Archives: Movie Reviews

Faintly entertaining British series about an immature teacher leading a classroom full of misfits. Starts slow, gets a little better as it goes along.

People trapped in a subterranean Japanese WWII bunker in the Philippines become embroiled in supernatural drama as corpse-like people and the spirits of deceased loved ones start to appear. As mediocre as it gets, and with a twist that you can see coming from 20 minutes into the movie.

Reasonably humorous Britcom about geeks in a corporate IT department. First season kind of slow but eventually it gets a little funnier. Ok if you need some occasionally entertaining background noise.

Christopher Walken, in his first film role, stars with Ronny Cox in this odd, talky little movie about psychological experiments in which army doctors implant chips into soldiers' pleasure centers to make them docile. Strangely, much less interesting than it sounds. Not much really happens. Overall kind of a low-budget-seeming oddity, despite the big names.

A couple wakes up to find their house completely surrounded by blackness in which unexplained phantasmagorical visions are sometimes displayed, and spends 2/3 of the movie bickering, 1/6 in "deep" philosophizing, and 1/6 in an incomprehensible arthouse special effects mess.

Seeming like the forced love-child of "Superstore" and quasi-improv post-"The Office" shows like "Parks & Rec", this ensemble show set in a grocery story more closely resembles comedy than any other show I think I've ever not laughed at. The quirky and deeply flawed characters, the hammy performances, the snappy patter, the absurd setups, the ridiculous romantic pairings, it sure does look and feel like comedy. And it's even faintly entertaining. But I don't think I actually laughed once. And the lead, a young manwho inherits his deceased father's grocery store, is just insufferable, without any of the charm that has historically made so many insufferable sitcom leads tolerable.

Views-obsessed "Influencer" gets possessed by an ancient demon or spirit or something that somehow knows how to use YouTube in this atrocious teen scream horror of the unfortunate modern "let's try to make a horror movie about social media" genre. This movie makes cheezy '90s teen scream horror look good.

Anna Faris in a faintly amusing stoner comedy. Harold and Kumar somehow got away with this sort of thing, but at this point it's kind of been done, and much better than this.

Faintly amusing TV series that plays like a cross between "Dead Like Me" and "Scooby Doo". A touring rock band gets an amulet that lets them see ghosts as they tour from city to city, whom they must help pass on from the earthly plane by helping them fulfill an unfulfilled ambition.

Rhys Darby, whom I ordinarily like a great deal, does his best Tracey Ullman impression, starring as multiple colorful characters in this mockumentary series about a small New Zealand village. It's not terrible, but how Darby, Jemaine Clement, and Stephen Merchant got together and made something this "not that funny" is a mystery for the ages.

Mildly amusing, slightly absurdist single-camera sitcom-leaning dramedy about a divorced dad & daughter from Manhattan settling in a materialistic Westchester suburb. Not bad to fill some time.

Sci-fi movie that somehow manages to be both boring and overwrought. Something about a guy recovering from some sort of injury, and his mother is injured or dead, and he hallucinates a lot, or something. I couldn't really follow it.