No Man of God (2021)

It's the American criminal justice system, one in the 1980s with a newly established criminal profiling department, that is the star of this oft-told, awful true crime story, approached from a peculiar angle - somehow Elijah Wood as real-life founding criminal profiler Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby's idiosyncratic and distracting Ted "Surely he sat up straight and spoke without a hand in front of his face, once?" Bundy disappear into the beige 1980s backgrounds, achieving little in their conversations about the infamous killer's crimes, and it is the access rules, prison protocols, and government bureaucracy that step forward and gently but insistently drive the interest here.  

★★★☆☆

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The Faculty (1998)

When one student says suspiciously of another, "We don't know what she is - gay, lesbian, or alien," and when problems at school are solved by snorting a home-laboratory-manufactured drug and waving a gun around, you start getting nervous about the messages in director Robert Rodriguez's sci-fi horror set in a high school and apparently based on Jack Finney's The Body Snatchers, but a surprisingly star-studded cast (Usher, Jon Stewart, Selma Hayek, and others) distracts from this irksomeness and lets other aspects of the movie pay effective tribute to the B-grade horror scifi movies of the 50s.

★★☆☆☆

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The Ice Storm (1997)

Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, based on a book by Rick Moody, does for the 70s what The Big Chill and Grand Canyon did for the 80s and 90s - present middleclass America in a moment, here an era of nuclear families contending with post-Vietnam War sexual liberation - and while the movie might have benefitted from a few more laughs as 70s upheaval is paraded in the form of packaging peanuts, Jesus Christ Superstar, est training and key parties, the sombre drama is redeemed by affecting endscenes suggesting the inexorable thaw and moving forwards of Time...and along the way compelling evidence is provided that Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood are not, in fact, the same person.

★★★☆☆

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