I won’t lie; I walked into The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 knowing that I would hate it. I liked the first two films well enough, but really don’t like Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and I’m sorry but I’m sick to death of watching movies that don’t seem to end. I miss the days when movies […]
Category: Movie Reviews
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 – Action, Suspense and Thinking!
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 could have gone wrong in so many ways that it’s a genuine relief to be able to say it’s infinitely better than the book – at least, so far. It’s smart and thought provoking while having considerably more action that I was expecting. In fact, it’s the best film […]
Dumb and Dumber To Bad!
Dumb and Dumber was a really smart movie about a couple of really stupid people. Dumb and Dumber To is not.
Big Hero 6 – Big Hearted, Huggable Adventure!
It was only a matter of time before Disney tackled an animated Marvel movie. Picking an extremely obscure title allowed the company to set up a unique world and introduce a group of genuinely fun characters. Loss leads to superheroic adventure in Disney’s Big Hero 6. It is one of the best films of the […]
Interstellar Is Stellar Not Interstellar!
Christopher Nolan’s new epic, Interstellar, is a magnificent achievement technically but falls a bit short in terms of story and character development. It’s an intriguing mix of science fact and fiction that attempts to turn a potential end of the world scenario with a phoenix-like rise from the ashes story. It spends a lot of […]
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): A Fabulous Fiction Rooted In Truth!
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a brilliant bombastic, bizarre skewering of: superhero movies, egocentric actors, actors’ insecurities, Broadway, Broadway critics, and pretty much all things entertainment. The story of Riggan Thomson’s (Michael Keaton) effort to be taken seriously as an actor/director/playwright after having starred in three superhero movies twenty […]
Horns: Joe Hill’s Book Makes a Good, Creepy Movie!
Horns is based on the novel by Joe Hill. It stars Daniel Radcliffe as Ig Perrish, broken-hearted young man who is believed by everyone in town to have raped and murdered his girlfriend, Merrin Williams. Things get weird when he awakens after a night of serious drinking with horns beginning to grow out of his […]
John Wick: Well Worn Trope in a Fresh World!
Why would we go to see yet another hitman comes out of retirement to wreak vengeance movie? Because it takes the reliable (okay, maybe overused) trope and reinvigorates it with style, a degree of wit and a unique world with unusual details. Also, Keanu Reeves at his best.
Bill Murray Makes St. Vincent More!
St. Vincent is a film that tells a story that we’ve seen many times before – a curmudgeonly older guy rediscovers life because of the influence of a child, while teaching that child about life. The difference between St. Vincent and those many other similarly plotting movies is that this film has a cast that […]
Ouija: Spiffy Premise, Cookie Cutter Movie!
Remember those Ouija boards that we used to use to scare ourselves silly when we were kids? Well, there’s a microbudgeted horror film about some kids who get into big supernatural trouble because they didn’t follow the rules. It’s a pretty lame effort at bringing classic (which is to say clichéd) tropes to an adolescent-friendly […]
Fury – Ideals are Peaceful, History is Violent!
Fury ratchets up the intensity from the opening moments and maintains it for over two hours through the introduction of characters that initially feel stock but become something else – and escalating violence and hints at the erosion of decency that war can cause.