Movie Reviews

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

Spring Fever: Now, this is more like it. This is to horror movies what “Fast Times At Ridgemont High” was to comedies.This is that rare beast, the platonic ideal that every movie that ever tried to be a good bad horror movie was aspiring to be but failed at. Plus, perhaps the most realistic depiction of high school and high school students I’ve ever seen in any movie. Any fan of great cheapo vintage ’70s horror a la Tobe Hooper or David Cronenberg should like this. Also that rare sequel that far outdoes the first film. I loved it. Many people would not appreciate it, I am sure. (NOTE: According to wikipedia, the director requested to have his name removed from the film, and the final film is more a product of the executives and producers. I am floored. Let’s all be glad, for once, that that happened.) (UPDATE: Turns…

A not-bad entry in the psycho-picking-off-teenagers-in-a-remote-location genre. but snow fields instead of woods this time, which is refreshing. Set in the norwegian outback, in an abandoned lodge. Goes on a bit long, but if you're gonna watch something in this genre, this is a decently creepy, non-annoying one.

after a team of gorgeous researchers discovered a cure for death, one of them is killed and resurrected, and gains random psychic powers, randomly turns evil, and kills her gorgeous teammates one by one for no reason.

dear Hollywood, at certain point we figured out that if the bad guy doesn't talk to anybody but the protagonist for the entire movie, they're going to turn out to be either the protagonist's other personality, or someone's already dead. Neither are very surprising twist anymore. This one is the split personality one.

pretentious, nonsensical, overstylized black and white crap. Hipster girl watches haunted house in Brooklyn, bring a guy home, inexplicably kills her then goes insane. Dull. (Much later note: Yes, I realize on re-read that this review doesn’t entirely make sense. Trust me, it doesn’t matter.)

Strangely underappreciated, moody film focusing on the human elements, rather than the violent ones, of the relationship between a child and the serial killer abductor raising him as his own in captivity in a remove farmhouse. Directed by the same woman as Jennifer's Body, another film I thought, while not great, was a cut above the usual fare.

almost a Cronenberg film. Not bad for a fairly predictable, piece of shit sci-fi thriller. A "bioprogram" drug that causes you to experience years of virtual reality life goes haywire when the inventor agrees to spent 1 yr in a virtual solitary prison cell for the accidental death of a friend who used it.

Sub-USA-Up-All-Night fare about a farm family that develops boils and goes insane after a meteor lands on their farm. Starring a pre-"Wil" Will Wheaton and a post-"Dukes" John Schneider, unrecognizable in late 80s fashions instead of late 70s.

Well, I guess if they had called it "American Horror Story season 10: Ratchet" nobody would have watched it, because they would have known to expect this.

extremely decent, gritty prison noir. Tall, square-jawed, hypermasculine accountant kills a friend in a DUI, hypermasculine tough-as-nails prison gangmembers turn him into a hardened criminal and he climbs the ranks to run the gang, along the way turning a 4-year sentence into life without parole. That kind of thing could easily be very cliched but this is actually a very good, adult film, not cheap exploitation. Acting is good even if the actors are typecast, and it's well-made.

English film. Girl hired to be caretaker for invalid at dark, scary haunted house runs around dark, scary house being scared of ghosts. Not bad for that.

Madeline Brewer (OITNB, Handmaid's Tale, Cam) seems to only pick somehow above-average, if not great, projects. This movie about a hiker stumbling on a couple of rednecks living in the wilds off the Appalachian trail was much more decent than I expected. Rather than being a run-of-the-mill thriller, it actually had a story to tell. Not a great story, but a good one, and more of one than a lot of movies nowadays.

Surprisingly alright buddy road trip pick that isn't really the stupid slapstick comedy it looks like it's going to be. Episodic slice of life as pair of travelers are thrown together, and get in and out of various trouble on their way actoss the southwest. Jason Mantouzakis does his usual thing, but somehow manages not to be overbearing.

Jake Gyllenhaal as a guy who discovers an actor who looks just like him. They seduce each other's partners, then one of the women turns into a giant spider. Not sure how something this arch and pretentious could simultaneously be this boring and uneventful. It's like nothing happens in this movie. Memo to all directors aside from David Lynch and David Cronenberg: You can't be David Lynch or David Cronenberg. You just can't.

Kyle McLachlan actually turns in a kind of intense performance in the most contrived drama I've ever seen. In a town where everybody is apparently always as big a dick as possible to everybody they meet — apparently solely as a means to create dramatic tension — society cinematically falls completely apart when there's an ordinary blackout, as gun store owners raise prices 300%, people start looting, threatening, and shooting at each other. Strong performances make this enjoyable despite the ridiculous premise (and strange saturated color palette for what wants desperately to be a very bleak drama.)

This starts with a premise that could go either way: a group of teens go to find a teacher who disappeared into a cave, to discover time flows differently inside the cave than out. In this case, it goes the right way, and instead of becoming a predictable thriller, it keeps bringing in new ideas, ending up unexpectedly far afield from where it started, and in an enjoyable & engaging way. Worked for me. Would watch again, eventually.

Decent drama/thriller starring Bradley Cooper as a down-on-his-luck writer who gets access to a drug that allows him to use 100% of his brain capacity, and his subsequent business and political ascent. Between him and De Niro in a supporting role, pretty watchable.

Death as entertainment. Dee Wallace in what looks like an interesting, quirky setup — a family full of characters gathers in a rural house for Christmas when the monstrous son they didn't know the mother tried to abort 20 years ago, and she didn't know survived, shows up — devolves into a fairly by the numbers captivity/everybody-gets-killed-one-by-one-and-hardly-any-plot-besides-that splatterfest. A woman gets cut in half vertically down the center with a single axe swing, another gets an umbrella run clean through her head and then opened, if those give you any idea. Is Dee Wallace this hurting for work?