The movie “Phantom Thread”, supposedly for reasons unknown, is the last Daniel Day Lewis will ever make. The story is about a middle aged and wealthy wedding dress maker and his ill fated and strange relationship with a much younger woman who is a waitress he finds while at a restaurant. I found the entire experience of his movie hard to watch, mainly due to the cruel treatment of Lewis character towards this very nice young woman who constantly tries and fails to please him, his all too frequent rude and moody outbursts and a sound track that seems to never stop droning throughout the whole 2 hours. Perhaps Lewis has decided to quit acting after months of cruel scenes with this nice woman co-star he was working with took its depressing toll. There is a strange twist to this movie at the end that I found more strange than interesting and throughout it all, the audience has to watch the downward spiral of a strong relationship that falls into verbal abuse.

For reasons I don’t understand, the ratings for this movie are very high, however I cannot recommend this film, even though it is Daniel Day Lewis’s last one.

The movie “Den of Thieves” makes a big mistake because it tries too hard to be like an all time movie classic about bank robbery, a head police investigator and a gang of criminals. That all time classic is “Heat”, that came out in 1995, starring Al Pacino and Robert Deniro. Heat is one film that will never be topped in terms of its perfectly told story, action and behind the scenes character development, so right from the start this film, this movie goes into a wrong direction.

I have always heard that the craft of screenwriting is the most difficult of all the creative art forms and it is for good reason. One of the reasons for this is that the story has to be interesting and compelling but most importantly make plausible sense. Unfortunately, this movie makes no sense on a number of levels even to the point of where the screenwriter used the “fill in the blanks” method at the end of the film in a last ditch effort to try and educate the audience about what happened behind the scenes that we all missed. “Den of Thieves stars Gerard Butler who still seems to trying to get back to his excellent performance in “Olympus has Fallen”, released in 2013 proving once again how difficult it is to follow a huge hit like that with another movie as good.

Mainly because of the overly complex plot that mostly holds no water, I cannot recommend Den of Thieves.