William Wellman directed many serious films (The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Nothing Sacred) as well as superficial but pleasurable pop pictures like Yellow Sky, a 1948 Western wherein a band of thieves muscles in to take advantage of someone else’s gold claim.  The someone else is Anne Baxter‘s “Mike” (a nickname for a very pretty tomboy) and her grandfather (James Barton), certainly not a match for six armed lawbreakers.

Wellman’s wild bunch, filmed in long shots on parched earth, snub and pound each other until real schisms develop.  Gregory Peck is somewhat miscast as an outlaw, but at least his character grows in nobility.  He gives the same dad-gum performance, though, that he gave in every movie.  Lamar Trotti’s script is colorful and integrated.  All the same, it is hardly edifying that the film implies that what will set a young woman on the right path is being tackled and smooched, yea, even by a thief.  We’re grateful the smoocher is not a rapist.

The interesting plot of God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness (2018) has Pastor Dave (David A.R. White) harriedly fighting an eminent domain plan pursued by fictitious Hadleigh University against Dave’s long-standing church.  The church is located on the university’s campus, but owns the land it was built on.  Wanting the land for itself, Hadleigh, a state institution, considers the church a bad P.R. entity for several reasons.  One is that Pastor Dave just got out of jail for properly refusing to have his sermons evaluated by the local government.  Another is that an act of vandalism against the church has led to the accidental death of a newly hired co-pastor.

The vandal is an ordinary young man and lost soul (Mike C. Manning) who is frustrated by his doubting Christian girlfriend’s resistance to unreligious living.  The film tells us that in New Century America any kind of assault on Christian people is possible, perhaps inevitable.  But America is complex, so we are also told that sometimes a move against a church is merely practical, not persecutory; as witness what the university does.

I  have never seen a faith-based, Evangelical movie depict as much human anguish as A Light in Darkness does.  Not only do many things take their toll on Pastor Dave, but Keaton (Samantha Boscarino), the vandal’s girlfriend, and the boyfriend himself go through arrant hardship.  It isn’t quite clear, however, what the Faith situation for Keaton is.

If this is a flaw, it isn’t much of one compared with the sentimental unlikelihood with which the film concludes.  It is a message of anti-polarization in society.  Good luck with that.

Another observation:  White and John Corbett (as Dave’s lawyer brother) deepen the film and are never false.

It was directed and co-written by Michael Mason.

Roma (2018), written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is a social film, akin to a social novel, but one set circa 1970.

Roma is a Mexico City neighborhood where a nanny, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), and the family she works for live.  Cleo is a hard-working if imperfect employee, and doesn’t deserve to be hotly scolded by her otherwise nice employer, Sofia (Marina de Tavira).  Both ladies, however, have wretched problems, for by and by the driven men in their lives forsake them. . . Life here is full of free-floating vicissitudes and disasters, and we are shown that even an incomplete family is still a family, an indispensable entity.

Commendably photographed by Cuaron, Roma is a post-censorship, black and white art film reminiscent of something by De Sica or Olmi.  The heavy avoidance of closeups, even so, causes the film to be less precise and effective than Umberto D. or Il Posto.  And, further, Cuaron (Gravity) is not the greatest of storytellers.  Again in a movie there is a scene—in the streets—of politically motivated protest and massacre.  Cleo’s boyfriend proves to be a two-dimensional villain, nothing more.  This is second-rate material, but don’t worry.  Greater imagination and honesty are available elsewhere in Roma.  To me it is an absorbing non-commercial work, by a poet of modest but real power.  And as the critics have said, it is moving.  (In Spanish with English subtitles, and it is currently streaming on Netflix.)

In the 1945 musical comedy, Bring on the Girls, actor Eddie Bracken is okay, Sonny Tufts is not.  He is practically the leading man in the film and he has no charisma.

Ah, but bring on the girls!  Veronica Lake, unlike contemporary actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Margot Robbie, exhibits a unique presence with her slender figure, sardonic, lazy voice and magnetic face.  Marjorie Reynolds is a real beauty of a supporting actress, likable and versatile.  Both women’s acting is inoffensively serviceable.  Not so the efforts of those who put together a routine near the end involving Spike Jones and his band, a routine more silly than funny.  But other sequences in this movie about sailors and dames are entertaining:  e.g. the tap dancing bits and the comedy with the two deplorable doctors.  Girls should have been a more respectable lark, with a slightly more respectable cast—uh, then I think about Veronica Lake and I understand the compensation.  Hiring Lake:  now that was a respectable move.

Critic David Edelstein has called the new flick, Mary Poppins Returns, which I probably will not see, “a bit of a dud.”  I see the original Mary Poppins (1964) the same way, except for the songs.  The agreeable score deserves a better, tighter story.  Again, what Edelstein wrote about the new Poppins is true of the old one:  “the plot is ungainly.”  Wasn’t the first time a Disney film was ungainly.