The Boys in the Boat tells the story of the eight-man junior varsity rowing crew from the University of Washington who, against all odds, made it all the way to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.  As you may recall, this was the same Olympics where Jesse Owens won four gold medals and single-handedly dealt a crushing blow to the Nazi belief in Aryan supremacy.  I wasn’t aware that the American rowing crew also took home the gold at that same event, but since the movie establishes that it’s an inspirational sports movie from the outset, I was certain that they would triumph in the end.  The only questions remaining were who these boys are and how they would get to that point.

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There’s a key moment in The Marsh King’s Daughter, when Jacob (Ben Mendelssohn) hands his daughter Helena (Brooklynn Prince) a rifle and tells her to shoot a female wolf.  She takes aim but hesitates because a wolf cub is pawing at the ground.  Both wolves are starving, Jacob explains.  Helena lowers the rifle and asks, “What will become of the cub?”  Jacob says that the cub will starve and die, and tells her again to shoot the wolf.  Helena lowers the rifle once more, and the wolf edges closer.  Jacob grabs the rifle and shoots the wolf and its cub.  “You must always protect your family,” he tells her.  The next morning Helena scratches that message on a piece of wood that we later learn is a punishment pit.  Jacob has thrown her down there so that she will not make that mistake of choosing anything over the family ever again.  What Helena doesn’t know is that her “family” is built upon a monstrous lie, one that her father has spun to rationalize how he treats them.

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Like many movies about drug addiction that have come before, A Good Person asks for our sympathy.  To my surprise, it got it without a struggle.  It tells the story of Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman who became addicted to prescription painkillers after a fatal traffic accident.  Physically, she seems fine.  Allison moves about normally when she chooses to and has no visible scars.  Mentally, she’s in an entirely different place.  She spends her days in her house with the curtains drawn, lounging around, conspiring ways to obtain a refill of her expired prescription.  Her mother Diane (Molly Shannon) pops over unannounced, throws open the curtains and shrilly demands that her daughter get her act together.  Nobody ever told Diane that the last thing a drug addict wants is a high-energy pep talk.

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