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…

Lion is one of the most emotional movies of 2016.  It is a movie that continuously hits you in the feels, yet not overdoing it to make it melodramatic. Lion is the incredible true story of Saroo (Sunny Pawar), a five year old boy who gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home.  He survives the tough streets and ends up being adopted by an Australian family (Nicole Kidman, David Wenham) and…

Office Christmas Party is one of those comedies where it is all about the cast.  The plot and story are all irrelevant, the love stories are useless and lame, and the movie runs too long.  But God damn, if this isn’t a cast of comedic all-stars that make this movie a blast. When an uptight CEO (Jennifer Aniston) threatens to shut down his branch, a branch manager (T.J. Miller) throws an epic Christmas party to…

I first saw Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  It was towards the end of the festival and the hype around the film was through the roof.  The film ended up being one of my favorites of the festival and was one I was constantly thinking about for months after. I decided check the movie out again when it finally got a wide release, a rarity for me, as I would…

The Eyes of My Mother is a truly disturbing and horrifying film, yet one of the most beautifully shot and made films of the year. The film looks at the life of Francisca, a lonely girl who witnesses a horrible tragedy the skewers her way of life.  We see as young Francisca (Olivia Bond) learns how to do facial surgery using dead animals, and we watch the questionable parenting techniques of her parents, until tragedy…