There's a kick in watching actors play their widely recognized “types” so flawlessly, and with such fresh enthusiasm, that these roles feel like ideal distillations of their portrayers' talent and presence. I'm thinking of Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood and Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich … and also, now, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain.

Both the funniest and saddest Cinderella tale you've ever seen, writer/director Sean Baker's Anora is a great movie with some great big problems.

Hugh Grant is is stunningly threatening in this Beck/Woods horror thriller, his recognizably benign shrugs, cheerful mugging, and self-effacing manner never masking the fact that there is one person in charge of this situation, and it isn't one of the visiting Mormons.

With the Boston Globe deeming the film "as pure and plaintive as a mountain ballad" and the Los Angeles Times raving "it makes history sing," writer/director John Sayles' Oscar-nominated 1987 drama Matewan enjoys a special November 13 screening at Rock Island's Rozz-Tox, this celebrated work's local presentation co-hosted by Iowa General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World.

In director Edward Berger's Conclave, both the narrative and the principal characters are hiding secrets that shouldn't be spoiled to those who haven't seen the movie and didn't read novelist Robert Harris' 2016 source material. But one secret about the film absolutely can, and should, be revealed in advance: This thing is an almost ridiculous amount of fun.

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a work that "makes an exquisite case for the impossibility of caging the heart," the award-winning Austrian drama Great Freedom enjoys a November 7 screening at Davenport's Figge Art Museum, director/co-writer Sebastian Meise's moving film also praised by The Hollywood Reporter as "a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration, and beyond that, an unconventional love story, tender but unsentimental."

First M. Night Shymalan makes his chanteuse daughter a significant part of his thriller Trap, then Todd Phillips floods his Joker followup with songs, and now this. Is no genre safe from the global Swift-ification?

In the spirit of the five-word pitches each of this quintet requires, here are similarly succinct (if 295-words-longer) takes on what resulted, discussed in order of attendance.

On October 24, a Golden Globe and Directors Guild of America nominee – and the director of 1993's Oscar-winning smash The Fugitive will be of guest of The Last Picture House in the Davenport venue's An Evening with Andrew Davis, a special evening for movie fans featuring a signing of Davis' first novel (co-written by Davenport author Jeff Biggers), a screening of Davis' 1989 thriller The Package, and a Q&A with the filmmaker afterward.

In celebration of the musical cult classic's 49th anniversary, the iconic entertainment The Rocky Horror Picture Show will enjoy a special screening at Davenport's Rhythm City Casino Resort Event Center on October 20, the event boasting a live shadow cast, audience participation, a costume contest, and the eagerly awaited guest host Nell Campbell, the Rocky Horror co-star who appeared opposite Meat Loaf as Eddie's eccentric love interest Columbia.

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