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Mystery, Alaska

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  • Title: Mystery, Alaska
  • IMDb: link

Flashback Friday takes us back to 1999 for an unlikely hockey game in Mystery, Alaska. You typical underdog sports movie with various dramatic threads running through it, the film from director Jay Roach and writers David E. Kelley and Sean O’Byrne involves a former local (Hank Azaria) of the town obsessed with hockey getting them some publicity, and making a tidy profit at the same time, by arranging a hockey game between the locals and the New York Rangers.

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Lady Macbeth

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  • Title: Lady Macbeth
  • IMDb: link

Only loosely based on Nikolai Leskov’s novella, 2016’s Lady Macbeth is primarily notable for the lead performance of Florence Pugh as a younger wife stuck in a marriage of convivence to a disinterested older man (Paul Hilton) growing more and more isolated in rural Northumberland before beginning an affair with one of her husband’s servants (Cosmo Jarvis). The film from director William Oldroyd takes some patience as, to highlight the banality of her life, nothing happens for the first 20 minutes of the film. We don’t know who Katherine was before her marriage and whether circumstances drove her to the cruelty on display or simply allowed that cruelty to fester and eventually lash out.

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The Falling

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  • Title: The Falling
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Tuesday takes us back to 2014’s The Falling which is an odd thriller most notable for having the good sense to cast Maisie Williams halfway through her Game of Thrones run and Florence Pugh in her first role. The pair play best friends at a strict English girls school in 1969 where Abbie’s (Pugh) sexual exploration and sudden and inexplicable death have a dramatic effect on Lydia (Williams). This is followed by other girls at the school showing similar symptoms to those of Abbie before her death in short unexplained fainting spells the administration of the school refuses to take seriously.

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The Belle Starr Story

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  • Title: The Belle Starr Story
  • IMDb: link

Over the years several films and TV series have made use of female American outlaw Belle Starr, most highly fictionalized. The 1968 spaghetti western The Belle Starr Story with Elsa Martinelli is problematic for multiple reasons not the least of which is Belle’s response to fall in love with attempted rapists not once but twice in the film.

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Rogue Agent

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  • Title: Rogue Agent
  • IMDb: link

Based on true events, James Norton stars as charming conman Robert Hendy-Freegard who ruined several lives over the years while pretending to be an agent of MI5. While alluding to several of his victims, the film focuses on a lawyer (Gemma Arterton) he seduced and stole from who worked to find and bring him to justice. Not only did the conman steal from several of his victims, to many he applied psychological stress while introducing them to the spy life or inspiring fear that others were after them.

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