For those of us who have the impossible ambition of breaking into the business of screenwriting, movies as bad as “The Nun” are especially infuriating. This could be the first bad horror movie that I have ever seen, where even the moments of horror are boring. The movie is about an evil Nun who inhabits a giant old convent and the haunts the minds of many other unfortunate characters in this very bad story. Who cares? We have seen this before. Just because a story involves exorcism and a religious theme does not mean its going to work as a horror movie.

One can only guess the number of religious and exorcism movies that have been released since “The Exorcist”, easily the most terrifying movie ever made – released in 1973. The number of movies that have tried to capitalize on The Exorcist is too high, but for me the best of these is “The Omen”, that was released in 1976 starring Gregory Peck. An honorable mention is the 2009 movie “Drag me to Hell” which is a very well done horror movie and about as good as The Omen.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this mess is a very low 31% – I would have given this film a 5% rating. Very simply, this movie sucks and should have gone directly to DVD. Do yourself and miss this mess.

The new movie “The Wife” stars Glenn Close, Christian Slater and Jonathan Pryce and its about the sacrifice that some people think they have to make to maintain and save a marriage. The problem is that sometimes when you sacrifice everything for someone else you can lose yourself – along the way. The big revelation of this story about a Nobel Prize winning author Joe Castleman, played by Jonathan Pryce I saw coming early in this story and for me this story was more about a lack of integrity than it was about the sacrifice one person can make for another for love or marriage.

The acting throughout this movie was outstanding, especially with Glenn Close who might receive and Oscar nomination for her performance as the wife of the famous author who sacrifices everything for her marriage. One bad thing about this movie was the constant smoking by too many characters for reasons that probably include funding from some Tobacco company. This is a very unfortunate problem with too many movies today and one day hopefully smoking will be banned from all movies.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a very high 85% and I agree with this review.

I highly recommend The Wife.

The new movie “Juliet Naked” has many characters and a great deal of dialogue and a story that I thought was too “all over the place” for my tastes. The acting is good from Ethan Hawk, Rose Byrne and Chris O’Dowd and the Rotten Tomatoes rating is a very solid 80% – but I thought that the story about a famous singer in of the 80’s, played by Hawk who has long given up his singing career was not interesting enough to hold my interest. I did notice I was dosing off at around the 3/4 point of this movie because it was getting very boring.

For these reasons I do not recommend Juliet Naked.