There’s a kind of movie we all know well—I’ll call it a “quest” comedy—where something causes our heroes to venture out to find something or someone, and along the way they get into all sorts of hijinks that keep pushing their goal just out of reach. They’re usually teens or college kids, looking for a party, or drugs, or something that ought to be easy to find, but isn’t. It’s the setup for many a sex comedy, although sometimes it also results in the delirious absurdity of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.

I’m going to do something now that basically no one should ever do, which is to say I’m going to review a movie I technically haven’t seen all of. It’s not what it sounds like—I saw every second from beginning to end. But there were a few stretches of dialogue, in French, that didn’t have subtitles that were supposed to, and despite trying every setting and menu and sub-menu I could find, I couldn’t turn them on.

I’ve found myself watching a fair bit of Columbo lately. Yep, that Columbo, rumpled Peter Falk shuffling around solving murders. It’s perfect comfort viewing—you always know he’s going to get the bad guy, the fun is just in watching him do it. And I used to watch Columbo when I was a kid in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so toss nostalgia on top and it’s pretty hard to beat.

As I watched Jason Statham take the elevator down at the end of Guy Ritchie’s bleak new crime film Wrath of Man, I thought of another movie-ending elevator ride, the one that closes the exceedingly disturbing 1987 Mickey Rourke / Robert DeNiro horror-mystery Angel Heart. And I wished there were something to hint at an even more grim possibility in Ritchie’s already-grim movie. Statham, known to us for most of the movie simply as “H,” is certainly a kind of angel of vengeance, although there’s no real indication he’s anything supernatural, other than the fact that of course you can’t kill him. Or if there is an indication, it’s such a slight wisp of an idea that it only really exists in me, wondering if Ritchie meant for this elevator ride to look this way.

Journalist Sian-Pierre Regis and his mother, Rebecca Danigelis, became something of a minor sensation in 2017 when word got out that, following Rebecca’s sudden firing from her decades-long hotel housekeeping job, Sian-Pierre came up with a novel way to help her cope: He asked her to create a bucket list of things she’d always wanted to do, but that her job had kept her from trying.

Human relationships are complicated, and there are all different kinds of them. But by and large, movies seem to tell only a few of those stories over and over. We’re leaving out a lot of people.

The old woman has lost all use for God. Her son has just died, following her husband, her daughter, and her granddaughter. And now, she simply wants to die too, to join them, feeling there was never any point to it anyway. As she tells the local priest of his own deceased wife, “She will die over and over again for the rest of your life. That’s grief. A senseless suffering. There’s no meaning to it.”

Well, here we have a movie that’s pretty much a complete mess, that only has one or two elements that really work at all, that’s even rather distasteful, but that I still found… kind of watchable? I’m not sure what to do with this.

Today is the birthday of the actor George O’Brien. There’s no real reason you’d know him, although he was pretty big in the 1920s and ‘30s. But I bring him up because he starred in the movie that completely changed my understanding of what silent films could be: 1927’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, from the great German director F.W. Murnau.

Spike Lee has said no person of color has ever asked him why Mookie threw the trash can through the window in Do the Right Thing . It’s only been white people.