One could easily say about the new movie “Overlord” that it has to be the most unusual World War 2 movie ever made. As the movie starts there is a scene that many World War 2 movies have started. A group of young men are about to parachute out of a huge plane behind German Lines at the start of the Normandy Invasion in June 1944. This scene will remind many people of the starting scene of Saving Private Ryan where a group of young men are on a boat about to be storm the beaches of Normandy where many of them will die before they even reach the beach. The harsh reality of war is very well done in this opening scene with anti-aircraft explosions and the inevitable explosions all around the soldiers. Once landed a group of young men are assigned to blow up a German tower to help the land invasion and this is where the movie ceases to be a run of the mill war movie and become a movie about German experimenting on dead people and eventually zombies.

The special effects for this movie are very good, as are the action scenes involving combat. For this who think that harsh realities war should be respected in all war movies this movie is not for you – because zombies in World War 2 is far fetched and considering the science rather ridiculous.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are a very high 81%, I would be more in the 65-70% range and I give this movie only a marginal recommendation.

The new movie “The Girl in the Spider’s Web” is a sequel to the much better “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”, released in December 2011. Some of the things that were good about the first movie, including the computer hacking and coding are evident in this sequel, but not nearly enough. Also the main character, this time played by Clare Foy is not tattooed or pierced enough to make her outrageous as to be considered similar to the original character played by Rooney Mara. The story for this new movie is all over the place, too long and in too many places hard to follow. One wonders who the main character Lisbeth Salander, works for, or why she is involved in trying to stop so many bad people. This movie lacks basic story telling and tries to make up for that with explosions and some special effects, which will never be the solution to a bad screenplay.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a pretty low 46% and IMDB has a rating of only 5.4. I agree with both of these ratings and I do not recommend The Girl in the Spider’s Web.

The new movie “Wildlife” is a low budget, understated story about real life in Montana in 1960 where the mountains and vistas are many but the jobs are very few.

When the jobs are few and what jobs there are – are bad and low paying, the desperation and fear increases as people are more terrified of a bad day at work or the random whim of an employer that can send a life spiraling downward. The story of Wildlife is about what can happen when a man loses his job in 1960 in the middle of nowhere and all the things that can go wrong in a relationship once that happens. The young couple is played extremely well by Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal – with a performance so outstanding by Mulligan that she will most likely receive an Academy Award nomination for best actress. The couple have a teenage son, played by newcomer Ed Oxenbould in a role where he showed very little emotion despite all the bad things that are happening around him. Perhaps his wooden performance was by design because he was too overwhelmed to believe the downward spiral he was witnessing.

After being fired from his first job Jerry Brinson has too much pride to go back to the landscaping job he had with a local golf club and eventually decides because of his pride to fight fires in the wilderness. His wife Jeanette Brinson, played by Mulligan misunderstands her husband’s male pride as he leaves his family for months at a time and this is where things start to go downhill very quickly.

The acting in this complex and unusual story about a relationship that goes bad because of money is outstanding. Relationship money problems is a life reality that happens far too often in too many marriages. If you can’t get a decent job or no job at all, where do you live? How do you survive?

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Wildlife is a very high 95% and I agree with this assessment. I give a strong recommendation to Wildlife because of the engrossing story and outstanding acting of Carey Mulligan.