Movie Reviews

Here are my reviews for Hold Your Fire and Lakewood from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.     HOLD YOUR FIRE In 1973, four Black men were looking to rob guns from John & Al’s Sporting Goods in Brooklyn, New York. What transpired was one of the most infamous hostage situations in American history and would later be considered the birthplace of hostage negotiation. Stefan Forbes’ enthralling documentary Hold Your Fire tells the story of what occurred during…

My reviews of Dashcam and Julia from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.     DASHCAM Dashcam is a horror movie that made me miss the full theatrical experience. Though it doesn’t break new ground in the found-footage genre, Dashcam is an insane, bloody, twisted film that is full of jump scares that would have the audience howling. Dashcam takes place all through the live stream of Annie (Annie Hardy), a MAGA-hat rocking vlogger whose obnoxious rants and tirades…

      The Protégé stars Maggie Q stars as Anna, a highly-skilled contract killer who was raised and trained by Moody (Samuel L. Jackson) after he found her in Vietnam as a child. When Moody is unexpectedly murdered, Anna vows to get revenge on the people who killed the man who taught her everything. As she digs deeper into potential suspects, she becomes entangled with Rembrandt (Michael Keaton), an enigmatic killer who might have…

        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…