A high judicial authority has finally agreed that a certain deranged insurrectionist is disqualified from running for President next year…praise God.

Audrey Diwan‘s Happening (’21) is the second best film I’ve ever seen about the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion. (The best is Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, released 16 years ago.) Diwan and cowriter Rebecca Zlotowski has been lensing a lesbian Emmanuelle, which may turn up in Cannes next May.

Emmanuelle was a steamy hetero franchise in the ’70s and early ’80s with Sylvia Kristel in the lead role.

French actress Naomie Merlant, who has played heavy-breathing gay characters in Portrait Of A Woman on Fire and TAR, is the titular character in Diwan’s newbie. Naomi Watts,,Will Sharpe and Anthony Wong costar.

Jimi Hendrix: “There ain’t no straight stuff nowhere except for that Glenn Powell-Sydney Sweeney romcom, and Sweeney is kinda funny lookin’.”

I don’t agree with any of these “best” calls. What these films are is “not half bad in an interesting, arresting way.“

I finally half-liked Munich when I re-watched it a year ago.

Pale Rider is basically Shane as a ghost.

Magnolia is essentially a morose middle-class thing enlivened by Tom Cruise, the third-act musical sequence and the frog finale.

Casino is watchable, but is gradually asphyxiated by Sharon Stone’s noxious self-destruction and Robert DeNiro’s nonsensical attraction to her. And then Joe Pesci and his brother are beaten to death and buried alive in a cornfield.

For me Kathryn Bigelow caught glorious fire as a director when she made The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Then she got tangled up in the mania of exposing horrible historical truths (i.e., evil white cops murdering victims of color) in Detroit, and the air just whooshed out of the balloon.