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.

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.