With the exception of 3D, found footage seems to be one of the most overused of Hollywood gimmicks. It’s certainly true that there are some good examples, like [REC], Undocumented, and TrollHunter, but most of the time it doesn’t actually help the story (which is usually weak to start with) and only serves to introduce plot holes. Chronicle is the latest entry in the string of found footage titles, and while it’s a good movie, the found footage element is yet again unnecessary and detracting.

Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is a high school student with a pretty crappy life. His mother is bedridden and near death. His father had been a fireman before he got into an accident and retired on disability insurance, but now spends most of his time drunk and violently taking out his frustrations on Andrew. It’s gotten bad enough that he bought a video camera and has decided to begin filming his entire life. This didn’t do much to help his social status at school, where he was already something of an outcast, and his constant filming is yet another excuse for him to get bullied.

Andrew’s cousin Matt (Alex Russell) is friends with star athlete and class presidential candidate Steve (Michael B. Jordan), and they enlist Andrew (or more accurately, the video camera that comes with him) to go with them to investigate a weird hole they found in the ground near a party. When they investigate, they find what appears to be some kind of alien craft, and after this one brief encounter with it, they discover that they have acquired some kind of telekinetic powers. They can manipulate things using only their minds, and while their first attempts are typical high school pranks, they quickly move beyond that and start to exploit their powers for other purposes.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the direction that the film took. While it had a brief (but still fun) stint in Zapped! territory (in which Scott Baio develops telekinetic powers, but primarily uses them to manipulate women’s clothing), I was glad to see it progress into more significant and intellectually stimulating uses. It’s most definitely not a run-of-the-mill sci-fi thriller, and I would not have predicted its ultimate direction from its trailer.

While the story is something that I quite enjoyed, I did find the “found footage” aspect of it to be somewhat annoying and completely unnecessary. I think that the story could have been told just as effectively from a completely third-person perspective, and without the need for them to keep inventing reasons for the characters to have cameras, and coming up with ways to get interesting shots from those cameras. There were cases in which it seemed unnatural to have a camera capturing the action, and some of what was recorded would very likely not have been accessible to whatever unseen editor put together all of the footage to create what we ultimately got to see as the movie.

Although the found footage element was ultimately detrimental to the film, the quality of the story and the acting make it possible to overlook those problems. We are then left with a very decent film, and one that I expect would be entertaining to teens and adults alike.

Hammer Film Productions is a British company with decades of experience creating films, especially horror and monster movies, like The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Quatermass Xperiment. They were something of a powerhouse through the mid 1980s, but then went mostly dark until 2010 with Let Me In, the unnecessary remake of the excellent Swedish Let the Right One In, and followed that up with several less well-known releases in 2011. With The Woman in Black, they’re back in the mainstream with a pretty decent thriller.

Set in 1920s Britain, the film focuses on Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe), a man whose work for a local law firm has been suffering since his wife died giving birth to their son Joseph a few years ago. His boss has had enough and is giving him just one more chance to keep his job. The firm has been put in charge of the remote estate of a recently-deceased woman, and the man who had been assigned to oversee the execution of the will had completely dropped the ball. Arthur must travel to the isolated and eerily-named Eel Marsh to sort through all her papers and ensure that the estate is handled according to her will.

On the train to the nearest town, Arthur meets an exceptionally nice man who introduces himself as Samuel Daily (played by Ciarán Hinds) and offers to give him a ride from the train station to his hotel, so he doesn’t have to make the long walk in the rain, and invites Arthur to dine with him and his wife Elizabeth the next evening. But upon arriving at the hotel, Arthur learns that not all of the townspeople are as nice as Sam, and he gets the distinct impression that he’s not welcome. They’d very much appreciate it if he just got right back on the train and went home to London. Of course he declines, but perhaps it would have been better for everybody if he had listened.

The Woman in Black may not be the greatest horror film of the year (or even of the weekend, which also includes the excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin and the very good The Innkeepers), but it’s still pretty good. Most of the scares are of the cheap variety, in the form of sudden movement punctuated by loud music, but they work fairly well, and they’re interspersed with enough of the “something slowly moving in the background” variety that you have to pay fairly close attention, so the jumps are even more startling.

I am a little disappointed by the motivation for the horror in the film. It’s a pretty common premise, with a spirit hanging around because something is left unfinished, but it’s vastly less honorable and more unprovoked than similar stories from other films. Whereas you often have the ability to develop a measure of sympathy for the spirit, I did not get that at all in this case, and the end was much less satisfying as a result.

Even with its faults, The Woman in Black is a much better horror movie than the majority of what gets pumped out, and I went in with fairly low expectations, which allowed me to be pleasantly surprised. It’s far from perfect, but it may be worth checking out if you’re into this kind of thing, and it gives hope for a Hammer resurgence.

Postpartum depression is a fairly common occurrence in new mothers as their body adjusts to the massive hormonal changes in addition to other factors like lack of sleep and a complete upheaval of life as they previously knew it. Often this happens within a couple of months of childbirth, but for Eva Khatchadourian (played by Tilda Swinton), it came on within minutes of delivering Kevin (played at various ages by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell, and finally Ezra Miller). That feeling of disconnectedness didn’t subside as Kevin began to grow, however, because he was far from a normal child, especially around her. Although doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, Kevin initially refused to speak or otherwise acknowledge Eva in any way, and he continued to wear diapers (and make use of them) far beyond the age at which he should have been able to exhibit control over his bodily functions. To add insult to injury, though, he was a real daddy’s boy, and was completely normal and even apparently happy around his father Franklin (John C. Reilly).

When we jump ahead in time to a point when Kevin is in his late teens, we can tell that something is seriously wrong, although we can only guess at what that is. The townspeople seem to genuinely hate Eva and have taken to quite bold measures to express their feelings. Her house and car are vandalized with red paint. People stare and glare in public, some avoiding her, some making their detestation known in other means. And she, clearly unhappy, takes it in stride as if it’s her lot in life and their outrage fully justified.

The story behind We Need to Talk About Kevin is revealed in a very nonlinear fashion, with parallel storylines from past and present interspersed and occasionally cut with other out-of-sequence peeks into the lives of those involved. This all helps to build tension, allowing the audience to know that the story is progressing toward something truly awful while simultaneously preventing us from knowing exactly what that is. It leads to confusion and suspense, keeping the audience on edge and prepared for just about anything, except that we’re really not quite prepared for everything.

Film history is littered with evil children, like Damien from The Omen, Christine from The Bad Seed, Michael Myers from Halloween, and all the kids from The Devil Times Five. But the really creepy ones are those who are evil for no apparent reason, and Kevin falls in extremely well there. All the actors who played Kevin were very effective, but Ezra Miller stands out in both appearance and behavior. His black hair, pale face, and bright lips really accentuate his creepy expressions that get the point across with only the slightest hint of emotion. It’s not at all hard to believe that he’s capable of anything, and it doesn’t hurt that this is also well established by what we see in younger versions portrayed by younger actors.

Tilda Swinton also gave an inspired performance, as is usually the case, and it was the perfect compliment to the creepiness exhibited by her character’s son. It’s inconceivable that neither Swinton nor Miller nor anything else in the film were nominated for Oscars, although it has its share of nominations and wins for other kinds of awards. John C. Reilly gave a good enough performance in his role, but it wasn’t a particularly significant character in the grand scheme of things, so it probably won’t be the topic of much conversation.

My primary complaint with the movie lies in its very last scene, which I feel softens the final tone and humanizes Kevin to the film’s detriment. I like the beginning of that scene, but I think that if it had been edited so that it ended a few seconds earlier, then it would have been much more powerful. This probably wouldn’t have been as much an issue if it hadn’t been the last thing in the movie, and therefore is likely to be stuck in your mind as you walk out of the theater. It’s a shame we were left with “it’s a great movie, except” instead of just “it’s a great movie”, but given everything else in the film, that’s easily forgiven.

Sometimes all that it takes to convince me to watch a movie is to see that it’s playing at an Alamo Drafthouse theater. That was the case with Dragonslayer, although it didn’t hurt that it was sandwiched between a couple of other movies that I wanted to see. I bought the ticket without reading the description, assuming it to be the 1981 Peter MacNichol film of the same name. When I looked more closely and saw it to be a new skating documentary, I was still hopeful because even I don’t like skating, the film won an award for best documentary at the 2011 SxSW film festival. I can only assume it must not have had much competition.

The documentary focuses on Josh Sandoval, better known as Skreech. He’s a professional skateboarder (at least to the extent that he has sponsors who pay for some of his stuff), but it seems like a lot more of his income is from selling marijuana than skating prizes. He’s always broke and spends what little he has on drinking and drugs, but he lives a meager life and leeches as much as possible off his friends. He’s got a baby that he has largely abandoned, providing no financial support and rarely any contact, and he’s got a young girlfriend who seemed like she had a promising future before she met him.

Skreech travels a lot, and although many of the places he goes have skate parks, he often ends up skating in empty swimming pools. The down economy helps with that, since there are a number of uninhabited homes with private pools, and he even enlists the help of friends with computers to fire up Google Maps in order to scope out possible locations. Skating in swimming pools offers a number of challenges that skate parks don’t, primarily in the form of obstacles that need to be avoided. The sides are littered with jets and filters, there are often steps in the corner, and sometimes tiles make for an uneven surface. It’s frequently necessary to sop up small amounts of standing rainwater, and sometimes they have to avoid angry owners and neighbors.

I suppose that all of these challenges can perhaps account for the generally unimpressive nature of the skating. What we see in the movie is certainly not on par with what you’ll find in The X Games, and there are no 360s or handstands or grindy thingies on display here (even when they happen to be skating in a park instead of a pool). Mostly, they skate down one side and up the other, then back again. It’s probably vastly better than I could do (even after any amount of practice), but it’s pretty unimpressive when compared with what I had been expecting.

There’s also surprisingly less skating in the movie than I had expected. Much more of the time is spent watching Skreech’s uneventful life play out, watching him get drunk and/or high, complaining about the quality of his life, or hanging out with friends. He reveals in a sad, ripped-from-a-sitcom moment that the documentarians are there at his request, so we can add extreme (and exceedingly unwarranted) vanity to his long list of character flaws.

In many ways, Dragonslayer is a lot like Total Badass. Both tell the life stories of truly worthless and despicable people, but as the prevalence of reality television has shown, there are apparently a lot of worthless and despicable people in the world who like watching that sort of thing.

Liam Neeson has become the one of the go-to guys for action films, with his roles in Batman Begins and Taken bringing him to broad public attention in this regard. He was about the only good part of The A-Team movie, and if he is in Battleship then perhaps it won’t be as stupid as it sounds in premise. I’d heard good things from the early screening of The Grey at BNAT, and from press screenings, but I tried to go in with cautious optimism to not have my hopes up too high.

Neeson plays John Ottaway, a hunter working for an oil company in the hostile Alaskan wilderness. Wolves are a very real threat for oil workers, and when they’re hungry or threatened, then they’re not shy about approaching people, so it’s John’s job to take them out before someone gets mauled or eaten. He’s very good at his job, and his skills come in handy pretty often.

When a group of men, including Ottaway, get some time off, they board a plane headed for Anchorage. But when the plane encounters some particularly nasty weather, it’s struck by harsh turbulence that is eventually just too much for the small craft. The plane goes down, and many aboard die in the crash or shortly thereafter from injuries sustained in the crash, with the handful of survivors still in mortal danger of cold exposure. And then the wolves show up.

The film has an odd pacing that really works for it, with slow stretches abruptly interrupted by intense action. Sometimes you see what’s coming, but even then it often doesn’t diminish its effect. Neeson’s character remains relatively calm and level-headed, but he’s surrounded by some immensely unpleasant and irrational people which alternate between funny and annoying, although it never gets to the point of making the film hard to watch.

I only have a couple of minor complaints about the film. The first is that, while the film is only lightly scored, there is at least one place in which I felt that a score was used when it would have been better without music so that only the natural sounds of the environment were audible. The music didn’t seem to tip off what was about to happen, but I felt that it was sometimes unnecessary and potentially distracting. A second gripe is that it seemed there were a number of “let’s get philosophical around the campfire” scenes that seemed to adversely impact the film’s pacing and seemed a little out of place for the kinds of roughnecks doing the deep thinking. It’s certainly the case that facing your own mortality may cause a significant change in your behavior, but it doesn’t seem as likely for an idiot to suddenly turn into a scholar or a poet.

The Grey seems to be among the rare set of films that is well regarded by about everyone I know. There are certainly varying degrees of affection, but I haven’t talked to anyone who disliked it.

Albert Nobbs (the main character in a movie of the same name) has a pretty ironic name. In the United Kingdom, the word “nob” is slang for penis, but Albert doesn’t have one. That’s because he’s not really a “he” at all, even if he has lived that way for most of his life. Albert (or whatever her name was as a child) was abandoned as a baby and had been adopted by Mrs. Nobbs. It was a good, if modest, upbringing and Albert lived as a girl (which she was) until Mrs. Nobbs died leaving Albert alone again. Needing a way to support herself, she saw an advertisement for a butler and was able to get the job while posing as a young man. The career stuck, and Albert would continue to masquerade as a man even switching employers several times. In his current job, Albert (played by Glenn Close) buttles in an upscale Dublin inn catering to well-to-do patrons who are often quite rude and self-important but nevertheless seem to like Albert. He’s been saving his tips for years and has built up a decent nest egg, but doesn’t really have anything to spend it on.

One day, the inn’s owner Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins) hires Hubert Page to paint some of the rooms. It’s going to be a multi-day job, and Mrs. Baker offers to let Hubert stay at the inn until it’s done. Unfortunately, all the rooms are taken so she has Hubert share Albert’s room. Albert is understandably nervous about having his cover blown, but is completely shocked to learn that Hubert (played by Janet McTeer) shares exactly the same secret, and in fact is in even deeper cover because s/he has a wife, Cathleen (who is actually a woman, played by Bronagh Gallagher) at home. Albert is intrigued by this possibility, and has his eye on Helen (Mia Wasikowska) who works as one of the maids at the inn.

Albert Nobbs is certainly not the first gender-bending movie, although it is the first I’ve seen to take place as a period piece. It’s also by far the least convincing performance of any in this class of films. At no point in the film does Glenn Close look anything like a man, and in fact the first time I saw the trailer I didn’t realize she was supposed to be playing a man until about halfway through. Janet McTeer’s disguise wasn’t much better, and it eliminates any possibility of surprise on the part of the audience when Albert learns Hubert’s secret. It’s certainly not in the same league as Boys Don’t Cry or even Just One of the Guys, but perhaps it’s about as convincing as Victor/Victoria (in which Julie Andrews plays a cross-dressing man).

Even if we ignore the unconvincing portrayals, it’s still a very disappointing movie. There are other kinds of believability issues, like why Albert continued to live as a man into his adult years after changing jobs, and the extremely unlikely nature of how Albert and Hubert met each other. It’s also incredibly boring, even compared with other period films, and the end is very unsatisfying. I’m not sure if it’s a movie by idiots or for idiots, but it’s definitely not for me.

There are a lot of good heist movies that make effective use of misdirection to pull off a job while everyone is looking the other way. There are a lot more not-so-good heist movies that also use the same trick. Man on a Ledge is one of the latter.

It starts off innocent enough. Nick Cassidy (played by Sam Worthington) checks himself into a nice, tall hotel early one morning, orders himself a big breakfast from room service, and then calmly steps out the window and onto the ledge many stories above the busy street below. Before too long, someone sees him, and the police are called in. But Nick is no stranger to the police, since he used to be an officer himself, but more recently he’s been on the other side of the law. While Nick was moonlighting as a security escort for the ultra-rich David Englander (Ed Harris), the $40 million diamond they were transporting went missing. Englander got an insurance check for $40 million, and Nick got 25 years in prison.

When his father died, Nick was allowed to attend the funeral, albeit in the company of a couple of armed police officers keeping a close eye on him. But Nick didn’t let the opportunity go to waste, and he managed to escape and stay out of sight until he was spotted on that ledge outside of his hotel about a month later. However, his time outdoors wasn’t as much about killing himself or getting some fresh air as it was about distracting the police (including officers played by Elizabeth Banks, Edward Burns, and Titus Welliver) while his brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and brother’s girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) broke into Englander’s high-rise across the street.

Although I was intrigued by the idea behind it, I was really put off by how thoroughly the film turned out to be. It spent most of its time ripping off The Negotiator, in which Samuel L. Jackson plays a police officer who was accused of stealing and must commit a crime and deal with dirty cops in an attempt to try to clear his name. But it does occasionally take a break from that to steal from Die Hard (moving through a high-rise using the elevator shaft and ventilation ducts, stopping a big industrial fan to crawl through, and introducing a sleazy reporter that became too involved with the story) and a little from Mission: Impossible (dangling by a rope from the ceiling to avoid setting off pressure sensors on the floor of a secure room, and the need to fake out temperature sensors). And even when it wasn’t taking from some other much better movie, it was still rather obvious and uninspired. I was disappointed to see Ed Harris in a shockingly one-dimensional role, but I’m guessing that the fault lies more with the writing than the acting.

There are still things to enjoy about the movie. There’s plenty of ridiculousness, and it’s frequently the kind of bad that can be fun to watch. It is particularly ludicrous in its need to tie up every single loose end, and even goes out of its way to address things that didn’t need any further attention. Genesis Rodriguez is rather voluptuous and is often attired in a way that accentuates that, and Elizabeth Banks isn’t too shabby either. And of course you can always play “spot the plagiarism” to help pass the time.

This year’s Academy Awards nominations are really bizarre. I absolutely loved The Artist and Midnight in Paris. I really liked The Descendants, The Help, Moneyball, and The Tree of Life. I was largely indifferent to Hugo, and didn’t like War Horse, but there was enough buzz around them that I wasn’t surprised by their nominations (even if I thought there were literally hundreds of better choices than either of them). But never in my wildest dreams did I expect Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to make the cut. I found its trailer to be absolutely repulsive, and I never heard anyone say anything even remotely complimentary about it. But apparently at least a handful of people consider it one of the greatest films of the year, so I felt compelled to see it at least once, and I really tried to go in with an open mind. It really is awful.

The film stars Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell, the kind of kid who probably gets beat up a lot, but not nearly as much as he deserves. He is very selfish and disrespectful, at least when he’s not oblivious to the world around him. He’s afraid of everything, from bridges and elevators to old people and other kids, and even for some unexplained reason (except that it’s convenient to the plot) playground swing sets. And that was before his father, Thomas (Tom Hanks), died in the one of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11. Oskar had been extremely close to his father and they were always going on adventures and quests together, apparently giving his mom, Linda (Sandra Bullock) the cold shoulder. When Thomas was killed, Oskar dug deep and became even more unbearable than he had already been. He refused to take public transportation and wouldn’t go anywhere without a tambourine that he would shake any time he felt nervous or uncomfortable, which was all the time.

Even a year after Thomas had died, his clothes were still hanging in the closet, with Linda unwilling and/or unable to get rid of them and Oskar hesitant to go near them. But one day he did, and while rooting around the top of the closet he knocked over a vase, shattering it on the floor. Inside that vase was a small brown envelope with only the word “Black” on it, and a key inside. Just like the treasure hunts he and his father used to have, Oskar took it upon himself to figure out what the key was for. It was something he intended to do alone, lying to his mother about where he was going and what he was doing, but eventually an old man (Max von Sydow) renting a room from his grandmother began tagging along.

While there is far less “policemen and firefighters are wonderful” pandering than I had feared there might be, there was nevertheless a revolting amount of fear mongering, made all the more unpleasant by being buried in Oskar’s neuroses. The kid won’t stop whining and refuses to see the world in any way other than how it affects him. In his quest to discover the key’s purpose, Oskar is downright rude to and intrusive upon others, and his mother simply lets it happen.

The only thing satisfying about the film’s conclusion is that it did, in fact, end. At over two hours, it took far too long for the end to arrive, and even then it leaves a number of story lines unresolved. I am thoroughly baffled that anyone would consider it to be a passable film, let alone anywhere near the nine best of the hundreds of the year’s theatrical releases.

I think that boxing is one of the dumbest sports in the world, and wrestling is about at the same IQ level but has the added detraction of being largely staged and injected with stupid story lines and unnecessary drama. That dislike has also spilled into martial arts, although there are exceptions (for example, I enjoy watching martial artists demonstrate their board/cement/baseball bat breaking abilities, and I often love karate and kung fu movies). Since I don’t follow MMA, I wasn’t familiar with Gina Carano, and I was pleasantly surprised to find her to be much more pleasantly proportioned than many female fighters, and yet no less capable.

In the film, Carano plays Mallory, who works for a private company that contracts to the U.S. government for all kinds of nasty top-secret jobs that no one else wants or is qualified to take. She had recently been called to Barcelona on a hostage rescue mission, and then no sooner had she returned home than she was out again to Dublin as a favor to British MI6. But things went all kinds of crazy on that job, and she found herself on the wrong side of the law and a target of the police and other government contractors. To clear her name, she’s got to stay alive, outwitting or outfighting those coming after her, while she tries to figure out who’s got it in for her.

I prefer going into movies knowing as little about them as possible, so Haywire had a lot of surprises in store for me. The overwhelming impression that I’d gotten from others was that it is wall-to-wall action, but I didn’t find that to be the case. There are lots of fight scenes, and most of them are pretty amazing, but there’s also quite a bit more downtime and a more intricate plot than I had expected. When Carano is fighting, it’s incredible. She also makes for impressive eye candy, and the scenes in which she’s both gorgeous and deadly are by themselves worth the price of admission. But acting is definitely not her strong suit, and her delivery of dialogue is much less convincing than her delivery of kicks and punches.

Fortunately, Carano isn’t required to carry the acting load on her own. Hers was the only name I’d heard in connection with the film, but I was quite surprised to learn of the extensive, well-credentialed supporting cast which included the likes of Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, and Channing Tatum. For the most part, they played their parts well, and when something didn’t work it was often more the fault of the weak screenplay (written by Lem Dobbs, who doesn’t have any other credited films in the last decade) than the actors inhabiting it.

I think that ultimately the film tries to be too smart for its own good. The best parts were the dumb action sequences, and the weakest were those that got bogged down with plot and dialogue. It’s a fun movie, but I think it would have been a lot better with a little less conversation and a little more action. Or maybe a lot more action.

Meryl Streep is an incredible actress and is superb at playing fictional characters, but she takes it to another level when portraying real people. She completely transformed her appearance when playing Julia Child in Julie & Julia, and she outdid herself once again as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. It’s a real shame that her talent was wasted on an otherwise disappointing film.

Margaret Thatcher (nee Roberts) was born into a relatively modest life. Her parents ran a grocery in a small town in which her father also served as mayor. She had to work hard for everything she got, and had the added difficulty of being a woman in a world in which the term “male-dominated” is a pretty significant understatement. And when she made it to the top of the British political system, she was faced with civil unrest, attacks on British territory, and the persistent threat of Soviet aggression. She was famous for sticking to her guns and refusing to compromise on important issues, and was willing to make tough decisions when the need arose. She held her nation together through tough times, and had a hand in the end of the Cold War.

You’d think that with such a resume, a biography would focus on her political accomplishments and struggles, and on the events that led her into that life. And yet The Iron Lady spends most of its time on a point in her life about two decades after stepping down as prime minister. Her husband Dennis (portrayed by Jim Broadbent) had been dead for about eight years, and since he died in 2003 then that would set the film in the year 2011. At this time, Thatcher is old and frail and often senile. She can still see and talk to her dead husband, tends to get confused when she’s around real people. What we do learn about the great accomplishments of her life comes in the form of flashbacks, often instigated by an only-in-her-mind exchange with Dennis.

I’m utterly shocked by the direction they chose to take the film. We only get momentary glimpses of the powerful, world-changing woman that she once was, interspersed among scenes showing her current state of failing mind and failing body. Meryl Streep was at the top of her game and her portrayal of Thatcher absolutely deserves the award victories and nominations she’s already received and those that are still to come. But I came away feeling cheated by their insistence on looking at the frailty and vulnerability of her current state rather than what she had once been. Someone who is only momentarily distracted might completely miss the fact that she helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union, but it’s made quite clear that Dennis couldn’t make toast without burning it, and couldn’t eat it without slathering it with butter.

To put it bluntly, the film borders on being offensive and embarrassing. I’m not saying that it doesn’t accurately portray her current state, but to so completely minimize her accomplishments and underscore her weakness does a disservice to both the Mrs. Thatcher and to the audience.