Despite her best intentions, journalist Chanté Adams falls in love with and begins a family with soldier Michael B. Jordan. Before he is deployed to Iraq, she implores him to write in a journal for their son to share whatever wisdom he feels he has to give. I had mostly watched this because I like the Black-centric stories director Denzel Washington chooses to deliver. Unfortunately the final product here fails. The only times this one pulls away from Lifetime film territory is when Jordan is on screen and that is only because of his natural charm. The characters across the board are extremely one-dimensional. The child actor and Adams’s friend group particularly are particularly cringey in their renditions. The story flip flops through time without any focus, eventually falling on a weird wishy-washy pro-military stance that the rest of the film seemed to be avoiding.

When her family is attacked by a rogue band of Apaches, Cate Blanchett teams up with her estranged father Tommy Lee Jones to rescue her eldest daughter Evan Rachel Wood from being sold in Mexico. The story is a bit of a long, slow burn that I experienced better when watching in two sessions. It has a rather stacked cast with the phenomenal performances by Jones and Blanchett bolstered by the likes of Ray McKinnon, Val Kilmer, and Elisabeth Moss. The craggy New Mexico landscape is well shot with the cold winter adding to the atmosphere of dread and desperation.  

When news reporter Jeremy Renner investigates the CIA’s involvement in cocaine trafficking to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, it triggers a smear campaign against the author that ruins his life. The details of the story are infuriating and shout the necessities of a free press, an almost impossibility when editors and other journalists will bend to power. The performances are generally solid even while the story feels a bit tedious at times. This was apparently a passion project for Renner and it shows in the performance he personally gives.

Teenaged gangster Richard Attenborough murders the newspaper reporter he blames for killing one of his fellow gang members. To establish a different time of death, he sends out his gang to carry out the promotional stunt the reporter was supposed to complete. Several blunders results in Attenborough needing to seduce young waitress Carol Marsh and shake a suspicious Hermione Baddeley off his tail. Gangster films are generally dark, but this one is particularly bleak. Attenborough is convincingly ruthless in pursuing his goals, uncaring whether he leads his fellow gangsters to death or psychologically damaging a young girl. Though presumably about a real time in Brighton’s history, the beach setting makes for a strange juxtaposition between frivolous fun and indiscriminate murder.