Movie Reviews

  The opening credits of the first Guardians of the Galaxy saw Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) landing on a planet, entering a cave, putting on the headphones to his old Walkman cassette player, and playing “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone as he dances and struts through the cave. In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the film’s opening credits are of Baby Groot dancing to “Mr. Blue Sky” by Electric Light Orchestra while…

  I saw The Super Mario Bros. Movie a few weeks ago and since then the movie has become a box office sensation. It will crack $1 billion at the global box office, and it continues to dominate the domestic box office, children everywhere are seeing it and loving it and some adults are too. The critical response to the film, however, was less enthusiastic. Sitting currently at 59% on Rotten Tomatoes (meaning 59% of…

  If you’ve followed me over the last few years, you know I am a big fan of director Ari Aster. His directorial debut, Hereditary, was my favorite movie of 2018 and one of my ten favorite movies of the decade. His second film, Midsommar, landed in my top ten of 2019. With just those two films, Aster became a director I immediately connected with and a director whose next films I would eagerly await….

  Broken Lizard, the comedy team comprised of Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stohlhanske, has been making movies for over twenty years are responsible for some of the great cult comedies of the 2000s. While their movies are hilarious, one thing the Broken Lizard crew doesn’t get enough credit for is how good they are at paying homage to the specific genres of their films. Super Troopers, the film that…

  Showing Up is a quiet slice of life from the great Kelly Reichardt. Reichardt’s latest takes us into the world of the Portland art scene where we look at an artist’s preparation for her latest show and the stresses that she deals with in the week leading up to it. It’s a delicate, amusing, and surprisingly stressful film about the creative process and being an artist. Michelle Williams, working with Reichardt for the fourth…

  As I was sitting in my screening of Air, Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort about how Nike got Michael Jordan to sign with them, I was wearing a pair of Jordan shoes, specifically a pair of Jordan Retro 1s, which look exactly like the first pair of Nike Jordan’s, but mine were a different color. Since several other people in the theater and I were wearing Jordan shoes and Jordan apparel, it was safe…

The opening scene of John Wick: Chapter 4 finds John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the underground training facility of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), the only assassin in this ever-expanding world of assassins who was willing to help John after he was labeled “excommunicado” by the High Table. John is getting ready for his ultimate revenge against the High Table, looking healed, strong, and angry, as he takes his aggression out on a wooden training…

  Boston Strangler is like David Fincher’s Zodiac and Maria Schrader’s She Said had a child: a tense, chilling newsroom procedural about a serial killer terrorizing a city and the two women who broke the story while facing adversity in the workplace. Set in 1960s Boston, Boston Strangler introduces us to Loretta McLoughlin (Kiera Knightly) a writer for the Boston Record America who mainly writes reviews for new house appliances, as most women do at…

  Scream VI takes the Scream franchise to a place it’s never been before: cross country to New York City. Usually taking place in the fictional Californian city of Woodsboro (except for Scream 3, which took us to a Hollywood film set that resembled Woodsboro), going to New York seemed like the next logical step in a horror franchise that has been going on for nearly twenty-five years. We’ve seen Friday the 13th do it…

  Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre is a globe-trotting, slick spy thriller that is non-stop fun and never overly complicated. Operation Fortune gets going right from the start. Co-writer/director Guy Ritchie wastes no time in establishing the players of the film. Nathan (Cary Elwes), working for some sort of British intelligence agency, is putting together a team of the best spies he can get his hands on in order to stop the sale of deadly…