michael's movie reviews
2023
These are the movies I reviewed in 2023.
reviewed 2023.12.29
This is a movie made in Spain in the 1960s but set in the US-Mexico frontier in the 1890s. Kinda crazy to think that almost as much time has passed since the movie was made as that initial difference! But I digress, and that's not usually a good start to one of my 'reviews'.Made in Spain to allow its US star to bypass his domestic contractual obligations, and with a script lifted from a recent K..
reviewed 2023.12.17
I watched this on a flight to Fukuoka today - the flight was barely long enough, and there were irritating pauses near the end, but I think I still pull off a review. So here goes!This is an animated flick set in a world where the humanoids are elementals of water, earth, fire, and so on...
reviewed 2023.12.03
After an extremely long work week, I managed to sit down with a movie for the first time in a while...
reviewed 2023.11.10
I needed a break after some very long weeks of late...
reviewed 2023.10.02
This is a "found footage" movie about a live streamer who decides to spend a night in a haunted home...
reviewed 2023.10.01
Tonight for "movie night", my daughter and I watched a Japanese movie inspired by Beauty and the Beast...
reviewed 2023.09.30
This is an interesting story about two neighbors in a small apartment building in Los Angeles who investigate some crazy phenomenon after one of them witnesses some unnatural light the unexplained levitation of household objects.I enjoyed the off-beat story-telling, which gradually reveals the nature of the characters but not the phenomenon...
reviewed 2023.09.27
This is a movie about some dudes who break into the world's most secure vault, which is apparently in Spain...
reviewed 2023.09.23
I don't recall having seen any of the Tremors movies except for the first, and I'm surprised to learn that this is the seventh. I did watch the TV series some years ago, so I was at least familiar with the trio of Graboid forms that appear or are referenced in this movie.This movie's fine as long as it's the scientists and technicians (and Burt) against the monsters...
reviewed 2023.09.22
This is a near-future Sci-Fi movie about a drone pilot who causes the deaths of some marines in a conflict in Ukraine through hitting a military target that was immediately adjacent to their position...
Spider-Man Across The Spider-Verse
reviewed 2023.09.18
One complaint I have with these Spider-Man movies is that the titles are so similar that you can't tell which is which. What differentiates "Far From Home", "Homecoming", and "No Way Home"? What differentiates "Across the Spider-Verse" from "Into the Spider-Verse"?Anyway, we watched this "Across the Spider-Verse"...
reviewed 2023.09.14
This is a fun if chronologically distant sequel to the '80s movie Predator. It features a young Comanche woman who slowly becomes convinced that there's "something out there". Despite being a girl she's bent on becoming a hunter and let's just say that between the Predator, some French trappers, a mountain lion or two, and her own band-mates .. she has a chance of earning her stripes.I ha..
reviewed 2023.08.23
Once upon a time I watched "Mission Impossible II" and did not like it. That was a very, very long time ago and I thought I was done with these films. I certainly had never seen the first one.But then I wound up seeing the 6th in the series after it got a lot of surprise good reviews, and I was happily surprised to realize tha..
reviewed 2023.08.02
We thought this flick looked interesting -- I had thought that Jackie Chan had retired...
reviewed 2023.07.20
I was slowly engrossed in this movie after a shaky start in which its clearly dated setting initially had me cringing. It's an old World War Two flick set in the sadly real war crime that was the forced-labor construction of the railway between Bangkok and Rangoon.It features a gaggle of British soldiers that was ordered to surrender to the Japanese in Singapore...
reviewed 2023.07.14
I got in late and decided to burn off what remained of the evening with this movie on Netflix...
reviewed 2023.07.13
After a long day's errands, hiking, and fishing, I spotted this underappreciated classic on Netflix and watched it for what must have been the third or fourth time...
reviewed 2023.07.12
This is a fun movie about a shlep whose fiance isn't close with her parents...
reviewed 2023.07.08
Tonight I watched this 1979 sci-fi movie with my brother and sister-in-law. I always like a good derelict story, but this ain't that. Its crimes, in descending order of magnitude were:
- tell, don't show: several key things are explained to us that would have had much more impact if shown...
reviewed 2023.07.01
This is a movie about a knight whos act of knighthood is sabotaged by a violent act of terrorism that causes him to unwittingly kill the city's monarch...
reviewed 2023.07.01
This movie is honestly an excellent action film...
reviewed 2023.06.30
Between jaunts to other continents, I managed to watch this with my kids. It's a Sci-Fi story that starts out in a high-atmosphere jet/spaceship chase and clearly winds up in the lush wooded seascapes of British Columbia in the present day. Where the pilot of the craft being chased winds up meeting his own self as a child.The story that ensues doesn't always work - time-travel almost never gets ..
reviewed 2023.06.23
I watched this again with my daughter and I really enjoyed it...
reviewed 2023.06.17
This is a sequel to the interesting Netflix movie "Extraction", which was a straight-up assassin story with enough intelligence and vulnerability to set it apart from the usual fare that I think most of us have been ignoring for decades...
reviewed 2023.06.08
Once in a while Netflix will recommend an older movie you've never heard of. Too often, these will have the words "Avengers" or "Mission: Impossible" in their name, but once in a while it's something more grounded and enjoyable. I'm not the biggest Mark Wahlberg fan but this movie featuring him has a bit more nuance than his usual work, and has a more sophisticated plot than I was expecting.The ..
reviewed 2023.06.07
This is about a teenager who is struggling with life following the death of her father -- an event that's weakened the family to the point of disintegration...
reviewed 2023.06.07
This is a movie about the cast of a series of blockbuster action movies. The movies are cretinous, the actors little better, and then came the pandemic. With the current filming happening inside the bubble times, there's an entirely new dimension to the ego-as-usual way that these people have been operating.It's an interesting premise, but the execution is itself too indulgent...
reviewed 2023.06.06
For some reason my daughter and I decided to watch this second modern sequel to the '80s original "Ghostbusters". The original was a fresh comedy with significant action and bouts of sophisticated dialog. This movie was an echo of all that with one of the kids from Stranger Things. Which, come to think of it, is why my eleven-year-old wanted to see it!It had its moments - usually involvin..
reviewed 2023.06.05
This is irritatingly close to a good movie...
reviewed 2023.05.20
I probably shouldn't be writing a review of this...
Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
reviewed 2023.05.13
This is an animated flick about a scrawny young dog who dreams of being a samurai. No one takes him seriously, but when a town is threatened by a gang of bandits he may be their only hope. Sort of.I liked the ludicrously nasty villain, the supporting cast, the shlep of a 'hero', and the various character arcs that they exhibit...
reviewed 2023.04.22
This is a sequel to 2019's surprisingly good Adam Sandler movie. Yes, I'm still not used to the phrase myself. In this outing, the stars have launched a private detective business that's gone nowhere. They eagerly accept an invitation to a billionaire friend's wedding, but the wedding goes disastrously with a body guard killed and their friend kidnapped.The on-screen chemistry of the stars is th..
reviewed 2023.03.03
This is a story about a family that moves into a grand old house to discover that it's haunted by the sad ghost of a man with a middle-aged paunch and a combover. The father and son who make the discovery react very differently, the former trying to cash in on the discovery while the latter wants to set the ghost free.It's a fun film with a consistently humorous tone and what turns out to be a m..
reviewed 2023.02.14
I last saw this movie about twenty years ago...
reviewed 2023.02.08
I can hardly call a movie that cost a billion dollars a "lazy cash grab" but this thing had some fundamental story-telling problems and was a confusing mess to watch. I really didn't enjoy this, and found sitting in a large cinema to do so an obnoxious waste of money. Some of the distracting plot problems included:
- the origin of the child posthumously born to a character that
reviewed 2023.02.03
This is a film about a real Troll waking up and terrorizing Scandinavia. It features the troll expert no one believes, his daughter who's called in to advise the government's response team in their moment of crisis, and of course a giant CGI troll.There was a little too much uneven dialog in this one, and a plot that felt like it was 2/3 filler...
reviewed 2023.01.23
There's a new Dungeons and Dragons movie coming out, and it looks pretty good...
reviewed 2023.01.21
For movie night, we watched this sequel to the "Puss in Boots" spinoff of "Shrek 2", which came out way back in 2004...
reviewed 2023.01.09
This is a movie about a young woman who becomes trapped in a "Groundhog Day" daily time loop. It happens when she follows a man she's met at a wedding as he runs from an unseen assailant who's been hitting the man with arrows. She follows him into a cave - against his warnings - and winds up back at the previous morning.What follows is a period of who-knows-how-long in which she makes a ..
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
reviewed 2023.01.01
This movie's had quite a rave reception and I have to say that I'm not entirely sure why. I didn't find it as engaging as I expected given that this is a remake of an old classic. I also expected more given the director's previous work. I found the tone off-putting, the story changes largely pointless, and the animation a bit off. I mean, this wasn't as good as "Troll Hunters".Not recommended...
reviewed 2023.01.01
This is a charmless sequel to a very different and original murder mystery...