Movie Reviews

Here are my reviews for How It Ends and On the Count of Three, which had their premieres at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.       HOW IT ENDS   How It Ends is one of the more unique end-of-the-world movies I have ever seen.  It’s a quirky, weird, often hilarious odyssey through Los Angeles filled with celebrity cameos and a sweet story. On the last day on Earth, Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) goes on a journey through…

Here are my reviews for the films CODA, Flee, and Censor, which debuted at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.       CODA   The 2021 Sundance Film Festival kicked off in the best way possible.  Sian Heder’s CODA is an absolute delight of a movie.  A funny, sweet, beautiful family story with a huge heart and great performances. The film follows Rubi Rossi (Emilia Jones) a hearing child in a deaf family.  Because Rubi is the only in the…

      The Little Things is as basic as cop thrillers get.  The IMDb plot description is “two cops track down a serial killer” and that’s very accurate because that is really all that happens.  Though it tries to add layers to its characters and story, the film never reaches its full potential and instead ends up being a mildly captivating, overlong thriller with solid performances. In The Little Things, Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel…

        La Casa begins with a series of archival news footage looking at a haunted house in a town in Chile.  The footage gives us a history of the house and the family that lived there, who were trying to start a family and when they were unable to conceive a child, they resorted to black magic for help, though when the child was finally born it was born deformed.  This caused madness…

        Outside the Wire is a futuristic, militarized version of 2001’s Training Day.  A movie that looks at a rookie on the job who follows along his too-good-at-his-job leader while questioning some of his methods in getting the job done.  This is a movie we’ve all seen before, but the thrilling action and a captivating lead performance keep this one relatively interesting. Set in 2036, drone pilot Lieutenant Thomas Harpa (Damson Idris) is…

        Wonder Woman 1984 was one of the major titles that got affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.  Slated to come out on June 5, 2020 – after being pushed back from November 2019 – the highly anticipated sequel was victim of the movie theaters shutting down in March.  After going back-and-forth in deciding whether to even release the film this year, Warner Bros. made the decision to release the film in theaters –…

        Pixar has been making movies for over twenty-five years now and throughout those twenty-five years they have done a great job of making movies that appeal to both children and adults.  Whether it be a fun character for the kids to love or a deep theme that adults connect to, Pixar movies have something for everyone, which I would argue is a key piece as to why they have had so…

        To say that the 2020 movie year has been unlike any other movie year before it would be an understatement.  Thanks to a global pandemic, movie theaters have been shutdown for a majority of the year, causing a lot movies to be pushed to 2021 or even later.  The movies that have been released this year have either been released through a streaming service or paid on-demand.  Though there has been…

          Mank tells the story screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s journey in writing 1941’s Citizen Kane, a film that many critics and scholars consider to be the greatest film of all-time.  But Mank isn’t a typical biopic about a man and his crowning career achievement.  This is a behind-the-curtain look at the Hollywood system in the 1930’s and 1940’s, the moguls who ran it, and a troubled man who just happened to write one of…

        The 2020 Christmas season might be a little different this year compared to most years.  Usually a time of year where families come together to show love and appreciation for one another by feasting and gift-giving, all of that might be postponed this year, as COVID-19 still sweeps the globe, particularly in the United States.  Many scientists, doctors, and government officials have advised not having large family gatherings during the holidays…