Movie Reviews

Peter Berg, you’ve done it again.  Patriots Day is Berg’s third feature in his trilogy of American tragedy and triumph, following Lone Survivor (2013) and Deepwater Horizon (2016), and it is his most accomplished work of the three and of the director’s career. This is a harrowing look at the bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013.  It shows the horrific bombing and the intense manhunt that followed.  The film also looks how the bombing affected the city…

A movie like Monster Trucks is hard to review.  How do I go about judging this movie?  Do I judge it based on how I, as a 28 year old man, view the movie, even though the film is not for my demographic?  Or, do I judge it as if I am a six year old boy, the film’s target demographic?  I have this issue with kids movies all the time. I started watching the movie as…

After seeing Underworld: Blood Wars, a quote from the movie Anchorman (2004) came to mind; “That’s not a good start, but keep going.” The 2017 movie year is off to a rough start, which is expected.  January is a dead month for cinema.  It is a time where studios release their worse movies on the docket.  Occasionally, we will get a gem or two, like The Grey (2012), but those are like gold hidden amongst a sea of…

2016’s biggest mystery has finally been revealed.  Throughout the year, it was uncertain when, or if, Martin Scorsese’s religious epic, Silence, was every going to hit theaters.  With no trailer or any buzz, it was looking like it was going to be one of my most anticipated titles of 2017.  Then, in November, we finally got a trailer and now, the final product, and I have to say, it was well worth the wait. Silence is true cinematic…

Fences is a movie the relies solely on the actors involved.  Based on the play written by August Wilson, this is a dialog heavy movie with a couple of settings.  All of the action comes from the dialog, so without good actors, the action would be stale. Thankfully, the movie stars two of the best actors we have today and is directed by someone close to source material, resulting in an electric, oustanding film. Wilson’s play…

I don’t usually do this, but this is going to be a SPOILER review.  To really express how I truly feel about this movie and certain things that happen, I have to spoil some of the twists the movie has, because the film the trailers say we’re going to get, we really don’t. So, before reading on, SPOILER ALERT! Now that that’s taken care of, Passengers could have been a good movie.  In fact, it was…

Video game movies have had a pretty rough life in the film world.  From critical and commercial flops like Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), and Max Payne (2008), there really hasn’t been a video game movie that has stood out to be great, or even good for that matter.  The genre took a small step forward this year with Duncan Jones’s Warcraft.  This film was a visual treat and has me intrigued for more films in the series.  Now,…

Since January, I championed Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation as the very best movie of 2016.  I saw fourteen movies before The Birth of a Nation and over 100 after and it was still the very best movie I had seen all year, and by good margin.  I knew the film was in for a tough battle to stay at number one during Oscar season, due to the amount of high profile films coming out from some…

Collateral Beauty is the cinematic equivalent of being promised a giant, juicy dinner and then getting to the table and being served celery wrapped in white bread with a side of white rice.  It is incredibly disappointing and painfully bland. The movie is essentially about sad rich people.  Howard (Will Smith) is an incredibly successful ad executive with a great team of friends and co-workers behind him (Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Michael Peña).  After Howard loses…

From its crawl-less beginning to its very last “hopeful” shot, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is unlike any Star Wars movie ever made.  Besides being the first origin movie that strays away from the traditional storyline, it is also the most un-Star Wars films ever.  This is an exhilarating war film and one that will blow you away. Rogue One takes place between Episode III: Revenge of Sith and Episode IV: A New Hope, as the Imperial…