Human interest, a true story that is almost impossible to believe ever happene and excellent acting are just some of the accolades that describe just about one of the best movies about a real event that I have ever seen.

The story of the new movie “Ordinary Angels” is about a hairdresser Sharon Stevens, played by Hilary Swank who is a serious alcoholic who refuses to admit she has a problem. Sharon is a person who is looking for a purpose, perhaps to make sense of her life of constant drinking, being divorced for many years, and estranged from her only son, who hates her. Sharon sees a picture of a 5-year-old girl in a local newspaper who needs a liver transplant and her life is transformed. After seeing this one article in the paper, all Sharon cares about is saving this child and her family.

Ed Schmitt, played well by Alan Ritchson is a married man with two daughters who lost his wife Theresa to an illness in 1993 when she was only 35 years old. To make matters worse, Ed had a hospital debt of 432 thousand dollars for the time Theresa was dying in the hospital. Ed then gets the news that his adorable 5-year-old daughter Michelle Schmitt, played by Emily Mitchell needs a liver transplant due to a rare liver disease. The weekly and monthly hospital bills to save Emily are both endless and outrageously high, threatening the family’s livelihood with additional worries of potentially losing their home. The life of Ed Schmitt considering what he had to endure with first losing his wife and then the fear over his severely ill daughter is at times, very hard to watch. This story is one of the worst examples of real life hardship I have ever seen in any film.

Making Ed’s life worse is a severe tornado that severely damages the family home in Louisville Kentucky, ever-increasing his problems and overwhelming debt. Then Sharon Stevens steps in and devotes her entire life to helping Ed with his financial problems and also tries to save the life of his 5-year-old daughter.

The best scene in this entire movie was the meeting between Sharon and the callous, cruel representatives of the medical insurance company, who could have cared less that a 5-year-old girl would die and her entire family ruined because of overwhelming medical bills of 432 thousand dollars. Sharon asked them to eliminate the entire bill and when one of the representatives laughed at her request she asked, “Did I say something funny”.

Another one of the many problems that Sharon had to deal with was Ed Schmitt and his male ego who over time, started to resent Sharon’s constant help, forgetting that under the extreme circumstances of criminal medical bills and his 5-year-old daughter dying, the only thing to do was to accept as much help as possible. There is no way anyone could deal with problems this extreme by themselves, facing something like this. Within a situation this extreme, the pride of any man wanting to take care of his own family should take a back seat. Additionally, the ending of this movie is so unbelievable it’s almost impossible to believe that it really happened.

I thought the acting in this movie was great, with Hillary Swank giving her greatest performance since “Million Dollar Baby”, released in 2005. Alan Ritchson (who currently is the star of the Amazon Prime “Reacher” series) is also very good in his role of a father who is overwhelmed with horrible grief and worry. Actress Nancy Travis is also very good in the role of Ed Schmitt’s mother.

Once again, the Rotten Tomatoes ratings of only 80% are way too low with some of critics not even liking this great film about empathy (so rare in this world) and a great person helping others in need. My rating for this film is 95% and a very strong recommendation. Unfortunately like last years “Air” released in April 2023, this movie has been released too early for Oscar consideration.

The new movie “The Teachers Lounge” is not for any young person on the fence about becoming a school teacher. The entire world knows that being a teacher is one of the most noble and important professions any person can aspire to. The world also knows that teachers are grossly underpaid and disrespected even though a good teacher can change lives and a great teacher can save lives. The Teachers Lounge is a foreign film from Germany with subtitles, but despite this I did not mind reading the dialogue.

The screenplay for this movie seems to hit all the important points about being an employee/teacher of a high school. Arguably a school teacher must endure all of the backstabbing and bad people that any typical employee has to live within any company. Schoolteachers, also have to deal with the same company politics, and injustice expected of an employee and additionally must also deal with difficult students, some who can be violent, bullying, and trying to help other students with learning disabilities.

The story of The Teachers Lounge starts with some students stealing, and then a member of the faculty is accused of stealing money from the wallet of teacher Carla Nowak, played very well by Leonie Benesch. What follows is an investigation and the forced temporary suspension of the teacher accused of stealing, Friederike Kuhn played by Eva Löbau. Kuhn’s son, who is a student at the school and in Nowak’s class, takes his mother’s suspension and accusations of stealing very hard. Worse is the young boy’s learning problems and bullying in the school from other students about his mother.

All of this human conflict is both written and performed extremely well, with an ultimate final resolution that nobody would ever expect for me was not strong enough given the quality of this story and was too abrupt.

Most interesting about this movie is the Rotten Tomatoes rating at an extremely high 97% from the critics with the moviegoing audience ranking this film a low 55%, with my rating about 80%. With a better ending, I would have ranked this film 90% due to the strong story and acting. However, I do recommend this movie.

The new movie “Madame Web” has achieved a new high as far as an idea, story, and screenplay that are so bad, there should be a documentary created just to try and figure out why garbage this horrendous was ever created and then greenlighted into a motion picture that costs millions of dollars to produce.

Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, in a role that could represent some level of complete career suicide. Anyone who would read this terrible screenplay, written by no less than 4 screenwriters and take this role anyway, has to wonder about either their decision-making ability or reading comprehension. There is no contiguous, or understandable story anywhere within this mess of two hours. This very bad movie just jumps from one scene to the next scene, without any rhyme or reason. 

The entire premise about a woman in 1973 bitten by a spider while pregnant giving her unborn child the ability to see a few minutes into the future – steals from Spiderman and the series of Final Destination movies – that were about cheating death and later death getting its revenge. Within the first 30 minutes, any viewer of this disaster no longer cares about what is going on or even why, and are all just waiting for this nightmare of bad movie-making to be over. The only reason to see this amazingly bad film is to be stunned at just how bad it all is.

This film also stars rising young actresses, Isabela Merced, Sydney Sweeney and Celeste O’Connor – in three roles that imply future female super-hero-spider movies that given this movie accident will never happen.

One of the best reviews I have seen so far about this amazingly bad film is from critic Kevin Maher: “In its sheer mind-boggling awfulness, it represents the death of the superhero genre, the burning of the superhero genre to the ground and then the returning in the middle of the night to piss on the superhero genre’s ashes.“

The IMDB rating for this mess is 3.8 and the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 13% is not low enough, with my rating a 0% because there is absolutely nothing worth seeing within these two hours. One of the worst movies I have ever seen.