Category: Review

Breath

  By

★★
“The hole story”

Lara Winslet (Daigh) is a vulcanologist, who is on the side of a mountain in Italy, taking samples, when the ground gives way beneath her, and she falls into an underground pit, damaging her leg in the process. Help isn’t going to come, so with limited resources (not to mention a count of functioning limbs that stops at three), she is going to need to cope with the situation on its own, and figure a way out of what could easily become a fatal scenario. Meanwhile, on the outside, her father (Cosmo) is becoming increasingly frantic. This is erhaps because if Lara doesn’t come back, he’s going to be stuck permanently with her kid (Di Mauro). That would be my reaction, anyway…

There may be ways to make this kind of thing exciting. I imagine 127 Hours must have been able to manage it, though not having seen it, I can’t be specific on the techniques it used. Breath could have used some help, as there isn’t a great deal of adrenaline pumping through the veins of this situation. To try and generate some, it keeps flashing back to sequences set earlier and off the mountain, covering things like Lara’s affair with fellow scientist Adam (Chupin), or her more or less abandoning her daughter for the sake of career advancement in the name of scientific discovery. While this does provide some fill-in colour for her character, we eventually go back to her sobbing in a literal pit of despair.

I can’t really complain about the performances, and the photography does generate a decent sense of claustrophobia. I get the message that there are times when you can’t rely on anybody else, and have (again, more or less literally) to pull yourself up. Though I tend to feel that most life-threatening situations like this require more than a stern self-talking to, in order to get out of them: that is, however, what we get here. Lara’s leg seems injured only when necessary to the plot, and while being buried underground does bypass the usual cellphone issue, I can’t help wondering why she didn’t lob it (and its GPS) out of the pit – the hole wasn’t that deep. Or eat the nutritious, if not delicious, snake sharing it with her.

In the end, it’s just too simplistic a story: it’s almost binary, with the heroine either being in the pit or out of it. A more stepped approach, e.g. overcome the issue of her leg; figure out the water situation; try and attract attention, etc. would perhaps have done a better job of sustaining interest. Hell, even her background as a geologist never comes in useful, and it could have been anyone ambling around that mountainside. There’s a near-complete lack of ingenuity needed. In the end, it purely comes down to brute strength, as to whether or not Lara can make it out. Dare I say it, this was hole-y unremarkable.

Dir: John Real
Star: Rachel Daigh, James Cosmo, Neb Chupin, Alba Di Mauro

Once Upon a River

  By

★★½
“Initially hits the bull, ends up firing blanks.”

Margo Crane (DelaCerna) has been brought up by her native American father, since her mother walked out on them several years ago. Under his guidance, they have become self-sufficient, and Margo has become a crack shot. However, her creepy uncle ends up having sex with the teenager, an incident for which she gets blamed, ruining her life. She resolves to apply her shooting skills on him, only for the resulting incident to become a tragedy. Margo strikes out on her own up the Stark river, in search of her absent mother. Doing so, she meets a variety of people, then has to try and reconnect with a woman who now has her own life, one not necessarily helped by the unexpected arrival of a teenager.

The set-up here is remarkably engrossing, creating an interesting selection of characters that achieve depth in only a few minutes. Well, except for Creepy Uncle, who is almost entirely obvious, from the moment he invites Margo on a “hunting trip”, and certainly well before he offers to teach her how to “skin deer”. The period up to the unfortunate turn of events could well have been expanded to an entire movie, rather than compacted into a terse 25 minutes. That’s all the more so, because once Margo hits the river, the film loses much in the way of narrative thrust. Certainly, her talents with a firearm become all but irrelevant, and the film instead gets bogged down in its own drama.

It instead goes further down the character-driven path, such as the old geezer whom Margo helps, or the young man she encounters who is rather more in touch with (read: gives a damn about) his Native American heritage. Though it’s hard to tell with Margo, due to her subdued nature: it’s not often that she says more than a sentence, and seems particularly adept (out of necessity?) at keeping her emotions in check. Which makes for an increasingly frustrating viewing experience, the equivalent of deciding whether to buy a house, without being allowed to enter it. Then there’s an abortion subplot, awkwardly shoehorned in, without any particular effect on Margo’s character arc.

It’s all especially annoying, since Margo is initially set up as being a decisive character. The encounter with her uncle could have been depicted in a way that turned her into a victim. Instead, it’s more the repercussions thereafter which are the problem, and cause her to resort to violent action. After finding her mother (Pulsipher), in particular, she never seems to find a purpose to replace her maternal quest. She’s like a dog that has finally caught the car it was chasing. “Now what?” is the resulting question, and the movie doesn’t provide enough of an answer. It ends up falling awkwardly between a number of stools, being not-quite a coming of age film, nor a social drama, and there’s no sense of resolution. If your reaction when the end credits roll is greater than “Huh”, you were more affected than I was.

Dir: Haroula Rose
Star: Kenadi DelaCerna, John Ashton, Tatanka Means, Lindsay Pulsipher

Home-Sitters

  By

★★★
“Home not-so-sweet home”

June Williamson (Guillot) is an out-of-work actress, who just broke up with her boyfriend, Oliver (Vernet), and is behind on the rent to her creepy landlord. An unexpected lifeline arrives in the shape of a very well paid gig, house-sitting a large house, deep in the countryside. Things get annoying when Oliver and his asshole pal Marcel (Thevenoud) show up. They get worse when Oliver admits they had an accident on the way, and there’s a body in the car boot. A stare of “terrible” is reached when the body vanishes. And we reach peak awful, when the house comes under siege from Wolfströeme (Bary) and his heavily-armed gang of mercy, who are looking for…

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? June doesn’t have a clue, yet Wolfströeme is very insistent she does. Fortunately, the house has some defensive systems, which help delay the inevitable. There’s also an underground section, with a firmly locked gate, which may be keeping everyone out… or keeping something in. It’s quite a lot for the film to handle in just 90 minutes, and doesn’t all get the exposition needed to work. To be fair though, it’s mostly a delivery system for the action, and there’s no shortage of this, in the second half at least. June leads the way here: Oliver is fairly useless (both as a boyfriend and as a fighter), and all you need to know about Marcel is, he’s wearing a T-shirt depicting Donald Trump as Rambo.

I do have to wonder why she is quite as competent as she appears. Are unemployed French actresses usually able to wield automatic weapons effectively, and go toe-to-toe with professional soldiers? I kept expecting an explanation for her skills to be forthcoming. Never showed up. Taking this as read though, it’s not badly-staged, without the frenetic editing style which I hate. Truth be told, there were times when this could perhaps have used quicker editing – probably the first time I’ve ever said that! – in order to punch up the impact and heighten the pace. There is also some underwhelming CGI blood that, for example, flies through the air without landing on anything. I’d be inclined not to have bothered with it at all.

I did like the ending, which has a glorious sense of the makers deciding they might as well go big or go home. It might not work for everyone, to put it mildly. Yet it did for me, in a way that’s hard to describe. The end credits then thank the likes of John Carpenter, John McTiernan and Tsui Hark, which made me wonder if the director had been rifling through my DVD collection. They finish by acknowledging the owner of the Chateau de Laye, where this was filmed, and justifiably so, as it’s almost an additional character. As an indie effort, the heart here is always apparent; for me, that goes a good way towards balancing the less effective elements.

Dir: Chris Rakotomamonjy
Star: Chloé Guillot, Francis Vernet, Boris Thevenoud, Bary
The film is now available to view on Tubi – depending on your region, perhaps!

You Have Been Judged, by Craig Martelle and Michael Anderle

  By

Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

This is another entry in the sprawling Kurtherian Gambit universe, which must have well over a hundred books in it, by a slew of different authors. I’m gradually coming to a couple of conclusions: a) it’s a very loosely-tied series, and b) the quality varies. When you give your book a title like this, evoking the spirit of Judge Dredd, you are setting certain expectations. Unfortunately, this is a book which fails to meet them, with a heroine who never achieves the level of intensity necessary to live up to the series title: Judge, Jury, Executioner. It has reached 16 volumes, which suggests either there’s a market for it, or the author has too much time on their hands. No prizes for guessing my opinion.

I guess this is loosely “legal space opera,” with the heroine being Rivka Anoa, a barrister who has the talent to read people’s memories and feelings through simple physical contact. When a criminal she knows is guilty gets released, she can’t control herself and kills him. Arrested, she’s given the Nikita choice. Work for the government as an all-in-one justice system, or pay the price for her homicide. Not exactly a difficult choice, and she is quickly pumped full of nanomachines to enhance her physical abilities, trained in lethal arts by her mentor, Grainger, and sent off across the universe with a bodyguard, Red… to troubleshoot a family squabble.

Yeah, my disappointment was palpable. I get it’s a governor’s family squabble: still, it felt like James Bond being assigned to direct traffic. The other mission in this book, brokering a treaty between two squabbling planets, wasn’t particularly interesting, exciting or a good use of her newly-acquired talents either. Indeed, her original ability, being able to sense emotions and history by touch – something you’d think would make her unstoppable as a member of the legal profession – is hardly ever used. Speaking of which, in terms of law, this is so unconvincing, to the degree it can only be read as childish parody.

With the emphasis there firmly on “childish”. Rivka doesn’t sound at all like a barrister, and even less like a judge. You get absolutely no sense about the moral weightiness of having to hand down capital punishment, and the attempts at witty banter between her and Grainger are flat-out cringe inducing. Do not even get me started on an alien species being vulnerable to being kicked in the crotch. Yeah, we are literally at the “Ow! My Balls!” level of entertainment here, folks. I was quite glad the last 12% of the book was unnecessary filler like the author’s outline, which I could skip entirely. I don’t know how much input Anderle had into this, but I would strongly recommend he exercise a greater degree of quality control over the material which goes out under his imprint. This kind of rubbish leaves me very cautious about buying other Kurtherian Gambit books.

Author: Craig Martelle and Michael Anderle
Publisher: LMBPN Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 16 in the Judge, Jury, Executioner Book series.

Mad Heidi

  By

★★★
“Pure cheese.”

I’d been aware of this movie for some time, through its innovative crowd-funding approach, which raised $3 million to cover the cost of production. After COVID hit, there were doubts it’d ever see the light of day, but here it is: the first “Swissploitation” film [If not quite the case, it’s certainly the first one with a seven-figure budget, as well as the first Swiss movie covered on this site] And it’s not bad: if you’re familiar with similarly crowd-funded spoof, Iron Sky, this is along similar lines of broad parody. It covers almost every genre of cult from kung-fu films through Starship Troopers to women-in-prison films, e.g. there’s an Asian prisoner sporting inmate number #701. It doesn’t all hit, yet safe to say, the more you’re a fan of B movies, the more you’ll get out of it.

The film takes place in s dystopian version of Switzerland, where the authoritarian government are the only ones allowed to produce cheese, under “very Swiss leader” President Meili (Van Dien, making the Troopers spoof propaganda film which opens proceedings, all the more amusing). They crack down harshly on black-market cheese dealers, and this includes shooting dead the boyfriend of Heidi (Lucy) in spectacularly gory fashion, blowing up her grandfather (Schofield) and imprisoning Heidi, under the tender care of warden Fraulein Rottweiler. The heroine eventually escapes, learns martial arts from two nuns and Helvetia, which I am guessing is the spirit of Switzerland. She then takes revenge, Gladiator style, on Meili’s second-in-command, Kommandant Knorr (Rüdlinger), and finally the big cheese himself.

There is a standard by which all nostalgic attempts at recreating grindhouse cinema are measured, and that is the near-perfection of Hobo With a Shotgun. I think the main area in which this falls short is the lead actress. While it’s almost unfair to compare anyone to Rutger Hauer, Lucy simply doesn’t make the same impression as the likes of the original #701, Meiko Kaji, Tura Satana, or even Dyanne Thorne. Although I cannot fault her effort, I was never fully convinced Heidi was the bad-ass necessary to the plot. However, the supporting cast are solid, led by Van Dien hamming it up to thoroughly entertaining effect.

It looks slick, with every cent squeezed out of the budget, and some startling bits of violence. Could have used more nudity, I’d say: the main source is Swiss performance artist Milo Moiré, who has quite the resume. I think I was hoping for it to be more outrageous. Operating entirely outside the confines of the studio system, it feels rather too safe. Yet I will admit to genuinely laughing out loud on occasion, and some of the sequences are fabulously deranged. For example, a prisoner is tortured with cheeseboarding – it’s like waterboarding, except with melted cheese – then finished off by being impaled through the head with a Toblerone, sorry, for trademark purposes, a generic, triangular bar of Swiss chocolate. Whether that concept has you appalled or intrigued, is likely a good guide as to whether or not you should watch this.

Dir: Johannes Hartmann, Sandro Klopfstein
Star: Alice Lucy, Max Rüdlinger, Casper Van Dien, David Schofield

Don’t Say Its Name

  By

★★
“Snow better than mediocre.”

I was going to start this with a warning to try and avoid reading other reviews of this before watching it, because it felt as if, without exception, they all included spoilers for a significant plot-point, that wasn’t actually revealed until deep into the movie. Heck, the IMDb synopsis does it too. However, having sat through the entirety of this bland piece of indigenous folk pseudo-horror, all I can say is “Meh.” You do you: it’s probably not as if it’s going to have much impact, because it’s hard to spoil something which already smells past its best before date.

It takes place on a remote Canadian reservation, where the body of a local activist is found on a road, apparently the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Local sheriff Betty Stonechild (Walsh) is trying to investigate, with the limited resources available to her, and deputizes former soldier, now a local tracker, Stacey Cole (McArthur) to help her. It’s not long before other bodies start appearing in more mysterious circumstances. For example, a surveyor for a mining company, looking to move into the area – something to which the car victim was vehemently opposed – is brutally slain, within feet of a work colleague. He can offer no clues as to what happened, beyond reporting an odd smell and a crow circling menacingly overhead, immediately beforehand.

The problems start with the characters, where both Stonechild and Cole are right out of the box of overused tropes. The former is a single parent, trying to bring up a teenage nephew, for reasons that may have been explained, but which failed to make any impact on my recollection. The latter, worse still, is affected with the kind of PTSD common to movies, which has no effective impact on them, and appears to exist solely as an excuse for lazy writing, instead of developing a rounded personality. The rest of the players are similarly underwhelming. While the film is clearly sympathetic to the local native population, its messaging is clunky at best, reaching its worst point during what feels like a five minute YouTube rant.

The positives are mostly on the technical side, with some nice photography of chilly yet beautiful locations, and decent use of both practical and CGI effects. The two heroines have decent chemistry, and at least we don’t have any unnecessary romantic threads, for either of them: Cole’s way in particular of dealing with unwanted attentions is laudably brusque. It’s not enough to salvage a plot, which spends too long getting to where it wants to be, and isn’t particularly interesting once it gets there. It does offer one amusing moment, after they find the creature responsible and discover to their bemusement it is impervious to their bullets. Otherwise, there is precious little here to stick in the mind, and it feels more like a drama with an agenda, dressed up in genre trappings to become a sheep in wolf’s clothing

Dir: Rueben Martell
Star: Sera-Lys McArthur, Madison Walsh, Julian Black Antelope, Samuel Marty

Silent Dove

  By

★★★
“Flips the bird at the bad guys”

While obviously cheap, and occasionally laughable, the straightforward nature of this helped it remain generally entertaining. It’s not over-burdened with unnecessary plot complexities and this gives it a clarity of focus that works to its advantage. Dove (Atkins) is an assassin for the mob, but her boss, Teddy (Mensoza) wants her and her handler father (Sanford) out of the picture. So he begins setting Dove up to fail, giving her bad intel on a job, hoping that will lead to her death. She survives the unexpected scenario, so on her next hit, Teddy “forgets” to mention the presence of a young child, whom Dove ends up shooting as well as her target. That gives Teddy the excuse he needs to unleash his dogs on her and her father. But Dove is not going to be easy to eliminate, especially after Teddy makes it considerably more personal than business.

It’s the kind of film which would be quite easy to pick apart. The relationship between Dove and her father, for example, is so scantily drawn, you wonder why they bother at all, and there is also an odd flashback sequence to Dove being tortured. Was this some kind of origin story? It’s purpose is never made clear. There are gaffes and mistakes to be found, if you try. After killing the child, Dove’s gun suddenly vanishes between shots, and later there’s a bizarre moment where she sews up a wound in her arm through a bandage. As you do…? Most of the mobsters are hardly convincing in their roles, lacking the necessary sense of threat you’d expect from them, and quite why Teddy feels so compelled to get rid of Dove, since she’s clearly more competent than any of his operatives, is not explained to any satisfactory level.

And, yet…. Probably the biggest compliment I can give this is, if I made a girls-with-guns flick, it would probably look not too dissimilar to Silent Dove. For example, the script is not lumbered with any unnecessary romantic angles. Atkins’s performance, while so low-key as arguably capable of being called flat and disinterested, somehow seems perfectly fitting for her role, capturing someone who appears to be emotionally dead inside (which may be part justification for the flashback sequence?). Though relatively long, at 105 minutes, there didn’t feel as if there was any real amount of slack, in the way of unnecessary scenes, and it has at least one memorably imaginative kill, involving a significant quantity of sulphuric acid.

The bottom line is, I was always kept watching, and was never bored, even if it was generally fairly obvious where things would end up. It more or less does, though there’s a pleasant final twist that I did appreciate. Filmed in ten days on a budget of $15,000, the makers have put the whole thing up on YouTube, and I’ve certainly seen far worse movies given away for free there.

Dir: Paul Dupree
Star: Chelsee Atkins, Johny Mendoza, Gary Brumett, Malcolm T. Sanford

V for Vengeance

  By

★★★
“The Vampire Slayers.”

This is briskly entertaining, and feels like a female version of Blade, with an extra good-girl vampire as a bonus. Yet it’s definitely best not to pause and think about some aspects, because the story will likely fall apart under close scrutiny. Matters are complicated by a flashback-heavy structure, on occasion multiple levels deep, and an apparent desire to overstuff proceedings, at the expense of some elements. That said, it hangs together and is entertaining, mostly thanks to a likeable pair of lead performances. There is a decent quantity of hand-to-hand action, even if some of it does leave a little bit to be desired on the quality front.

Our heroines are Emma (Hudon) and Scarlett (Van Dien), sisters who were abducted from their adoptive parents, and turned into vampires by the evil Thorn. They eventually broke away from his control, and have just learned their third sibling, Kate (Dyer), is not as dead as they had long presumed her. Indeed, she has just succeeded in inventing a vaccine that can “undo” vampirism; it’s based on their mother’s research, a rare blood-type being the reason the trio were adopted. With the help of a bounty hunter called Marcus (Russell), they set out to re-unite with Kate, unaware that Thorn has similar designs on her, albeit for entirely different reasons. There’s also the Federal Vampire Control agency, who’d be more than delighted to see Thorn and/or Emma and Scarlett taken out of action.

Quite a lot of this which will be familiar if you’ve seen a reasonable number of vampire films, such as the tech’d up accessories, as well as the enhanced speed/power of the vampires. However, none of this is used to particular effect: the good old stake through the heart seems to be the most effective weapon. Similarly, the FVC seems little more than an afterthought, which plays almost no meaningful part in proceedings. Instead, this is at its best when going its own way. Emma tries only to feed on bad people, e.g. rapists, and there’s an amusing scene near the start with her increasingly less subtle efforts at entrapment falling on entirely stony ground. I’d like to have seen more of this tongue-in-cheek approach.

I did enjoy Hudon and Van Dien’s performances, which do manage to capture a real sense of sisterly love/hate. However, Marcus’s role is utterly obvious, and a later flashback shows he should definitely have been recognized by one of the siblings. Very convenient and selective amnesia is a wonderful cinematic thing, isn’t it? It’s this kind of sloppy scripting which stops this from potentially reaching the level of cult classic. The movie is nicely shot, and doesn’t look cheap, though the doubling for some of the stunts is occasionally a little too obvious. It feels as if it could have been a pilot for a series, although it’d need to find another Big Bad. A role-reversed version of Buffy, with the vampires doing the slaying, might have been fun.

Dir: Kelly Halihan
Star: Jocelyn Hudon, Grace Van Dien, Christopher Russell, Pauline Dyer

Blood and Gods, by Nathan Bueckert

  By

Literary rating: ★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

What I’ll remember about this one is the arc. Not so much of any character, more as to whether or not this would qualify for the site. The story began on solid enough ground, but around the end of the first volume (this omnibus contains parts 1+2), it plummeted well below the threshold needed. I almost gave up reading at that point, but persisted, and the book did rebound with an extended, gory finale in which the heroine and her ally took on what felt like an entire city. Okay, it’s back in. But I’m not happy about it, for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.

The focus here is Tratalja, a city-state which rules over a wide swathe of countryside. In this world, writing is comparable to magic, and those who practice it without royal authority are subject to summary execution. This takes place at the hands of the Sceyrah, the enforcers of the ruling religion. In training to become one of them is fourteen-year-old Lilija, whose fighting skills, demonstrated in arena exhibitions, have caused her to become popular with the inhabitants – a cause of concern to her masters. 

When a tribe of barbarians, the Blood-Eaters, under their young leader Ari, sack the city, Lilija becomes the scapegoat, and narrowly escapes execution, fleeing the city to join forces with Ari. But their meeting… well, let’s just say it doesn’t go well. It was at this point I thought it was done, in terms of review purposes here. However, a new heroine arose thereafter, one possibly even more highly-skilled than Lilija, and she does manage to team up with Ari. Together, they face the threat of a high priest possessed by an evil god, with an unquenchable taste for human sacrifice. It gets a bit messy, though Book #2 does finish in a tidier way than #1. If I’d just had the latter, I’d have been annoyed.

Instead, however, there were still two significant problems. Firstly, the concept that certain people can have whatever they write, come true. It’s basically a massive get out of jail free card, which could be used as an excuse for sloppy writing. I don’t feel Bueckert necessarily does: however, it’s a questionable can of worms to open, especially when apparently done with few limitations. The other issue is the reduction of death, to something which is barely an inconvenience, little more than a spiritual time-out. After one character comes back – even if in a different physical form – then it’s hard for the reader to commit fully, to believing anyone else has ever ceased to be. I feel the story would have been significantly stronger, if other methods had been found to achieve the same plot results. While not devoid of positive elements, they aren’t what I’ll remember, and I don’t think I’ll be bothering with the second half of the series. 

Author: Nathan Bueckert (Timothy Frame)
Publisher: Black Rose Writing. available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1+2 of 4 in the Creators Quatrain series.

Fly Like a Girl

  By

★★★
“American girls only need apply…”

This documentary is about the field of women in aviation, combining archive footage with interviews, covering the range from those who aspire to fly (giving their Lego aircraft lady pilots!) to those who have been into space, fought combat missions in the Middle East or dodged death in aerobatic displays. There’s not any particular structure to proceedings, choosing instead to bounce around between its topics and subjects. This helps keep things fresh, yet at the cost of any narrative beyond, I guess, “Women can do anything men can”? Which, to be fair, deserves saying in the aviation field particularly: how much strength is needed to handle a joystick?

As you’d expect, the interviewees are a bit of a mixed bag. Historically, perhaps the most interesting is Bernice ‘Bee’ Haydu, who was a WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in World War II, and aged almost a hundred at the time she was interviewed; sadly, she died not long after. I think what made her and the others interesting, were being the ones who had actually done something. While wanting to be an astronaut, say, is fine, it can’t compete with Nicole Stott giving an eye-witness account of what it’s actually like to be on the Space Shuttle as it takes off. Or Vernice Armor, the first African American female combat pilot and her tale of flying an attack helicopter, running down to its final missile and being the last hope for a pinned-down squad of troops. That kind of thing could easily become a Major Hollywood Movie.

I think my favourite of all the people interviewed was Patty Wagstaff, a three-time winner of the US National Aerobatic Championships, who seemed remarkably down to earth (pun intended) about her exploits. Seeing her fly upside down, to cut a ribbon with her propeller just a few feet off the ground, was genuinely impressive. On the other hand, Sen. Tammy Duckworth came over as a career politician, with career politician speak that was easy to tune out. Maybe she has stories of her time in the military that are the equal of Armor’s. You wouldn’t really know it from the bland content she contributes to this.

My main complaint, however, was the absolutely American focus. It felt as if no-one outside the United States had ever left the ground. No mention of Sophie Blanchard, the first aeronautess. No mention of British pilot Amy Johnson. No mention even of the Soviet Union’s Night Witches. They’re only the most successful group of female combat fliers in aviation history. But they’re not American, so for the purposes of this film, they don’t exist. The only meaningful reference to anywhere else, is when there’s a passing mention of Bessie Coleman having to go to France to get her pilot’s license. On that basis, it feels like a missed opportunity, only scratching the surface of its topic and wearing a large, nationalistic set of blinkers.

Dir: Katie McEntire Wiatt
Star: Nicole Stott, Tammy Duckworth, Patty Wagstaff, Vernice Armor