Daniel Espinosa’s Life is Alien set in the International space Station and threatening Earth –as opposed to hunting the crew of a cargo ship in another galaxy. That’s more than enough to make it feel original.
Tag: Movie Reviews
Power Rangers Is The Very Model of Diversity!
Power Rangers is a more serious take on the patched together kids’ show that gained a huge following in the ‘90s. More serious doesn’t mean Batman serious – more like Iron Man Lite. It’s fun if you don’t go in with much in the way of expectations – and it checks off a laundry list […]
CHiPS – It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses Their Head!
There are two good movies lurking beneath the surface of CHiPS – an R-rated comedy and an R-rated cop drama. The problem is that they’re both chopped up and are jammed together in such a way that the result is an unhappy compromise that lets down the movie as a whole. The drama would work […]
Beauty and the Beast Is an Almost Flawless Beauty!
Disney’s latest attempt at translating one of its classic animated films to live-action is a beauty, if a bit flawed. For the live-action take, the script was tweaked to allow Belle to be even more independent (and less of a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer) and a late tweak include a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gay moments. Neither […]
Logan – Everything Ends!
Logan is the long awaited/eagerly anticipated R-rated Wolverine movie and it lives up the hopes of Wolverine fans in spades.
Table 19: Lovable Losers Escape Wedding Humiliation!
Table 19 is a lighter-than-air confection about a girl who was broken up with via text and went from being her oldest friend’s maid of honor to one of the people at table 19 – the people invited through a sense of obligation but not actually expected to attend. Eloise McGarry (Anna Kendrick) was to […]
Get Out – Meeting the Parents Is No Fun At All!!
Jordan Peele’s first effort as a writer/director fairly simmers with rage – not at the clichéd southern-fried racist rednecks of most horror movies that have discrimination at their root, but at white liberals who have all the right friends and say all the right things (or what they think are the right things).
The Great Wall: Great Movie? No! Great Fun? Yes!
Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall is the first Chinese big budget movie that is targeted at a global audience. It has a number of Chinese stars and one major American star and tells a story that brings East and West cultures together in an uncomfortable co-operation against a foe that, should it feed enough, could […]
Fist Fight Is Three O’Clock High With Potty-Mouthed Teachers!
Almost thirty years ago, there was a sleeper comedy hit called, Three O’Clock High, in which a nerd named Jerry Mitchell got himself in hot water with the school’s behemoth of a bully and found himself challenged to a fight after school. It was pretty good. Fist Fight is essentially the same film only with […]
I Am Jane Doe: Sexual Slavery of Children? In America?
I Am Jane Doe is the documentary that follows the efforts of the parents of survivors of child sex trafficking in America to take down the men who facilitated that trafficking via the website Backpage.com by hiding behind a law meant to help the internet grow. In and of itself, I Am Jane Doe is […]
The LEGO Batman Movie – Lacking Something/Everything!
The LEGO Movie was original, inventive, witty and stylish. Batman was used as punctuation – injected a bit of pompous self-congratulation while saving a few lives. The LEGO Batman Movie takes those few moments and puffs them up into a 104-minute excursion into the EGO part of The LEGO Batman. By the time he decides […]