"doubt"

This year, what do you say we switch things up and not dread the whole back-to-school business? No prodding the kids to plow through the summer-reading-list books they haven’t yet cracked. No bracing yourself for the logistical nightmare of getting your brood up, fed, dressed and off to their classrooms.

It boggles the mind that only a couple of generations back, women were sometimes referred to as “the weaker sex.” That’s not only sexist, but misleading.  Plenty of tough, cunning, even deadly female characters have graced the screen over the past six decades that prove this idiotic saying wrong.   Here are an even dozen.

In his hey-day, William Powell was the epitome of sophistication, wit and urbanity, with his distinctive baritone voice, custom tailored suits and pencil thin mustache. During the 1930s and 1940s, Powell was a bona fide box-office draw, starring opposite Myrna Loy as a tippling detective in “The Thin Man” series, as the sly hobo-turned-high society butler in the classic screwball farce “My Man Godfrey,” or in “The Great Ziegfeld,” playing legendary theater impresario Flo Ziegfeld.

Going crazy in real life is about as glamorous as sleeping in a bowling alley, but going crazy on-screen? Plan your Oscar outfit early. There is scenery to be chewed, fits to be pitched on an epic scale, fantasies to spin, and a kind of canny brilliance to the crazy character’s lunacy.       Maybe we are drawn to movie crazies as a kind of proxy nervous breakdown, the one we’d like to have, if only we could spare the time. In the more extreme cases, such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s criminally insane killers in “Psycho” (1960) and “Frenzy” (1972), we are watching a bomb blast from a safe distance, marveling at the potential for distortion within the human mind. And then there are characters that are driven crazy, like Ophelia (Jean Simmons) in “Hamlet” (1948), or Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the shattered widow of an unscrupulous New York financier, in “Blue Jasmine” (2013).

Film lets us move in with idealized families, the families we would happily join if they were real and would have us. Here, we have gathered our favorites into one warm, harmonious place. We can smell the cookies baking from here…

While the holidays are the ideal time to cozy up to cheery family fare, it’s also a swell idea to take a break from interrelating with relatives to witness the astonishingly bad behavior of families far more dysfunctional than one's own (hopefully).

Ralph Fiennes, while recently chatting about his part in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” let it slip that’s he’s set to play M, replacing Dame Judi Dench as the head of British Secret Service, in the upcoming Daniel Craig Bond film. Shooting is set to begin in October, in time for the 2015 release of “Bond 24” (a working title, we hope).   Why should this announcement from Ralph get us all worked up? Well, in addition to the fact that he seems an excellent choice to succeed Dame J., confirmation of a new Bond movie means... new Bond Girls!   Whether these ladies start out on Bond’s side or against him, they all succumb to his charms eventually (except the really bad ones who just use him for rough sex and then still try to kill him – you just can’t trust some women.)