Winter On The Plains - - The Power Of The Dog (2021, UK, Color, 126 min) - - 17 January 2022

Not recommended. Tho' this ain't John Ford's kind of Western, it must be said: The Power Of The Dog is a visually stunning film and the acting, principally Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia), Jessie Plemens (The Irishman) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road), is mesmerizing. Even Benedict Cumberbatch (1917) gives a powerful performance . . . albeit as the strangest ‘cow-boy’ seen since Brando in The Missouri Breaks. But to what end, one might ask? There is almost nothing we learn about his tortured unpleasantness at the end of this overwrought film except that he may be a closeted gay man, castrating steers in Montana. Jane Campion (The Piano) directed and wrote The Power Of The Dog from Thomas Savage's 1967 novel . . . Savage, also a closeted gay man from Montana. Despite all this, there seems to be no generosity in this nasty, brutish and not so short story, a work of art but ugly in spirit.