Enigma (2018)

When a television show approaches the mother of a murdered woman proposing a 90-minute true-crime special that might help reveal the truth of the daughter's death, the mother is torn because first her husband, sisters, and large number of daughters must address some matters that until now have been dealt with as deeply private, and although this is an important and very well-acted film, there is something infuriating about watching all the extended family members and friends whispering and gossiping for an hour over something that, outside of conservative Chile at least, shouldn't stand in the way of a murder investigation.

★★☆☆☆

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Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) (2009)

I think it was the laugh-out-loud melodrama I enjoyed most watching Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, an overwrought carry-on about a blind film writer's affair with an actress, but everything else left me a little cold, including the rush to tie all the nonsense up sensibly in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

Well, you pretty much have to watch this 1955 thriller play adaptation - the play is called Murder Mistaken - not just for a well-delivered surprise towards the end but also for the jaw-dropping endscenes in which one particular female character stands up to a killer in a terrifying shouting match that I think is unprecedented in its melodrama - the only similar scene I can think of is Sigourney Weaver's Helen Hudson inviting a crazed serial killer to put up his dukes in that rooftop scene in Copycat. 

★★★☆☆

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Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles (2005)

This melodrama, a Chinese production, has an older Japanese man, an emotionally detached fisherman, travelling to China with a hare-brained scheme to reunite with his dying son - his misguided and really only completely self-serving actions cause enormous trouble to everyone he encounters including Japanese-speaking tour guides, Chinese village leaders and townsfolk, Government officials, prison wardens and staff and prisoners, and they in return go to so much trouble for him - ridiculous amounts of trouble - that you have to wonder in the end if this infuriating, humorous, and emotional story from director Zhang Yimou really means to pull your heartstrings or comment on a cultural difference.

★★★★☆

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The Red House (1946)

This dreary 1946 film is about an abandoned red farmhouse that conceals a dreadful secret, but given no one can find the house, most of the movie is taken up with the characters in-the-know, like Edward G Robinson's histrionic farming family man, being annoyingly, whiningly circumspect about the importance of not visiting the house while all the other characters not-in-the-know, like adopted daughter Meg and her farmhand chum Nath, make repeated attempts to find it, walking in circles and talking in circles through the woods, padding out the dreariness before a final underwhelming reveal.

★★☆☆☆

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Phone Call From A Stranger (1952)

We spend so much time with "The Four Musketeers", a self-named group of not terribly interesting - and in the case of Keenan Wynn's Eddie Hoke, a novelty salesman, downright annoying - plane passengers thrown together by chance, that it comes as a bit of a shock when the plane crashes, killing three and leaving the fourth, Gary Merrill's dullard lawyer, to take up the others' unfinished business - unfinished and very melodramatic business involving guilt, shame, love, betrayal and other overwrought stuff that only a movie-final appearance by Bette Davis can neatly, patly resolve.

★★★☆☆

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Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) (1997)

Director Pedro Almodóvar turns Ruth Rendell's psychosexual thriller into a rambling soapy melodrama and turns Rendell's main character, the 38-year-old serial rapist Victor, into a more palatable naif whose inexperience-in-love and obsession with his 'first' results in an incident in which a policeman is shot and ends up a paraplegic.

★★★☆☆

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Beaches (1988)

This 1988 movie machine-guns through the career and relationship highs and lows of lifelong best friends C.C. and Hillary as if in a hurry to fit into its runtime the tearjerker bit at the end.

★★★★☆

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Sweet Dreams (Fai Bei Sogni) (2016)

This could easily have been pure melodrama - there's little light, not much gaiety and every scene tightly revolves around the core idea of mother-child love - but remind yourself this is an autobiographical Italian film about a real man who grew up minus a fundamental building block - the truth about his mother's death - and it becomes tolerable melodrama and more than that, an occasionally profound look at a successful war correspondent and newspaper columnist's happiness, success, and faith.

★★★☆☆

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Dulcima (1971)

A film with a weird Carry On beginning and an unpleasant, melodramatic finish, this Golden Bear contender tells the ugly story of young home helper Dulcima who upon discovering money tins in the home of her drooling, lecherous peeping tom farmer-boss, Mr Parker, changes her behaviour towards him while also falling Lady Chatterley-style for the strapping young gamekeeper in the cottage down the way.

★★☆☆☆

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East of Eden (1952)

This family melodrama based on a John Steinbeck novel is sure to make you uncomfortable as James Dean writhes and squirms and grapples with immature impulses playing Cal Trask, the second son of a Californian farmer, a man whose high standards Cal just cannot live up to. 

★★★★☆

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Babel (2006)

With a change of tone from moribund to comical, this well-intentioned miserable load of nonsense could easily have been a sequel to Lemony Snickett's Series of Unfortunate Events, presenting a ridiculous account of a day Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett really shouldn't have gotten out of bed.

★☆☆☆☆

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