The Hero (2017) is a sensitive human-condition film for potheads.  The principal characters enacted by Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon and Nick Offerman regularly and casually get high, without the film making any kind of point about drug use.  It’s just there—an uninteresting motif.  Almost nothing in director Brett Haley‘s script is novel or fresh, and it even turns fraudulent with its portrayal of a sad, 71-year-old man (Elliott) made happy by a much younger, attractive woman.  Miss Prepon pursues him, doing so not because Eliott has a measure of fame but simply because she has “a thing for old guys.”

A terrible romantic comedy, this, but a nifty musical.  Elvis Presley is a great singer in 1964’s Viva Las Vegas, but Ann-Margret outshines him because her voice is more than serviceable and her dancing charming and heartfelt.  Re the dancing, the movie wisely takes its cue from West Side Story: it’s vigorous.  So is some of the cutting from scene to scene (buckle up!)

As for the songs, they have hooks.

Cover of Viva Las Vegas [Blu-ray]

Mauriac’s brilliant 1927 novel, Therese Desqueyroux, was filmed in recent years by French director Claude Miller, the result of which is, I think, a respectable but forgettable period piece.  It is called Therese (2013), and its title character (Audrey Tautou), like Therese in the novel, tries to poison to death her husband Bernard (Gilles Lellouch).

There is some astute footage in the film (an emaciated, declining Therese making an appearance for her in-laws, Therese starting a fire with a cigarette), but Therese is less interesting than the novel because of how the novel is structured.  Plus, Tautou goes around with such a saturnine face that she makes the movie a bit stifling.  No high spirits ever spring up, as they usually do in Antonioni and Bergman, and the acting is not as varied as that in the finest art films.  Such cold art this is!

(In French with English subtitles)

Mauriac’s brilliant 1927 novel, Therese Desqueyroux, was filmed in recent years by French director Claude Miller, the result of which is, I think, a respectable but forgettable period piece.  It is called Therese (2013), and its title character (Audrey Tautou), like Therese in the novel, tries to poison to death her husband Bernard (Gilles Lellouch).

There is some astute footage in the film (an emaciated, declining Therese making an appearance for her in-laws, Therese starting a fire with a cigarette), but Therese is less interesting than the novel because of how the novel is structured.  Plus, Tautou goes around with such a saturnine face that she makes the movie a bit stifling.  No high spirits ever spring up, as they usually do in Antonioni and Bergman, and the acting is not as varied as that in the finest art films.  Such cold art this is!

(In French with English subtitles)

S. Craig Zahler‘s shocking Bone Tomahawk (2015) is such a grungy, gory and searing Western that no one in the film is decent.  Right?  Wrong.  Most (but not all) of the white people here are basically decent enough.  Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) is good to his wife, his deputies and others, in addition to being manly and brave.  Bravely does he search for the wife of another admirable man, Arthur (Patrick Wilson), after said wife and one of Hunt’s associates are abducted by cannibalistic Indians, unless only the word “savages” will do.

At first the Indians murder a black boy before doing their kidnapping.  A bigoted but smart man named Brooder (Matthew Fox) joins Hunt, Arthur, and Hunt’s “backup deputy,” Chicory (Richard Jenkins), for the pursuit, eventually losing their horses but also finding the savages.  Hunt and Chicory are taken captive.  They witness a horrifying atrocity the savages do to a man.

The film lets us know that in the 1800s a physical search could be harrowing, especially if one of the searchers (Arthur) had a broken leg.  Zahler, who wrote as well as directed the movie, conveys too that the civilizers were not always civil, but whatever the case they were among the barbaric uncivilized.  They could not always survive them.  Arthur seems to be a Christian, but in fact religion in such a world doesn’t appear to stand a chance.  It does, yes, but doesn’t appear to.

Bone Tomahawk is not invariably credible.  Hunt gets clubbed without suffering a bleeding head.  And why do the seekers so easily lose their horses?  However, this is minor:  the film is artfully made and authentically acted (Jenkins and Russell are great).  Although few Native Americans went in for cannibalism, like the savages in the film they often did scalp living people, among other very cruel things.  Thus BT can be called ferociously honest.