Movie Reviews

Wow, talk about a flawed gem. I really like this neo-noir, which features the two most realistic 10-year-old boys I've ever seen in a movie finding an apparently abandoned cop car and going for a joy ride, attracting the attention of the corrupt sheriff whose car it is and the man he's got in the trunk. Really appealing, set deep in the windswept prairie, kind of a snowless "fargo" at least in terms of setting. The only problem: the too-recognizable-to-suspend-disbelief Kevin Bacon as the sheriff, who is, additionally, repeatedly clever enough to creatively think his way out of jams in a split second, but not clever enough to leave his cop car where two 10 year olds won't find it, or to not leave the keys sitting on the seat in plain view. But overall, despite the flaws, this picture is kind of a fave, I'm glad I caught it.…

About to get engaged to a woman he's only ever met over video chat, a man discovers when she moves in that she's attached to a homicidal conjoined twin. 100% campy, which usually isn't a good thing, but in this case it works. John Waters got famous making movies this bad and really only just barely more fun.

Pale, hoodie-wearing outcast friend-requests Alicia Debnam-Carey, who I really would have hoped had brighter prospects than this, then kills herself, after which gorgeous teens die one by one for the slimmest of reasons. As slick and terrible as you imagine a teen horror movie about Facebook would be, especially once I've told you it contains the line "Unfriend that dead BITCH!" So, you know what you're getting into. (Not to be confused with the similar Unfriended, a prior horror movie about Facebook.)

Self-consciously quirky black-and-white "Indie" film starring huge megastars. Martin Starr actually acts in this. This guy keeps dumping women after 3 months by paying a friend of his to pretend to be his mother and not get along with them, and there's some sort of thing about babies who don't grow up, which must be a metaphor. It was vaguely ok, I guess, at least not cringeworthy like these things usually totally are.

The Blair Witch Project with UFOs. Painful.

I have always found Robert Patrick to be an acquired taste, and I suppose I've acquired it. He does a little more acting than usual in this true crime thriller, which portrays the infamous 1978 Tison Gang jailbreak and murder rampage across the southwest. Definitely a little Hollywooded-up, as I have a hard time believing all the white-trash villains, lawmen, and bystanders of 1970s Arizona were uniformly so gorgeous (see Heather Graham as Tison's deluded prison-groupie wife, as well as Chris Browning playing Billy Bob Thornton playing Tison's fellow escapee, the porcine-in-real-life Randy Greenawalt, as a lean-and-mean, charismatic psychopath), but apparently it's based on a well-though-of true crime book, and the sheer sociopathy of the crimes makes it a least hold interest.

Haunted winery turns out to be something more as gorgeous ghost hunters get picked off. Why did previous owners kill themselves by stabbing themselves in the stomach? Starts out as a standard ghost story and expands to something a little more freaky and maybe even sci-fi.

zombie road picture plays like a missing episode of Walking Dead, from one of the good seasons.

gorgeous English couple buys Scotland farmhouse, so locals put on pig masks and chase them around it with axes, because, obviously, movie.

you know, for a poorly acted, no budget, poorly written, completely amateurish zero budget effort, this winds up being a halfway decent ghost story. The leads are charming and give it their all, as well.

Mexicans crossing illegally into the united states are abducted and subjected to the world's cheeziest brainwashing experiment, and the only one being conducted by Creed from "The Office".

By all rights, I should hate this movie. One of those sort of "heartfelt" "indie" movies starring major stars (and once again Tim Heidekker in a non-comedy role. Why?) Zoey Deutch, who has somehow raised likability to an art form, plays the manic pixie dream girl this time (hands up, everyone who's ever met a real-life pretty girl who gives impulsive blowjobs to homely guys because she feels like it), but manages not to be too overbearing beyond the basic standards of the type. She hunts for adult men to give blow jobs to, which her friends film and then use to extort money from. When her new stepdad's son gets out of rehab and moves in, she they decide to entrap a teacher he made a molestation claim against a few years earlier. From there, though, despite some predictability, the film manages to avoid cliches and sets out on…

Family that films every moment of their lives in POV for no apparent reason, when "scary" things start happening for no apparent reason.

I have no idea how they got renee zellwger, ian mcshane, and that guy bradley who I guess is good-looking to star in this crap horror thriller about a social worker who adopts a little girl who is evil or demonic or something and kills people because, movie. Maybe they all had a contractual obligation to discharge or something.

Like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you'll probably like this film. Don't like seeing pretty girls be tortured? Then you won't. There's some religious or supernatural claptrap it's wrapped in, but it's not important. I wasn't at all suprised to discover this is a remake of a French horror movie, the surest sign of a terrible horror movie. The french culture seems to have an immaculate grasp of so many art forms, and they compensate for it with a complete, total inability to figure out how to write a good horror movie plot.

Apparently this is a Coen Brothers film. And visually, it looks as good as any. Doesn't appear to have a plot, other than "The Coen Brothers love 1940s Hollywood" and "There are star cameos in this movie". Maybe other film industry folks liked this.

Uh-oh. Another of those kinds of movie that I like but I bet most people didn't: the entire film is a group of people having a conversation. It takes place almost entirely in one room. A college professor, reluctantly attending his own going-away party before moving on to his next job, confesses to a group of colleagues that he is immortal and has lived for 14,000. Cue 90 minutes of cerebral and, to me, well-done and interesting conversation among academic types of varying degrees of skepticism (and one unfortunate cliched religious zealot, my sole gripe with the film, only because, as here, they're all too often a cheap way of perfunctorily adding conflict), exploring all the different angles of this. For a completely unrealistic premise, I think the conversation, and the main character's takes on things, are very realistic and well thought-out along the lines of what an actual, realistic…

Mom tries to cross zombie-infested Los Angeles to find her daughter. The Walking Dead, except with fast zombies instead of slow zombies, and any plot considerations totally replaced by people shooting each other. I can't even figure out how everybody got a gun — everybody has one, but I never heard anybody say, "Here, have a gun" or "Hey, I found some guns!" They're all assault rifles, too. UPDATE: I don't know if I'm watching a remake or an expanded cut or a new season or whatever, but it's much better than this original review. Maybe I missed a couple of episodes on the first view? Worst episodes are still like halfway decent walking dead episodes, but some of them are quieter, almost black mirror-style (in terms of mood) vingettes, more realism than a lot of zombie fare, and everybody definitely doesn't have a gun now. There's a weird "Lord…

Did we really need another movie like this? Uncomfortable dinner in the English countryside between two young couples with an obvious uncomfortable history gets increasingly uncomfortable until, in a stunningly original piece of plotting, masked guys unexpectedly break in and start brutalizing them. Iwan Rheon is better than this. The tables turn repeatedly as the victims and the intruders repeatedly manage to overpower one another, the movie ends as soon as the violence does just in case you though anything besides the violence was the point, and the whole thing is rendered terribly English by pretentious title cards dividing it up needlessly into "chapters" and saving the title card for the end of the movie with a sudden "bam" sound to underscore that it's supposed to have some sort of impact. I suppose if you've never seen a gratiutous bloodbath before it might, but really, what moviegoer hasn't at this…

Early Chris Pratt and some other goofy handsome guy with a bunch of minor celebrity cameos. Two guys get stuck in a magic porn booth that transports them to an alternate universe where real life is like a porn film. They actually stretch the joke for an admirably long time, and really nail some of the "porn film" acting and dialogue, including a stereotypical cop who speaks in nothing but cliches. It could have been way worse.

Daniel Radcliffe is as redeeming as possible in this based-on-a-true-story lost-in-the-jungle survival flick. Friends set off, slowly get separated, winds up being protagonist alone walking back through the wilderness towards civilization, encountering every possible obstacle along the way, including quicksand, a snake, hallucinations, you name it, in the slow-moving third act. Was a pretty good movie until it started to sag... one guy grimacing in pain, hallucinating, and talking to animals doesn't really feel like much of a plot. You gotta admit Radcliffe always gives his all to everything he does, though. And also, that aside, he somehow manages to be strikingly handsome-looking when covered with mud, which strikes me as something of an accomplishment, I guess. I couldn't do it.

Ok, no great shakes. Kind of turgid. Strange young man tries to end his own life, keeps bumping into suicidal women and in two cases takes their bodies home for a short while before burying them in his garden and moving on to the next one. Completely unengaging leading man with virtually no personality and not much drama or buildup to the story kind of leadens the whole endeavor. Also not clear why some suicidal women would be so damn chipper and engaging. It does have that woman who played the strange junkyard woman in Walking Dead, who I've always kind of liked for some reason.

Incredibly beautiful lead actress is the only conspicuous feature of this rote, by-the-numbers kids-on-vacation-in-a-haunted-house story. Oh, yeah, also, one cheap scare with what turns out to be the world’s scariest pizza delivery guy. I forgot this movie almost immediately after watching it.

It's starting to feel like you can kind of rely on Kevin Hart. Anything he's in is going to be at least reasonably good. This is a fairly forgettable action/adventure buddy comedy involving Hart going to the wrong cabin and being mistaken for a hit man, excepting one extremely memorable, well-choreographed, well-shot fight scene near the end, where they fend off a handful of assassins in the gym, which rightfully should go down in action movie history as a classic. That aside, this was entertaining enough. One of his lesser efforts, but Hart keeps his reputation for picking good projects.

"Saw", but with over-the-top Hollywood excess rather than the British restraint that made it good. Very stylish, I'll give it that, like a music video.

Somewhere in the same fictional Los Angeles as "Psych" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" (and across a fictional continent from the fictional New York of "Ugly Betty") is "Drop Dead Diva" , perhaps the perfect stupid TV program. A gorgeous model dies but refuses to go to heaven and wakes up in the body of an obese lawyer. Every episode features courtroom drama in which gorgeous legal clients pursue only-on-tv type