Movie Reviews

It’s hard to follow up a masterpiece. After a director makes a masterpiece, everyone expects the next film to be just as great. Most of the time, the results are underwhelming. Quentin Tarantino followed up Pulp Fiction (1994) with Jackie Brown (1997), David Fincher followed up Se7en (1995) with The Game (1997), Steven Spielberg followed up Saving Private Ryan (1998) with A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and so on. Not saying these movies are bad, but…

The story of French tight-rope walker Philippe Petit’s mind-blowing stunt of walking between the World Trade Center towers had already been told in 2008’s Oscar winning documentary Man On Wire.  The documentary is a masterpiece and one of the best documentaries I have ever seen, so the idea of a narrative version of the story had me a bit hesitant, as it is completely unnecessary.  But, with technical master Robert Zemeckis behind the camera and the…

Johnny Depp’s still got it. After a series of duds, Depp’s acting and film choices made us question his ability as an actor. But as James ‘Whitey’ Bulger in Scott Cooper’s gangster drama Black Mass, Depp gives one of his best performances to date and proves why he is one of the best actors in Hollywood. Told through the stories of Bulger’s henchmen, we start in 1975 with Bulger as a small-time, yet intimidating force…

We have seen movies about the quarter-life crises, like The Graduate (1967), Garden State (2004), and The Worlds End (2013).  We have seen midlife-crises movies like 8 1/2 (1963), American Beauty (1999), and The Incredibles (2004).  What we don’t see a lot of, however, is the three-quarter life crises movie.  We rarely see movies about people in their elder years looking back at life and realizing, after seeing friends and loved ones die, that they haven’t fulfilled…

Here’s a film history lesson for you.  In 1999, director M. Night Shyamalan released his first monumental film The Sixth Sense.  It was a massive success, both at the box office and with awards, and launched Shyamalan on to the Hollywood scene.  That same year, a groundbreaking horror film titled The Blair Witch Project came out and brought the found footage horror genre into the mainstream. Since 1999 however, neither Shyamalan nor the found-footage horror genre…

When comedic actors venture into drama, it can go one of two ways.  They can be great, like Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Steve Carrell in Foxcatcher (2014).  Or, they can be terrible, like Vince Vaughn in Psycho (1998) or Jim Carrey in The Number 23 (2007).  So when I heard that Jason Segel of Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) and How I Met Your Mother fame was stepping into the dramatic world as author…

Straight Outta Compton, was another film I could not wait to see in 2015.  In fact, it was number three on my Most Anticipated Films of 2015 behind only J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman (2014) follow-up, The Revenant.  The trailers for the film were electric, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube were godfathering the film, the cast looked good, the director was established, and the music was…

One of the worst things to watch as a film critic is a gifted cast wasted in a terrible movie.  With films like Ocean’s 12 (2004), All the King’s Men (2006), Bobby (2006), and Movie 43 (2013), studios put together an all-star, awards caliber team and put them into a movie that is either underwhelming or just awful. However, Josh Trank’s Fant4stic might be the biggest culprit of this travesty, as Fant4stic is a cinematic debacle that…

Southpaw was a film I could not wait to see.  It was number nine on my Most Anticipated Films of 2015 list that I made at the beginning of the year.  It had everything going for it.  An established director in Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, 2001), an incredible cast, including Rachel McAdams, Oscar winner Forrest Whitaker, and a jacked Jake Gyllenhaal, excellent marketing and trailers, and a soundtrack produced by Eminem. Sadly, the film did…

Before going into Ant-Man, the 12th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I was a bit hesitant.  My lack of knowledge of Ant-Man gave me the idea that this superhero and his powers were kind of a joke and mildly stupid compared the other Marvel heroes we have met so far.  Also, the production was a troubled one, with one of my favorite directors, Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, 2007), originally set to direct but left…