Movie Reviews

        Shawn Levy’s action-comedy, Free Guy, is about a character named Guy, a background character, or NPC (non-playable character), in a video game called Free City, a game full of explosions, violence, chaos, and an unknown plot. As an NPC, Guy lives the same day over and over again. He wakes up, greets his fish, puts on the same blue shirt, tie, and khakis, eats his sugar-filled cereal, gets the same coffee order from the…

  The last time we saw Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) was in Avengers: Endgame, where she fell off a cliff on Vormir, sacrificing her life so that the Avengers could retrieve the Soul Stone in order to reverse the damage Thanos had done to the galaxy. It seemed like her story was complete, and it was an emotional, fitting, satisfying finale for one of the original Avengers. So why make a Black Widow and release…

        Writing a review for F9: The Fast Saga seems almost pointless. The Fast & Furious franchise has been around for twenty years and in that time has churned out ten movies (F9 is the tenth), made billions of dollars at the domestic and international box office, and received pretty good critical acclaim. This is a franchise that has become a staple of the cinematic experience. Much like a movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe…

My reviews of The Novice, The Phantom, and Ultrasound from the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.     THE NOVICE   How far are you willing to go to be the best? Whenever this question is brought up in a movie, I am immediately hooked. Movies like Black Swan and Whiplash showcase protagonists who push themselves to their absolute limits, both physically and mentally, in order to be what the deem to be the best. Writer/director Lauren Hadaway’s film The Novice is the latest in this…

My reviews for See For Me, Catch the Fair One, and Dating & New York from the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.     SEE FOR ME   See for Me belongs in the same horror sub-genre as Rear Window and Hush in that the film is thriller revolves around a protagonist with a handicap. In Rear Window, it was a man confined to a wheel chair due to a broken leg who suspected his neighbor of killing his wife. In Hush, it was a…

My reviews of Blind Ambition, Mark, Mary & Some Other People, and Wolfgang from the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.       BLIND AMBITION   Blind Ambition is a documentary that plays like an underdog sports movie in the vein of Cool Runnings, but there is no athleticism involved. This is a movie about a group of refugees from Zimbabwe who now reside in South Africa who try to win the global Wine Tasting Olympics. This is…

        In the Heights is a perfect movie for a post pandemic world. After over a year of staying home, social distancing, and not being able to see friends and family members, we are slowly getting back to normalcy as the world begins to open back. John M. Chu’s fantastic musical wants to celebrate everything that we’ve missed in the last year. It is a movie about community, love, life, and fun…

        Cruella marks the second time Disney has given us a live-action reimagining of one of their iconic villains following 2014’s Maleficent. And much like Maleficent, Cruella was a movie that was very frustrating. There are a lot of elements to the film that I really liked, particularly the look and the vibe of everything. But that all gets bogged down by a bloated runtime and a very messy plot. Cruella de Vil’s villain origin story…

        2018’s A Quiet Place was a critical and box office sensation and a breakout hit for director John Krasinski. One of the aspects that made that film great was its simple concept: if you make a sound, your life could be over. Krasinski crafted a terrifying, thrilling film and one that put Krasinski on the scene as a director. With A Quiet Place Part II, Krasinski shows his growth as a director….

        Army of the Dead marks director Zack Snyder’s return to the zombie genre since his feature directorial debut Dawn of the Dead, a remake of the George A. Romero zombie classic. The film also marks the first Snyder film not rooted in the world of DC universe since 2011’s Sucker Punch. Seeing as I think Dawn of the Dead is Snyder’s best film as a director, as well as not being the biggest fan of…