An alcoholic wants to end his life, through drinking. He starts a love affair with a very tolerant prostitute.

The Mike Figgis movie, Leaving Las Vegas (1995), is hardly a masterpiece. Even so, it can be appreciated, I think, as would-be Edvard Munch on film, a flashy cinematic Scream.

I said flashy: the film’s artiness works against it—the slow motion, the many fades to black. Moreover, when Ben the alcoholic is discovered by Sera the prostitute having sex with a strange woman, the plot element seems rather cheap, rather implausible. As Ben, Nicolas Cage is good. As Sera, Elisabeth Shue is perfect, and both clothed and naked she is beautiful. I never saw her in such flicks as Cocktail and The Underneath, but I suspect that American cinema has underused her. Probably she ought to be cast in some important roles now.

Some would call Monte Hellman‘s The Shooting, from 1966, an absurdist Western but whether it is or not, it is decidedly unusual and, in its own way, entertaining. A woman, Adrien Joyce, wrote the script, in which “a mysterious woman persuades two cowboys to help her in a revenge scheme” (imdb.com). The woman in question (Millie Perkins) is pretty but waspish, and her boyfriend is a detestable gunslinger (Jack Nicholson) she has hired, as she hired the two cowboys, to do the killing she wants. Cowboy Willett Gashade (Warren Oates), however, opposes and fights against the killing.

In the film, the past is unrevealed and motivations unknown. The woman, who may be pregnant, keeps mum about everything, even her name. What we do know is that two mostly ordinary men, the cowboys, are quite stultified by peculiar evil, even if the gunslinger ends up stultified as well.

Joyce also wrote the screenplay for Five Easy Pieces. Dead in 2004, she had gifts. Hellman, who died in 2021, provides some impressive long shots.

The satirizing of men and women in modern England in the 1970 film Take a Girl Like You is hardly strong or memorable. The insights are few and the laughs are zero. There are men who are horndogs and Hayley Mills‘s Jenny refusing to lose her virginity.

A Kingsley Amis book is the source novel here. The movie was directed by the late Jonathan Miller, a British theatre director who may or may not have been an artist; I can’t say. To me, Take a Girl Like You is tame, insignificant non-art. It is worth seeing, though—I’ll make the concession—for the charm and good looks of Miss Mills.

Rowan Joffe‘s direction of Before I Go To Sleep (2014), from a novel by S.J. Watson, is pleasantly sensitive to the film’s eerie material. His screenplay is suitably penned. Mystery lies atop mystery for a woman (Nicole Kidman) so abused she is temporarily brain-damaged.

Kidman knows how to be anguished, is never false. Colin Firth is richly effective. There are too many mentions of adultery in the tale, but the small Sleep is a scary pleasure. To the critics who dislike it I have a ho-hum reaction.