For The Virgin Suicides (1999), Sofia Coppola directed amiably, cleverly and fancifully, and I like her screenwriting (based on a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides) as well. Therein, five young sisters in the Lisbon family of Detroit, during the 1970s, commit suicide. The girls are ever in the thoughts of the teen boys who took them to a party, except for the perplexing Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), who forsakes the prettiest Lisbon girl, Lux (Kirsten Dunst).

The film is about living with the unfathomable (such as the girls’ suicides). It is about—and it shows us—a free-floating rejection of important things: of life, Trip’s rejection of Lux, Mrs. Lisbon’s rejection of further schooling for her daughters. The characters behave this way because they see it as the only way to behave. There is no real alternative for them. Thus The Virgin Suicides is quietly gloomy, though with odd humor. It is a tenebrous seriocomic examination of human absence. It is limited as a personal film for Miss Coppola—limited in a way her Somewhere is not—but it is personal. . . Writing apropos of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, critic Ross Douthat indicated that the lady’s movies are more notable when they “feature not just mild dissatisfactions, but the shadow of the guillotine.” The present film does just that, and more than the shadow.

Zulu (1964) is a powerful war movie and period piece, directed and co-written by Cy Endfield, in which soldiers of the British Empire fight to survive the onslaught of numerous Zulu warriors. The year is 1879. After the film’s first hour, there is a steady drumbeat of unusual conflict until the finish. Endfield is sympathetic mostly to the British because they are outnumbered—easily they could all die—and he is anything but unpatriotic. But he doesn’t withhold respect for the Zulus either, who can be honorable as well as brave. Stanley Baker, the film’s producer, stars as the dignified commanding officer. It is hard to get a handle on Michael Caine‘s character—Lt. Bromhead (though Caine exhibits his usual great talent)—but Zulu is energetic and cohesive nevertheless.

A girl rescued from awful parents living on “the Mountain,” Charity is raised by a lawyer, Mr. Royall, and his wife in the small New England town of North Dormer. She is secure there until, long after his wife’s death, lonesome Mr. Royall enters the teenaged Charity’s bedroom one night looking for intimacy. Charity demands that he leave, which he does, and thereafter she hates him. There is very little talk between them, but Charity does find a friend in smart Lucius Harney, presently falling in love with him. Their relationship, complete with copulation, goes well until somehow it doesn’t.

This is what is proffered in Edith Wharton‘s novel, Summer, from 1917. Written clearly and gracefully, in an apparently ageless style, the book is about people living in an almost dead (and provincial) sphere where they mightily hope for the love of someone of the opposite sex. I won’t reveal the ending but, truth to tell, there is a kind of compensation for Mr. Royall after Charity withholds all sympathy and forgiveness for him. Really, a sad charity emanates from sad Charity.

With appealing authenticity Chiwetel Ejiofer enacts a courageous man in the 2018 film, Come Sunday (on Netflix). He is Carlton Pearson, the Tulsa pastor willing to declare to his congregation that he now believes in the ultimate salvation of all people, that God Himself led him to this fond conviction. Most of his fellow Christians are scandalized, ergo leaving his church. The church can’t afford to stay open. Pearson finds himself on a unique and troubling path.

I am glad Pearson is a universalist—like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa before him—although his theology seems very incomplete here. (Where is the ideation?) The film is respectable but also more interesting than dramatic, and then it runs out of steam. The sop it throws to homosexuals isn’t interesting at all. . . Even so, such actors as Martin Sheen (as Oral Roberts), Condola Rashad (as Pearson’s wife), and Jason Segel deserve plaudits.

I have generally respected, but not liked, the art of playwright Arthur Miller, but the John Huston film The Misfits (1961), for which Miller wrote the script, I neither respect nor like.

Misfitism and disillusionment, femininity in the face of masculinity, amatory competition—these are a few of the themes in this movie which gradually turns into a particularly stupid milksop concoction. And by calling it milksop I am saying it is basically anti-masculine. Miller achieves this through his depiction of the very vulnerable Roslyn, played by his wife, Marilyn Monroe.

Clark Gable is in the film but his performance, for a long time, is mannered, his smiles usually phony. Eli Wallach, however, is incisive. Monroe—gorgeous, of course—goes nowhere fast, and Montgomery Clift is not much better. Not all the peekaboo shots of Monroe’s body are gratuitous, but most of them are. For some reason Monroe thought Miller turned director Huston against her. Maybe he did.