Josef Krebs

This indie revelation explores sexuality, relationships, and the way that both interact with technology. Therapy doesn’t seem to be opening uptight housewife Ann to her feelings; it takes videotaped erotic confessions for her to overcome her inhibitions. Meanwhile, Ann’s sister and husband are deceiving her with a steamy affair and endless lies. Eventually, a candid, oddball drifter comes to visit and uses his video project to untangle the tape tying up this dysfunctional family.

Facing their own complete extinction due to extreme storms that are destroying whole cities, the world finally comes together, sending 17 teams of scientists and engineers to create a system, a series of satellites all controlled by a giant space station that can use an assortment of devices—super lasers, thermal missiles, freezing beams, etc.—to stabilize the weather. Naturally, someone’s gonna try to seize control of Dutchboy, as the system is known, and weaponize it to make himself president of an all-powerful country that will destroy its enemies and rule the planet.

Based the novel by E. M. Forster, Maurice is a groundbreaking room with a different view, projecting as much romance, passion, and class consciousness as producer Ismael Merchant and screenwriter-director James Ivory brought to their earlier hit adaptation of another Forster novel. In 1909, a student at Cambridge, Clive, urges college colleague Maurice to embrace the love of male physical beauty as described in classical literature and accept their mutual platonic love.

This being the third film in a row I’ve reviewed on Blu-ray in which a man’s life is destroyed by the death of a child and the loss of a wife (alongside Manchester by the Sea and Nocturnal Animals) leads me to suspect that a strong sense of loss is vibrating through our national zeitgeist despite the blessings of unsocial media. Collateral Beauty, a feel-good downer (a romtrage, if you will), is a parable filled with It’s a Wonderful Life–like whimsy concerning a grieving advertising executive, Howard (Will Smith), who, two years on from the loss of his daughter, is writing letters to Time, Death, and Love to voice his complaints and express his trauma.