2017 SLEEPERS
                                                               Part 6

Are you up for a sixth helping of 2017 sleepers? Well, here they are anyway. There’s some gold in these hills!
I will admit to being absolutely smitten with Charles Dickens. The Man Who Invented Christmas is a fictionalized account of how he came to write A Christmas Carol. Almost everyone is at least familiar with the basic outline of the story. Each set-piece in the film shows how it could have happened that he wrote this scene. Little-known Dan Stevens is Dickens. Miserly, miserable Ebenezer Scrooge is brilliantly portrayed by the unmatchable Christopher Plummer. 
Victoria And Abdul is about the unlikely but true story of how the queen became fast friends with an Indian servant. Surrounded by sycophants and ungrateful children (9 of them, waiting for her to die), the queen is really lonely. Enter a handsome Indian sent to England to present the monarch with a commemorative coin. Soon they are fast friends and he is teaching her Urdu and Hindi as well as cultural matters. Her court is outraged. Too bad, she’s still the queen! This movie is worth watching for Judi Dench’s performance alone, but it’s an interesting story of an interlude no one would have predicted.
A physician at a not-for-profit clinic in Belgium is ready to go home after a long, hard day when the buzzer from the street goes off. She considers, looks through the peephole and sees a young woman outside. Then she decides against opening the door and goes home. The next day she matches up the picture on the intercom with that of a murdered girl in the newspaper. Stricken with guilt, she wants to find out the identity of the girl and what happened to her. And that is the plot line of the very intriguing The Unknown Girl. The story takes twists and turns and keeps your interest to the end. The doctor is played by Adele Haenel, well-known in France but not here. 
He was known for playing hangdog losers in a host of movie but Harry Dean Stanton’s crowning effort is displayed in last year’s Lucky. The movie begins with a long shot of Lucky’s surroundings- desert sand and cactus, and a tortoise named President Roosevelt. Lucky hits the bars and diners downtown and just sits and talks a lot. His face looks carved from stone through which lots of water has run,  and he moves about like the tortoise. It is a bravura performance, admittedly not to all tastes. But it is one of stellar acting performances of the past few years. 
I’ll end this with another outstanding performance, this one by an actor who started his movie life as a pretty-boy star. Richard Gere was born to play Norman. I don’t think anyone else could pull this off. He is a hustler, down on his luck, looking for the main chance. He is whoever he needs to be at any particular moment. He’s not exactly likeable, but he is complicated and somehow we relate to him. 
All of the films in this article are available on DVD. The first two are fine for all audiences. The rest are for adults.