titular John Adams (a part that got him the Emmy and a Golden Globe) in the 2008 HBO series of the same name. Recently, I saw Paul Giamatti in the superb The Holdovers , a movie that I wasn’t planning on writing up, but I kept thinking about it--and all of its characters--long after I saw it. In The Holdovers , Giamatti plays Paul H...

When Serenity , starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, was released theatrically earlier this year, it was ripped, bashed and completely trashed by reviewers, many of whom thought of it as being an insipidly stupid story that never should have seen the light of day. Some even criticized it for taking the name of a much better movie called Serenity (2005), the Joss Whedon-directed science fiction film that served as a magnificent capper to his equally marvelous TV series, Firefly (and I agree that the SF Serenity is superb). Naturally, I wanted to see this new Serenity , which dared to take the name of a beloved SF film, because I wanted to see if this new film lived up to the hype of being such a scathingly reviewed flick that has already earned its place on several “worst of” lists of 2019. McConaughey stars as a fishing boat skipper named Baker Dill who’s having some trouble keeping his grip on reality. He’s served in Iraq, and--as he freely admits--his tour in the milita...

I had no interest in women’s figure skating until Tony Harding came along. No, scratch that. I had no interest in women’s figure skating until the “incident” occurred. That moment when ice skater Nancy Kerrigan got kneecapped was all over the news, and that incident--along with the sordid story that came crawling out afterwards--was such a WTF moment for me that I proceeded to watch everything about it, just like the rest of the country did. It was clear why Tonya Harding was so popular in figure skating--she came from a rough and tumble background, and her down to earth nature was nothing like the perfect little ice princesses whom the sport promoted. Many people liked Harding because they saw her as being one of them, an ordinary gal who made good. But that surface veneer is far from being the actual story, here. In the new film, I, Tonya , ably directed by Craig Gillespie (who also helmed the superb Lars and the Real Girl ), Tonya’s story is told from the beginning, where a very y...

There has to be a better way to get an Oscar than this! When I studied writing in college, I was taught that there are three basic stories: man verses man, man verses himself, and man verses nature. The Shallows is definitely the latter version of classic story-telling: man verses nature. Although, in this case, it’s actually woman verses nature. Blake Lively plays Nancy, a med-school drop out who’s doing a surfing tour of Mexico after the death of her mother. Her mom’s death has shattered her to the point where she wonders aloud to her father about what’s the point to it all. Why go on, she muses, with such loss all around us?  But Nancy gets a hard lesson in the basics of survival when she goes surfing in a secluded cove on the Mexican coast. Unknowingly swimming right into the feeding ground of a Great White Shark, Nancy becomes stranded on a rock outcropping that’s just 200 feet from shore. Yet she doesn’t dare try to swim for it, because the monstrous shark is actively ...

Nice trick, kid. The Sith Lords could use you.  Midnight Special is one of those great movies that hits the ground running--literally, since the main characters Roy, played by Michael Shannon and Lucas, played by Joel Edgerton, find themselves on the news during an Amber alert, which accuses them of having abducted a young boy. It turns out that they did take a boy, but he’s Roy’s son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) and he was actually taken from a cult that’s led by Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard). Calvin had taken Alton from Roy (who was a member of the cult) and raised the kid as his own son--the reason being is that Alton has developed some very particular powers at a very young age, powers that make the cult worship Alton as if he were a prophet. Abducting his child from the cult compound, Roy goes on the run, with his childhood friend Lucas helping in any way he can. Calvin, not wanting to let the golden goose slip out of his grasp, begins organizing some men to go after Roy--until...