Sally Potter's The Party Is An Agreeable Gathering

Dinner parties rarely go according to plan in the movies and Sally Potter's The Party is no exception. A gathering for Janet (Kristen Scott Thomas) to celebrate her being appointed to the position of minister of the UK Health Service ends up spiraling into a lot of chaotic drama that rarely involves Janet. First her husband, Bill (Timothy Spall), announces he's dying and later states that he's also been carrying on an affair. then a coked-up Tom (Cillian Murphy) has his own insecurities relating to his marriage to hash out while Jinny (Emily Mortimer) and Martha (Cherry Jones), who are expecting a child, find themselves caught up in a potentially devastating argument.

Lars And The Real Girl Finds So Much Power In Kindness And A Terrific Ryan Gosling Performance

There is, to quote Avenue Q, "a fine fine line" between kindness and schmaltz. The latter element is widely detested and, not unfairly, looked at a manipulative way to generate pathos without actually generating substantive characters or plot details for the audience to get invested in. There are times where I've seen movies that get too schmaltzy for their own good (remember that ending of The LEGO Ninjago Movie that smothered the audience in too many hollow dramatic monologues?), but I'm always gonna root for a movie to charge towards kindness, even if it stumbles along the way. Kindness is such a vital thing in our lives and it's always good to see art championing it. Well-done kindness is one of my favorite things in all of cinema and you can see it in all kinds of movies like The Muppets, Blockers, City Lights or even the 2007 dramedy Lars And The Real Girl.

Spectral Gets Flanked By Its Generic Nature

Spectral's struggle to getting released at all feels like as much of a struggle as any of the supernatural wartime battles seen in the movie itself. Filmed back in the late parts of summer 2014, the film was produced by Legendary Pictures and set to be released theatrically by Universal in August 2016. Then, two months prior to its release, Universal swiped it off the release schedule without explanation. Spectral basically ceased to exist until two weeks ago, when Netflix abruptly announced that they'd be the ones releasing it on their streaming service on December 9th. They dropped the title yesterday with zero fanfare, no even the official Netflix Facebook page was promoting this thing, instead deciding to further promote the newest season of Fuller House.