Dennis Seuling

Mister Lonely, directed by Harmony Korine, is an unusual film about celebrity impersonators. With its often bizarre images, awkward transitions, challenging logic, and melange of ideas, it’s not easy to understand. It’s an independent film with an identity crisis, structured like a documentary and appearing spontaneous but scripted and professionally acted.

Botany Bay is set in the era when England, under King George III, was transporting convicts to New South Wales, in what’s now Australia. With England’s population having doubled in only a few years, hordes of impoverished people living in hunger and filth, and long prison sentences or execution the punishment for even petty crimes, the country’s prisons were overflowing. The American colonies were now the independent United States of America and would no longer be a dumping ground for England’s undesirables. The solution was to send shiploads of convicts to Botany Bay, so named for its brilliant and varied plant life. There, they will establish New South Wales as the first penal colony in Australia, ensuring a supply of unpaid labor to exploit the continent’s resources.

Movies deal with all kinds of relationships, some of them subtly destructive (Gaslight), horrifically abusive (What’s Love Got to Do with It), homicidal (Badlands), or socially difficult (Brokeback Mountain). In Secretary, an employer and employee find in each other a bizarre yet fulfilling connection.

The film I Remember Mama is based on the play by John Van Druten which, in turn, was based on Kathryn Forbes’ novel Mama’s Bank Account. A TV show called simply Mama ran on CBS in the early 50s and a musical of the story ran on Broadway in 1979. Directed by George Stevens in 1948, the film features an outstanding cast and was nominated for five Academy Awards.

Conflict, a psychological drama with film noir elements, focuses on a man who commits a murder and is subsequently consumed by self-doubt, guilt and fear. With a suspenseful script and an expressionistic style, it’s an unusual crime drama.

Boxing movies have the benefit of built-in action sequences along with their dramatic stories. In 1947, Body and Soul established the template for future boxing movies, such as Requiem for a Heavyweight, Rocky, Raging Bull, and Cinderella Man. A young man from modest beginnings, lured into professional boxing by the promise of fame and fortune, finds his morality coming into conflict with his ambition.

Hollywood during its Golden Age turned out many musicals, including some biopics about song writers, such as Night and Day (about Cole Porter), Till the Clouds Roll By (Jerome Kern), Deep in My Heart (Sigmund Romberg), and Three Little Words (Bert Kalmer & Harry Ruby). Usually, their stories were whitewashed to exorcise any unpleasantness or controversy. Words and Music, about Rodgers and Hart, did the same, forgoing an authentic portrayal of its subjects and devoting most of the film to elaborate stagings of their most timeless songs.

Up the Creek is a wannabe National Lampoon’s Animal House, the low-budget film that made a fortune out of fraternity-gone-wild antics, sexual suggestiveness, and an off-the-wall John Belushi. Up the Creek uses the same template of slacker college kids raising a ruckus but takes them off campus for a challenging competition.

The Becomers combines elements of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with indie filmmaking in a sci-fi love story set in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rob Lowe was already a star, with credits including The Outsiders, The Hotel New Hampshire and St. Elmo’s Fire, when he took on the challenging role of a young hockey prodigy in the 1986 film Youngblood.