michael's movie reviews
2021
These are the movies I reviewed in 2021.
reviewed 2021.12.29
This is the third Bond movie that my son and I watched together...
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
reviewed 2021.12.21
This is the second Bond film that I watched with my son...
reviewed 2021.12.20
I watched this with my almost-thirteen-year-old this morning...
reviewed 2021.12.17
I showed the kids this '80s classic movie tonight...
reviewed 2021.12.04
This is a Chinese-produced movie on Netflix that my daughter and I watched for "Movie Night"...
reviewed 2021.12.03
Burned out after another brutal week at work, I sat in front of Netflix and took a chance on this movie about a beautiful young Russian woman who winds up working for the KGB in the waning days of the USSR...
reviewed 2021.11.20
This movie is four hours long...
reviewed 2021.11.19
Sometimes, Hollywood will make a movie simply by assembling a leading cast and letting them do their usual shtick...
reviewed 2021.11.18
We watched this one for "movie night", and I realized that I'd somehow never seen this movie. I'm a fan of Spider Man inasmuch as can still tolerate super-hero movies. And while the cast is excellent, the plot makes little sense and Jamie Foxx is cruelly mis-used. Spider-man comes across like an unpleasant and self-serving person, and quite undeserving of his girl's affection.I suppose this is t..
reviewed 2021.11.16
It's been quite some time since I watched this Sci-Fi/thriller...
reviewed 2021.10.30
This is the story of a vampire who is locked up in a coffin for centuries and then released in our time. Well, the early '70s. It's a tonally confused story that doesn't match the trailers and doesn't in fact seem to pick a lane at any time. There's quite a cast assembled here but the story feels like it was made up as everyone walked onto the set each day.I will say the sound-track is top notch..
reviewed 2021.10.30
Following hot on the heals of "Army of the Dead" comes a prequel about the German safe-cracker...
reviewed 2021.10.16
This is an awkward semi-comedy featuring a guy who loses control of his life to an app...
reviewed 2021.10.10
This is by far the best of the Men in Black movies about human cops chasing a bunch of alies around Earth...
reviewed 2021.10.10
In this story, a girl finds a yeti cowering on the roof-top of her building. Before you can say "road trip", she's entrained a couple of likely lads in an effort to get the poor thing home.This animated feature has a distinct drawing style and moves along at a good clip (it is barely 91 minutes long, including title screens and credits)...
reviewed 2021.10.03
This was another "movie night" viewing on Netflix...
reviewed 2021.09.23
This is the telling of a team of US soldiers that went into the Taliban's stronghold in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist strike...
reviewed 2021.09.19
Another semi-lockdown quarantine movie review with the kids...
reviewed 2021.09.18
We watched this with the kids...
reviewed 2021.09.13
This is the story of a detective who is sent to his former precinct in Los Angeles to complete some paperwork...
reviewed 2021.09.11
This is an action pic about an assassin who's been tasked with hitting a yakuza target...
reviewed 2021.09.05
Once in a while my daughter and I try to watch something for "Movie Night" that turns out to be unwatchable...
reviewed 2021.09.04
My son and I watched this flick for a school assignment...
reviewed 2021.08.28
This is a story about a man and daughter who lose their wife/mother and the father can't shake that his wife was allowed to die due to some mix of medical and pharmacological incompetence and/or conspiracy...
The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf
reviewed 2021.08.27
This is an animated movie based on the excellent TV series "The Witcher"...
Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie
reviewed 2021.08.22
This is a spy farce starring the penguins from the Madagascar movie which I want to say was fifteen years ago or more. As absurd as a spy movie featuring anarchic penguins might sound, this also includes their origin story and a bonkers plot by villains to turn humans into animals.It's mostly harmless...
reviewed 2021.08.15
This is a whodunnit set in a mansion...
reviewed 2021.08.14
In this film, a girl in Miami finds a kinkajou (a rare monkey thing) while on a trip in Cuba...
reviewed 2021.08.11
This is an over-the-top cop-in-trouble movie in the vein of "Bad Boys II"...
reviewed 2021.08.04
Sometimes there are movies that seem to be grown up around the personas of the lead actors. This movie, about cops in the afterlife who chase down ghosts that have escaped damnation, features Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds. And that's all you really need to know.Well OK, you want more: Uh, Men In Black but with dead gangsters meets ...
reviewed 2021.07.20
It's about a young fellow who is being raised by a single mother. He's harboring a crush on a child-hood friend (a girl raised by a single dad) and is still trying to meet and impress her although she's become an in-demand model.Our hero finds a magic lamp containing a genie in the form of a dragon...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
reviewed 2021.07.10
This is a sci-fi action film about a pair of agents for a galaxy-spanning government military force of some kind. It's a time in the distant future when humanity's left Earth behind to travel the stars in a massive man-made world-city that's home to countless other species.The cast is young and hot and there's plenty of interesting sets and scenes and an almost unbelievable combination of chase ..
reviewed 2021.07.03
This is an animated flick that re-purposes twenty-something Hansel and Gretel as investigators for the society of magicians that maintains order by tracking down missing peoples of all types...
reviewed 2021.06.24
This is a movie about a pissed-off semi-sentient car tire that discovers it has psionic abilities...
reviewed 2021.05.30
This is a movie about a trio of siblings that move into a rambling and decrepit home of a deceased relative after the separation of their parents...
reviewed 2021.05.29
This is an Adam Sandler movie. OK, let's do this.The two main characters are losers and decide to fake their deaths in order to start again. With fake identities in hand, they head off to somewhere warm and slide into new lives. Not realizing that they're pretending to be recently murdered people, they quickly find themselves in trouble and don't understand the context.Or that's what Sandler's..
reviewed 2021.05.27
This is a style-over-substance heist movie set in a fictional Las Vegas that's been over-run with zombies. The zombies are now evolving into something new so the government's going to nuke Las Vegas (to the satisfaction of literally everyone globally). Before that happens, a great amount of money has to be retrieved from a casino vault by the gangster owner of the casino.It's a zombie flick, so ..
reviewed 2021.05.22
Set during the Spanish civil war, this is a zombie movie...
reviewed 2021.05.20
This is a very uneven telling of the assembly of a "B" team of agents to track down a missing nuclear bomb...
True Memoirs of an International Assassin
reviewed 2021.05.18
This is the tale of a novelist who writes spy thrillers...
reviewed 2021.05.14
I have a feeling that this movie came together due to someone owing someone a favor because I don't think it was built on an idea per se - or at least not a solid one...
reviewed 2021.05.05
This is a strange version of Spider Man that has no origin story but is basically a kid in the by-now Iron Man's wake. They've dragged Spider-Man through a worm-hole to depict a minor, local hero in a world filled to the brim with overly-powered heroes ranging up to literal gods.Even his character is changed...
The Mitchells vs. The Machines
reviewed 2021.05.02
This is an animated flick we watched on "movie night"...
reviewed 2021.04.07
This is a movie about an elderly woman whose life is turned upside down when she's forcibly confined in a nursing home by a crooked self-employed agent who has the legal authority to make self-serving financial decisions. However it turns out that the elderly woman's son is a powerful and unstable gangster who loves his mother (in his way).This is a movie bent on exposing the chaos and corruptio..
Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
reviewed 2021.04.03
This is a story of a girl who's drawn into a ghost story...
reviewed 2021.03.08
This is a sequel. No, it's not the 12th in the series, but only the second. I only vaguely recalled the first one and wanted to see what this offered and as it went on I started to remember.I think the formula for these movies works fine on paper but not on screen...
reviewed 2021.02.23
It's been many years since I was happily surprised by this gritty Angles-and-Demons flick featuring a human who has learned many occult secrets and now spends his unhappy days fighting "Lu"cifer and his minions...
reviewed 2021.02.22
This movie has a promising cast and certainly appears visually stunning, but is let down by an unengaging story in which characters behave without clear motive and no one is really very sympathetic...
reviewed 2021.02.17
This is a spy spoof in which Rowan Atkinson plays a dimwitted secret agent of mostly good nature...
reviewed 2021.02.11
This is a luke-warm reboot of a TV show from the '60s that lacks a good deal of the charm of the original...
reviewed 2021.02.09
This is a Korean piece of Sci-Fi that I quite enjoyed...
reviewed 2021.02.04
"Take me out into the black, tell 'em I ain't coming back...
reviewed 2021.01.30
This is an entertaining film that's basically "The Goonies" in Hawaii plus girls...
reviewed 2021.01.11
The main weakness of Heist movies is being too clever...
reviewed 2021.01.11
As much as I like the stars of this film, I couldn't sit through it to the end...
The House with a Clock in Its Walls
reviewed 2021.01.09
This is a spooky family flick about a boy who goes to stay with his uncle, who is something of a witch...
reviewed 2021.01.07
This is a gritty telling of true events in mid-Century France...