Mank is a brilliant biopic of Herman Mankiewicz, his screenwriting career in Hollywood, and his creation of the screenplay for the famous Citizen Kane film from 1941. (Practically every film scholar and film historian includes Citizen Kane as one of the greatest films ever made.)

The Life Ahead is a coming-of-age drama set in Naples, Italy about a 12-year-old orphaned boy (Ibrahima Gueye) who is sent to live with an elderly cantankerous woman whom he recently robbed. This reluctant pairing is a clash of opposites with young and old, Muslim and Jew, refugee and native, as the young boy starts selling drugs on the street and his aged caretaker struggles with memories of the Holocaust.

Netflix recently released their own adaptation of the 1938 novel by Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, that was first adapted into a feature film in 1940. This 1940 version was directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window, 1954) and received the Oscar for Best Picture.

In the current wasteland of barely mediocre movie theater releases, I'm happy to say I recently watched a new release in my home (on Netflix) that's one of the best I've seen all year.

An efficient assassin traveling the globe tries to reconcile her damaged family relationships and fight her own superiors for survival when the tables turn against her.

Writer-director Armando Iannucci has proven himself an exciting creator of raucous, vulgar, profane comedy with the dark historical parody The Death of Stalin from 2017 and the brilliantly insulting TV series Veep (2012-2019) which concluded last year. His latest film is still funny, but with a PG rating The Personal History of David Copperfield is decidedly less obscene than Iannucci's other work.

The Binge was released on August 28th and is currently available for personal streaming on Hulu. Set in the not too distant future, when all alcohol and drugs are banned from everyone in the United States, The Binge focuses on the stressful lives of 3 teenage boys trying to attend an exclusive party on the one night of the year when all drug and alcohol consumption is legal for everyone. It's like a merging of the films The Purge (2013) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).

The Secrets We Keep is a patient psychological mystery set in a quiet post-WWII suburb where a housewife (Noomi Rapace, Prometheus, 2012) starts to unravel when she suspects a new man living in her town is a Nazi who tortured her during WWII years ago. This suspicion leads to kidnapping, interrogation, and blood. And when suspicion grows into an obsession with vengeance, nobody walks unscathed.

Oscar-nominated director Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk, 2017) is evidently still enjoying his obsessions with complicated action sequences and non-linear storytelling.

Tesla is a historic, biographical drama on the life of pioneering engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla, whose ideas changed the world at the turn of the 20th century and beyond (his work included the alternating current electricity system, a thermo-magnetic motor, and the Tesla coil.)