Watched LEAVE NO TRACE this week.  It was at Sundance last year and was not yet titled….remember the “untitled Debra Granik” movie?  It was very good!  Quiet, beautiful, great acting.   We liked it so much we came home and streamed her first feature, WINTER’S BONE, on Amazon.  That was good too.  Ben Foster stars in LEAVE NO TRACE.  He was also in HELL OR HIGH WATER and was nominated for a bunch of awards for best supporting actor for his performance.  I’m guessing he will show up at Oscar time this year.

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS is out now too.  We tried to see that at Sundance.  Interesting/disturbing, and worth a watch.

We streamed BRIMSTONE AND GLORY last night on Amazon.  It is about a town in Mexico, Tultepec, that manufactures fireworks and holds a couple of huge, crazy firework shows each year.  It was very interesting, in a shaking my head sort of way, about how they ignore the dangerous aspects of fireworks.  Relevant, since this week 24 people were killed and 40+ injured in a warehouse explosion there.

Saw THE KING…you can skip this one.  The documentary centers around somewhat random people in the back of Elvis’ Rolls Royce, giving their opinion (and you know what they say about opinions) about Elvis’ life and his mistakes.  Most of the people did not know Elvis, and Ethan Hawke was particularly blowhard-ish about Elvis’ mistakes, which I did not appreciate at all (he bugs me maybe most of all).  There was little mention about the bad people around Elvis (namely Col. Parker – drugs), little respect for the way millions/billions of people liked/like his music, and lots of comparisons of Elvis’ career and downfall to the downfall of American culture…kind of a stretch.  See something else.