michael's movie reviews
2022
These are the movies I reviewed in 2022.
reviewed 2022.12.25
What can you say about movies you see on airplane equipment? You won't get all of the dialog because of announcements, and you won't see everything because of the condition of the screen (and random side lighting). And the sound system usually falls between OK and painful. But then you see a movie like this on the plane and all that doesn't matter.It's an original story about a character in a FP..
reviewed 2022.12.19
I watched this seminal flick from the '90s with The Boy, today...
reviewed 2022.12.17
My son wanted to a see a Denzel Washington movie so you know this was my first thought...
reviewed 2022.11.27
This is a Sci-Fi thing about some genetically-modified humans living in a world that has censured them and placed them under rigid restrictions...
reviewed 2022.11.27
This action-comedy is so much over-the-top fun that I watched it a second time with my kids within days of my first, solo viewing...
reviewed 2022.11.26
My daughter and I watched the original story about a young girl whose father disappears at sea...
reviewed 2022.11.20
I honestly have no idea what the fuss is all about with this movie...
reviewed 2022.11.12
This is a fun story about a kid who moves to a small town with her parents...
reviewed 2022.11.06
This is an animated story I watched with my ten-year-old daughter for "movie night"...
reviewed 2022.11.04
This is a movie in which Kevin Hart plays the diminutive comic relief and someone capable of maintaining a scowl plays the heavy. They team up to some purpose and annoy the hell out of each other en route.In this case the game is freelance assassination and the stakes are high...
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
reviewed 2022.10.25
This is an infectiously chaotic story about a famous but fading movie star who is invited to the home of a Spanish billionaire for a $1 million project of unknown purpose...
reviewed 2022.10.22
This is a film with a star-studded cast and an overly ambitious plot that more than fills out its 2+ plus run-time. I watched it with my daughter for "movie night" and I have to say it reminded me of "The Descendants" and that's not a great thing.It's about two girls who travel to a place to be inducted into one of two magic programs...
reviewed 2022.10.11
This is a somehow unappealing prequel to "The Kingsman", a modestly original take on the spy genre...
Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
reviewed 2022.10.04
I spent the first twenty percent of this movie thinking that I was seeing a cartoon prelude to a live action movie...
reviewed 2022.09.25
This is, like other Guy Ritchie movies, about a gangster in a pinch. In this case, he's looking for revenge for the rash killing of his son. It's a journey that takes him to the heart of an armored car company, which happens to be corrupt.It's a violent story but not in a way that needlessly glorifies the violence the way that certain hacks do...
reviewed 2022.09.18
This is a sci-fi flick about a man surviving quite alone after some apocalyptic disaster. He has built some companions in the form of semi-sentient automata, and when he realizes that a terrible storm is coming that will wipe out his entire city, he takes to the Earth's radiation-bathed surface and attempts to find new shelter.It's a bit of a slow piece, though it has its moments...
reviewed 2022.09.17
Now I'm not dumb but I can't understand how this story played like fantasy but we're expected to believe that it's real...
Everything Everwhere All at Once
reviewed 2022.09.11
On the surface, this is a sci-fi movie about a woman in her fifties that is asked by an other-dimension version of her husband to join an epic struggle to save the multiverse...
reviewed 2022.08.24
This is a spy thriller in which the government aims one of its off-the-books killers at another of their killers...
reviewed 2022.08.18
This is a movie about a vampire hunter in Los Angeles...
reviewed 2022.08.04
This is an unassuming animated movie about a mer-boy/reptile who becomes interested in the humans in a nearby village - which is in sunny rural Italy. His entre to this world occurs because he meets another mer-boy who lives full time in an abandoned lighthouse. As a note, one should always take new directions based on encounters with people who live alone in an abandoned lighthouse.Anyway, from..
reviewed 2022.07.28
This is the latest Bond flick and it is not good...
reviewed 2022.07.23
Movie night comes to Netflix once again. This time in the form of the animated flick The Sea Beast. It's about a young girl who becomes obsessed with her nation's perennial struggle with the monsters that rule the surrounding oceans. She stows away on a monster-hunting ship, and causes herself to become marooned with the ship's lead hunter .. and one of the sea beasts.Realizing that the beasts a..
reviewed 2022.07.09
In this sequel to "Venom", a sloppy sci-fi/super-hero movie featuring a human and his alien "parasite". Oddly enough, they made a sequel and are continuing to ignore the original purpose of the Venom character, which was as a counterpart to Spider-Man.If the first plot felt made-up-on-the-spot, this one has far more emotional content...
reviewed 2022.06.29
The premise of this movie is that a wastrel winds up with guns surgically grafted to his hands. Can he fix this somehow? Why has he been thrust into a sanctioned murder tournament? Can he save his girlfriend, who is being held by the Big Bad? Is this world populated entirely by assholes? All these questions and more befront our hero.It's a bonkers concept and mayhem in execution...
reviewed 2022.06.25
This is a sequel to the imaginative and fun, "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle". I had no idea that this sequel was in the works (almost certainly because I live in Japan) but it's a welcome story that carries on in much the same tone and character. What I didn't know until I sat down to writ this, is that it's actually the fourth in the series.Anyway, the core characters return, played by the sam..
reviewed 2022.06.22
This is a movie in which Kevin Hart plays the diminutive comic relief and someone capable of maintaining a scowl plays the heavy...
reviewed 2022.06.22
This is an unpleasant little Sci-Fi number that features a number of inmates at a facility who are serving lengthy sentences...
reviewed 2022.06.21
This is an off-beat movie about a former star chef who now lives in a shack in the hills with his truffle pig. When his pig is stolen by violent unknown parties, he descends from the hills to find his companion and resume his life of solitude. This throws him back into the world of the restauranteurs and some fairly unlikely scenarios along the way.I enjoyed the unusual concept, the amazing work..
reviewed 2022.06.19
This movie is what they call "fan service", designed foremost to please people who are really into the material. The results can be pretty inexplicable to casual viewers and that's what I suppose I am despite now having seen all of the Spider-Man movies.We start this outing with Spider-Man once again playing a junior employee to Iron Man through his nebulous business empire...
reviewed 2022.06.15
Apocalypse now! It's the end of the world, and to survive a small but fractured family must get to Greenland. It's every man, woman, child and Gerard Butler for himself!!!The movie is not unintelligent, and deals with a variety of plausible aspects of a world where everyone realizes only a small fraction of the populace is going to survive...
reviewed 2022.06.12
This movie is a near miss...
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
reviewed 2022.05.22
This is a Marvel super-hero movie with enough of a re-skin that it is more watchable than many...
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them
reviewed 2022.05.18
This was a "movie night" movie and despite myself I found it growing on me...
reviewed 2022.05.14
This is an animated remake of the old Addams Family series, movies, and comic strips...
reviewed 2022.05.07
For Movie Night, The Boy and I watched this now thirty-year-old Hollywood flick about a mentally and emotionally disturbed individual who - get this - attempts to walk across Los Angeles...
reviewed 2022.04.24
This is an interesting work of Science Fiction that starts with its main character falling off a sky hook and then follows him to every miserable corner of a future that's at once dystopian but also somewhat grounded and optimistic but not in a Star Trek way. More like, corporate projections optimistic, in that they are colorless and say more of the dead nature of their dreamers than the dream.T..
reviewed 2022.04.17
This is a tense tale set in a near future Crapsack World where war has broken out between ...
reviewed 2022.04.02
This is a family-friendly animated movie about a girl in Toronto's Chinatown community (the one on Spadina) who discovers that she is heir to a family secret - puberty-onset shape-shifting superpowers. When she gets triggered by her emotions, she turns into a giant anthropomorphic red panda.Now I adore red pandas since seeing them in a fabulous environment in a Hong Kong zoo...
reviewed 2022.03.15
This is a particularly good animated kids' movie. We watched it for "movie night" and I'm glad we chose it. It's gorgeously illustrated and has charming lead characters/voices. Its story revolves around the evil at the core of a once harmonious world, and the lead's desperate mission to find a dragon to fight back.I'd easily watch this again...
reviewed 2022.03.03
This is a movie about a guilty survivor of a horrific incident at a university in which a fellow female student is filmed while being raped to death. The survivor can't move past it and spends the movie on an unlikely revenge plot that she seems to know will consume her.The title appears to be taken from comments by various judges while finding some Promising Young Man not guilty of rape...
reviewed 2022.02.24
This is a comic book movie based on real comic books that I have actually read*...
reviewed 2022.02.21
This is a Fantasy story about the seventh son of a seventh son - a supposed marker of great ability as a wizard...
reviewed 2022.02.07
This is a movie set in a near/alternate future in which GMO's were necessitated by an ecological collapse - humanity was starving...
reviewed 2022.02.01
This is a frustrating Sci-Fi/thriller flick that doesn't realize it's promise. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world in which The Machines Have Risen and it's now a Crapsack world. The heroine is pregnant and with her man she's trying to reach a purportedly safe location.I'll summarize what happens in this as this: the subject matter is mis-handled...
reviewed 2022.01.29
This is a somewhat weird and off-putting animated story about a species of cuddly mammals that have bodies shaped like donuts - replete with the center hole...
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
reviewed 2022.01.23
This is the third in the "How to Train Your Dragon" series of animated movies...
reviewed 2022.01.22
This is an animated story of a human girl who wakes up to discover she's become a troll...
reviewed 2022.01.15
This is a sequel to a sci-fi thriller in which massive comets have fallen to Earth, spawning alien killing machines as they go...
reviewed 2022.01.09
For "movie night" we watched a film about a kid who likes to write scary movies...
reviewed 2022.01.08
Today my son and I watched the first of the Bond movies to feature Daniel Craig. He agreed that it was by the best of the five we watched together, and had none of those moments when he wondered, "Why did they do that?"I've reviewed this movie in the past, but I have come to realize something in watching it this time...
reviewed 2022.01.07
I watched this Bond flick with my son as part of our ongoing series...
reviewed 2022.01.01
Today my son and I watched our fourth James Bond movie, for the fourth actor to take on the role...