Movie Reviews

Ok nature/animal attack thriller. Kaya Scodelario and her father are trapped in the crawlspace of a house in Florida as particularly ferocious but oddly slow-moving alligators swarm in the rising floodwaters of a Florida hurrican, finding their way into every crevice and attacking everything that moves at the most dramatically opportune moment. Not bad for that.

Some fleeting ok cinematography and occasional well-done action sequences are nice touches. There's a thing with some looters at the convenience store across the street that I liked. Anybody in a movie like this who's first shown stealing an ATM in a flood is obviously going to meet a bad end, but the way they're dispatched is gratifyingly to-the-point.

Decent enough b-movie monster movie, if you're in the mood for a b-movie monster movie. A mechanic is stuck pinned under a car in a garage while giant poisonous nematodes from below the surface of the earth roam and attack people. Somewhere among the better end of what a movie that could be described by that sentence could be.

Very decent, tense thriller. Halle Berry is a 911 operater on a live call with a girl who's been abducted and is in the trunk of a car speeding down the highway. Nothing spectacular but good direction make it watchable, if you're in the mood for a law enforcement action thriller.

Unfortunately the third act sacrifices the moderately successful formula, is less "intense pursuit thriller" and more "Silence Of The Lambs"-derivative stalk-the-killer-around-a-darkened-house, victim-gets-delicious-revenge-in-the-end sort of typical Hollywood stuff. Still, you know, it's alright. I think everything I've ever seen Halle Berry in has been alright, so, it fits.

Moderately entertaining if almost too quirky sci-fi comedy along the lines of, but happily much more restrained than, something like "Being John Malkovich". Paul Giamatti plays himself, so tormented by a gruelling dramatic role that he has his soul scientifically extracted for two weeks so he get play the role. Unfortunately he doesn't realize there is an international trade in extracted souls and his is, er, "misplaced".

The funny thing is he, and other serious actors, like Emily Mortimer, play this absurd idea so straight that it works. They never do reveal exactly what the difference between having a soul and not having a soul is, as everybody who undergoes the process seems to basically still be themselves, although several times people are heard wanting their souls back, and Giamatti is distressed enough to find he can't reclaim his to go through some intrigue trying to get it back.…

Starts out a cute, quirky-but-not-unbearably-so comedy about a geeky small-town movie theater ticket taker who may or may not be the son of God and have the ability to decide whether people will go to heaven or hell after death. Has a couple of unlikely star cameos, like William H. Macy as his therapist, Justin Kirk plays his usual charater as an earthbound ghost who wants to know his permanent fate, and Neve Campbell, improbably, as Kirk's daughter (I guess he had an active sex life at the age of 4) and Milo Ventimiglia in an amusing and out-of-character turn as a womanizing, fast-talking fellow theater employee.

Entertaining enough until it descends from comedy to sentimentality as the subject turns from his obsession with the concession girl and his responsibilities deciding peoples' ultimate fate into him dealing with his complicated feelings about his father's death. I guess the writers forgot…

This was ok. During the pandemic, a woman goes to visit a friend who has been having intense nightmares, and they turn out to be contagious. It gets into some vaguely supernatural and eventually existential ideas as they learn the cause. It ultimately isn't really that rewarding, but, unlike a lot of horror movies, it's underplayed, which works in its favor. Watchable enough if nothing else is on.

Sort of bombastic, portentious sci-fi wannabe-"epic" pseudodocumentary about humans exploring a wormhole and having their brains transplanted into artificial bodies and finding new solar systems and such. Moderately ok, I guess.

Quirky, kind of fun English film about three couples living in a backyard bunker after the apocalypse when things get crazy. It was billed as a "horror comedy", which typically puts me off, but it really wasn't, it was more of a straight comedy with postapocalyptic horror theme, but played entirely for laughs, not like a horror movie that was so bad they called it a comedy in hopes of salvaging it. I've seen less entertaining films.

This film is pretty good. A lot of Stephen King adaptations are terrible, even ones of good books, but this one about a writer being held captive by a psychotic fan works due to strong casting—James Caan, Kathy Bates, and a couple of other recognizable if not-exactly-tip-of-the-tongue character actors in the supporting cast.