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If you aren’t adept at social networking, at understanding the working of such sites as Facebook and Twitter, this missing persons mystery may be just a little too mysterious for you.  John Cho (Star Trek, Harold and Kumar) is David Kim, a dad who finds that his 16 year-old daughter Margo (newcomer Michelle La) is missing, and the clues may be on her computer and wireless devices.  The movie was shot in just 13 days, but it took two years to edit, as most of it, like the movie “Unfriended” takes place on the screens of various devices. Debra Messing (Grace on “Will and Grace”) is Detective Vick, assigned to the case, in a story that jumps back and forth in time to help us understand Margot’s personality, and perhaps what motivated her to disappear.  David lost his wife, Margot’s mother, to lymphoma two years earlier, and since that time he and his daughter have become more and more distant. As he begins his follow-up after she fails to return from a friend’s overnighter, he learns that she has been up to many things beyond his understanding – although she went for her piano lessons faithfully, for example, David finds, from her piano instructor, that she had cancelled the lessons six months earlier.  Further investigation shows that she has been using the money for payment on a strange website. The movie got excellent reviews, did well at the box office, and has more twists and turns than yu can imagine. An excellent thriller. Rated 14A. 

The Little Stranger:

This Gothic horror-thriller is based on the best-selling novel of the same name, and tells the story of a country doctor in England, circa 1947, who is summoned to a once grand mansion, now fallen into disrepair.  He is asked to treat a child in the home, but soon, he learns that all is not as it seems, and horror lurks behind each corner. A story of the British class system, of things that go bump in the night, and of unrequited love plays out as Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) works in the house that we learn he knew as a boy.  His mother was a maid there, and he was allowed to accompany her on occasion. Now owned by a terribly disfigured WWII pilot, burned terribly in a wartime plane crash (Will Poulter), it is clear that something is terribly wrong with the house, with the family, and with the child the doctor is asked to treat. The child insists that something evil lurks in the shadows, and that it hates him. The doctor feels that the boy is mentally unsound. The doctor should have listened to the boy! Also stars Charlotte Rampling.  Rated 14A. 

 The Miseducation of Cameron Post:

 One of two movies released this year about treatment centres specializing in re-educating gay teens so they may take the straight path (the other is “Boy Erased”), this thoughtful film, based on a best-selling novel, is largely fact-based.  Chloe Grace Moritz is the title character, forced by her conservative aunt to undergo LGBTQ conversion therapy after being caught in a compromising position with another girl. The techniques and practices depicted in the movie are real, and it appears to be something out of the Spanish Inquisition in terms of forcing “confessions” out of young people for something that the therapists believe is a choice rather than a genetically-coded direction.  Group therapy sessions, and a number of interventions by well-meaning, but unqualified Christians leaves those in the program sometimes feeling they would be better off dead. A somewhat grim story that has its positive moments. Rated 14A.

The Holiday Calendar (2018):

Political correctness rears its head in the title of this Netflix original movie which was produced under the title "The Christmas Calendar."  A romance starring Kat Graham (The Vampire Diaries), we follow the challenges of a gifted photographer, Abby Sutton (Graham) who, despite her talent, can't get her business to the place where it pays the bills.  She inherits an advent calendar which, she believes may have a supernatural ability to foretell the future .. will it make her luckier at business ... or more lucky at love?  Ron Cephus Jones (This is Us) co-stars.  Rated PG.

The Other Side of the Wind (2018):

Orson Welles spent a good part of the 1970s shooting this film-within-a-film in which John Huston stars as an old-Hollywood movie director who is trying to revitalize his career by making a flashy, splashy movie unlike anything ever before seen.  When Welles died in 1985, the film remained unfinished, and actor-director Peter Bogdanovich, who has a part in the film, vowed, in the early 2000s, to raise $2 million to finish it.  That didn't happen, but in  2017 Netflix bought the rights to the movie and completed it.  Dennis Hopper and Edmond O'Brien also star.  Rated PG.