Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

That Thing You Do!

Tom Hanks’ big screen directorial debut is that of an assured filmmaker who’s worked with some major talents throughout his career. That Thing You Do! is an entertaining glimpse into the rise and flame-out of a small garage band in the pop-fueled days following the success of The Beatles.

Starring an interesting, talented group of young stars (and a couple future celebrities), Hanks takes his first screenwriting effort and turns it into a fascinating exploration of group band dynamics, ego and talent that brims with wit, experience and homage. Superbly researched, the film paints its protagonist (Tom Evertt Scott) as a jazz aficionado whose affinity for the drums leads him to sit in for a broken arm, turning a ballad into a popular hit that takes the from playing a small talent show to a national stage where their record steadily climbs the charts.

The actors have moments of weakness, but as a whole this is an amazingly talented group of kids. That only two of them would become true stars (Liv Tyler as the band’s feminine backbone and Charlize Theron in a bit part as Scott’s character’s original girlfriend) is a disappointing turn of events. For a film about rivalry, recriminations and the allure of success, it’s a sweet, charming, humorous look at how far people are willing to go for success and how difficult it is to attain while maintaining the purity of your true self.

Lone Star

In spite of an impressive career starting in 1979, writer-director John Sayles found his greatest successes in the 1990’s as writer and director of two films, Passion Fish starring Angela Bassett and Mary McDonnell and this film starring Chris Cooper as the son of a famed lawman (played in flashback by Matthew McConaughey) who can’t overcome his father’s legacy or the disappearance of the man his father replaced, a corrupt sheriff played by Kris Kristofferson.

Sayles’ winding script sets up an ideological battle between the murderous and loathsome sheriff Charlie Wade (Kristofferson) and the gentler, more accommodating, but still corrupt Buddy Deeds (McConaughey). The screenplay also looks into the lives of those who’ve grown up in the shadows of the town’s great men, including Cooper’s honest cop Sam Deeds and Otis (Ron Canada), the son of a noted black restauranteur, who must contend with his regimented son Del (Joe Morton) who has placed a heavy burden on his own son Chet (Eddie Robinson).

This multi-faceted murder mystery drama places an emphasis on character, situation and history, exploring race relations, corruption and historical relevance in the face of new threats to stability and safety. While the no-nonsense past is replaced by a more subtle corruption, little has changed in the small town on the Texas-Mexico border. The fascinating characters are propped up by a brilliant and unsurprising mystery and some subtle directorial flare that works so incredibly well you wonder why Sayles wasn’t a bigger name than he is today.

The Purge: Anarchy

Last year, a brilliant concept played out in a locked-house horror drama called The Purge. Strapped with a small budget, writer-director James DeManaco was left to leverage his clever premise with a film of small scope that left audience’s disappointed, but had a great deal to say about class warfare in the United States.

The Purge: Anarchy provides DeManaco with a much larger budget, which enables him to take his story out into the streets of the city where rampant savagery provides a gruesome background for a story of survival. In the near future, this film is set in 2023, a group of politicians has been elected known as the Founding Fathers and they’ve declared an annual holiday where all crime is legal, including murder. Emergency services are suspended and everyone must fight for themselves. Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo) has a plan to kill the man who, while drinking and driving, killed his young son and escaped on a technicality. Prepared to go all the way, Leo is caught in other crossfire when he decides to save the plucky mother-daughter pair that are about to be gunned down by a gatling-gun-operating maniac whose origins and purpose become a central focus of the film’s story.

There are five intertwining stories in the film and all of them are handled adeptly by DeManaco who seems certain that audiences will respond better to the dire peril of five survivors hoping to make it through the night alive. While the first film had to meld a complex socio-political story into its framework, The Purge: Anarchy has more room to maneuver and presents a more bountiful exploration of its subject, making it a more assured film than its predecessor. Both films have their problems and there are some weak characterizations in this sequel, but ultimately anyone fascinated by this particular premise will be pleasantly rewarded. While ostensibly a horror film, some of the most horrific elements are sparsely used to accentuate the situation, not dull the audience into mindless regurgitation of blood and gore.