Lawless screenwriter Nick Cave has admitted a basic truism to L.A. Times columnist Steven Zeitchik, to wit: “If beautiful movies can influence you to go out and hug your children, then we have to be honest and say that other movies can inspire you to do bad things. To say they can’t is to deny all movies their power.”

Well…of course! What is lively, impassioned, straight-from-the-heart movie criticism but descriptions of the various mental and emotional states that movies have put us in, and how cleverly or clumsily they’ve managed it?

What movies have put bad thoughts in my head? We’re talking about a very long list, I fear, but almost every film Kate Hudson has made (with the exception of Almost Famous and The Killer Inside Me) has made me want to knock people’s hats off. Yes, including her ass-cancer film. Ditto early Matthew McConaughey. (I’ve twice alluded to Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick here, and this riff is inly three paragraphs long.