What happens when a psychopath is initially more sinned against than sinning? This is the case with Graham Young (Hugh O’Conor) of the U.K. in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, from 1995. A crazy injustice is done to Graham by his stepmother (Ruth Sheen, terrific), after which the boy chemist poisons her among others. Thallium, in fact, becomes Graham’s summum bonum.

Taking the true story of a teenaged killer, Benjamin Ross, director and co-writer, and Jeff Rawle, co-writer, concoct for the screen a jaunty, comic assault on the human race. The mental institution where Graham is confined houses men who are, in the words of the institution’s director, “moral imbeciles to a man.” This includes Graham, but not quite most of the other characters who are nevertheless cynical, rude, patronizing—and unjust. With great persuasiveness Antony Sher enacts the reasonable psychiatrist who treats Graham, but the therapeutic culture in this canny film founders. Dysfunction dominates.

(All reviews are by Earl Dean)

Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (2022) is for people like me who don’t want to read the long Joyce Carol Oates novel on which the film is based. Well, yes, the film itself is long—long enough to get tedious—but it is also a remarkable dreadnought of visual poetry. Everything cinematographer Chayse Irvin touches here turns to gold. Blonde concentrates on Marilyn Monroe, except that primarily, as Emina Melonie correctly notes on the web, the movie is “about the notion of personae, both acting and sexual, and how this strange metaphysical make up has been embodied by Marilyn Monroe.”

Ana de Arnas ardently gives the role of MM everything it calls for. The shots of her nude breasts are usually magnificent. In one sapid scene, for example, her first husband (Bobby Cannavale) rails at Marilyn for posing for soft core porn as she sits on the floor of the couple’s bedroom naked (as though she has just finished the porn shots) and fearful, vulnerable. There is art in this scene.

True, elsewhere aestheticism exists. Even so, this very figurative work is largely a success. It presents an American woman, an American icon, with movie-star privilege, who is nevertheless, from start to finish in this film, an American sorrow.

(A Netflix production)

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.