Movie Reviews

In my review for Sicario (check it out here), I wrote how it was hard for a director to follow up a masterpiece.  The same can be said for a screenwriter.  Aaron Sorkin’s last solo screenplay was for The Social Network in 2010.  (He co-wrote Moneyball in 2011 with Steve Zaillian).  The Social Network is an all-timer for me.  It is expertly crafted and acted and captures the state of communication and technology in today’s…

I grew up reading the Goosebumps books.  They were fun, creepy, and well written.  The idea of a Goosebumps movie had me intrigued and worried because this isn’t an exact adaptation of one specific book, which was fine because they did those very well with the television show.  However, every creature from every book is in this movie and I was worried it was going to be a cheesy kids flick with Marvel syndrome of…

Let’s pretend you hate strawberries.  Now let’s pretend someone takes a bunch of strawberries and makes them look all fancy with chocolate, and some fancy sauce, and makes the strawberries look unrecognizable.  You see this fancy treat and you get excited like, “Oh, that looks good.”  And then you take a bite and realize it is a strawberry, becoming immediately disappointed because you hate it.  You put the strawberry down and look at the others and…

The 2010’s have not been kind to director Sir Ridley Scott.  After having a great 2000’s with films like Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down (2001), the underrated Matchstick Men (2003) and American Gangster (2007), Scott has made some of the worst films of his career this decade.  With the films Robin Hood (2010), Prometheus (2012), The Counselor (2013), and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), Scott has received some of the worst reviews and box office…

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…