In May December (2023), by Todd Haynes, a committed actress played by Natalie Portman, temporarily stays with and studies a Mary Kay Letourneau-like character (Julianne Moore) whom Portman’s Elizabeth will portray in a movie. Gracie (Moore) has long been married to Joe (Charles Melton), the man she fell for when he was only thirteen.

Samy Burch‘s perceptive script serves up the themes of exploitation and objectification (both coming from Elizabeth), confusion and pressure in an abnormal household, and when an abnormal person like Gracie creates an abnormal marriage. Passably does Moore play a naive and neurotic woman. In a sad moment, she comments that Elizabeth is “getting on her last nerve”—this puzzles Joe—without quite knowing what she is saying. Persuasively and unshowily Melton and Portman play their roles.

A Netflixer, May December is not woke or semi-literate or trite. It is a brittle triumph which, as critic Alison Willmore indicates, approaches the place of horror without reaching it. This is proper, as are the nice comic touches along the way.

A 71-minute doc about Tom Wolfe, Radical Wolfe (2023) shows too much and comments on too much. Plus it makes a mistake in featuring clips from the film versions of Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities while sentences from the books are read aloud. Wolfe didn’t direct those movies!

All the same, Tom Wolfe is here, and engaging, and Richard Dewey‘s doc is usually honest. The huge-in-journalism (unlike journos today) author had many interests, exhibited well after the “intellectual Left” in college exasperated him. He explored New York City, a blue metropolis in all its disjointedness, in Bonfire. Dewey may not see the essential conservatism in this novel and others, but it’s there. . . Granted, I don’t like all of Wolfe’s writings, but his is an outstanding—and important—American success story, journalistic and, up to a point, implacably political. Thus I call it important.

The directing of John Ford (using the name of Jack Ford) is interesting and efficient enough to make his silent Western, Straight Shooting (1917), better than it is. E.g., the inner shots of door frames are there. Rather unpalatable is George Hively’s script about a morally conflicted hired killer (Harry Carey) summoned by a big-bully cattleman. I recommend reading such Western novels as L’Amour’s Down the Long Hills or Patten’s A Killing in Kiowa, both fresh and fun, rather than pulling up this Ford item on Tubi. Not that it doesn’t have its virtues, though.