Film history has proven that sequels released more than a decade after the last film tend to not be very good.  Examples of this include Godfather III (16 years after Godfather II), Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (23 years after Wall Street), Basic Instinct 2 (14 years after Basic Instinct), and Dumb and Dumber To (20 years after Dumb and Dumber). But Pixar seems to be the exception to this rule.  With sequels like Toy Story 3 and Finding Dory, Pixar seems to have…

        Hereditary is a movie I saw back in January at the Sundance Film Festival and it is a movie that has been engrained in my mind since.  Director Ari Aster has created a modern horror classic.  It’s a tense, moody, atmospheric thriller with deep themes and beautiful craftsmanship.  It is genuinely one of the most haunting movie experiences I have ever had and the best movie that I have seen in 2018 so…

      Upgrade is an unexpected triumph.  I call it unexpected because the title of this movie is horrible (every time I say the title, I say it like Maya Rudolph’s character in Idiocracy, where it sounds more like “upgrayde”), and the marketing of the movie made it look like the kind of throwaway action flick we get every year: low budget, violent, minor actors, etc. But Upgrade is far more than that.  Upgrade is a smart, thrilling, compelling,…

      Here’s a brief conversation between myself and my girlfriend while watching Adrift:   Girlfriend: How long is this movie? Me: Two hours. Girlfriend: How much longer do we have? Me: *looks at watch* an hour. Girlfriend: *sighs* I feel Shailene Woodley’s pain.   I wasn’t in nearly as much pain watching this movie as my girlfriend was, but this brief conversation sums up a lot of how I feel about Adrift, a poorly constructed,…

In one of the first scenes of Ron Howard’s Solo, we get an encounter between Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and an Imperial desk clerk.  Solo is a small time crook who has found his way off the streets by joining the Imperial Army.  Here is how the encounter went down: Imperial Desk Clerk: Name? Han Solo: Han. Clerk: Last name? Han stares silently into the distance. Clerk: Your last name?  Who are your people? Han:…

      Deadpool is back!  But this time, it’s personal.  After the funny, entertaining, game-changing first film, the Merc with the Mouth changes gears in this sequel, which offers up more blood, characters, action, and, more impressively, more depth and emotion. After tragedy strikes our foul-mouthed mercenary, Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) must find a new meaning of life and does so in a troubled mutant named Russell (Julian Dennison).  When Russell is being hunted…