The new movie “Gloria Bell” is about many things, but mostly about survival after a divorce. Gloria Bell is played by Julianne Moore, a woman in her 50’s and after her divorce is trying to find someone in LA dance clubs that play music from the 1970’s and 80’s. The awkwardness of trying to have any conversation with anyone in a noisy dance club like this, I thought was played out very well. This entire movie is a series of connected and disconnected scenes with Gloria and her new boyfriend, played by John Turturro and her x-husband, her daughter who is moving away, her son who is having marriage problems and the complicated awkward emotions so common in all human relationships.

Given that the story was so disconnected there is less of a real story and more of a series of emotions based on something that is either going wrong or right at the time. The acting in Gloria Bell is outstanding and includes a large number of known actors Michael Cera, Holland Taylor, Brad Garrett, Rita Wilson, Sean Astin and Jeanne Tripplehorn who I have not seen in a movie in many years. Unfortunately and once again, there are too many scenes where people are smoking in this film, continuing this stain on so many movies that are financed by Tobacco companies.

The Rotten Tomatoes review for Gloria Bell is a very high 94% and my rating is a very solid 85%, more for the acting then the story.

The new movie “Captive State” is about the aftermath of a massive alien invasion within the city of Chicago. The only 2 things interesting about this bad movie are that making a movie about the aftermath of an alien invasion is not a subject I have seen done before and the screenwriter and director managed to make a movie about aliens and an invasion, incredibly boring. Captive State is one of the bad movies that you will forget within hours of seeing it, after wondering why a great actor like John Goodman decided to make this mess.

Everybody should run from this very bad waste of 2 hours. The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is 47%, and my rating is 7%.

If there is even the most remote silver lining in the shocking recent death of actor Luke Perry at the young age of 52 due to a sudden stroke, it is that he didn’t know it was coming. Very suddenly, with no warning he got a very severe stroke, then went into a coma and never woke up. Perry did not have to endure years of agony, fear and operations followed by hope that things would get better only to get sick again and after years of suffering finally die. The fear of knowing that death may be coming can very often be worse than the disease itself.

Diseases like CF(Cystic Fibrosis) are the most insidious because it attacks young people and slowly kills you after years of suffering as mucus builds up in the lungs making it harder and harder to breathe. The new movie “Five Feet Apart” is about two teenage patients who have CF within a well told story that takes place entirely inside of a hospital. Then we all learn about all aspects of one of the worst diseases anyone can get in life. The only cure for CF is a lung transplant but even with that miracle surgery the average life span after the transplant is about 5 years.

The title “Five Feet Apart” is the distance that the 2 teenage CF patients played by Haley Lu Richardson as Stella and Cole Sprouse as Will have to stand apart, so they don’t give themselves an additional infection that would make their condition worse. Throughout the story there are new clinical trials that provide hope for all the patients with CF as the hope that maybe this time it will work and will be the miracle cure. This is followed by more fear and depression as another attempted clinical trial fails.

We have all seen tearjerker movies like this one, where one or both of the main characters have a terminal disease and fall in love. All films like this are very hard to watch, and this one is no different. The acting is well done, and the story while not a great one, is good enough to recommend. Movies like this along with a tragic celebrity death like Luke Perry temporarily knock us away from our life of habits and very often feeling sorry for ourselves over a bad relationship, money problems, a bad job or any number of other issues that are trivial when we compare it to something like this.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie are only 53% and I think this is way too low. My rating is around 75% for a solid, but depressing story about disease and real life.