Movie Reviews

Technically well-made enough, I suppose, but this is the kind of movie that I hear made Sundance and wonder what the standards really are at that festival. Sunil Mani and her real-life boyfriend, playing exactly the sort of unbearable hipsters you don't live in Brooklyn because you're afraid you'd meet, spend like a half hour arguing about their relationship (because that's the sort of escapism you want in a movie, sitting through arguing about a relationship for 30 minutes) before heading up to a friend's cabin, as the world is invaded by alien poofballs who drink all the alcohol and kill everybody, because, movie, apparently. The couple tries to escape, a woman they could have just given a ride to steals their car and leaves them behind for no reason, they find a baby, stumble around in a hallucinogenic stupor because of a gas the poofballs decide to emit instead…

Like a caricature of a "Best Picture Oscar Winner"... all the signifiers are here. A complete, pristinely-polished exercise in navel contemplation. Every performance screams, "ACTING!", every soliloquy screams "DRAMATIC WRITING!", the cinematography screams, "CINEMATOGRAPHY!" Despite some good feints in which it appears to be about to descend into complete cliche and then doesn't, nonetheless it's as pretentious as they come, wearing it's "great movie" aspirations on its sleeves, without ever actually saying anything that I could relate to or care about... as perhaps best exemplified by totally unnecessary "look what I can do!" technical exercise of making most of the movie look like one long continuous shot, as if "gee whiz" factor is a substitute for entertainment. All the pretense even renders the extremely cool solo-drumming-only soundtrack into complete contrived artifice, in this context. Granted, complete contrived artifice /can/ work, but it still has to say something. Here, it doesn't.…

decent indie werewolf flick. Southern boys at a farmhouse, yet somehow also, gangstas there.

what starts out seeming like it's going to be a typical captivity flick set at a hospital grows into an ambitious, if difficult to understand, Clive Barker-type affair with demons, an alternate dimension, and lots of tentacles. Kind of entertaining.

Alright. Petulant Kiwi teen under house arrest, ankle monitor and all, with her crazy family in big old house. Things go bump in the walls, as what looks like a setup for supernatural horror turns into a pretty decent non-supernatural thriller.

good old-fashioned monster movie! People hiding in a basement from an invasion of giant wasps. Cheezy, but not toooo cheezy. Done right in most ways. Big fun here, I like it. Once again proves the universal horror-movie truism that, if you're stuck in a horror movie situation, outliving Lance Hendriksen is the key to survival.

A personal fave. More of a horror comedy than a horror film, but twisted and bizarre enough to be real fun. A kid, a serial killer, a halloween mask, a case of mistaken identity, what more do you need?

Continuing the tradition of flawed but interesting films that can be found on Hulu. Two cooking up meth in the woods get caught in a time loop when her psychotic boyfriend shows up. This film desperately wants to be a cult favorite, starts off like it's going to be standard USA Up All Night-quality fare, and gets better and better with each scene, wrapping up in an original and unexpected but satisfying way.

A decent sci fi flick. A lone astronaut on a 10-year space voyage to locate the source of intelligent radio signals from within our solar system. Quiet and somewhat introspective, I enjoyed it.

Halfway decent Spanish haunted house flick (with overdubs). Family moves into isolated house, son dies, EVPs, spectral visitations, ghost hunters with electronics, labyrinth discovered in basement. But, actually pretty good for such well-trodden subject matter, at least it's well-made and well-acted all the way through. Probably would be an ok date movie.

This is kind of a masterpiece of crap television. First off, the cast is stellar, the acting is superb. Beyond that? Garbage. I expected a drama, but this is straight melodrama, just a soap opera. It's like Dynasty meets Glee's hip-hop kid sister. As glossy and expertly produced as it is empty and unbelievable. The Glee-style over-autotuned, overcompressed vocals in the frequent musical numbers sums it all up.

Another exercise in tinseltown omphaloskepsis. This one was ok, I guess. Kevin Spacey as a shrink with worse problems than his patients.

You can virtually hear someone watching "The Hunger Games" and thinking, "There's got to be a way I can come up with a franchise that is this same thing, except I get paid for it."

beautifully-shot move about women living in the wilderness as "wives" and "daughters" of a cult leader. Slow-moving. Didn't really follow it. Gorgeous cinematography, though, and spectacular natural locations. Can't imagine where this was shot. Alaska? (Turns out, Ireland.)

Ok, I'm about 15 minutes into this, and it looked like it was going to be a sci-fi thriller or teen scream about some teens d-bags on vacation out in the woods, but we learn in the first 5 minutes that Wesley Snipes is a stereotypical insane-seeming, camo-wearing tough-as-nails vet living in a remote cabin, we see him unloading his gun, and 15 minutes into it it's showing a meeting of tough-as-nails military officials, one of whom has a russian accent. Why do I have a feeling Chekov's rule is going to apply? "If you put Wesley Snipes as a troubled, tough-as-nails gun-toting military vet in act one, you must have him go off as a troubled, tough-as-nails gun-toting military vet in act three." Will check back in when it's done. [Much later note: apparently I never checked back in.]

Taken in yet again by Netflix's tendency to confuse "indie" for "comedy", and movies starring the likes of Amy Adams and Embeth Davidtz for "indie". In this case, acceptable enough entertainment that even the ordinarily-intolerable use of phony southern accents doesn't make it too unwatchable. City-slicker art dealer accompanies husband to visit his family in North Carolina while on a trip to secure the right to represent a possibly insane folk artist primarily characterized by obsessions with the Civil War and penises, and a totally implausible and possibly completely made-up accent.

All style, zero substance. Apparently based on a novel, but I don't see more than a very short story's worth of plot here. A psychopath hires a prostitute played by Mia Wasikowska to his hotel room with the intent of killing her, but it turns out she's crazier than he is. S&M hijinks ensue, she gets him tied up, and that's it. That's the movie. It looks great, though, excellent production.

What a weird movie. A pretty run-of-the-mill bad horror movie that aims far higher than it reaches, about a gorgeous young woman returning to her mother's island home after receiving a call that her mother's grave has been vandalized shortly before the close of the season, only to be stalked and trapped by some kind of supernatural claptrap. However, it looks like it was shot by Jonathan Demme, which elevates it somehow to almost Giallo-like atmospherics. If only the story made sense.

Surprisingly not terrible thriller about a gorgeous autistic kid who secretly films gorgeous guests in the hotel he works at in order to learn to mimic ordinary social cues, when he witnesses a murder. Better, and better-done, than that setup suggested to me, although somehow the entire cast looks like they've had botched plastic surgery, which bothered me from start to finish.

The Blair Witch Project, but with Bigfoot, and less. BONUS TROPES! "No cell reception", unfriendly locals trying to run them off for unknown reasons, clueless city slickers lost in the woods, "Who messed with our campsite?", camera conspicuously running when it doens't need to be, "That's the same tree, we went in a circle!", all the cliches. Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, who apparently somehow, amazingly, didn't know better. Oh, also, the protagonists waste too much time talking about their relationship, which is always great cinematic entertainment. No, seriously, this is the worst-paced movie I've ever seen. Ok, they hear something outside in the woods, outside the tent. Does that require seeing them sit there listening in the dark for literally 20 straight minutes?

Incredibly handsome English guys go off-trail and get lost in the woods (England? Sweden? I missed it). Vacation gone wrong. stalked through the woods, captivity, scary house in the woods, besieged by rednecks, but also a monster movie (only partially-seen creature until the end), which is cool. Much more decent than it could have been. Also pretty inventive in its handling of flashback sequences. Well-acted and well made, and pretty cool monster. Ultimately kind of a bit of fluff, but slightly more original fluff than the enormously cliched setup would lead you to expect. I think somebody involved with this has watched some Svenkmayer films. (Turns out, this director has been responsible for shorts I've liked much more... from https://www.avclub.com/the-ritual-is-a-chore-1822765612 "Technically, The Signal (2007), his first effort, constitutes a single narrative; three different directors were in charge of the film’s three “transmissions” (read: acts), though, and it’s all downhill after…

Amusing horror spoof with unbelievably likeable cast: Matthew Gray Gubler, Kat Dennings, Ray Wise, and Mel Gonzales in one movie, even cameos by John Waters and by that funny Mexican actor from "Ash vs Evil Dead". Gubler plays a guy who basically nobody likes who returns home and is haunted by visions of CGI ghosts nobody but him and Kat Dennings can see. Ray Wise talks more about his penis in this than in any other movie, which if it was anybody other than Ray Wise, could have been a problem, but isn't.

Supernatural thriller crossed with hardbitten detective tale. Thre's some gobbledygook about a cursed book. Matt Frewer, which generally tells you about what to expect. Ok, I guess, it was kind of amusing.

Odd sort of, I dunno, drama? Two women at the opposite ends of motherhood deal with life after an astronomical event over Troy, NY. Low-key enough to be unpretentious in a way that arty films like this usually aren't, which makes it watchable, as do the likeable cast and performances. But don't come looking for sense, story, or resolution, there isn't any of any of those. I kind of enjoyed it because of how low-key it was and because it was set in Troy, near old stomping grounds of mine, but the lack of sense ultimately bothered me.