Blood Simple (1984)

I had seen a dozen Coen brothers movies. My overall impression was that they are very skilled at the craft, whether going goofy or gritty, but always include something strange and unsatisfying, seemingly to annoy viewers on purpose. I got curious about their first feature-length effort, an indie, which was the only entry on AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills I hadn't seen yet.

Texan bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya) hires PI Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to see whether Marty's wife, Abby (Frances McDormand in her screen debut), is cheating on him. She is -- with one of his employees, Ray (John Getz). When his own confrontations prove fruitless, Marty asks Visser to kill Abby and Ray. He learns the hard way not to try to make a hit man out of someone who wasn't in that line of work to begin with. But that's just Act 1. Characters get confused from there, and as their panic mounts, so do the dangerous mistakes....

Women Talking (2022)

I almost skipped this Best Picture nominee because of the rape theme. Then it won Best Adapted Screenplay. Besides, I had mostly liked Promising Young Woman, so maybe this would be similarly watchable. Now I might as well tell you up front: While there's no on-screen depiction or even audio of the crimes, it's not for the faint of heart.

Netflix's DVD jacket doesn't even adequately describe the first minute; the one-sentence summary on the Netflix webpage is better for that. The setting is in 2010, but you could be forgiven for initially thinking it's much earlier because of the low-color Mennonite community, called only "the colony." In its isolation, it has become worse than the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale in some ways: All post-infancy girls and women have been repeatedly gas-sedated and awakened with telltale signs of rape. Men tell them it's the work of ghosts or demons, lies, or imagination run wild (even when pregnancy results?), until one man gets caught breaking in and then spills on several others, who all get arrested. Alas, most other men in the colony leave town to contribute to the bail, tho that mercifully keeps them away for a couple days. Most of the movie takes place in that interim as women consider three options: stay and try to forgive everyone, fight a revolution, or run off to start their own colony.

Nomadland (2020)

Before the next Academy Awards, I thought I'd catch up on previous winners and nominees. I had been putting this Best Picture off because some people made it sound depressing. Then I remembered that the same was true of No Country for Old Men, which I turned out to like just fine. Besides, after Johnny Got His Gun, how painful could it be for me to watch?

In 2011, the closing of a factory spells the emptying of its tiny Nevada town. Sixty-something widow Fern (Frances McDormand) stays as long as she can but then decides to live out of a van, seeing the countryside and taking odd jobs. She meets many other nomads in a mutually supportive community, including Dave (David Strathairn), who clearly has a crush on her, but commitment to anything other than preserving her husband's memory is far from her mind.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

For all the praise heaped on this movie, for all the high ratings across different websites, I was reluctant to watch. The trailer made clear that it was full of anger, at an intensity I was unlikely to find comfortable. Still, I wanted to maximize my chances of seeing the Academy Best Picture ahead of the ceremony.

I'm not sure in what period the story takes place, but from the phones and a reference to 1986, I'd say the '90s or early 2000s. A little-used road with three long-disused billboards suddenly has a message: "Raped while dying/And still no arrests?/How come, Chief Willoughby?" In a town so small, everyone knows the event in question, and it's not hard to guess who paid for the message: bereaved mother Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand). Alas, for all the sympathy she'd gained, almost no one can get behind the challenge to a respected chief (Woody Harrelson), especially since he has terminal cancer. But Mildred insists on keeping it up until there's appreciable progress on the case.