9 to 5 (1980)
Director: Colin Higgins
Genre: Comedy
Notable cast: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, Dabney Coleman, and Elizabeth Wilson
MPA rating: PG
Rotten Tomatoes: 71%
Metacritic: 58
After the passing of Dolly Parton this year, rewatching her in her first film role here can feel bittersweet, but it also proves how she was able to conquer all art forms she tried with seeming ease.
The multihyphenate icon once joked to Vanity Fair about taking the role of Doralee Rhodes, saying, “I thought, Well, if it’s a big success, I can just join in there with Lily [Tomlin] and Jane [Fonda]. And if it’s a big flop, I’ll just blame it on them ’cause nobody thinks about me being a movie star.” Parton would also get her first Oscar nomination and two Grammys for the title track, but the comedy gold of this trio taking on their sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot boss remains a classic.
Ad Astra (2019)
Director: James Gray
Genre: Space Drama
Notable cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland, John Ortiz, and Natasha Lyonne
MPA rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
Metacritic: 80
As director James Gray prepares to storm the awards season with Paper Tiger—a return to the crime genre that put him on the map—it’s maybe time to reassess his misunderstood and mishandled space elegy Ad Astra. It’s not your typical space exploration adventure, but something much more personal. Starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut who ventures to the depths of our solar system to recover his father (Tommy Lee Jones) after a failed mission, Ad Astra is a more soulful and introspective space film than most audiences were expecting. It didn’t help that post Disney merger, Fox whimpered the film into theatres. “But what has long distinguished Gray, and what rings true in even this [film], his grandest and in some ways most complex movie, is that his movies peer inward, not outward—toward longing, frustration, uncertainty, and rattled expectations, rather than toward resolution,” praised Vanity Fair about what makes Gray’s film so special.
Alien (1979)
Director: Ridley Scott
Genre: Horror
Notable cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto, and Harry Dean Stanton
MPA rating: R
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
Metacritic: 89
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