Miss Bala:

Katherine Hardwicke (Twilight) directed this remake of a Mexican movie of the same title, in which a woman named Gloria (Gina Rodriguez, star of TV's Jane the Virgin) finds herself drawn into the world of cross-border crime.  A Los Angelino, Gloria heads to Tijajuana on the US/Mexican border, a city in which she once lived as a young girl, but she is now a total American.  She is a makeup artist and is headed back to her old home town to help her childhood friend Suzu who is in the Miss Baja California contest.  In a nightclub together,  a gang shootout occurs, the two young women get separated, and Gloria is abducted by a Mexican gang.  The end game here is for Gloria to find her friend and get back to safety, but the gangsters see a far better use for their captive with her American passport.  "Do us one little favour, and we'll see that your friend is found," she is told.  The favour involves running cash across the border, and then a load of guns back the other way.  The plot twists and turns as each time Gloria seems to be moving towards her objective, another faction has her, and is looking for just one favour.  Great tension, and to director Hardwicke's credit, the movie remains 14A with minimal language, no nudity or sex, and a strong story that keeps us on edge right until the final scenes.  Ismael Cruz Cordova (Mary Queen of Scots) is her Mexican captor in an interesting role that makes him, at times, seem almost like a good guy.  "Bala" is a Spanish word meaning "bullet," so the movie's title is "Miss Bullet."  Rated 14A. 

Serenity:

Matthew MacConaughey stars as Baker Dill, a charter boat captain on a tropical island where tourists come for the tuna fishing, the sword fishing, and the excitement of being on the water.  We learn in short order that he is a man with a past that he would like to forget, that he is an Afghan War vet, and that he has an ex-wife and a young son.  The movie reminded me, in the early going, of Cape Fear, a dark thriller with no real good guys, and a lot of mystery surrounding each character.  That focus shifted as the story moved along and Anne Hathaway's character, Dill's ex-wife Karen, shows up with a proposition - take my abusive husband out fishing, and feed him to the sharks.  For this she will pay the financially struggling Dill $10 million in cash.  She can't divorce her wealthy, but oh-so-evil husband (Jason Clarke) because a prenup would leave her penniless ... but if he should die, different story.  That's the set up ... it's a morality tale of sorts as to whether Dill, whose boat is about to be foreclosed on by the bank, will take a life to change his own life ... or if he will listen to his long-suffering First Mate Duke (Djimon Hounsou) who begs  him to take the path of right, not the path of wrong.  Scripted and directed by Stephen Knight (The Girl in the Spider's Web), the story takes an unexpected turn, then turns again, and yet again ... to say more might give away key plot points, and I won't offer spoilers here, Filmed in Mauritius, the early scenes offer up Dill, Captain Ahab-style, chasing a gigantic tuna that he has now hooked four times, but has never landed, which leads us to believe that this is the story's end-game - catch the tuna, and it's game over.  But the rules keep changing, and we aren't certain at times just what the game really is.  I found this interesting, unusual, and somewhat satisfying ... it has a lot of bad language and a number of sex scenes ... as well as the biggest tuna you are ever likely to encounter.  Rated 14A in Alberta / BC, R in the US.

Arctic:

Mads Mikkelsen stars as the central character in this survival film that, unfortunately, goes on too long, doesn’t really end appropriately, and offers little in the way of information as to what really happened in the Arctic plane crash that left just one survivor … until a rescue helicopter goes down, leaving another survivor – sort of.  She is a nurse, she is unconscious, and Mikkelsen’s character, named Overgard, realizes, after several days, that the preferred tactic, which is to stay with the aircraft, isn’t going to work, as nothing has happened, the young woman who is unnamed, is critical, and waiting rather than striking out across the white wasteland seems the only choice, which is a brutal one.  Filmed in Iceland, the movie has almost no dialogue, and we see Overgard, in his bid to save the young woman and himself, run into danger after danger, and challenge after challenge. It’s not a true story, so it doesn’t even have that aspect to drive it. Rated 14A.

Wonder Woman (2017):

Director Patty Jenkins has done a masterful job with this origins story in which Gal Gadot stars as perhaps the greatest superhero of all time, and certainly the most influential female one.  Chris Pine plays Steve Trevor, a WWI pilot who crashes his plane on the all-but-invisible island, home of the Amazons.  Diana, daughter of the Queen of the Amazons, saves him ... and in her first travels outside the boundaries of the protected isle, against her mother's wishes, she takes up her weapons to fight in the war ... and she is in for a very big surprise, as the outside world is much more wicked and evil than anything she could have imagined.  Rated 14A.

Little Women (1994):

Keeping with the theme of strong women, another female director, Gillian Armstrong of Australia, wanted so much to capture the look and the feel of the March sisters growing up in post-Civil War America, that she recreated the house in which author Louisa May Alcott lived - the place where she both wrote, and set her story - so that what we see on screen is the closest approximation possible to the actual setting.  This was Clare Danes movie debut, and also stars Winona Ryder and Christian Bale.  Rated PG.