INDISCRETION OF AN AMERICAN WIFE: a couple of cheaters face the music

Despite it's extraordinarily short running time - just 1 hour and 4 minutes - INDISCRETION OF AN AMERICAN WIFE makes quite an impact although not all for the right reasons.

The drama focuses on the efforts of Mary, the titular woman (played by Jennifer Jones), and Giovanni (Montgomery Clift), the Italian-American with whom she has the indiscretion,to say goodbye to one another at Rome's central railway station. Mary is overcome with guilt at betraying her husband and abandoning her young daughter, and wants to get home to them both as soon as possible. Giovanni's not prepared to let her go and uses all of his considerable charm and smoldering looks to try and persuade her to stay. Imagine the final scene from 'Brief Encounter' minus the chilly British reserve and rigidly stiff upper lips and you'll have a good idea what to expect.
On the plus side, the black and white cinematography is beautiful, and Clift is a compelling presence. On the minus side Alessandro Cicognini's musical score is both unmemorable and overblown; unnecessarily serving as the aural equivalent of waves crashing onto seashore rocks, turning drama into melodrama.
But what really deals the fatal blow to the film's credibility is Jennifer Jones and - in particular - her seemingly bottomless fund of inappropriate facial expressions. Where-ever Truman Capote's script calls for her to exhibit sadness, passion, anger, fear or any other emotion, Jones appears to lose control of her facial muscles resulting in a random expression completely at odds with what's required.It's as if she's acting while wrestling with a particularly malevolent form of facial Tourette's Syndrome.
Director Vittorio de Sica reportedly shot a 90 minute version of the film which was then cut down to 64 minutes by Jones' husband, legendary producer David O.Selznick, for US release. While some cinephiles may lament the 'butchering' of de Sica's vision, I'm not sure I could have taken another 26 minutes of Miss Jones' facial contortions and Signor Cicognini's swelling strings.

MARTY: he's a fat ugly man looking for love

They're Marty's words not mine. He's stout it's true, and he's no Brad Pitt in the looks department but Marty Pilletti is utterly adorable.
The chunky and not exactly handsome Ernest Borgnine deservedly won the 1956 Best Actor Oscar for his powerful and intensely moving portrayal of Marty, the tender-hearted Bronx butcher who's convinced that love has passed him by.

All his siblings and most of his friends are married with kids on the way but 34 year old Marty just can't find a woman who's interested in what he's got to offer.He feels beaten down and defeated by the constant rejection and the haranguing from customers and family about his inability to find a wife. Then one Saturday night at the local dance hall he meets Clara (Betsy Blair), a 29 year old plain featured schoolteacher with equally bad luck finding a man.
If MARTY were made today rather than half a century ago, it would be classed as a chick flick, Marty would be a woman called Marti and Clara would be Chuck. Hollywood just doesn't make love stories like this anymore with a sensitive male protagonist agonising over his failure to connect with that special someone. The closest they come is when they play it for laughs with Seth Rogen or Kevin James or some other overweight comedy actor.
MARTY is a perfectly serious drama laced with a smattering of very natural humour. Marty is not a character to be made fun of or otherwise mocked. Nor is he a character to be patronised. He has some moments of self-pity (understandable after a lifetime of knock backs) but they're quickly over and he rallies himself to fight another day.
Best known for his many tough guy roles ('From Here to Eternity', 'The Dirty Dozen', 'The Wild Bunch') Borgnine is a revelation here, using his unlikely leading man appearance to Oscar winning effect. Betsy Blair is also impressive in a part that calls for a lot of confidence. Clara is referred to by numerous characters as 'a dog' (and by Marty to her face) and the camera emphsises her plain appearance and lack of conventional beauty.
MARTY is that rare breed of film I class as a revelation. I was not expecting to be as thoroughly entertained as I was or to be so impressed by the quality of the performances. Now I've seen it I can understand why it picked up 3 other Oscars (direction, best film, best screenplay) in addition to Borgnine's. This is a classy piece of filmmaking and should be on everyone's list of 100 great movies.

LIMITLESS: meh!

LIMITLESS is the first time Bradley Cooper's had to carry a film on his own and he does ok. In fact, ok just about sums up this movie. Everything about it is alright.
I neither hated nor loved this thriller about a drug that can open up the unused 90% of the human brain, giving the taker an incredible advantage in almost every facet of life. I felt reasonably entertained but never fully engaged. Cooper's a likeable enough leading man but he couldn't get me to invest in his character.
It was a treat to see Robert de Niro doing more than simply going the motions in some overblown unfunny comedy (the whole Fockers franchise) or ill-advised drama ('Rightous Kill'), but overall LIMITLESS is the kind of film I can take or leave.
I didn't feel it cheated me out of 100 minutes of my life but I wouldn't have missed anything if I'd invested that time elsewhere.

BOYS IN BROWN: rising stars take a wrong turn

This 1949 British crime drama is as uninspired as it's title.
It focuses on a bunch of unfeasibly well-spoken, slightly over-age teenage troublemakers doing time at an implausibly cuddly and cosy borstal for a variety of minor crimes.

If BOYS IN BROWN is to be believed, the British borstal system of the mid 20th century was akin to the British boarding school system minus the homosexuality (although Dirk Bogarde's character is suspiciously softly spoken). Neither were particularly welcoming institutions but if you knuckled down and followed the rules they'd both make a man of you.
Writer-director Montgomery Tully operates under the illusion that he's making a message movie about youth and society, and how the latter must act humanely if it is to keep the former from falling into a life of crime. But the script is so simplistic and the actors so ill-suited for the parts they're playing that the whole thing comes off as a seriously misguided and patronising attempt by  well-meaning middle class do-gooders to tell the lower classes just what's best for them. These boys have done bad things but they're not bad, just a little misguided, and if they'll only listen to the kind hearted liberal governor of the borstal (Jack Warner) everything will turn out ok.
Richard Attenborough's character, Jackie Knowles, is the primary recipent of this benificence. He's got his mum (Thora Hird) and his girl (Barbara Murray) waiting for him on the outside and he doesn't want to let them down again. It can be tough on the inside, resisting the peer pressure from the likes of Alfie (Bogarde), Bill (Jimmy Hanley) and 'Sparrow' (Michael Medwin) but if he just follows the pearls of wisdom in the Governor's lectures he'll be ok. Jackie is a variation on Attenborough's 'Pinkie' in 'Brighton Rock' made 2 years earlier, but minus any depth of character. Bogarde's inexplicably Welsh accented Alfie is so delicate it's impossible to imagine what crime he could have committed to get himself sent to borstal, while Hanley, Medwin and the rest of the gang look and sound like over grown grammar school boys slumming it.
The miscasting is really not the fault of the actors. They were all signed to contracts with studios like Rank and Gainsborough and told what parts to play. Everyone involved in BOYS IN BROWN would go on to bigger and better things, and the kindest way to look on this film is as a training ground for some genuinely talented actors.

GOING IN STYLE: grandpa's last gasp

George Burns' career revival in the mid 1970s was one of the showbiz wonders of the decade. The stars of 30s movies and 40s radio made a surprise smash hit comeback in 1975 with 'The Sunshine Boys' and followed up with 'Oh God,' 'Just You and Me Kid' and 'Oh God Book II' (I'm glossing discreetly over 'Sergeant Pepper's :Lonely Hearts Club Band' - every octogenarian's allowed one career stumble).We have to reach back to the early 1930s and George Arliss run of movies for Warner Bros to find anyone as old as Burns headlining so many mainstream Hollywood productions.

By 1979 Warner Brothers were so confident of 83 year old Burns' star power that when they came to make GOING IN STYLE they not only put his name above the title (and allowed him to act without his toupee) but also cast 78 year old Lee Strasberg and the prematurely old looking Art Carney alongside him as co-stars. Then they filled the supporting cast with not a single recognisable face or name. These three old guys were going to carry the whole movie with no concessions to the expectations of multiplex-goers under 50.
It was a daring move and one that doesn't quite pay off.
GOING IN STYLE shuffles along with all the speed of the old codgers at the heart of its story, making a last gasp effort to prove it's still young at heart. The action's sprightly at first with a certain spring in its step and an obvious sense of determination, but all too soon it runs out of breath, enthusiasm and energy. And then comes the overwhelming urge for pudding and a nap....
Joe (Burns), Al (Carney) and Willie (Strasberg) are three elderly housemates, living out their declining years aimlessly, going to the park everyday to feed the pigeons and wait for the Grim Reaper to tap them on the shoulder. Joe finally summons up the energy to declare he's had enough of this and challenge Al and Willie to join him in robbing a Manhattan bank just for the hell of it.
So far so good.
Then comes act three, and it's soon clear that writer-director Martin Brest has absolutely no idea what to do with his characters after they've pulled off the raid. In place of meaningful forward motion he treats us to a painfully extended sequence in a Las Vegas casino watching Joe and Al playing craps. It just goes on and on without any real purpose. They're clearly having fun but it's definitely a case of "you'd had to be there" and ideally be one of them.
If Brest's intention was for the story's pace mimic the rather more sedate rhythms of senior citizen life then he succeeds admirably, but it comes at a price. The final product is considerably less than satisfying or memorable. Burns is good but he's not great and he's not enough to rescue the film from its own failings.

SUSAN SLADE: so-so soaper studies sex and the single virgin

It really is redundant to describe the plot of a soap as implausible and ridiculous so I'll settle for calling SUSAN SLADE a turgid viewing experience.
It starts out frothily enough with the Slade family, dad Roger (Lloyd Nolan), mum Leah (Dorothy McGuire) and their naive, virginal teenage daughter Susan (Connie Stevens) returning to California after 10 years in Chile's Atacama Desert where dad has been overseeing a mining operation for the uber-wealthy Corbett family (headed by Brian Aherne). On board the liner taking them home the shy and insecure Susan finds herself ardently pursued by the handsome hunk in the next cabin. Conn White (Grant Williams) is not only a chiseled dreamboat, he's also an avid mountaineer with a passion for 'conquering virgin peaks', Miss Slade included.
By the time their boat docks in San Francisco Susan is not only secretly engaged but also knocked-up, so when Conn is killed shortly afterwards in a climbing accident the Slades are faced with an appalling dilemma. What are they going to do with their unwed pregnant daughter? To admit her condition is unthinkable. This is, after all 1961, and decent people with wealthy friends just don't do that kind of thing. So they make the far more rational decision to move to Guatemala where Susan can give birth out of sight and grandma Leah can pretend the baby is hers.
So far so good.

Then the story becomes bogged down with plotlines involving a horse given to Susan as a birthday present and a stuttering romance with stable owner Hoyt Brecker (Troy Donahue). Hoyt's less chiseled than Conn but considerably taller (he almost has to get down on his knees to kiss Susan). He wears a red, Jan Dean style, windcheater but that's as rebellious as he gets. When he's not grooming horses he's writing books, and he's so sensitive that at times he comes across as barely less feminine than Susan. He's solid and dependable and Susan is going to be utterly bored with him within a year or two of marriage.
SUSAN SLADE's main point of interest for me is it's efforts to straddle two cultures - that of the staid, respectable, patriarchal 50s where success was measured by how far up the corporate ladder one can ascend, and the more liberated youth oriented 60s where teenagers turned their back on their parents values in favour of free love and uncoupling happiness from material acquisition. Screenwriter and director Delmer Daves tries to have it both ways with the tale he tells but his sympathies are clearly with the status quo.
It's a little sad to see old timers like McGuire, Nolan, Brian Aherne and Kent Smith slumming it in such a trashy production (and playing second fiddle to Stevens and Donahue), but I'm sure they were grateful for the work. I'm not so sure that McGuire would have been grateful for Daves' hamfisted efforts to endow her close-ups with a veneer of youth. They're shot through such thick filters that her face resembles a moving smear on the camera lens.
Neither a superior soap nor a top tier tearjerker, SUSAN SLADE is nothing more than industrial strength corn. Consume it at your peril.

A CHILD IS WAITING: a star is reborn

There's one really good reason for watching this 1963 John Cassavetes' directed drama and that's Judy Garland.

Her penultimate big screen performance, as a music teacher at a boarding school for mentally handicapped children, is just incredible. It's a masterclass in being - not playing - the part.
Garland is Jean Hansen, a woman still searching for a purpose in her life in her late 30s. She finds it at the Crawthorne State Training Institute in New Jersey. Despite having no training in nursing, teaching or working with developmentally challenged youngsters she rapidly bonds with the children, and autistic Reuben Widdicombe (Bruce Ritchey) in particular. The 10 year old has been abandoned by his parents and looks to Jean for the love and attention he's missing in his life. But the institute's director Dr Matthew Clark (Burt Lancaster) believes tough love is the best way to prepare Reuben for life and forbids Miss Hansen from giving the boy special attention.
I never realised just how big, liquid and expressive are Garland's eyes until I watched her use them to convey feelings of  love and compassion and pain and sadness toward Reuben. For an actress best known for her expansive theatricality Garland is impressively low key here, recognising that less is considerably more in portraying her character's state of mind. At times she appears so fragile she might shatter into a million pieces, while at others there's a steely determination not to be ground down by circumstances.
Garland and Lancaster are an unlikely but effective pairing, with Burt keeping a lid on his scenery chewing tendency, and there's excellent support from13 year old Ritchey and Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands as Reuben's missing mother.
If we overlook the datedness of the institute's philosophy toward its students, A CHILD IS WAITING holds up well as a sincere, sympathetic and non-patronising effort to explore a serious social issue. The story's continuing impact is due in large part to Garland's astonishing performance and it left me wondering just how great a character actress she could have become had she lived.

REMEMBER THE NIGHT: a romantic comedy that's more than a rom-com

REMEMBER THE NIGHT is a romantic comedy with everything that's lacking in 'No Strings Attached.'  Great performances, likeable characters and a story which moves forward rather than round in circles.
Made and set in 1940 it stars Fred McMurray as hot shot New York City district attorney John Sergeant who finds himself falling for the woman he's trying to put behind bars. Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) is a habitual shoplifter, but it's Christmastime and Sergeant knows that juries don't like to convict at this time of year so he gets her trial postponed. He arranges to have her released on bail but finds she's been entrusted to his care, so he invites her to join him on a roadtrip home to Ohio where they both have family. This is in the days before interstates so rather than heading straight down I-80 they face a painfully slow journey along back roads through small towns giving them time to discover a slow-burning attraction for one another.
MacMurray and Stanwyck would make film noir history four years later with 'Double Indemnity' playing a pair of immoral characters who absolutely deserve one another. Here, in their first on-screen pairing they are considerably more innocent and appealing but there's already an irresistible spark between them. Sure Stanwyck is a bad girl but she's got her reasons and they're mostly to do with her upbringing. It's circumstance rather than character that's driven her to steal, and as MacMurray discovers during their journey west it's frighteningly easy to cross the line from law abiding to law breaking.
With a script by Preston Sturges and direction from the stylish Mitchell Leisen, REMEMBER THE NIGHT is a warm and witty affirmation of the innate goodness in everyone, and the importance of family. The scene where Lee reunites with her estranged mother (a chilling performance by Georgia Caine) tells us all we need to know about why her daughter turned out like she did, and stands in stark contrast with the warm welcome extended to Lee by John's family.
Stanwyck is absolutely adorable as the young woman whose steely exterior conceals a tender heart. Inside she's just crying out for someone to give her the break which'll let her get back on the straight and narrow. MacMurray's image today is as a rather dull and bland leading man but he's surprisingly virile here and more than holds his own against Stanwyck's star wattage. There's no question that he's right for what's wrong in Lee's life.
Very few films released today come anywhere remotely near to creating the kind of uplifting magic that REMEMBER THE NIGHT achieves so seemingly effortlessly. That's why this film deserves to be called a romantic comedy and not just a rom com.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED: circular blandness

Most romantic comedies tend to follow a similar, reasonably predictable path. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, boy and girl get together, they break-up, boys wins girl back, and fade out. Few however follow quite such a circular pattern as NO STRINGS ATTACHED from veteran comedy director Ivan Reitman.

Watching it felt like essentially the same scene being repeated over and over for an hour and 48 minutes. Adam (Ashton Kutcher) meets Emma (Natalie Portman) repeatedly over the course of 15 years. Adam falls for Emma but she has serious commitment and intimacy issues and persuades him to settle for friends with benefits.Cue an interminable montage of them screwing in all kinds of locations, before Adam pushes his desire for a proper relationship just a little too hard and they split up. But of course she's not as tough as she thinks she is and so, with unseemly haste, she runs back into his arms.
Ok, so this brief synopsis would seem to suggest that the plot is perhaps more linear than I first indicated but - believe me - it doesn't feel that way watching it. It's also difficult to fathom exactly what it is that Adam sees in Emma that keeps him knocking at her door for 15 years. She's cold, hard and emotionless, and it's not as if he's so unappealing that no one else will have him. The film attempts to tackle this objection by showing Adam that the only other women can attract are shallow bimbos and good-hearted kooks with overlarge mouths. It's just not credible, but then neither is Emma's final conversion to the wonders of emotionally engaged love.
It's no easy task to develop an opinion on Kutcher's screen presence since he doesn't really have one. He's sort of just there, delivering his lines and avoiding the furniture. He's a pretty face without much personality, inoffensive but unmemorable. Portman reveals her rarely seen lighter side and while she proves herself competent at comedy she's no Jennifer Aniston. And both of them are too old to be convincing as teenagers! Kevin Kline is wasted in an underdeveloped cameo as Adam's lecherous, self-centred dad. I kept expecting him to do or say something funny but he never did.
I've already devoted more attention to this film than it deserves so I'll say no more other than it is only to be recommended for the very easily entertained.

PILLOW OF DEATH: the horror, the horror.......

PILLOW OF DEATH could have been the kiss of death for a less resilient actor. But not Lon Chaney jr. He'd survived many low budget horrors by the time he churned this one out in 1945 and he'd survive many more in the future.
PILLOW OF DEATH isn't actually a horror movie but it is horrifically bad. The kind of film that's so bad it can put a serious dent in an actor's reputation if they have one to dent. Which is where Chaney was lucky. He'd already made five of these Inner Sanctum cheapies in very quick succession by the time the cameras rolled on this final installment so expectations were pretty low all around.
The studio had clearly run out of enthusiasm and inspiration by this point - they'd even given up on the distorted head in a glass bowl introducing the story - and there's an obvious lack of commitment by everyone involved. The script is beyond ridiculous in its contrived implausibility, and no one in the cast seems able to summon up the energy to even try to give their best.
Chaney moves in slow motion for much of the story, failing to react as any normal human being would to the sight of his murdered wife, or a scream in the night, or the discovery that his dead wife's body is now missing from her coffin. He even has trouble finding the second floor in the big old house when he's on the first floor and standing directly in front of the staircase.
Brenda Joyce as his love interest is so cold and unaffectionate that I was amazed to discover she wasn't the murderer, and it's a little sad to see Dorothy's Auntie Em from 'The Wizard of Oz' - veteran actress Clara Blandick - in the thankless role of a harridan aunt whose sole purpose is to be smothered by the titular pillow.
On the plus side, much of the slow moving action takes place in a sumptuously designed and decorated grand old house set obviously built for a more prestigious production recently shot on the Universal lot. It's the only classy element in the entire film.

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU: please adjust your disbelief to avoid disapppointment

The first 20 minutes or so of THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU will lull fans of 'Inception' into believing they're in for a similar - if easier to understand - treat. Based on the short story by Philip K Dick, BUREAU also plays with perceptions of reality and our ability to control our own destiny. But then first-time director George Nolfi goes and spoils it all by showing us the man behind the curtain who's making all the magic happen.

On its own that needn't be disastrous - after all 'The Wizard of Oz' did just that and it's regarded as a classic - but Nolfi compounds the mistake by making the man simultaneously omnipotent and fatally flawed, and while it's possible for both qualities to co-exist, in this case the latter undermines the premise of the former. The titular Adjustment Bureau is an organisation run by an army of bureaucrats who dress like 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executives and operate like the J.Edgar Hoover era FBI. It's members are tasked with ensuring the life of every human being follows the pre-ordained path set down in a notebook by an unseen power who's higher than the US President and may or may not be god-like (his/her actual identity is kept deliberately vague to avoid offending believing or alienating non-believers).
Matt Damon, as US Senate candidate David Norris, first encounters these men in grey when a chance encounter with the beautiful Elise (Emily Blunt) causes him to deviate from the routine laid out for him. It's at this point that the coherence of the story starts to fall apart. The Bureau is all knowing and all powerful yet the only tool it has to keep Norris in line is to threaten him with a personality make-over if he tells anyone about them (of course, they wouldn't have had to threaten him at all if they'd just knocked him out rather than engage him in a lengthy conversation during which they describe their work in detail to him), To erase his memory and personality in order to keep him quiet would be an enormous deviation from his pre-assigned destiny (remember, they're trying to stop him from deviating from this plan) and the bureau has a particular interest in keeping Norris on track because really big things are planned for his future (it'll take you about 2 minutes to figure out what they are). Norris however wants what he wants and that's Elise, creating the story's dramatic tension as he battles to assert his free will against forces determined and sort-of powerful enough to stop him.

The fight which ensues strongly suggests that love trumps pre-ordained destiny and this is the biggest problem I have with the story. I find it hard  to believe that the Bureau has not had to deal with this particular form of rebellion before at some point in the history of the world (and senior Bureau man Terence Stamp makes it clear they've been around for centuries doing this job). Surely by 2011 they'd have come up with a solution to counter the disruptive possibilities of one man's libido.
Damon turns in his usual solid performance, but even his admittedly impressive ability to run countless New York city blocks at full pelt without breaking a sweat is not enough to gloss over the gaping cracks in the story. The only way to avoid repeating the phrase "yeah but..." over and over again while watching THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU is to not simply suspend your disbelief but send it off an all expenses paid three week Caribbean cruise. And if you've got any sense you'll go with it. You'll have more fun than watching this.

SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN: the growing pains of pre-Brat Pack life and love

In the interests of full disclosure I want to make one thing clear right from the start. I am not a member of this film's target audience. Even when I was in the target age range I was not in the target audience. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN is a chick flick for females too young to have attained chickhood. It's the cinematic equivalent of young adult literature as written by Judy Blume.

My reason for watching is the film's star Jennifer Connelly. I've been an admirer of her charms ever since discovering them in 1991's 'Career Opportunities,' and SEVEN MINUTES was a film of hers that I'd not heard of before so I wanted to check it out. I was also intrigued by the synopsis which made it sound like a John Hughes style drama for teenagers just a few years too young to identify with his brat pack movies (SEVEN MINUTES was released in 1985, the same year as 'The Breakfast Club').
SEVEN MINUTES focuses on the struggles of three lifelong friends to maintain their friendship in the face of newly competing pressures from the opposite sex. Natalie (Connelly), Jeff (Byron Thames) and Polly (Maddie Corman) have always done everything together, but when Natalie starts dating the high school hunk that Polly has a crush on, jealousy threatens to shatter the childhood bonds.
While SEVEN MINUTES is no-where near as polished as 'The Breakfast Club.'  'Some Kind of Wonderful' or 'Pretty in Pink' there's still plenty to enjoy. The growing pains of first love are something most of us can relate to, and there's something very charming and almost quaint in watching teenagers negotiate these without the benefit of cellphones or the internet. It's fashion, however, that provides the most unexpected pleasure. I'd completely forgotten that the in look in the mid 80s, at least according to SEVEN MINUTES, was the chunky sweater. Almost every character is decked out in one of these shapeless monstrosities which do nothing for the figure and must weigh several pounds a piece.
15 year old Connelly gives a very self assured performance, and it's easy to understand why she went on to become an Oscar winning film star while her fellow actors vanished into bit part obscurity. This is a sweet but not sugary coming of age story that definitely deserves a higher profile than it has today.

CAUGHT IN THE DRAFT: it'll make a conscientious objector out of you

Time moves awful slowly in the company of this feeble 1941 Bob Hope comedy about a cowardly film star who accidentally enlists in the US Army in his efforts to woo a colonel's daughter.
Hope, of course,plays the coward and Dorothy Lamour the object of his affections. Sadly there's no Bing Crosby and no good or even corny jokes. The whole film has the feel of a project that was hastily thrown together to cash in on the then topical issue of hundreds of thousands of men being drafted as the USA ramped up for war.
Poorly written and unimaginatively directed with unenthusiastic performances CAUGHT IN THE DRAFT is an ordeal for even the most ardent Bob Hope fan. For those of us who find a little Hope goes a very long way the film is almost unwatchable.

ALL GOOD THINGS: don't come to the viewer who waits

ALL GOOD THINGS is a well acted but ultimately frustrating exploration of a real life case which spanned three decades and involved 2 murders and 1 mysterious disappearance.

The common link is David Marks (Ryan Gosling), the rebellious but weak oldest son of a wealthy New York family which owns a large amount of land in mid-town Manhattan. His youthful rebellion against his domineering father (Frank Langella) takes the form of an unsuitable marriage (in dad's eyes) to Katie (Kirsten Dunst) and a brief spell running a health food store in Vermont. But when dad threatens to cut off the funding the couple return to New York and David reluctantly takes his place in the family business.
David's always been a little strange but once he's back under his father's control he starts acting seriously weird and there are incidents of violence against Katie. Then one day in 1982 she disappears never to be seen again. ALL GOOD THINGS wants to make the case that David murdered her, but because this is a story based on actual events and the real life David (under a different name) is still alive, director Andrew Jarecki is forced to be more circumspect than he would probably have liked. So what we get is an apparently solvable mystery if only one of the characters would ask the right questions. The same is true of David's behaviour. Several possible causes are hinted at but never explored by either friends and family or the police.
What we're left with is a bunch of fine performances - Gosling's portrayal of David over 30+ years is excellent, and Langella is particularly repellent as the father with an accounting ledger for a heart - but a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction. I didn't expect all the loose ends to be tied up with a pretty bow at the end of an hour and forty minutes, but a few answers would have been nice.