Goodbye Christopher Robin is a unique film that somehow managed to slip under the radar in the plethora of last fall’s film releases. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a very good one that has lots to say about the writing process, not all of it good.

Author-poet-playwright A.A. (Alan) Milne returned from his service in World War I with undiagnosed and untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, then known as shell shock. Suffering from a severe case of writer’s block, he moves his wife, young son, and the son’s nanny from London to Sussex but is still having trouble writing when his wife goes off on one of her trips to London, threatening not to come back until he publishes something. At the same time the nanny goes on emergency leave to tend to her dying mother in London. Milne is forced to bond with his son who he takes on long walks in the woods where the boy’s imagination inspires him to write a poem about the boy and his stuffed animals come to life. He sends the poem to his wife as a treat for her and she, in turn, has the poem published. It becomes a literary sensation that demands a full fledge book which becomes Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. Both works usher in a world-wide phenomenon in which everyone wants to meet Milne and his son, the Christopher Robin of the books.

Although Christopher Robin was the son’s legal name, he was called Billy Moon from early childhood, Billy because that was the nickname his parents gave him and Moon because he couldn’t pronounce Milne. A.A. Milne convinced the boy that because he was Billy Moon in his private life, the Christopher Robin in the book was not him, but a character drawn to resemble him, not a concept that is easily understood by a young child. Billy was five when the first book was published.

Milne’s wife, Daphne, was a social butterfly who encouraged her husband to use the boy as a show pony in public appearances where he was adored by the public, but scorned by other boys, something his nanny understood and tried to fight against, but something that his parents were oblivious to. When he was eight, Billy observed his nanny stepping out with a neighbor and jumped to the conclusion that the nanny was going to marry and leave him. Voicing his concern to his parents, Daphne uses it as an excuse to accuse the nanny of betrayal and demand her resignation, but not before she breaks protocol and tells Alan and Daphne that what they are doing to Billy is wrong. On their next outing, Alan finally comes to the realization that the nanny was right and vows not to write another word about Winnie-the-Pooh, which remains a world-wide phenomenon anyway. In the meantime, Billy is sent to a series of boarding schools in which he is taunted and ridiculed by his fellow students until he is eighteen and enlists in the army at the outset of World War II.

Domhnall Gleeson gives a good performance as the tortured writer, but Margot Robbie is rather one-note as his dim bulb of a wife and mother. Wil Tilston as Billy aka Christopher Robin from 5 to 8 and Alex Lawther as the character at 18 are both excellent, but the film’s greatest asset is Kelly Macdonald as Olive, the nanny, known as Alice in the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

Macdonald has been good before, most notably in Gosford Park, No Country for Old Men, and TV’s Boardwalk Empire, but here she outdoes all her previous accomplishments. She shines in every scene as the nanny who is forced to keep her opinions to herself as her heart breaks watching her young charge being exploited until she can no longer keep silent. She has two additional scenes near the end of the film that it would help to have a box of tissues on hand for. Had the film been more successful, she might well have gotten greater year-end awards recognition than just a nomination from the British Independent Spirit Awards.

Goodbye Christopher Robin was directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn, Woman in Gold). It’s available on Blu-ray and standard DVD as are films about Winnie the Pooh now controlled by Disney.

Taking a closer look at post traumatic stress disorder, Thank You for Your Service, the new film from actor-writer Jason Hall (American Sniper), follows the true-life 2007 return to civilian life of three Iraq war veterans played by Miles Teller, Beulah Koale, and Joe Cole. Times have changed in the more than 70 years since William Wyler explored similar territory in the Oscar-winning post-World War II classic The Best Years of Our Lives, but problems relating to returning veterans have not improved. They have, in fact, gotten worse.

Cole, looking forward to his imminent wedding, returns to an empty house in which the electricity has been turned off. His fiancée has taken their daughter and emptied their joint bank account. He spends the next night partying with his two buddies and sleeping it off on Teller’s couch. The next morning, he goes to the bank where his fiancée is a teller and shoots himself in the head in front of her.

Koale, who returns to his pregnant wife (Keisha Castle-Hughes), suffers from memory loss and is in desperate need of assistance with which the Veteran’s Administration is unable to properly give him.

Teller, their platoon sergeant, is calm on the outside but a bundle of nerves on the inside. Although his wife (Haley Bennett) does her best to try and break through, he is haunted by the injuries to one of his men and the death of his superior officer who took his place on the mission in which he died. It is only when that man’s widow (Amy Schumer) forgives him that he can forgive himself.

It’s powerful stuff and overall a better film than American Sniper which was a box-office phenomenon while this one sadly flopped.

Thank You for Your Service is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Yorgos Lanthimos was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for 2016’s The Lobster. The fantasy film starring Colin Farrell was difficult for me to sit through the first time but improved with subsequent viewings. I’m not sure I will ever want to sit through his follow-up film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, also starring Colin Farrell, ever again. This one’s a horror film, a very bleak one in which Farrell plays a heart surgeon who is stalked by the teenaged son of a man who died on Farrell’s operating table. The gist of the story is that he wants Farrell to experience the same level of loss by killing a member of his own family, either his wife (Nicole Kidman), his fourteen-year-old daughter, or his twelve-year old son or all three will die from a psychosomatic illness that will paralyze them from the waist down, kill their appetite, and signal the end when blood flows out of their eyes. The film reaches a low level of contempt for its audience when Kidman suggests that Farrell kill one of the children, rather than her, because he and she are young and healthy enough to have a replacement child. It can only go downhill from there and it does.

If you though Kidman’s torture of Farrell in The Beguiled was mean, it was kid’s stuff compared to what happens when the situation is reversed.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Warner Archive’s stunning Blu-ray upgrade of 1959’s The Hanging Tree is a welcome addition to anyone’s library. Gary Cooper as the doctor with a past, Ben Piazza as his indentured servant, and Maria Schell as the near-dead woman they nurse back to life during the Montana gold rush are superb, while Karl Malden and George C. Scott are appropriately sleazy as the film’s principal villains. It remains one of the best, if lesser known, westerns of the 1950s.

This week’s new releases include Last Flag Flying and Westfront 1918.