The new movie “Widows” is highly unusual for several reasons. The story is told in a very original way, filling in the blanks of the story in unexpected areas of the film. I have also rarely scene such a high number of named actors all in the same movie – including Colin Farrell, Viola Davis, Liam Neeson, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Lukas Haas and even Robert Duvall. There were several new ideas in movie making that I have not seen before, including once scene where a car was in motion and there was a conversation going on inside, and all that was shown was the darkened windshield of the car. New ideas are the cornerstone of a good movie, and Widows is a very high quality production. There is a good deal of violence in this movie and the message of this story is that when you get involved with crime and associate with very bad people, you are putting not only yourself but also your family in grave danger.

It all starts with a great screenplay and the screenplay for Widows was written by the director Steve McQueen and Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay for Gone Girl. This is one of the very rare times in movie history where two major celebrities have had the same name – Steve McQueen. Based on this new movie Widows and “12 Years a Slave”, released in 2013, McQueen is becoming known as highly respected director in Hollywood.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Widows is an extremely high 91% and based on the complex and well told story and great cast, I agree with this rating. I highly recommend Widows.

The new movie “What They Had” is about an adult brother and sister with older parents and their mother has advanced Alzheimer’s. With a story like this one, just about everything is hard to watch as their aging mother wanders off in the snow in suburban Chicago and tries to take a train to her childhood home. She thinks a stapler is a phone and over time remembers less and less and recognizes almost no one in her family. The story of this movie is mostly about the logistics of what to do with their mother and what is best for not only her but her husband who is refusing to send her to any care facility.

Any husband having to watch his wife of over 50 years go through something like this is heartbreaking and the real life acting in this movie is outstanding. Starting with Blythe Danner as the older woman with Alzheimer’s, Robert Forster as her long suffering husband, Hillary Swank as her daughter and Micheal Shannon as her brother. It was good to see Hillary Swank in this high quality film as she has had one of the most volatile careers in acting as anyone ever has – having won 2 Oscars and then a series of bad movies after “Million Dollar Baby” in 2005. Hopefully this movie will be a strong comeback for her career.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for What They Had is an extremely high 88% and I agree with this rating and highly recommend this movie. I really disliked the constant smoking in this movie that was 100% completely unnecessary. Hopefully one day this disgusting practice will stop, but for now we all have to tolerate producers accepting money from Tobacco companies and showing people smoking.

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The actress Tiffany Haddish is probably as in demand and in more movies than any actress who has become suddenly famous in many years. She seems to be in just about every movie and every talk show and because of this she is risking overexposure – the kiss of death for anyone in fickle show business. Haddish’s road to fame and fortune could not have come harder and unlikely as she frequently talks about her time being homeless, even mentioning living in her car – a small GEO Metro, which was a cheap car popular in the 90’s. While plugging “Nobody’s Fool”, another Tyler Perry movie on talk shows, Haddish has also brought up the fact that Tyler Perry was also homeless and also lived in a Geo Metro. Tyler Perry’s turnaround story is one of the greatest rags to riches show business stories of all time. Perry should do a movie about his life coming from despair and homelessness to being the owner of a movie studio in Atlanta and being worth about 600 million dollars.

A documentary or movie about Perry’s life would have been a far better project than Nobody’s Fool because like many of Tyler Perry’s movies, they seem to be mass produced with no original idea. This movie has an plot-line that involves the TV show Catfish and attempts a twist at the end that mostly does not work and does not make much sense. The screenplay of this movie seems like it was on a shelf for a while and the idea came to use Tiffany Haddish and some of her off the cuff mostly raunchy humor to save this story and for the most part, this does not work.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a very low 21% with IMDB a low 4.6 – which is very low for IMDB ratings. This movie could have been fixed by relying more on screenplay re-writes and a better story rather than thinking that Tiffany Haddish could just save the entire movie because of her raunchy on the fly humor. For these reasons, I do not recommend Nobody’s Fool.