Movie Reviews

There is nothing special about Life.  Everything that happens in this movie we have seen dozens of times before and done better each time.  Even with its stellar cast, nothing in this movie is exciting, original, or scary, causing the movie to do an overall dud. The movie is about a team of scientists aboard the International Space Station that discover a rapidly evolving life form, that caused extinction on Mars, and now threatens the crew…

The opening of CHiPs is a black screen with a warning on it that reads, “The California Highway Patrol does not promote this movie.  At all.”  Well, neither does this reviewer.  CHiPs has a few parts that made me chuckle, but overall is an immature, uneven, unfunny action comedy. When aN F.B.I. agent (Michael Peña) goes undercover in the California Highway Patrol, he is teamed with a reckless, clumsy rookie (Dax Shepard) and the two work…

The Belko Experiment is the definition of B-movie madness.  This is a movie that would have played perfectly at a midnight screening in a garbage theater on some sort of hallucinogenic drug.  It is a bloody, violent, insane movie with a simple plot, cliché characters and the right amount of cheesiness. The Belko Experiment takes place at Belko Industries, a government building set in middle of nowhere Columbia.  On a typical work day, the building…

Beauty and the Beast is the fifth live-action adaptation of a Disney animated classic following Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), The Jungle Book (2016), and Pete’s Dragon (2016) (we don’t count 2010’s candy-colored Alice and Wonderland).  When it comes to these remakes, what exactly are we looking for?  Are we looking for a near shot-for-shot remake of the original animated film?  A reinvention of the classic story?  A little bit of both?  Cinderella was closer to the shot-for-shot version, as was The…

Kong: Skull Island is the fourth incarnation of the infamous giant ape, following the original classic from 1933, the 1976 version starring Jeff Bridges, and Peter Jackson’s 2005 version.  Those 1976 and 2005 versions are both remakes of the 1933 film, all being essentially the same movie with a few story changes and new technology for each film.  But in Kong: Skull Island, we get something that is both original, yet keeps the same spirit and similar…

‘An old man dies, a little girl lives. Fair trade.’ Hugh Jackman graces us as Wolverine for the final time in Logan, James Mangold’s epic, violent, emotional finale that sends the legendary superhero off in a blaze of blood and glory. Logan, inspired by the Old Man Logan comic series, takes place in 2029, where mutants are few and far between, as Logan/Wolverine (Jackman), now limping, scarred, grayed, and disheveled, is taking care of an ailing Professor Xavier…

Table 19 is about sad people on a happy day.  Table 19 represents the very last table at a wedding reception, a sort-of “rejects” table where you dump random business friends, distant family members, and friendly ex’s at. At this table, we have Eloise (Anna Kendrick), the ex-girlfriend of the best man in the wedding and a long-time friend of the bride, Jerry and Bina Kepp (Craig Robinson and Lisa Kudrow), a dysfunctional married couple…

2016 was a spectacular year for horror films, giving us a number of smart, violent, scary films unlike any we had seen before.  If Get Out is any indication of the horror movies we are going to get in 2017, we are in for an even better year. Get Out is a wildly original, incredibly smart, genuinely scary, and twistedly funny horror film with an uncomfortable amount of realism. In Get Out, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black…

Before going in to Fifty Shades Darker, I had only seen about twenty minutes of the first film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015).  I turned the movie off because, well, it was awful.  I was fortunate enough to watch Grey at home, that way, I could turn it off or leave if I hated it.  Not so much luck with Darker, where I actually went to a theater, paid money, and sat in said theater for two hours and…

The whole movie of Fist Fight revolves around a fight between funny guy Charlie Day and tough guy Ice Cube, two men who couldn’t be more opposite.  We know that this brawl is going to occur at the end of the movie, so how does the movie survive until then?  First, it needs compelling characters that we care about.  It also needs a strong second act filled with actions and development that keep the movie afloat until the big…