Archives: Movie Reviews

Two things I can't stand: 1.) unbearably twee, self-consciously "quirky" comedies; and 2.) Tom Arnold being cast as anything other than the one white guy on the Soul Plane. I lasted like 20 minutes on this movie.

Any horror movie starring Katie Holmes is only going to be so good. This one has very decent creature effects, though. Guy Pearce (who appears to be completely featureless other than his tiny little nose, sorta like a male Milla Jovovich) and his tiny little nose are utterly wasted in this. Also notable for (spoiler) basically being a horror movie about the Tooth Fairy. If you're the kind of person who's amused by catching goof details like the scullery maid in the beginning trying to see what's in the dark basement by holding the candle right in front of her eyes, this movie is full of that stuff.

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.

Did we really need another movie like this? Uncomfortable dinner in the English countryside between two young couples with an obvious uncomfortable history gets increasingly uncomfortable until, in a stunningly original piece of plotting, masked guys unexpectedly break in and start brutalizing them. Iwan Rheon is better than this. The tables turn repeatedly as the victims and the intruders repeatedly manage to overpower one another, the movie ends as soon as the violence does just in case you though anything besides the violence was the point, and the whole thing is rendered terribly English by pretentious title cards dividing it up needlessly into "chapters" and saving the title card for the end of the movie with a sudden "bam" sound to underscore that it's supposed to have some sort of impact. I suppose if you've never seen a gratiutous bloodbath before it might, but really, what moviegoer hasn't at this…

godawful "indie"-flick-starring-major stars I got tricked into watching by Hulu billing it as a "comedy". This movie seems to desperately want to say something, but I have no idea what that is. Kristine Froseth stars as a gorgeous childcare worker, and a virgin who had a medical hysterectomy at 15, who has a crush on the father of the boy she watches, seduces him, has an affair before getting caught, writes a fan letter to a porn star she likes, anonymously fucks a lot of guys, catches an unspecified STD, and at the end gets a video back from the porn star giving her advice to stand up for herself and avoid bad people, end of movie. Except for the "written by Lena Dunham" credit that finally explains why this well-acted-but-otherwise-completely-hollow exercise even exists.

Had opportunity to re-watch this, and you know, I like this movie. Not sure what I can say that hasn't already been said. Meryl Streep in an iconic performance she modeled partly on Clint Eastwood's ability to command attention by speaking softly, plus Anne Hathaway, who to me has always been an entertaining-enough sort of "everyperson" actress, one of very few prominent stars you see regularly who isn't annoyingly Hollywood-y. A refreshing example of how you can make movies with female casts that are emphatically not chick-flicks, and pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, all without preaching, moralizing or ever forgetting that the main objective is just to be a good movie. Now if they could just make these about something besides the fashion industry.

Eh, this is all getting a bit Harry Potter for me. The first season was cool. By season 4, they actually do a decent job of retconning an overarching narrative for everything they've ever should (helped along by a disturbing digitally age-regressed heroine for new scenes of "her" as she looked as an 11 year old in season 1). I mean, it wasn't bad, I don't regret watching it, but there's a lot of good stuff on Netflix nowadays, and a lot of very grandiose high-concept fare, and I dunno, this isn't bad but it's comparably nothing to write home about, either, like it was 5 years ago. Also, as an IT guy then and now, I'm a little annoyed at the presence of laptop computers and the use of IP geolocation as a plot device in a show set in 1986.

Talk about a disappointment. For about 85% of its running length, this jump-out-and-say-boo ghost story about a young widow mourning her husband's recent suicide in the lake house he built manages to stay better than average by mostly avoiding familiar tropes and plot twists and slowly ratcheting up the weirdness with a minimum of special effects or exposition, or even ever tipping its hand as to whether the haunting is actually happening. Then, in the very final scenes, whatever forces often conspire to take middling horror pictures and ruin them by jettisoning sense and writing in favor of overly familiar tropes, sentimentality, and special effects packs as much of all that into the last few scenes as they normally do into a whole movie, and completely undo everything that was good about it up to that point before concluding with an ending that neither satisfies nor even makes much sense.…

Ridiculous, hamfisted, but a charismatic cast kind of save this ridiculous attempt at making a "Get Out" for Latinos. An emergency order results in the arrest of all children of illegal immigrants, with an offer to drop all charges if they help out for three months at a creepy senior center. It only gets more ridiculous and unbelievable from there.

Just re-watched this movie, which I remembered as being pretty good, after many years. It's funny how different it plays in post-Trump America. It could almost be a parable. And the stereotypically smug, condescending, aloof liberal (to judge by their horror at someone owning — gulp — a gun!) city couple doesn't come off as innocent as they did the first time I watched it... to the extent that I was a little disappointed that, rather than make a controversial observation, aloofness simply wins in the end over brute physicality and living perhaps just a little too much in-the-moment, and apparently without even being really changed in any substantial way by the experience. But, after a slow start, the acting is every bit as good as I remember, and the movie actually raises a lot of interesting things to think about, all of which elevates it above the exploitation flick…

contrived set piece in which a young, insecure couple agrees to stay in an empty white room for 50 days for $5,000,000. Guess whether they last or not. Hint: in act 1, they wake up and suddenly a gun is in there, which they kick under the bed. Actually, I kinda liked it for the frenetic performances. Reminded me a little bit of Jim Henson's psychedelic pre-Muppets "Room", except, instead of a psychedelia, it has Ashley Greene's boobs.

Madeline Brewer, who always seems to pick at least faintly interesting projects, in what could easily have been a slightly titillating Black Mirror episode, as a cam girl who finds her account, and identity, have been usurped by an impostor. Ultimately a little unsatisfying, as it leaves questions unanswered, but entertaining enough, in that "pretty good Black Mirror episode" way.

"The Lost Boys" was better.

"Superbad" as a TV movie with girls instead of guys. The two leads are genuinely likable and have real chemistry, and the humor is good, but the try-hard over-quirkiness, contrived situations, and inclusion of too many familiar teen movie tropes and stereotypes wears a little bit thin.

Terrible horror movie. Like a teen scream, except stars adults. A doctor sees a deranged patient kill herself in front of her, inherits a curse that makes random jump scares happen to you for no clear reason before making you kill yourself in front of someone else to pass the curse along.

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.

Ok movie with Lily Collins as an anorexic in a group home. Not much to say.

So, I'm watching this movie, which stars Robert Pattinson's teeny, tiny nose as the nose of a billionaire riding around New York taking meetings and having sex in his limo all day, and I'm a little put off by how strange, stiff, and mannered the performances are, and how overall pretentious it seems. And as it wears on, I have to admit, there's something well done about it. By the end, which features a soliloquy by a madman of a lengthy that would have been incredibly tedious if anyone but Paul Giamatti had attempted it, but instead works incredibly well and is one of his shining moments as an actor as well as an all-around cinematically impressive scene, I had to admit I liked it in spite of myself. And then the credits roll, and: directed by David Cronenberg. A-ha! That's my boy, sneaking one past me by creating what…

Mom tries to cross zombie-infested Los Angeles to find her daughter. The Walking Dead, except with fast zombies instead of slow zombies, and any plot considerations totally replaced by people shooting each other. I can't even figure out how everybody got a gun — everybody has one, but I never heard anybody say, "Here, have a gun" or "Hey, I found some guns!" They're all assault rifles, too. UPDATE: I don't know if I'm watching a remake or an expanded cut or a new season or whatever, but it's much better than this original review. Maybe I missed a couple of episodes on the first view? Worst episodes are still like halfway decent walking dead episodes, but some of them are quieter, almost black mirror-style (in terms of mood) vingettes, more realism than a lot of zombie fare, and everybody definitely doesn't have a gun now. There's a weird "Lord…

Joe Dante in "workmanlike mainstream director" mode. A woman with psychic powers is drawn in to a murder trial and followup investigation in this dirtbag rural whodunit. I find it hard to buy a town full of "rednecks" played almost entirely by recognizable A-list celebrities: Keanu Reeves, Hillary Swank, Katie Holmes, Greg Kinnear, Blake Lively, JK Simmons. I could buy maybe one or two of these people as rednecks talking with fake southern accents, but, all of them?

As Kat Dennings's likeability is to Jay Baruchel's, and Los Angeles is to Vancouver, so is Dollface to Man Seeking Woman. Which is to say, it's pretty good, entertaining enough.

A pleasant enough way to kill an hour and a half, with Charlize Theron as a gorgeous prom queen returned to her small home town to reclaim her gorgeous prom king, now happily married and with a new child, in a fairly pitch-perfect and nuanced performance s a clueless narcissist who remains steadfastly oblivious to what's really happening around her. Also stars Patton Oswalt as, surprisingly, a pointedly non-gorgeous Star Wars-loving nerd, which you may consider a plus or a minus according to your own tastes at this point.

Eli Roth, once again showing his ability to waste his more than adequate filmmaking skills on torture porn the sake of nothing but torture porn, technically well-done but with nothing to actually redeem it beyond the extent to which you enjoy obscenely unflinching brutality, and no originality, only novelty in persuit of the same, just a masterful abilty at repeating the exact sort of think he's seen before, tweaked just enough to be a different movie. Even the name is ripped off from a device used in the genuine gore classic "Cannibal Holocaust". Plus, despite showing the most graphic violence imaginable, he studiosly avoids showing so much as a nipple during this films more than an hour of showing "amazonian natives" running wild. I have to imagine there's an x-rated cut of this floating around somewhere, and honestly, I'd respect that more than this. You want to be genuinely transgressive,…

I'm generally not a fan of "so bad it's good" films, but, my god. Except for the White Zombie-sounding tracks in the otherwise analog synth soundtrack, this 2017 film is a note-perfect simulation of gloriously over-the-top 1980s USA Up All Nite-style supernatural gorefest fare. Two gorgeous secret agents descend into a prison modeled after Dante's Inferno and full of psychotic and/or supernatural killers. Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Adrienne Barbeau, Dee Wallace, Michael Berryman, and every one of them chewing the scenery like they're loving every minute of it ... this one is kind of the exception that proves the rule. It's very, very hard to make a camp movie like this that I can sit through, but this one takes it so far, and takes itself so ridiculously seriously, that it accomplishes what few can. I would never recommend this as a movie for anyone else to watch, but for…

What promises to be a total crap thriller about a young girl being pursued by a supernatural force after a "Bloody Mary"-type teenagers-foolishly-test-a-superstition-that-turns-out-to-be-true incident actually turns out to be a pretty decent, well-made supernatural thriller. Maybe it has something to do with being a British film. I'm starting to get the impression that Katee Sakhoff has some basic standards as to what she'll appear in... I don't believe I've ever seen her in something that wasn't at least alright.

Robin Wright in a 1/3-live action, 2/3-animated film about, um, I'm not really sure. Something about actors being digitized, and then about people taking chemicals made by the movie studios that let them live in a cartoon world. The animation is a stupendous take on vintage Paramount style but this might be the most tendentious film I've ever seen. It desperately wants to mean something, I'm probably supposed to conclude something from the nonstop over-the-top sentimentality about Wright wanting to see her disabled son, but either it misses the mark or I just don't get it. The "From the story by Stanislaw Lem" end credit makes head-smackingly perfect sense.