I think it’s only a matter of time before Fatal Attraction (1987) starts aging poorly in a way an entertainment movie such as Hitchcock’s Psycho has not.  Psycho, after all, is better written than FA.  Director Adrian Lyne had better material with his remakes of Lolita and the Chabrol picture The Unfaithful Wife.

Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) is an arrantly insane career woman whose evil is sometimes baffling.  All the same, her shenanigans are filmed by Lyne in some strikingly well-done suspense scenes, such as the one with the rabbit.  The directing is nearly as impressive as Close’s penetrating performance.  Fatal Attraction is entertaining without being truly good.

Cover via Amazon

English: Actor Matthew McConaughey at the 83rd Academy Awards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not everything in the  Civil War movie, The Free State of Jones (2016), makes sense, but it is a worthwhile product.  Lifted from history, it focuses on Confederate army deserters and runaway slaves, led by Matthew McConaughey‘s Newton Knight, who live for a long while in a swamp.

That self-serving Confederate soldiers intent on stealing a Southern woman’s hogs never return to her house after Newt and four females, armed with rifles, hold them off is one of the nonsensical items here.  And yet there is a nice historical scope to Jones, and it is rich and transportingly presented.

Set, of course, in a Christian sphere, the story proffers a gent who is—and, in history, was—a pseudo-Christian activist.  He is properly anti-slavery but also parts from his wife (Keri Russell) without divorcing her and starts living with ex-slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw).  (In history, he had a bunch of children with her.)  This is Newt Knight.  Can’t deny he is interesting.

Cover of Marathon Man

John Schlesinger‘s Marathon Man (1976) is a mediocre thriller—paranoid, rambling, even silly.  Thus it is devoid of the economy and sensible content of the American crime movies of the Forties and Fifties.  Yes, those movies were usually based on novels, but so is Marathon Man.

Dustin Hoffman and Roy Scheider are wholly remarkable here.  They don’t belong in a wholly unremarkable film.

In the first-rate Iranian film, The Salesman (2016), by Asghar Farhadi, Emad, the main character, is not a salesman.  He is a schoolteacher who plays a salesman—Willy Loman—in a local production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, but this is not the only role he is drawn to assume.  A second role is that of vengeful husband after he discovers the man who mistook Emad’s wife Rana for a prostitute and may have impulsively abused her.  Although he’s a smart man who surely knows how to leave well enough alone, Emad, failing to do this, acts the dishonored avenger; and it ends badly.

Human weakness and fault are all over this downer of a film, but as well people are trying to adjust to, and stay alive in, urban society in general and Iranian society in particular.  The old apartment building where Emad and Rana live begins to collapse due to nearby construction work.  The former apartment of a prostitute, the couple’s new home, invites some aggression.  That the police are never called to investigate the situation has something to do with the fact that, as Anthony Lane puts it, “The woman [in Iran] is the guilty party until proven innocent.”

Life in The Salesman has people limping along day after day, and even those who charge ahead, as Emad does, are limping.  What Farhadi’s men believe themselves justified in doing—and they do gain our sympathy—suddenly pushes them and their wives against the wall.  Both sexes demonstrate their vulnerability, in a marriage, alas, which may be in jeopardy.  Is there a new role to take on that will salvage this?

(In Farsi with English subtitles)