Movie Reviews

    Chuck (Patton Oswalt) isn’t winning any “Father of the Year” trophies any time soon. When we first meet him, he is on a walk with his young son Franklin. On this walk, Chuck and Franklin find an adorable puppy and Chuck asks Franklin if he wants to keep it, to which Franklin happily replies yes. A few seconds later, we see a sign for a lost dog, with a picture of the puppy…

    Matt Reeves’s The Batman is the best Batman movie since The Dark Knight and the best movie about Batman as a character. This isn’t a Batman movie that is focused on Batman as a city-saving superhero, but Batman as a tortured detective. It is a dark, intense, thrilling film-noir about a hero learning his place in a broken society. Since 1989, when Michael Keaton donned the cape and cowl in Tim Burton’s Batman,…

  Dunk or Die is an electrifying documentary about a man who dreamed of flying. Not literally flying, but flying on the hardwood floor of the basketball court to throw down creative and powerful dunks. From tough beginnings to international fame, director Nicolas de Virieu shows an inspiring profile of an impressive and motivated athlete that most people may never have heard of. That athlete is Kadour Ziani, an Algerian man who grew up in…

  The cinematic romantic comedy is rare nowadays. The once-popular genre that brought us classics like When Harry Met Sally… and My Best Friend’s Wedding has now shifted from the big screen to the small screen by way of streaming services. Films like Always Be My Maybe, Set It Up, and the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy have found great success on streaming services, thus making the theatrical romantic comedy nearly obsolete….

My reviews of Watcher, 892, and Call Jane, all of which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.     WATCHER Watcher is a tense, well-made thriller reminiscent of Hitchcock. The film follows Julia (Maika Monroe) a woman who has just moved to Romania with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) for his job. Busy with work all day, Julia is left alone in her large, creaky apartment in a place she knows nothing about. She does some exploring…

    The gang behind MTV’s hit show Jackass saw their star power rise rapidly in the early 2000s. The stunt-prank-comedy show lasted three seasons and gave us hilarious and iconic skits like “Party Boy” and “The Cup Test”, and made Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Wee Man, and other members of the crew household names. Following the show’s end, they got their own movie with Jackass: The Movie, which basically played like an hour-and-a-half-long episode with…

  Moonfall is a big, dumb, insanely silly, big-budget sci-fi movie we haven’t seen in a long time. Reminiscent of end-of-the-world blockbusters from the 1990s, director Roland Emmerich has given us an explosive movie that would fit right next to the likes Armageddon or Deep Impact, yet one that also feels weirdly refreshing in today’s cinematic landscape. Moonfall has a very simple premise: what if the moon fell towards Earth? How may you ask this…

    Jim Archer’s Brian and Charles was the biggest surprise for me at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Originally not on my main list of movies to watch during the festival, I was lucky enough to get a ticket for the film and I could not be happier with my decision. This is a lovely, sweet, hilarious comedy about a man and his robot. Brian (David Earl) lives alone in a small Welsh village,…

    I’ve been attending the Sundance Film Festival for over ten years now and one of the reasons that keep me coming back to this film festival is watching the movies of emerging filmmakers and new filmmakers. I love seeing filmmakers who have been on my radar come into their own in terms of style and voice and I love seeing a new vision from a director who had never made a feature film…

    Aubrey Plaza gives the best performances of her career in Emily the Criminal, a slick, tough L.A. crime movie with shades of a Michael Mann movie. Plaza plays Emily, a woman living in Los Angeles strapped with a mountain of student debt. Unable to break into the job market because of her slight criminal record, Emily tries to make money working for a catering company where she is miserable. In a feat of…