The movie “American Woman” is nothing about a typical Hollywood formula with a beginning, followed by a huge conflict in the middle and then a conclusion. This film is about the real life desperation and misery of a divorced woman Debra, played extremely well by Sienna Miller, in her late 30’s. She has a teenage daughter who is also a single mother and they both live with her. The relentless harsh reality of the garbage house Debra lives in across the street from her sister, played by Christina Hendricks and her husband, their children and her mother, played by Amy Madigan is at times extremely overwhelming to see, knowing that so many millions of Americans live like this in this country.

The most difficult parts of this story to watch, is the desperation of Debra, who is forced to take demeaning low paying jobs and live with an abusive boyfriend because she thinks she has no choice but to put up with his constant physical and emotional abuse – because she does not have enough money to walk away. Depicting real life is where this story hits home in the most impressive way. Just because a human being has suffered and deserves for their luck to change – if for no other reason than the law of averages – does not mean that this will actually happen. This is real life, not a Hollywood formula happy ending and that is the main reason why this film stands out.

Much of this story plays like a roller coaster throughout with extreme highs and lows and I agree with all the critics who are saying that this is Sienna Miller’s best performance in her career. She is definitely deserving of an Academy Award nomination, even though this movie has not been released at the end of this year.

There is another story within this movie about Debra’s daughter, that I would not reveal in this review, but it does involve another possible harsh reality of living in a poor or lower middle class neighborhood.

This movie has outstanding acting with all the actors involved, including Aaron Paul who plays one of Debra’s boyfriends.

What I did not like in this movie throughout was the constant chain smoking of Sienna Miller and once again, this happens because of Tobacco companies funding the production of too many movies, even after decades of knowing that smoking will kill you. I hope to one day see this ongoing disgusting practice of money over health, finally end.

Despite this depressing story, and tough life reality of American Woman, I highly recommend it and agree with the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 81%.

The new movie “The Dead Don’t Die” is an experiment of a low key, campy, strange, dark comedy that for me did not work. The problem with this experiment was mixing extreme horror of dead people eating live people with sarcastic, dry, subtle, lazy humor is not funny enough to actually make these two hours entertaining. To offset the strange horrific world of zombies, the jokes, the irony and the situations have to be much funnier than in this film. Inside of 1 hour of this almost 2 hour film, it all got old very quickly.

The director and screenwriter Jim Jarmusch, is great friends with all of the many named celebrities in this movie and it appears that many favors were called in to get well known actors like Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits,Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Rosie Perez, Tilda Swinton and Selena Gomez to appear in what amounts to a low range zombie comedy.

Why zombie movies and TV series like the long running “Walking Dead” series continue to be popular makes no sense to me. How many times can a zombie get their heads cut off or shot in the head or stabbed in the eye, until we have all collectively seen enough already. For me, its time to stop making zombie movies, especially those that dare to be funny.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for The Dead Don’t Die is a low 52% and I give this only about 40% for the few jokes that almost worked. This is one zombie comedy that should be skipped.

The new movie “Late Night”, is the first I have seen since “The Devil Wears Prada” released in 2006 that shows the working reality of so many millions of Americans. The Devil in this movie is the star of late night talk show, Katherine Newbury, played very well by Emma Thompson. Katherine is so rude and abrupt with all the writers in her staff, she doesn’t care to remember any of their names and at one point starts calling them numbers, “you are 1, 2, 3, etc”. This level of condescending and outrageous treatment of other people is all too common in the working world, and this film, written by Mindy Kaling does a very good job of showing this reality.

Not only is Katherine Newbury rude to everybody who works for her, she only hires men for her staff, because she hates women. This is where Molly Patel, played by Mindy Kaling comes in, as the token woman hired to fix this men only problem. Molly is hired into the writing staff even though she has no experience as a writer and works at a Chemical Plant in Pennsylvania. In real life, something like this would almost never happen, but this situation was believable enough for this story. It turns out that Katherine is losing her show after many years because of low ratings and there are many scenes of stressful talk show reinvention debates with Molly and Katherine that I thought were very well done.

There was the expected screenplay paradigm in this story as a major conflict comes in the middle, followed by resolution at the end, and I thought the ending was a strong resolution to a very good story.

This is Mindy Kaling’s first screenplay but it comes off as a story written by a more seasoned screenwriter. The best line in this movie was “people who hate themselves do whatever they can to make other people feel the same as they do”. A great line, and very true of real life and the cut throat world of working for other people.

The Rotten Tomatoes for Late Night are a very solid 81% and I agree with this rating and highly recommend this movie.