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Cinedigm buys christian cinema streaming service, dove movie review site.

The deals get the digital media company deeper into the faith and family content market.

By Etan Vlessing

Etan Vlessing

Canada Bureau Chief

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Digital media company Cinedigm Corp. has acquired the streaming service Christian Cinema and Dove.org, a movie review site for Christian-themed films.

Terms of the deals were not disclosed, but they expand Cinedigm’s presence in the faith and family content space. Dove.org is a movie review and ratings service, and the transaction will see the property combined with Cinedigm’s existing streamer Dove Channel.

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“This pair of acquisitions immediately provides us with an established consumer base, immediately accretive revenue and multiple new avenues for growth. Much like we have done in other verticals, we expect to dramatically ramp up our offerings in original theatrical releases, podcasts, publishing, audiobooks and more,” Erick Opeka, president and chief strategy officer of Cinedigm, said in a statement.

The box office success of movie titles like I Can Only Imagine and Miracle From Heaven  has given impetus to an expanding content market for faith and family-friendly films and TV series.

Cinedigm is led by Chris McGurk as chairman and CEO and operates a range of streaming channels and third-party platforms as it looks to leverage its own library, technology and distribution abilities to expand its online content offering.

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What happens in Henry James takes place deep within stories where, on the surface, the characters go languidly about their lives of privilege. They subscribe to a code of what is done and what is not done. They know exactly what it means to be a gentleman or a lady; those titles are like decorations, to be worn invisibly at social occasions. And then in the privacy of their souls, some of James' characters darkly contemplate getting their way no matter what.

"The Wings of the Dove'' is the cold-blooded story of two British lovers who plot to deprive a rich American girl ("the richest orphan in the world'') of her heart and her inheritance. What makes it complicated--what makes it James--is that the two lovers really do like the rich girl, and she really does like them, and everyone eventually knows more or less precisely what is being done. The buried message is that when it comes to money, sex, love and death, most people are prepared to go a great deal further than they would admit. There is, if you know how to look for it, incredible emotional violence in the work of Henry James. This new film of his famous novel makes two significant changes. It moves the action up slightly, from 1902 to 1910. And it makes the British woman a little more sympathetic than she was in the book. The second change flows from the first. James' story, which he began writing in 1894, embedded the characters in the world of Victorian propriety. By 1910, the actions they contemplate, while still improper, were not unthinkable; modern relativism was creeping in. Kate Croy, whose desire fuels the story, was more selfish and evil in the James version; the film softens her into someone whose actions can almost be defended as pragmatism.

Kate, played with flashing eyes and bold imagination by Helena Bonham Carter, is a poor girl with a tenuous foothold in society. Her father is a penniless drunkard. Her mother is dead. She is taken in by her wealthy Aunt Maude ( Charlotte Rampling ), who wants to marry her off to the best advantage--perhaps to Lord Mark (Alex Jennings). But Kate loves Merton Densher ( Linus Roache ), an ill-paid journalist who cheerfully admits he doesn't believe the things he writes. Maude forbids the marriage and even threatens to cut off the weekly shillings she pays Kate's father.

What is Kate prepared to do? Characters talk a great deal in Henry James, but are sometimes maddeningly obscure about what they mean (does any other novelist use the word "intercourse'' more frequently, while not meaning by that word or any other what we immediately think of?). They talk much less in this film, where facial expressions imply the feelings that are talked around in the novel. My guess is that Kate might have eventually married the odious Lord Mark, while continuing quietly to see Merton Densher.

But that is not necessary. At a dinner party, she meets Millie Theale ( Alison Elliott ), the rich young American, and discovers that Millie has an unnamed disease, possesses hardly a protector in the world except for her traveling companion ( Elizabeth McGovern ), and intends to see Europe and die. One of the things Millie wants to experience in Europe is romance; she doesn't say so, but she is looking for a man, and when she sees Merton, she asks Kate about him.

"He's a friend of the family,'' Kate replies--a lie of omission, because Kate and Merton are secretly engaged. Kate's plan is clear. She will accompany Millie to Venice. Merton will join them there. Millie will fall in love with Merton, marry him, die and leave him her fortune. Merton will then have the money he needs to marry Kate. This scheme unfolds only gradually in the James novel, emerging from behind leisurely screens of dialogue and implication. It is more clear in the film, especially in a dark, atmospheric scene where Kate and Merton walk down deserted Venetian passages. She tells him she is returning to London and outlines what she expects him to do. Then, to seal the bargain, they have sex for the first time. (They do it standing up against the old stones of Venice; one imagines the ghost of James turning aside with a shudder.) Iain Softley's film, written by Hossein Amini , emphasizes Kate's desperation and downplays her cold calculation. It softens the villainy of Merton by making it clear how desperately Millie does want to be involved in a romance with him; is he simply granting her dying wish? There is another fugitive strand of affection in the film that I did not sense in the book: Millie and Kate genuinely like each other, and it's almost as if they strike an unexpressed bargain, in which Kate lets Millie have the use of Merton--lets her find what she came to Europe for. The money is crucial, of course, but too vulgar to be discussed.

In its stark outlines, this plot would be at home on a daytime talk show ("Sold her lover to a dying rich girl''). But the film sets it at a time when standards were higher, when society had clear expectations of moral behavior. The reason we're so fascinated by the adaptations of James, Austen, Forster and the others is that their characters think marriage, fidelity, chastity and honesty are important. In modern movies, the characters have no values at all.

In "The Wings of the Dove,'' there is a fascination in the way smart people try to figure one another out. The film is acted with great tenderness. If the three central characters had been more forthright, more hedonistic, we wouldn't care nearly as much. But all three have a certain tact, a certain sympathy for the needs of the others. At the end, when Millie knows the score, she can at least be grateful that she got to play the game.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Wings Of The Dove (1997)

Rated R For Sexuality

103 minutes

Helena Bonham-Carter as Kate Croy

Alison Elliott as Millie Theale

Linus Roache as Merton Densher

Elizabeth McGovern as Susan

Michael Gambon as Kate's Father

Charlotte Rampling as Aunt Maude

Directed by

• Iain Softley
• Hossein Amini

Based On The Novel by

• Henry James

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Tyler Perry’s Divorce in the Black’ on Amazon Prime Video, Another Shabby Melodrama from the Prolific Media Mogul

Where to stream:.

• Tyler Perry’s Divorce in the Black
• Tyler Perry

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From the Wow, He Just Keeps Cranking Out the Content file comes Tyler Perry’s Divorce in the Black , a pseudo-psycho-thriller that’s the media mogul’s first movie in his recent deal with Amazon Prime Video . Not only is Perry shockingly prolific, writing and producing and directing TV series and movies at an insane clip for a large and devoted audience, but now he’s simultaneously producing content for Netflix AND Amazon Prime Video, the highly competitive behemoths of the current Cold War among streaming services. Did I mention he also opened his own independent studio in Atlanta, and is a billionaire? Perry’s achievements are astonishing, really, and that extends to the ludicrousness of the melodramas he churns out seemingly by the gross; this one stars Meagan Good as a long-suffering woman who finally divorces her serial lout of a husband, with predictably, oh-so-Tyler-Perryesque nonsensical results. I dunno, maybe it’ll inspire a few laughs, intentional or otherwise (but most likely otherwise).

TYLER PERRY’S DIVORCE IN THE BLACK : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a funeral, for Ava’s (Good) brother-in-law. She married into the Bertrand family, a bunch of ne’er-do-wells who’ve long feuded with her parents, preacher-farmer Clarence (Richard Lawson) and devoted lady-of-Gawd Gene (Debbi Morgan). So Ava’s marriage to Dallas (Cory Hardrict) must be a real Montagues-and-Capulets type situation, right? Ehh. I dunno about that. She talked the Bertrands into letting Clarence conduct the eulogy, during which he pretty much just comes right out and says the deceased gentleman is gonna be eating fire and brimstone for all eternity. So much for ending all the fussin’ and a-feudin’. All Ava can do is cringe-and-facepalm as the Bertrands get so mad they pull the body right outta the casket so they can bury their boy where he belongs, just outside their cruddy mobile home, over yonder past all the old mattresses and husks of dead cars and miscellaneous assorted trash in the yard. 

And it’s not like Ava and Dallas’ love is particularly star-crossed. They moved to Atlanta from rural Wherever, Georgia to live their life of bliss, but it didn’t turn out that way. She got a good job doing Whatever at a big bank, and Dallas just drinks and smokes and beats her and psychologically abuses her. And now – get this – HE’S the one who wants a divorce. It goes against everything Ava learned from her parents, who stuck it out through better or worse, rich or poor, hot or cold, smelly or not smelly, poop on the bottom of your shoe or poop not on the bottom of your shoe. She’s stricken with guilt. Dallas careens out the door and she goes back home to Clarence and Gene for a while, staying in her perfectly preserved childhood bedroom which still has the Fresh Prince posters up over the bed. As a reminder of how craptastic it’s been for many years, her best friend and coworker Rona (Taylor Polidore) wrote down all the terrible things Dallas did, and it’s pretty small print with tight margins and everything. The guy’s a real creep.

Clarence and Gene are supportive of the split – so supportive, they pair her up with her old friend Benji (Joseph Lee Anderson), a farmer and divorcee who looks like he can carry half-ton steers over each shoulder without cracking the Right Guard seal on a single armpit. This involvement with Benji is when Dallas gets mad at the woman he’s divorcing for “cheating” on him, which only makes sense if you’re more plot device than man. Prior to this, Dallas disappeared for a remorselessly turgid hourlong stretch of the movie as Ava mopes around and thinks about sleeping with Benji but doesn’t but then eventually does, because she has to in order for this plot to hit Ludicrous Speed and get to the inevitable trademark Tyler Perry Batshit Ending. All of his “serious” movies conclude in this manner, you know. It’s right up there with death and taxes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Let’s just say this isn’t quite Marriage Story . Heck, it’s not even A Madea Halloween .

Performance Worth Watching: Add Good to the growing pile of talented and capable actresses (see also: Taraji P. Henson, Alfre Woodard, Kelly Rowland, Crystal Fox) chewing their way through some of the toughest, stringiest beef-jerky dialogue ever.

Memorable Dialogue: Benji offers Ava some reassurance, and offers us some derisive chuckles, with this awkward exchange:

Benji: I do know what it’s like. Anger, betrayal, all of that. One minute you’re strong, and the next you’re looking at the bottom of a whiskey bottle and listening to the Chris Stapleton song ‘Either Way.’ Ava: Never heard it.

Sex and Skin: No naughty bits or glutes visible, but at least we get one of the clumsiest sex scenes ever filmed.

Our Take: And at least one of the clumsiest sex scenes ever filmed is immediately followed by one of the clumsiest fight scenes ever filmed. They make for quite the sequence, an ineptly executed mess that finally, at long, long last, breaks the tension Perry has spent 90 minutes ineptly attempting to build. Nearly two decades into his career as a film director has taught Perry nothing new about the craft, but the billion dollars in his bank account has enabled him to not care because people will watch this dreck anyway. It’s quite the feedback loop he’s created for himself.

And yet, Divorce in the Black – nonsense title, by the way – never truly achieves the level of overheated, bake-a-single-biscuit-by-burning-down-the-kitchen dramatic absurdity Perry gave us in the likes of A Fall From Grace , Mea Culpa , or Why Did I Get Married Too , which showed us just how thin the line between melodrama and comedy can be. He tames the bull in the china shop and ends up with a stultifyingly dull exploration of ill-formed characters working through their banal existences in Very Expensive Homes. All we can do is sit there and wait for everything to explodinate in the signature Perry style, and when it finally does, it’s two measly sparklers on the Fourth of July, and one of them fizzles. And in order to get there, we have to suffer through a logic-deprived screenplay in which you’ll be positively thirsting for a lick of sense. The only way to get through it is to take a drink every time someone on the screen does something dumb. You’ll be hammered in no time flat.

Our Call: You know what to expect from a Tyler Perry joint by now. But Divorce in the Black isn’t the hoot you want it to be. It doesn’t derail like a memorable trainwreck; rather, it poots out on the track. How disappointing. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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The scariest movie of the year (so far) is ‘Longlegs,’ by a mile

Starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage at his sinister best, Neon’s serial killer thriller weaves a hypnotic spell.

Nerve-jangling and devilishly bleak, “Longlegs” is easily the front-runner for scariest movie of 2024. Set during the drab 1990s of Clinton-era America, the latest offering from writer-director Osgood “Oz” Perkins throbs with a bone-chilling sense of dread, a marvelous piece of supernatural horror wearing the skin of a serial killer thriller that weaves a lasting, sinister spell.

Maika Monroe, already a genre darling thanks to “The Guest,” “It Follows” and “Watcher,” delivers her best turn yet as rookie FBI agent Lee Harker, a watchful loner whose uncanny intuition for rooting out perps — or is it some kind of evil ESP? — lands her a special assignment tracking an elusive suspect dubbed the Longlegs Killer.

So named for the cryptic signed notes left at a string of grisly murder-suicides rocking the rural Pacific Northwest, Longlegs is an enigma: a serial killer responsible for turning family men violently on their wives and children, despite no evidence that he was ever there. Monroe infuses Lee with a bone-deep introversion, down to the way she stiffly moves through her bleak world, more at ease with gruesome crime scene photos and occult symbols than she is around people.

Echoes of “Se7en,” “Zodiac” and especially “Silence of the Lambs” position Lee as the Clarice Starling of this piece, in which hallucinogenic editing by Greg Ng and Graham Fortin, cinematographer Andres Arochi’s diabolically patient camera work, and jarring sound design by Eugenio Battaglia combine to conjure potent menace in the jump scares, nightmare images and ominous negative spaces of the frame.

But something more insidious begins percolating in Perkins’s slice of American Gothic horror once Lee’s quarry turns hunter and her mind tugs at a long-buried childhood memory of a ghoulish stranger with a singsong voice, remembered only in snatches. And once you get a full gander at Longlegs, well, good luck getting him out of your head, too.

Perkins initially wields Nicolas Cage’s most unhinged role to date with restraint, the actor’s nearly unrecognizable features cropped just enough out of frame to send the imagination skittering. When he’s eventually unleashed, unnaturally pallid, powdered and plumped under wild hair and grotesque facial prostheses, it’s to skin-crawling effect. Who knew that the secret to a maniacal all-timer of a Cage role was giving his mothballed boogeyman a botched makeover and an over-the-top obsession with ’70s glam rock, then keeping his battiness strategically at bay? (You’ll never hear T. Rex’s “Get It On” the same way.)

Cage cranks the dial, sealing his Longlegs as one of the great horror villains. Monroe, meanwhile, holds the center of the slow-burn chiller opposite Lee’s religious hoarder mother (a fantastic, unpredictable Alicia Witt) and her amiable boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). But it’s the deliciously strange interaction with Longlegs’ only known survivor (a mesmerizing Kiernan Shipka, star of Perkins’s 2015 debut “The Blackcoat’s Daughter”) that highlights the final stretch of the movie’s descent into the unexpected, even if the lore takes a few unconvincing late-breaking turns to get there.

Still, Perkins, who made his own acting debut portraying the younger version of his father Anthony in 1983’s “Psycho II,” knows the terror of unmooring us from our places of safety, including the safety we search for in nostalgia and in the stories we tell ourselves. Playing with aspect ratio and composition with a sure hand, the filmmaker blankets his fourth feature in an unsettling shroud of wrongness as Cage and Monroe play out their unorthodox cat-and-mouse game. Even the end credits are cleverly designed to ensure viewers linger in a state of visceral unease, letting the dread sink in.

R. At area theaters. Contains bloody violence, disturbing images, language, satanic panic and Nicolas Cage rage. 101 minutes.

‘Twisters’ Review: Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones Lead a Sequel Full of State-of-the-Art Storms, but It’s Less Awesome Than the Original

It follows the template of "Twister," yet 30 years of real-life storm-chaser footage has given Lee Isaac Chung's tornado thriller a higher bar to clear.

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Owen Gleiberman

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But some viewers thought the effects looked like digital effects, and while I don’t share that feeling, it’s one that I often had while watching “Twisters.” The tornadoes in the new movie are down-to-the-particle replicas of the real thing, and close up, from the bottom, we can just about see the dusty winds that combine to create them, but viewed from a distance they lack the eerie muscular power a real tornado often has, the sense of air churning so fast that it becomes nearly solid. They aren’t scary in that way. They’re impressive but they don’t wow you.

The director, Lee Isaac Chung , made the incandescent humanistic drama “Minari” (2020), about South Korean immigrant farmers trying to make a go of it in the rural Arkansas of the ’80s. And while that wouldn’t seem to make him the likeliest contender to helm a popcorn spectacle as rooted in technological wonderment as this one, he does a smooth and confident job. Yet Chung isn’t a Spielbergian wizard like Jan de Bont. (Spielberg served as an executive producer on both films.) Instead of simply trying to replicate what “Twister” did, I wish he’d tried something more radical and startling to the eyeball — like, for instance, shooting the tornadoes as if they were being filmed on iPhones, so that they seemed as real as something barreling toward your house or glimpsed in the rear-view mirror.

A great deal of storm-chaser footage — I’d say this is the essence of it — is just hanging back and gawking at tornadoes. That’s what you want to do. But “Twisters” is so busy with everything the movie is “about” that it almost forgets to let us do that. The storm chasers in the original “Twister” were trying to learn more about tornadoes in order to create a storm-warning system. But the storm chasers in “Twisters” have larger — and, I would say, windier ­— ambitions. The film opens with Kate Cooper ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ) and her crew driving through Tornado Alley in Oklahoma, trying to deploy Kate’s grand experiment: sending a dozen barrels’ worth of polymers up into a tornado’s eye, so that it will cause the tornado to wither and die. They’re literally fighting the tornado. But the tornado, which they thought was going to be an EF1 (the Fujita scale has now been replaced by the Enhanced Fujita scale, which began to be used by the U.S. in 2007), turns out to be an EF5. It’s a fearsome beast that funnels three of Kate’s colleagues, including her boyfriend, to their deaths.

Then again, maybe she’s just leaving all the popping to Glen Powell as Tyler Owens, a good-ol’-boy storm chaser in a white Stetson who has built up a following on YouTube as the “tornado wrangler,” a grinning cowboy daredevil who doesn’t just film twisters. He drives his red truck right into the middle of them, welding the vehicle into the ground with automatic screws and pulling off stunts like shooting fireworks into the eye of the storm. He’s the storm chaser as social-media Jackass, and at first the film treats him like an exploitation vulgarian. By contrast, it lauds the crew of scientists that Kate has agreed to join for a week during a once-in-a-generation outbreak of tornadoes. They’re a small corporation of storm chasers headed by Kate’s old chum and colleague Javi ( Anthony Ramos ), who wants to study the phenomenon of tornadoes by surrounding one by three pieces of radar, the better to gather all that data.

Ah, data! It was what the storm chasers of “Twister” (Helen Hunt! Bill Paxton! Philip Seymour Hoffman!) were gathering as well, but somehow we always knew it was a MacGuffin, the excuse for it all. They chased tornadoes because they cared! — but really, deep down (this was the subtext), they did it for the rush, which is why the thrill of the chase could set off vibrations of sexual energy between Hunt and Paxton as a divorced couple getting back together.

A similar thing happens here, theoretically, as Tyler, with his rawhide grin, razzes Kate, who he insists on calling “city girl.” In this case, though, the rival teams of storm chasers represent Opposing Values, even as the furrowed-brow Kate and the showboat Tyler may not be as far apart as we think. He’s actually, underneath it all, a serious dude who studied meteorology. And is she a thrill-seeker at heart? Not quite, but by the end she’s willing to drive a truck right into the storm to do the right thing. Meanwhile, that very good actor Anthony Ramos is put in the awkward position of having to mope around as Javi, who has a one-sided crush on Kate.

Reviewed at Universal Screening Room, New York, July 8, 2024. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 122 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of Warner Bros., Amblin Entertainment production. Producers: Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley. Executive producers: Steven Spielberg, Thomas Hayslip, Ashley Jay Sandberg.
• Crew: Director: Lee Isaac Chung. Screenplay: Mark L. Smith. Camera: Dan Mindel. Editor: Terilyn A. Shropshire. Music: Benjamin Wallfisch.
• With: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glenn Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane, Harry Hadden-Paton, David Corenswet, Daryl McCormack, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brien, Nik Dodani.

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Days of our Lives’ Julie Dove Reveals the Marlena Evans Moment That Made Her Cry

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Julie Dove, who plays Connie on Days of our Lives , is thrilled to be working on the same stage as many of her idols. However, the longtime DAYS devotee recently shared with Soap Hub the storyline that nearly got her to swear off the show!

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As Connie’s story has heated up ( read our story about that here ), Dove’s been working on the show more and more. As a result, she’s gotten to meet actors who aren’t even necessarily in her story orbit including Stephen Nichols (Steve) and Mary Beth Evans (Kayla) . “I’d been here for a few weeks [before] I told them I’d been scared to even talk to them,” Dove says. “I told Mary Beth about how I’d written her a fan letter and that it meant a lot to me that she’d sent one back. I told Steven about how I’d met him once, too.

“They laughed and said, ‘Oh, my gosh — you should have introduced yourself to us earlier!'” says Dove. The actress was even more apprehensive about approaching Deidre Hall (Marlena); it turns out she didn’t have to!

“Deidre came up to me ,” Dove says. “She said that I just wanted to introduce myself and tell you that you’re doing a good job. I almost died!”

It’s not a case of mere shyness that kept Dove from chatting up her fellow actors. Sure, she’s a longtime viewer but she’s a professional, too. “Everything’s so fast,” she says. “You’re in the makeup room but everyone is working on their lines. There’s not a lot of chitchat going on. There’s so much on which to focus. Everyone one the show — every single person — is doing an incredible job. It’s my understanding that there’s a lot more being produced every day than there was in the 80s and 90s.”

Speaking of the 1980s, a pivotal story development stands out in Dove’s mind. It was so dramatic and painful, she almost had to stop watching the show! We’re talking about when Roman (Wayne Northrop) “died” after taking a bullet while fighting Stefano (Joe Mascolo) on the DiMera villain’s island. Roman fell off a cliff, presumably to his death.

Back in Salem, Bo met with Marlena where they dealt with the fact that Roman’s body had apparently washed out to sea, robbing her of the chance to say goodbye to her husband. (But the missing “corpse” set up Roman’s return in 1991!)

While Dove is a John (Drake Hogestyn)/Marlena devotee today , she was team Roman and Marlena back in the day. “I watched Roman die after falling off the cliff,” Julie Dove recalls. “My favorite story was when Marlena blamed Bo [for leaving Roman].

“The acting in that storyline made me realize that she’s just one of the greatest actresses I’ve ever seen,” Dove raves of Hall. The actress’s fellow performers agreed. Hall was nominated the following year for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the Daytime Emmys.

The post Days of our Lives’ Julie Dove Reveals the Marlena Evans Moment That Made Her Cry appeared first on Soap Hub

This 1989 Miniseries Was Considered the Best Western of Its Time

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Based on the novel by Larry McMurtry , the 1989 Western miniseries Lonesome Dove entered an entertainment landscape that had largely given up on both miniseries and Westerns in general. By the time the story wrapped up, a story that was split into four parts at a whopping 384 minutes combined, Lonesome Dove had revitalized both . The miniseries was popular, averaging nearly 40 million viewers, and it was good, having been nominated for 18 Emmy Awards and winning seven. Critics lauded everything from the cast, the scenery, up to the sheer majesty of the production itself. It was hailed then as one of the best Westerns of its time, even of all time. Looking back at it post- Unforgiven , another touchstone moment in the history of the Western genre, one may question if Lonesome Dove is still worthy of its accolades. It is.

Lonesome Dove takes place in the late 1870s, and the story begins in the Texas border town of Lonesome Dove. Two famed former Texas Rangers, Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae ( Robert Duvall ) and Captain Woodrow F. Call ( Tommy Lee Jones ), run a horse stable on the edge of the small town. The pair complement each other well, with Gus a twice-widowed, affable soul who doesn't work too hard, while Call is a strict workaholic who keeps his emotions hidden beneath his gruff exterior. One day, a long-lost former Texas Ranger and friend, Jake Spoon ( Robert Urich ), shows up on the doorstep, a wanted man after inadvertently shooting the mayor of Fort Smith, Arkansas. His tales of the wonders of Montana move Call, who proposes gathering a herd of cattle to drive them there and settle in the pristine north.

RELATED: 'Unforgiven' 30 Years On: 13 Things That Make It the Best Clint Eastwood Movie

'Lonesome Dove' Is an Unflinching Look at the Real West

From there, Lonesome Dove follows the journey of Gus, Call, and their companions: Joshua Deets ( Danny Glover ), a tracker and scout from their Ranger days; hard-working but thick-headed former Ranger "Pea Eye" Parker ( Tim Scott ); Bolivar, ( León Singer ), cook and former Mexican bandit; and 17-year-old Newt Dobbs ( Ricky Schroder ), who doesn't know that Call is his father. It's a journey that is filled with inclement weather, cattle rustling, gunfights, a good-hearted prostitute, and death, hitting all the tropes of the Western and more. What sets Lonesome Dove apart from other Westerns is in how it doesn't glamorize the West. There is no white-hatted hero, just a group of imperfect, haggard, unkempt men simply trying to survive. Their surroundings are not pristine, but rather a collection of well-worn locales that speak to the harshness of their world. The women are whores, or at the very least treated as such. Death comes from anywhere, at any time, and not just at the hands of a gunslinger. And it is cruel.

At the same time, Lonesome Dove subverts the Western genre throughout. Frederic Forrest 's Blue Duck, a half Native-American, half Mexican bandit, is a true, murderous villain, but he exists in a gray world. The cattle and horses needed for the drive were stolen. U.S. cavalry soldiers exert their authority violently, whipping Newt as punishment for not freely surrendering their horses to the soldiers, prompting Call to beat one of them nearly to death, only stopped by Gus before doing so. The bad people do bad things, and so do the good. When they enter Montana territory, Native Americans steal a dozen of the group's horses, but not for nefarious reasons, which so often happens in Westerns in need of faceless villains. They are starving, and only did so in order to eat. More importantly, this fact is recognized by Deets, who prevents Gus and Call from storming the area and killing the innocent Natives to reclaim their horses. It's also a scene that, more than any other in Lonesome Dove , speaks to the theme of death's cruelty. After the Natives are scared off, Deets comes to the rescue of a blind Native child left behind, but his benevolent action is misunderstood by a nearby Native, who impales Deets with a spear. It's a good man, doing a good deed, and yet he still pays a price for it.

'Lonesome Dove' Goes Deep

The miniseries format of Lonesome Dove is another asset, allowing the viewer the time to develop a far deeper connection to the characters than what is normally afforded in a "typical" Western. Over the course of six hours, we get to know the characters intimately. The regret of Gus' former love Clara ( Anjelica Huston ) for not saying "yes" to Gus' proposal years before stings that much more. The anger she feels towards Call for keeping him from her. Denying them happiness may be unfair, but it is relatable and understandable, because we get the time to know them. When Gus would rather face death than have his other leg amputated, we know his pride, his need to do things on his own terms, won't allow him to do it. We mourn his decision, but, again, we understand it.

Of course, none of this matters without having actors that can pull it off, and Lonesome Dove has that in spades. The casting is spot on, and some of the "lesser lights" — Urich, Diane Lane , Glover — deliver characters that feel real , not just stereotypes or caricatures. Three performances specifically, though, deserve recognition. Robert Duvall, already an acclaimed actor since his start as Boo Radley in 1962's To Kill A Mockingbird , is perfect as Gus. His eyes speak to the wisdom of the character, his face betraying one that has seen many things yet still seeks to find the humor in it all. Duvall nails the grace of Gus, and his personality that sees Gus as a father figure and stern protector. Ricky Schroder gets to show off his talents, shaking off the image of his Ricky Stratton role in the 1980s sitcom Silver Spoons by deftly taking his character from teen to man, gradually building his maturity through the events he experiences on the drive. The real surprise in Lonesome Dove is Tommy Lee Jones . For anyone who relates the actor to his one-note Agent K role in the Men In Black films, the way Jones slowly breaks down the walls of Call is nothing short of amazing. His introduction in the series promises that same note, but by the end, when we see Call weeping openly over the grave of Gus after having brought his body back to Texas, one would have to have a heart of stone to feel nothing. It's a depth that we don't see often enough from Jones over the course of his career.

Lonesome Dove succeeds as a Western by both adhering to its rules and disobeying them outright in equal measure. It succeeds by imbuing an emotional depth unlike its kin. It succeeds in grand cinematography and realism. Lonesome Dove , simply, succeeds.

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‘Touch’ Review: An Old-School Tear-Jerker, With a Twist

An Icelandic widower revisits London, the site of his first romance, in this film from Baltasar Kormakur.

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By Beatrice Loayza

“Touch,” a globe-trotting romance from Iceland, is an epic, old-fashioned weepie in the vein of “Atonement” and “The Notebook” — it’s mushy and ridiculous, then, suddenly, you’re in the throes of an ugly cry.

Based on the novel by Olafur Johann Olafsson, the film straddles two timelines — 2020, at the very outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Swinging Sixties London — and plays out, at first, like a mystery. Kristofer (Egill Olafsson), an ex-restaurateur and widower, is diagnosed with dementia and spurred into action before the disease might incapacitate him: He books a flight from Reykjavik to London, unfazed by the imminent lockdown. He’s the only guest at his London hotel, his flights are near-empty, and his anxious daughter keeps calling, urging him to get back home.

As Kristofer revisits his old stamping grounds — he was a student in London — the source of his longing becomes clear. In the earlier timeline, a young Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur), a devoted leftist, abandons his studies and takes a dishwashing job at a Japanese restaurant. The rest of the staff is Japanese, but the restaurant owner, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), takes a liking to this Icelandic gentle giant, whose passion for Japanese culture is convincing. (Plus, there’s a humorous parallel between Iceland and Japan — the love of fish!) The trope of the white guy with an Asian fetish certainly comes to mind, but Kormakur’s soft-spoken charisma wards off this pigeonholing, creating space for the Japanese characters to become three-dimensional as they tease Kristofer out of his shell.

Then there’s the girl: Miko (Koki), Takahashi-san’s daughter, with whom Kristofer is smitten. The film tracks the twists and turns of their friendship, which unfold tragically when Miko’s origins — she’s a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing — come to light.

Directed by Baltasar Kormakur, the father of Palmi, a veteran filmmaker with big-budget Hollywood credits (“Beast,” “Adrift,” “2 Guns”), “Touch” rekindles a treacly genre that I didn’t realize I missed. Its tender performances and gut-punch reveals are classic tear-jerker ingredients. Add to this a natural, inordinately sensitive approach to intercultural love — mercifully, without a sense of righteousness or obligation.

Touch Rated R for sex, references to abortion and images of atomic bomb casualties. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.

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