More movies to consider

Between HBO, a paid service, and Tubi, a free one, we watch a lot of movies. Tubi has turned out to be a wonderful resource, as it requires commercials to pay for the free service. Yet, at our age, restroom and snack breaks can fill that advertising time. Here are more than a few movies you might like, so the descriptions will be brief.

“A most wanted man” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams and Robin Wright is set in Hamburg. It focuses on a small group who tries to help people seeking asylum gain it in turn for evidence to get bigger fish. The movie is one of Hoffman’s final movies and he is excellent.

“Lions for lambs” starring and directed by Robert Redford, also starring Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Anthony Garfield, Derek Luke and Michael Pena. It shows three different perspectives on a surge in Afghanistan, with Redford as a professor meeting with a smart but aimless student in Garfield, Cruise doing a very good job as a gung-ho Senator being interviewed by Streep, and Pena and Luke in a battle pinned down after a helicopter crash.

“Mulholland Falls” starring Nick Nolte, Jennifer Connelly, Melanie Griffith, John Malkovich, Treat Williams, Chaz Palminteri, and Bruce Dern. It is set in LA in the 1950s and revolves around an aggressive and corrupt police unit who is looking to solve a gruesome murder of a young woman which involves some important people.

“True Confessions” starring Robert Duvall, Robert DeNiro, Kenneth McMillan, Burgess Meredith, Rose Gregorio and Charles Durning. It is set in LA in the 1940s and involves the relationship between a very imperfect detective and his problem-solving brother who is a Monsignor as the detective investigates the murder of a prostitute.

“Gorky Park” starring William Hurt, Lee Marvin, Brian Dennehy, Joanna Pacula, and Ian Bannen. Set in Moscow, Hurt is a police detective trying to solve a gruesome murder of three people in Gorky Park. Marvin plays an opportunistic American businessman quite well and usually steals the scenes.

“The Dry” starring Eric Bana, Genevieve O’Reilly, and Keir O’Donnell is an Australian movie set in a very dry part of the country that has not had rain for almost a year. Bana is police detective in a big city who has returned to his hometown for a funeral of three members of a family, the father whom he knew. The parents have asked him to work with a young local deputy to solve the murder, given the friend is a suspect. While there an earlier drowning death of another friend resurfaces.

“The two faces of January” starring Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst and Oscar Isaac is set in Greece in the early 1960s. Isaac is an American who is a tour guide in Greece and befriends two American tourists played by Mortensen and Dunst. While Isaac likes to skim money from his clients, the two American tourists have a past that catches up with them and Isaac as well.

“The next three days” starring Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Banks, Brian Dennehy, Olivia Wilde, Ty Simpkins, Jason Beghe, and Aisha Hinds, with small cameos from Daniel Stern and Liam Neeson is about a wife and mother played by Banks who is in prison for a murder she did not commit. After exhausting all appeals, Crowe decides to take matters into his own hands and seeks to break her out before she is sent in three days to a maximum-security prison.

Each of these movies is worth seeing in my view and has a good story to tell. The first and last ones are the ones I more highly recommend, as the stories are matched by the gravitas of the actors. We watched a movie called “Dr. T and the women” the other day which had nine well-known actors, but it was only OK in my view. A few more we have seen that are good are “Untamed Heart” with Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater, “Just between friends” with Mary Tyler Moore, Ted Danson, Sam Waterston and Christine Lahti, and “Broken Vows” with Tommy Lee Jones, Annette O’Toole and Emmet Walsh.

If you have seen any of these, let me know what you think. Please feel free to mention others you watched and liked.