"A Star Is Born"
"A Star Is Born" surprised me. Not because it is good. I had seen the trailers enough times to expect that. And I was ready to see a good movie, having come off a couple of moderately interesting ones ("A Simple Favor" and "Searching," more about which another time) and a stinker ("Night School," a horrible waste of Tiffany Haddish and Kevin Hart). Still, I was not prepared for how very, very, very good "A Star Is Born" proved to be, and how often it moved me. Even most of you tuning in late know that this is the fourth go-round for the "Star Is Born" story, and I've seen two of the previous ones, the James Mason-Judy Garland gem and the misguided Kris Kristofferson-Barbra Streisand version. (Find John Gregory Dunne's essay about his and Joan Didion's involvement in the writing of that one, a process that -- as Dunne says in "Gone Hollywood" -- included "three drafts, an arbitration, a threa...