Archives: Movie Reviews

Impossible-to-follow movie about a young couple whose marriage is falling apart as the wife becomes obsessed with demonology. Or she's a demon, or, just hallucinating. Or the husband is hallucinating. Or all of the above. Or something. I don't know.

I do know they never leave the house, even once, for the entire movie.

Also, they spend the first half of the movie arguing, and you know, movies that show long scenes of just couples arguing are like my favorite thing.

Totally avoid.

Captivity/pursuit flick in which gay couples visiting a wooded cabin are stalked and imprisoned by homophobes who kill gay people for the entertainment of thousands of rednecks watching on the internet. How many gay couples do they get vacationing all the way out in the woods?

Elisabeth Shue in a movie that is to horror movies what Elisabeth Shue is to actresses. So, basically, a step and a half below a Julianne Moore horror movie.

Anyway, Shue plays a woman trapped in a mansion with a new baby that a mysterious nanny who shows up suggests is stealing her soul. Husband complains that her coming unhinged is hurting his career when she's unable to socialize acceptably at his office gala. Ends up running around the house in her underwear, t-shirt and a blousy blouse with a knife, as you might have guessed.

The house is nice, though.

Gorgeous professional couple adopts a gorgeous child who brings a ghost in tow and standard haunted things happen around their gorgeous home, seen only by the gorgeous child and mother, who standardly struggle to convince the gorgeous standard disbelieving father.

Low-key English movie that desperately wants to be a thriller, and feels a lot like a thriller, but just isn't thrilling. Couple adopts kids who turn out to be weird after their mother overdoses. Absent mom works while dad, a house husband, either goes insane, or the kids are somehow doing something to him, or it's just a movie and doesn't quite make sense.

I have never seen a movie so closely resemble a good movie and yet just bore the living daylights out of me.

Very slickly produced, I'll give it that. Kind of a snappy neo-noir, I guess. Overpretty young hipsters, including the de rigeur millennial lesbians and Pete Davidson, gather for a small party. They play "bodies bodies bodies", apparently some kind of hide and seek game in the dark, and someone gets killed. Soon they kill someone else thinking they're the killer, and everybody is running around yelling and waving guns at each other and I can't figure out WTF is going on.

This ostensible supernatural thriller has exactly one sentence of the supernatural in it and zero thrills. I wanted to like it because the cast was charismatic but it's just tepid, all the way through. A woman moves home to take care of her mother who is ailing with dementia. The mother seems to be talking to ghosts. The woman goes through the typical emotional merrygoround of exhaustion, concern, and frustration you might expect of a young person taking care of a parent who is making less and less sense. And that's basically it, that's the movie.

Rather disappointing major swing-and-a-miss. Well acted and well made, starts well, has a decent denouement, and just sags terribly throughout otherwise.

I sexually confused adolescent is sent by his parents to an unusually strict boarding school where the small class of 7 manages to be a panoply of "freaks": burn victim, tourettes sufferer, and, memorably, a 12-year-old femme fatale. They're made to read the bible constantly, beaten with a switch, and slowly turn up dead one way or another. Suffice to say, things are not as they seem.

The early scenes, of the kid getting bullied at school and dancing around his apartment in an evening dress, are unusually well done for this kind of movie. Then, towards the very end, as everything falls to shit—again with the kid running around in an evening dress, BTW, andthis time with makeup, too, having been goaded into it by the…

Well-acted but very slow... er... I don't know what it is. Horror? Drama? This film starring a pre-"Ozark" Julia Garner revolves around a family of religious zealots who slowly turn out to be involved in a bunch of local disappearances... and soon mom is diagnosed via autopsy with a disease you can only get from cannibalism.

And somehow, they manage to make that boring.

Then, in the last 5 minutes, they have a whole horror movie's worth of gore, all of a sudden.

Ok, whatever.

A pretty atrocious horror movie that feels like an 80s TV movie except for the cell phones and the way-over-the-top-gore of the death scenes. A photographer inherits his grandfather's large-formate camera, once used to obsessively take "death portraits", posed post-mortem portraits of corpses. Some of the deaths are a little imaginative, I'll give it that.

Particularly atrocious is the use of video effects to try to make action more "intense"... processing the video when actions happen. So "TV movie".

How Ray Wise allowed himself to be involved with this, I can't imagine. I think this might be the first bad movie I've ever seen him in, usually he's a pretty good tipoff that something is at least a little entertaining. Maybe it's that his top-billed role, as the grandfather in a few flashbacks, has almost no speaking lines, or that his sole bit of dialog with another character…

Odd little movie about a woman (played for no reason that's ever explained by a man in drag) who is just unlikeable. And that's really it, she just goes around being unlikeable.

I kind of enjoyed it, oddly, some of the characters have some charisma. I didn't mind watching it but wouldn't go out of my way to either.