Italy’s The Fiances (I Fidanzanti) is not a religious film, but was made by a man with a Catholic sensibility. This is the devout Ermanno Olmi, a director who loved and was gentle with his characters, religious and otherwise. The fiances of the title must separate for 18 months after the man, Giovanni, moves to Sicily for some higher paying work. Olmi creates the impression that Giovanni becomes neglectful of Liliana, his betrothed, before discreetly mistreating her. He goes back to loving her, though, but will it make a difference?

A master of film art, Olmi died in 2018, long after releasing The Fiances in 1963. The movie is devout in its own way as well as clever and poetic.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Born in 1902, Sarah Rector was a black woman under whose private Oklahoma land there was oil, thus paving the way for a millionaire’s status. Cyrus Nowrasteh‘s film Sarah’s Oil (2025) is loosely based on this interesting story, yielding some inaccurate detail, and it’s moving and tasteful and Christian. All the same, it has limited authenticity about rural life and racial relations in the 1910s. Newcomer Naya Desir-Johnson is fine as 11-year-old Sarah* but her likable character is too precocious to be believable. The film is unconvincing, its Christianity, in point of fact, rather remote.

*Sarah, then, started getting rich at an early age. Unfortunately, she lost most of her wealth in the Great Depression.

The Robert Davi-directed My Son Hunter (2021) proffers an engagingly true performance by Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden. It fits perfectly a ferocious satire on political malfeasance and techno-age conniving. John James is also comically strong as Joe Biden. As amusing as it is barbed—very barbed about the laptop affair—the film eventually fails because of a changing tone and moments of agitprop. It’s a necessary piece which could have been good. Incidentally, if President Trump has been unprincipled about acquiring money, a film about this too would be necessary.

Joaquin Phoenix is superlative, never making a misstep, as a small-town sheriff in Ari Aster‘s Eddington (2025), set in Covid Year 2020. The themes include the adequacy and inadequacy of legal and personal reaction to epidemics, internet deceit and folly, political fury and violence, marital thoughtlessness. It’s a pretty sturdy, and weird, tragicomedy until the last third of it serves up an unsavory, nihilistic mess. Semi-good work, then, from Aster; very palatable work from actors Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone and Austin Butler.

It may be that in the 1970s, men and women were not quite sure what to do about marriage. The divorce rate was rising and they were perhaps fearful. Many started living together. The humorous I Will . . . I Will . . . For Now (1976) may reflect this uncertainty. In the film, “A divorced couple tries reconciliation through a legal contract instead of remarriage . . .” (imdb.com). They finally find themselves undergoing inane sex therapy, but are bereft of real solutions.

Directed and co-written by “Golden Age” Hollywood veteran, Norman Panama, with the help of old-time TV writer Albert E. Lewin, this flick, as a romantic comedy, is monumentally unmemorable. It might have been funny had it contained some true wit, but I don’t recall any. Elliott Gould and Diane Keaton enact the couple, Gould failing to be a thespian of taste while Keaton is bland. Victoria Principal was given a worthless role but is fine in it—and almost as beautiful as she was in Dallas. Paul Sorvino more or less succeeds but with Panama’s trivial script working against him. I’d like to see some of Panama’s other movies; maybe I Will is simply not Panamanian enough.