Love old or unusual movies? Here's a re-view: "Wicked Little Letters" (2024): This delicious little confection about the power of being in the religious majority stars two of our best actresses, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. They play neighbors on a working class street when a series of amusingly vile letters begin landing in Colman's mailbox. Everyone immediately suspects the disreputable Buckley, and she immediately begins suffering.
But is she the real culprit? What follows is both highly funny and, at the same time, sobering. It's one of those movies that you expect to be fun and funny, and it is, but it's also surprisingly serious-minded. Strong support provided by Timothy Spall (whose brittle character will make you sad), Eileen Atkins, and particularly Anjana Vasan as the determined local cop.
Now streaming on Netflix "Letter Never Sent" (1960): Four idealistic geologists get dropped off in the wilds of Siberia to search for diamonds to help their country's industrial eff orts. The taiga is beautiful and dangerous, and our four heroes (guide Innokentiy Smoktunuvskiy), loving nerd couple (Tatyana Samoylova and Vasiliy Livanov) and their more brutish companion (Evgeniy Urbanskiy) search tirelessly for the mineral riches. Then disaster strikes in the form of a huge wildfire and the quartet are faced with the possibility that they might not make it back home.
The movie is justly famous for its sumptuous black and white cinematography. Now streaming on The Criterion Cha.