Late twenty-somethings Raven Goodwin and Dominique Perry are constantly pressured to get married. When an attractive new pastor comes to their church at Christmastime, they find themselves rivals for his attention. The quality of the film is about average with any other romantic made for television Christmas film. It’s not a particularly unique story and I almost universally find outside pressure to couple up rather grotesque. The competition between the women gets downright nasty at times, but the leads are still appealing and it’s mostly harmless, mindless entertainment. While I tend to find religious themed films annoying, I do enjoy a church setting. Particularly in a film such as this where there is sniping and fighting, congregation members are constrained from certain types of actions unless they want to be subjected to community disapproval.   

Excited to be a surrogate for her two best friends, complications arise for Jasmine Batchelor when prenatal tests show anomalies in her fetus. The film relatively successfully attempts to touch upon a number of heavy subjects from abortion to surrogacy and the ethics involved with both of those. While her optimism and strong-headedness are not completely unappealing, Batchelor’s character is a bit difficult to empathize with. She makes a decision and attempts to steamroll everyone in her path forgetting that these are the people she most cares about and not bothering to really take in the multitude of consequences inherent in her decision. The rest of the characters are relegated to spending their time trying to reason with her.

Living with his mother and older brother in working-class England and despite his protestations otherwise, destined for a life working the coal mines, fourteen year old David Bradley finds escape from his circumstances in the form of a falcon which he trains. Their relationship gives him confidence and a bright light into his dreary circumstances. Unfortunate from cruel teachers to his callous brother, the system is against him. Bradley’s portrayal of the slight young boy isn’t particularly likable, especially early in the film, but the changes he expresses as he slowly develops some self confidence makes you want to hope that something better awaits him in the future.  

For every Pirates of the Caribbean, there is also a Country Bears or The Haunted Mansion. This fits somewhere in between those two extremes. Dwayne Johnson portrays his usual character, an amiable, wisecracking something or other (here an Amazon riverboat captain, similar to those who pilot the Disneyland ride). He’s hired by Emily Blunt to take his boat to search for a mythical tree with magical flowers. The two of them have a stupidly negative amount of chemistry between them. Portraying German Prince Joachim, Jesse Plemons squanders almost every opportunity to ham it up as a villain. Sadly Paul Giamatti would likely have done an incredible job in the role, but is relegated to a lesser antagonist. Though quite heavy on the CGI, the settings are colorful and appealing, but that doesn’t offer enough to explain why a sequel is being made. 

Accountant Johnny Depp travels to a company town for a new job, only to be told by owner Robert Mitchum that the job has been filled. He drowns his sorrows by spending the night with a prostitute and ends up in a shoot-out with her former lover, Mitchum’s son. It’s a surrealistic journey as he travels, accompanied by a native man named Nobody and trailed by bounty hunters, west to the Pacific Ocean to die due to the bullet that is lodged near his heart. Between scene jumps and vision quest hallucinations, I had a bit of a tough time following the narrative a bit, but that seemed to be deliberate and at some point just went with the general flow to the fatal end.  

After rising rodeo star and horse trainer Brady suffers a horrific brain injury, similar to one a friend of his had experienced that now confines him to a wheelchair, he is forced to reexamine the direction he wants to take his life. It feels like a fairly authentic portrayal of life amongst the Lakota Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, perhaps made further so by having Brady’s family played by his real life father and sister. After Nomadland, I was interested to check out Chloe Zhao’s other films. She has incredible eye for the wide expanses of middle America and some of the less celebrated people who incorporate those areas.