Directed and scripted by Rodrigo Garcia, the 2005 Nine Lives is a film drama of vignettes about nine women. That they have in common sins and agonies and a willingness to live on (with, they hope, quality in life) is the movie’s reason for being. By no means, further, does Garcia ignore the permutations of their personalities, as witness the vignette where Holly (LisaGay Hamilton), a young black woman, undergoes an emotional breakdown in front of her father and, in a later vignette, is shown placidly doing her work as a nurse.

Garcia is serious, and with a vision more likable than offensive, which is good. How right he was to have Glenn Close‘s not-so-young Maggie, visiting a graveyard with her small daughter (Dakota Fanning), briefly weep and say to the girl, “I’m so tired, honey.” It is unsentimental and implies much. . . Every actor, from Robin Wright to Ian McShane, provides stupendous merit. One is glad that Garcia is interested in women, for it has led him to make the fine Nine Lives and then the fine Mother and Child in 2009.

Peter Sellers is extraordinary with his triple roles in Dr. Strangelove (1964), and the movie—a Cold War black comedy—is still quite funny. Unlike five or six other Stanley Kubrick pictures, however, it is a failure. The jokes about male sexuality and military forcefulness are stupid when they aren’t vulgar, and the character of Dr. Strangelove, the German scientist, is silly. Satire should be more palatable than this.

In some ways DS is as brilliant as Kubrick’s 2001: consider the ironically lovely credit-sequence music at the beginning of the film. Still able to be seen as daring, the work is nevertheless presented from the same left-wing perspective that ultimately led the American people to deeply distrust the Democratic party regarding the Soviet Union. Liberals discovered that they can’t have everything.

A short story by Sigrid Nunez, “The Plan” (2018) has as its narrator a horrid criminal—a serial murderer of women. The author harbors no sympathy for him—he wants more culture (i.e. the arts) in his life but also, on the last page, he strangles a whore because murder “was one of the things whores were for.” (He never learns anything.) Yet Nunez underscores the strange truth that a human being, like me and thee, is responsible for this wanton slaughter. Why? Is it not true that nothing human is alien to us?

“The Plan” is a propulsive fiction written with many short paragraphs. It is cruelly honest, as it should be, but does not descend to nihilism, cheap or otherwise. Maybe, just maybe, it gets close, though.

No doubt it is one of “the best American short stories” of the year it was published, found in the 2019 book of the same name.

Jasmine in Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine (2013) had money, but no longer. She had a husband but, an appalling swindler, he committed suicide. She had, and has, family relationships, but they do not go well. Though the fragile woman tries to reinvent herself in San Francisco, where her sister Ginger lives, the walls are closing in. Many authentic tragic elements, and sparse rueful humor, are found in the film, which glides along acceptably on sheer emotion.

As everyone knows, Cate Blanchett is wonderful as Jasmine. Notwithstanding the film is is “a quietly respectful tribute” (critic Anthony Quinn) to A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanchett’s Jasmine is not Blanche DuBois. She is an independent character, a smart bourgeois. And she is ill-served by men. Not a great picture is this, but a good one. All the same, I found it hilarious when a Village Voice critic pointed out that the Sweathogs have a San Francisco chapter in Jasmine.

Would the Soviet Union, allied with Cuba, have initiated a third world war in the rural Midwest of the United States? I doubt it, but, boy, do we all know about Russian expansionism. In the 1984 Red Dawn, the Midwest is where the communists invade, and teenaged sons and daughters are the ones who aggressively engage them. Though far from a work of art, the film harbors themes: communist hostility and the global inevitability of invasion.

As an action movie, Red Dawn is reliable. Director-writer John Milius is an avid gun collector and it shows. Firearms here are rather distinctive, an attention grabber. War violence is framed in shots of surrounding mountainous beauty. Up to a point, though, the film is silly. Milius is a conservative who, despite the strengths in Dillinger, made poor choices as a moviemaker. But I say unhesitatingly that American cinema is more fun and interesting with him than without him.