Movie Reviews

[Not to be confused with Amelie] A decent distraction that ends kind of unsatisfyingly by giving too much away. A thriller about a gorgeous babysitter who turns out to be very disturbed, mounting some fairly distressing psychological horror in the first half by way of her increasingly disturbing treatment of the children she's supposed to be caring for, but as is sometimes the case, ratching things up too high and shifting from a sort of dogme 95 realism to physical violence and a darkened house breaks the tension rather than heightening it. Decent performances, though.

Campers find a baby and wind up pursued by psycho rednecks in the woods. But Australian, so with no American over-the-topness, just sick realism, preceded a dreadfully slow 45 minute buildup in which nothing happens. Pure brutality-as-supposed-entertainment, nothing redeeming about this one at all. One of the easiest Netflix thumbs-downs I've ever given to a film that was technically well made.

Ok, now we're talking. There's something distinctly Kubrickian about this quiet, low-budget indie flick about three people who sneak into a penthouse apartment only to become trapped over the winter and descend into a grisly struggle to survive. Supernatural forces may or may not be at work. I liked this one pretty well, in a quiet, low-budget indie flick kind of way. The incredible, apparently universal hatred for this film is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I was born on the wrong planet.

Lauren Cohan stars as a gorgeous nanny hired by an elderly english couple in a remote mansion to care for what she thinks is their son but turns out to be a life-sized doll... until things begin to move around the house. Plenty of fridge logic abounds but I didn't notice it until the a few minutes after the credits rolled and Lauren Cohan had left the screen. She is, I should add, a pretty good actress, as these things go... actually, better than this material. But I would probably enjoy a movie of Lauren Cohan just walking around an empty room for 90 minutes. And this was actually even more than that.

Brooklyn guy takes in old friend who turns out to be a raving lunatic who thinks humans are turning into demons, thinks his girlfriend is giving him orders over the phone, etc. Not much actually happens, though.

Promising but ultimately disappointing future dystopian black comedy with a slight Clockwork Orange artifice and sterility to the production. Single people are sent to a hotel to either hook up or be transformed into animals and set loose in the woods. One man escapes and joins the "loners", who forbid romance, in the woods — at which point the movie completely runs out of steam, and spends the remaining half its length going absolutely nowhere.

Decent supernatural thriller with Mr. No-Nonsense, Art La Fleur. Two families are lured to look at a house out in the woods, arrive to nearly hit a young girl in the road with her tongue cut out, and soon discover they can’t leave the property. Every attempt to drive or walk back to the road just puts them back at the house. 7 cans of beef stew keep reappearing in the pantry every day. Months pass. Everybody goes a little insane, dead relatives appear, etc.

ravers chased through the woods by satanists. Acrually surprisingly good, like how some episodes of 90210 were good.

"Escape From New York" with less charisma.

Another one of those fun-enough Mark Duplass pics. This time, full of all those charismatic actors who basically always play themselves: Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, that guy Nick from New Girl, cameos from Kristen Bell and Jeff Garlin. Journalists in Seattle follow a story about a guy who placed an ad looking for time travel companions. Lots of fridge logic in this one, but if you like movies like this, you probably don't care.

I gave it a shot because I was feeling braindead and it stars Owen Wilson (who I'm somehow not quite tired of yet) and Jason Sudeikis (who I still like, which we can probably credit to lingering afterglow from "Son Of Zorn"), rather than the usual never-once-have-made-me-laugh suspects (Sandler, etc.) And for maybe the first half of the movie it feel list maybe the Farrelly brothers have maybe matured just a tiny bit, from trying to appeal to 4th graders' sense of humor to maybe even 9th graders'. But by the time the "humor" degenerates to "black men have huge dicks, and, that makes other men uncomfortable" you realize things have gotten worse, if anything, and it's not a matter of maturity, but just plain stupidity. And, I wonder, what audience both: 1.) demands a brainless, cliched redemptive ending; and, also, 2.) thinks a person sneezing so hard they shit…

A contender for the most boring movie I've ever watched. Religious girl works as a hospice nurse, mostly just wanders around. Sometimes wanders around hallucinating, sometimes wanders around picking up guys. Kills her patient and sets herself on fire. The end.

Ok, Netflix's description said only "Biologist, cop hunt deadly creature in museum". I said, ok! And it turned out to be a really enjoyable monster movie in the John Carpenter vein. Like, imagine John Carpenter had directed "The Poseidon Adventure", and instead of trying to escape a ship capsized by a huge wave, they were trying to escape a monster that was terrorizing a museum. Nice to see people still sometimes make good monster movies every once in a while. I liked it.

Another Duplass Brothers production of a passabloy watchable indie film that occasoinally veers into major creeponess and discomfort, imagine that. Family and brother's girlfriend deal with developmentally disabled man with a fixation on Fonzie, action movies, and female bodies, and an a little too much of a willingness to cross boundaries. Does an intresting job of occasoinally showing a realistic warts-and-all view of the ccomplexities of relaitonships, although not consistently and just as often comes across a little pat. But, still, watchable, I suppose.

What starts off like a cheezy tv movie slowly turns into a very decent hitchcockian thriller. An illegal immigrant maid hired by a family in the Hamptons suspects the son has drunkenly hit-and-run a pedestrian, and it all goes to shit.

couple sailing across the pacific wind up adrift for a month and a half. Considering how much I usually like these kinds of survival stories, meh. Somehow this one didn't speak to me.

Anthology horror. Not that well written, mostly just stories leading up to an often predictable "gotcha" or "surprise" twist and not plot-driven enough to bother follow the narrative any further than that to explore what happens, but surprisingly alright, mostly due to a reliance on character instead of gore and a pretty good cast turning in strong performances. Dylan Baker is the bright spot of the first and worst of the four stories; Samm Levine turns in the most solid acting I think I've ever seen from him; and Tony Todd ("Candyman", I've seen him a million times but never caught his name) turns in a touching performance as the husband of a terminally ill woman. Each story is slightly better than the last; overall I actually liked it.

"The Lost Boys" was better.

WTF is this? It was billed as a horror movie, and 13 minutes into it, we've had he-men with huge biceps and crewcuts running around shooting guns, getting into a barfight, drinking shots of whiskey, and having a sex scene with a woman who looks like a bleached, hyperinflated, airbrushed playboy centerfold, and some of the all-around worst USA-Up-All-Night-quality acting I've ever seen. In the first 13 minutes. I give this flick about 2 more minutes and then I'm done. (Ok, right after typing that some sort of apocalyptic alarms started going off and a monster appeared outside his door and now he's freaking out. Ok, I'll give it a little while.)
Ok, very shortly I'm glad I stayed with it. Thi smight be one of those rare "so bad it's good" movies that really is so bad it's good. He spends the rest of the time trapped in…

Starts out as a documentary about a complicated performer, and turns into a documentary about the complications of making a documentary about a complicated performer. Good, and the events that unfolded in trying to make the documentary are amusing, but lump this in with "Catfish" in the "documentaries that must've sounded really good on paper, but never get somewhere quite as interesting as they promise to" category.

A hitman transporting a body on Halloween is mistaken for a partygoer in a Halloween costume. 20somethings wind up with the body and he wants it back. Truthfully, this movie was background noise while I was working on other things, and every time I looked up, it appeared to be fairly entertaining, until the third act, which appeared to be mostly a gory chase scene with the hitman pursuing the kids across the city to retreive the body.

Boy, what to say about this. Father says he wants a divorce, mom blows her brains out, six months later father brings kids & new fiance up to his remove fishing lodge and leaves them there in the dead of winter. Two acts of sheer, drawn-out boredom as the kids and new fiance first fail to get along, then come to believe they've died and are stuck in the house, lead into one of the most emotionally cold, cruel, brutal third acts I've ever seen. Can't exactly say it's a bad movie, but can't imagine who would ever find this entertaining. Not many movies have made me actually feel bad, but this one did.

Comedy based on real-life armored car heist caper. Zack Galiafinakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Jason Sudeikis, Sharon Jones, Joe Lo Truglio, and many more. With that many big comedy names in one movie, how could it be funny? Answer: it can't. It's mildly amusing, yeah. At moments. But that's the best I can say for it.

Unknowning damned souls board a tourist bus in Holland that strands them by a windmill where the spirit of an ancient miller drags them to hell. 2010's version of the kind of forgettable B movie that Vincent Price could have saved nicely, had he been in it. But he's not. Nice twist on convention at the very end, though, as Final Girl doesn't make it. Don't worry, that's not spoiling anything—you don't need to see this.

Julia Stiles and husband move to South America and encounter some sort of ancient supernatural tradition claptrap surrounding their young daughter. Paced like a political thriller. Political thrillers aren't scary.