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BLUE SUN PALACE is set in Queens, Nee York in the present day. The characters are immigrants from Taiwan. Didi and Amy, who survive by working in a massage parlor, want to leave the city to open a restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland. A genuinely kind man befriends Didi. It is after this moment that the drama begins.

The movie is photographed in a very direct way, the acting is naturalistic and, above all, a sense of what women go through is conveyed.

It has one of the best fade-outs I've ever seen. BLUE SUN PALACE appears to have little to no studio trickery. In fact, its minimalism is cinematic. It is a well-acted story of ordinary people, but it is not a staged play or a short story on a screen. It is well-realized cinema.

I didn't expect SATURDAY NIGHT to be more than a tribute to SNL. I was surprised to find it involving. It depicts the hour and a half before the airing of the first episode. As the title of the series ("Saturday Night Live") implies, the show is live. The makers fear the network will pull the plug at the last minute. Since we know the show will be a hit, the job of this film is to put us in a time when the series ran the risk of never being aired.

While it's intriguing to see how the cast members, recognizable to us for decades, are portrayed, it's wonderful to see that luminaries who are not public faces are played with distinction. Willem Dafoe, as one of NBC's top brass, plays a man who can inspire and deflate in a split second. The Union crew are simultaneously lovable and threatening; the depiction of the not-very-well-known but sometimes-visible cast member and writer Michael O'Donahue reminds us of how edgy this program was at its inception.

I was fifteen when the first episode hit the American living room. I watched the show religiously for the next three years. I've read a few of the books about it, heard the many podcasts featuring SNL alum from various generations, and, given that exposure to it, I did not even imagine this movie would capture the mood of 1975. I expected it to be polished. I did not expect it to be believable.

It has the tropes of an opening-night story. But it does not manipulate, cajole or fool the audience. I'd be naive if I thought every scene in this happened that night - but I would say about 95 per cent of it occurred during that first year.

It's nice to see Billy Preston's moment as a star attraction of the first episode, and to see him as someone who could toss a little sarcasm around. He kids Garrett Morris, who says hello and is feeling the sting of being ignored by the SNL gang. SNL is notorious for misusing black performers. That pattern didn't break until Eddie Murphy became the show's most famous player while Lorne Michaels was on hiatus.

One of the best moments has Chevy Chase and Michael O'Donohue breaking the ice in a room full of network affiliate station presidents. Chase was in top form when the series started. He was an unknown and was very disarming.

George Carlin losing his cool is novel; especially with Michael O'Donohue putting him down with expert, informed viciousness. That he was a great comedian is not the point: He was already part of an establishment the SNL crew were upending. Milton Berle being a classic jerk is no surprise; Johnny Carson placing a call to freak out Lorne Michaels seems relatively likely; but I doubt he was as withering on the phone as the script implies. I do think what he says on the phone are highly likely to be things he said to others about SNL.

You don't have to know the show well to enjoy this. It is a showbiz story done well.

No great shakes visually, and the background music sometimes drowns out the dialogue, but it's a straightforward story of mentor and pupil. The acting is stellar.

You don't have to have heard of any character in this movie to get what's happening. Knowing exactly who they are won't add much. It is a story with dramatic tension, but it's more a character study than a drama.

It is a tale about pride. There are no pyrotechnics. It is not obscure, which I feared it would be. I will say it is not especially entertaining. It is depressing, but depression is a reasonable expectation given that THE APPRENTICE is the origin story of our current national situation.