michael's movie reviews
Not recommended
reviewed 2024.01.12
I came across this odd movie in one of our streaming services and despite its mediocre ratings on IMDB, gave it a chance...
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...
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 2023.08.02
We thought this flick looked interesting -- I had thought that Jackie Chan had retired...
reviewed 2023.07.14
I got in late and decided to burn off what remained of the evening with this movie on Netflix...
reviewed 2023.07.12
This is a fun movie about a shlep whose fiance isn't close with her parents...
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...
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 2023.01.09
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...
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 2022.11.20
I honestly have no idea what the fuss is all about with this movie...
reviewed 2022.11.06
This is an animated story I watched with my ten-year-old daughter for "movie night"...
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 2022.09.17
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...
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 2022.07.28
This is the latest Bond flick and it is not good...
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 2022.06.21
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 2022.06.12
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...
reviewed 2022.05.14
This is an animated remake of the old Addams Family series, movies, and comic strips...
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 2022.03.03
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 2022.02.07
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...
reviewed 2022.01.07
I watched this Bond flick with my son as part of our ongoing series...
reviewed 2021.12.29
This is the third Bond movie that my son and I watched together...
reviewed 2021.12.20
I watched this with my almost-thirteen-year-old this morning...
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 2021.10.30
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 2021.10.16
This is an awkward semi-comedy featuring a guy who loses control of his life to an app...
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 2021.09.11
This is an action pic about an assassin who's been tasked with hitting a yakuza target...
reviewed 2021.09.04
My son and I watched this flick for a school assignment...
The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf
reviewed 2021.08.27
This is an animated movie based on the excellent TV series "The Witcher"...
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 2021.05.20
This is a very uneven telling of the assembly of a "B" team of agents to track down a missing nuclear bomb...
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...
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..
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 2021.02.22
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 2021.02.11
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 2021.02.04
"Take me out into the black, tell 'em I ain't coming back...
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...
reviewed 2020.12.26
I really wanted to enjoy this movie about a scientist struggling to resolve a global climate crisis while a space mission is returning to the ruined planet. The mission includes his daughter but also has the knowledge of a planet to which humanity can relocate (as if we deserve it).But the movie's many problems got in the way: too slow, too bleak, and too much of a forgone conclusion that things..
reviewed 2020.12.26
Of late, Robert Rodriguez has been making kids movies...
Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
reviewed 2020.12.20
This is a Batman spin-off, or perhaps a spin-off of "Suicide Squad", which is a spin-off of Batman...
reviewed 2020.12.13
I tried showing my kids this flick for "movie night"...
reviewed 2020.12.05
This is a story about a man stuck on Mars, who must Animal Crackers
reviewed 2020.12.05
For "Movie Night" my daughter and I watched this one...
The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two
reviewed 2020.11.27
Proving once again that there can't be a good movie without a sequel, this is the unnecessary follow-up to the endearing Netflix Christmas Special featuring Kurt Russell as Santa Claus...
reviewed 2020.10.06
This is a sci-fi/super-hero movie about a disgraced photographer and the alien symbiote that he meets while breaking into a lab owned by a billionaire. The symbiote is an amorphous black puddle with a callous disregard for life, so they make a pretty good team.Naturally, the material here can only be played a couple of ways and they seem to have chosen to keep it a bit kid-friendly but also pegg..
reviewed 2020.09.18
Every time I sit in front of a Spike Lee movie, I'm hoping for "Do the Right Thing" or "Malcolm X", and not, say, "She's Gotta Have It" or "School Daze" (which was the first of his works I saw). "Da 5 Bloods" is a mix, combining strong narrative story-telling with the direct-to-viewer stuff that speaks either to ego or a misunderstanding of the medium that I can't believe would be possible.Using..
reviewed 2020.08.29
We watched this for "movie night". It's about a bunch of kids that determine that their mother is a former spy and try to help her when she's drawn into one last job. It's quite an uneven thing, with some bits working and others not. I didn't find it interesting enough despite a great cast and a story that really just had to be a kid-friendly version of "Long Kiss Goodbye".There'..
reviewed 2020.03.26
This is a movie about the state of the "war on drugs", as told from the point of view of an officer from a local law enforcement agency who is drafted following a significant drug bust...
reviewed 2020.03.10
This is an unpleasant movie about a reclusive genius and tech billionaire who has been dabbling in artificial intelligence androids - to make women to keep under his thumb. It's told from the view of one of his staff who wins a lottery to visit the recluse's home. Will the visitor develop real feelings for his favorite artificial woman? Will a struggle ensue? Whither the beautiful sex-slave?Who ..
reviewed 2020.02.26
OK, I've sat through two of these with the kids...
reviewed 2020.02.16
This is a live-action kids' movie about a fellow who is trying to hang on to his family's circus...
reviewed 2020.01.25
This is a downer of a story about a much of mutually antagonistic members of a drug cartel that's imploding over internal strife. Crossing a great swath of North America, the "protagonists" trudge through their duties knowing they'll die if they don't.And, it turns out, die if they do...
reviewed 2019.12.15
This is a choppy heist movie by a director who absolutely nails the stunts and visual wizardry and often struggles to capture natural human interaction...
reviewed 2019.12.10
For a second time in as many decades, the Spider-Man movies have now been rebooted; they've started all over again...
reviewed 2019.10.04
What a load of shit...
reviewed 2019.09.23
I wasn't sure the title of this one is actually a word, but it is! That out of the way, this is a relentlessly unpleasant movie about one brother's bid to make his gangster brother pay for a large array of crimes ranging from having the vengeful brother imprisoned for seven years to enslaving well over a hundred other people through the threat of violence.Unfortunately, the story told involves t..
reviewed 2019.07.28
When I reviewed the Disney direct-to-whatever movie "Descendants" two weeks ago, my hasty review contained a lie.> about the only thing I can say for it is that there aren't sequelsThis is incorrect, dear reader...
reviewed 2019.07.12
Arnold Schwarzenegger uncharacteristically plays a corrupt DEA agent in this movie of suspected revenge by one of his gang's victims...
reviewed 2019.06.25
This is the tale of a girl from a rough background who is simultaneously a ballerina and maybe also a prostitute or any way seems to be living with a gangster. Anyway, she becomes a spy for the Soviet regime, following the well-worn trope of the lethal female Easter Bloc spy who of course will use sex as a weapon. Will she survive the rigors of her training? How will she function as a spy?It's c..
reviewed 2019.06.11
Some kids' movies are good enough to grab the whole audience and keep them engrossed. Fantastic Mister Fox. Paddington. Wallace and Gromit.Then there are those that are at least worth a chuckle, like Despicable Me.And then, just above the ones you stop watching because you'd rather be doing your taxes, are things like Early Man, which will simply fade from your memory immediately like reading ..
reviewed 2019.05.19
This is a spy story set in the modern, post-Cold War era...
reviewed 2019.05.11
Sometimes they make a movie where they just land on a personality and a broad plot line and start rolling the cameras...
reviewed 2019.04.20
To catch an international assassin, the police employ an imprisoned IRA agent. In a story that ranges across the world (there's even a scene spent sailing lake Michigan) the game of cat and mouse continues while the authorities try to prevent the assassination of a prominent US politician.It's a bit dated, and I think it being a foregone conclusion that they catch "The Jackal" is a bit t..
reviewed 2019.03.15
According to my records, I don't have good luck with movies titled "Life". I see a review of a bomb with Eddie Murphy back in the '90s, and now this.This one is a Sci-Fi story that starts on an Earth-orbiting science lab...
reviewed 2019.02.03
This is a grim flick about a semi-retired contract killer who's attempting to live out his life in the woods outside a small town...
reviewed 2019.01.26
The Boy wanted to see this flick, so we did...
reviewed 2019.01.20
This is an interesting if challenging film about a lone young lady trying to find a solution to a major environmental catastrophe on a (very) dying planet Earth...
reviewed 2019.01.05
This is a movie about a kid who discovers a robot thing. Maybe a toy, maybe a weapon. Anyway, he goes about befriending the robot and then doesn't want to give it up. Various parties become interested and the whole thing limps to an end.We endured it because the seven year old was fairly engaged...
A Million Ways to Die in the West
reviewed 2018.12.29
As I was watching this, it began to dawn on me that it was mostly just alternating shots of two people speaking. So I started moving the old slider and found that yes, that was the large majority of the movie. The two leads speaking directly at each other.I gave up due to the unfunny hamming, the lack of at least some compelling action that comes with the Western genre, and yes, the talking...
reviewed 2018.12.13
This is the story of a corporate employee who is sent to Mexico for purposes that aren't quite what it seems...
reviewed 2018.12.04
This is a thoroughly unpleasant Bat Man movie with an absurd story line even by the standards of Bat Man...
reviewed 2018.11.18
This is a series of shorts set in the Wild West of the late 19th Century...
Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie
reviewed 2018.09.14
This is a story about an LA detective who works magic in the field but stumbles in dealing with his own affairs...
reviewed 2018.09.12
This confounding movie begins (more or less) with a couple's decision to shrink themselves to live in an eco-friendly fashion as miniature humans in a miniature domed habitat...
reviewed 2018.08.25
This is an unrelentingly unpleasant movie in which an unspeaking slave finds freedom when his captors are attacked...
reviewed 2018.08.13
This is an animated story about supermarket food products that become aware that they are food stuffs and other disposable products - and then fail to recover from that realization...
reviewed 2018.08.10
This is a story about a teenage girl who's struggling with her emotional load due in part to suffering terrible bullying, witnessing the illness of her mother, and living without her father. Our heroine escapes into fantasy, in which she's defending the town against an incursion by giants.By the end of the thing, I couldn't quite parse what was real and what meant what exactly to our hero...
reviewed 2018.08.09
This is a drama about a raid on a "safe house" maintained by the CIA, and the unlikely pairing for the rest of the story between one of the agents and the Bad Guy he is tasked with protecting...
reviewed 2018.07.25
The four of us went to see this hugely popular super-hero flick and I have to say I am close to the end of my tolerance for these things...
reviewed 2018.06.29
This is an ambitious movie about a young lad who's sent out to kill a reindeer with a bow and arrow as part of his "becoming a man"...
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
reviewed 2018.05.09
As you can probably tell from the title of this movie, it's a sequel and not a particularly good one...
reviewed 2018.04.30
This is a re-telling of the King Kong story, but with Brie Larson along for some reason...
reviewed 2018.04.20
This is a story about three couples who meet while hiking a famous path in a tropical paradise...
reviewed 2018.04.16
Once in a while, Hollywood produces a movie where they take some stars and tell them, "Here's the plot outline, improvise...
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
reviewed 2018.04.14
We watched this for "Movie night"...
reviewed 2018.03.03
This is a gangster flick, in which a mute bartender is dragged into the appalling underworld of a sci-fi Crapsack setting. Dealing with characters like an Paul Rudd's uncharacteristically evil surgeon in a quest to find his girlfriend, he finds himself in a violent and desperate situation without much help.It's dire, it's appalling, and despite some interesting flashes it seems to have been murd..
reviewed 2018.02.15
This is an animated story of a young boy who lives on a lighthouse with her father and little sister...
reviewed 2018.01.30
This is a Horror movie dressed up as a robbery flick...
Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters
reviewed 2018.01.23
This anime has the interesting premise of documenting mankind's return Earth some 20,000 years after Godzilla chased them off the planet...
reviewed 2018.01.06
So it turns out there's a third of these movies, and tonight that's what we watched...
reviewed 2017.12.19
We recently showed the kids the movie Home Alone and I stupidly mentioned a sequel...
reviewed 2017.12.19
"Uncle Jon" and The Boy and I went downtown to see this...
reviewed 2017.12.12
We watched this with the kids for "movie night"...
reviewed 2017.12.07
This is a (very rough) adaptation of Ursula K Leguin's novels that spanned decades of the world of Earthsea (as well as taking decades to write)...
reviewed 2017.11.18
This is my second review of "Tron", some sixteen years after the last time and I presume thirty years after I first saw it...
reviewed 2017.10.01
This is an Adam Sandler movie in which he and a (rather excellent support cast of) team fight to save the world from space invaders that have chosen the form of all our favorite '80s video games...
reviewed 2017.08.04
My kids love these dinosaur movies, so we watched this - which must be our third this year?It's a whole new dinosaur adventure, with a new generation of lead actors to mug through some stiff dialog before the dinosaurs get free and raise hell...
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
reviewed 2017.06.18
This is a film about a boy who joins an unusual household full of bizarre children...
reviewed 2017.05.21
I don't know if this movie was strictly necessary, they covered Lego Batman in sufficient depth in the Lego Movie itself. But here we go.This is Lego Batman's story, but there's not much story...
reviewed 2017.04.24
I wonder if any good movie ever had the word "Sing" in the title...
reviewed 2017.04.16
This is a strange and violent story about transplanting the memories of a dead spy/soldier into the brain of a death-row prisoner with a neurological condition that means he'll never have empathy and will never deviate from his life of violent disregard for society. With an absolutely top-notch cast I had high expectations for this thing.But it doesn't seem that everyone showed with the same lev..
reviewed 2017.04.16
This movie centers on a small scientific team that's worked out how to prove the existence of the afterlife...
reviewed 2017.04.09
Well, it had been almost 17 years, so I decided to show the kids this flick for "movie night". I don't really know why. The Boy is nine now and sounds like a Youtuber tearing these things to shreds.And I have to say I feel sorry for Sam Neill, I like his acting and yet he's in so many dismal movies...
reviewed 2017.04.02
This is one of the sequels to the stellar Jurassic Park...
reviewed 2017.02.24
Someone decided, "Let's put Johnny Knoxville from Jackass in a movie with Jackie Chan." Everyone round the table agreed, and here we are.I have to say, I enjoyed it but won't recommend it...
reviewed 2017.01.23
By all accounts, Adam Sandler is a decent guy who treats people well and there's no denying that he's made his own path...
reviewed 2017.01.04
This is an interesting Sci-Fi piece set in a world where people can opt to spend the remainder of their days as an animal of some kind...
reviewed 2016.12.24
How better to spend X'mas eve than with a slick continuation of a movie from your childhood? In which your favorite character dies for no reason, the most iconic hero of the 20th Century is reduced to a petulant cripple, and the plot is a mess...
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
reviewed 2016.12.23
Which aristocrat will marry which daughter? Or will the zombies win out, having already over-run 95% of the UK. Will the modern viewer be able to tolerate the sexism and patriarchy woven into the story of half a dozen ass-kicking warrior women?I thought I'd enjoy this more than I did and found that the whole thing just didn't work...
reviewed 2016.12.05
This animated kids movie is such a frenetic mess that it lost the attention of our four-year-old and we stopped watching it...
reviewed 2016.11.11
This is an animated flick from Japan, about a young boy kidnapped to an alternate world (of ghosts or demons, I want to say?) who winds up living with a bluff beast of a man. Hence the title. The brutish adult is indeed quite rough, in the time-honored tradition of being quite useless and belligerent. And the boy is indeed a needy child, and it's the voyage that matters.There are a couple of dis..
reviewed 2016.10.24
This is yet another super-hero movie...
reviewed 2016.09.30
This is the story of Hachiko, the dog who is immortalized with a bronze statue at Tokyo's Shibuya station...
reviewed 2016.08.21
The kingdom has never been under greater threat than when a pissed-off water-buffalo with unlimited strength and the ability to command certain wild magic aims to I dunno, take over.Once again the action is superb, the interplay between the characters - heroes and villains alike - is engaging, the story arc works...
reviewed 2016.07.03
This is a movie about a thief and con-man who pushes into the TV cameraman line of work after witnessing a crew in action...
reviewed 2016.05.12
This is a sci-fi movie that goes to great lengths to be pro-science and defend humanity's space record and so on but when push comes to shove it veers into mysticism...
reviewed 2016.04.15
As much as I like Mila Kunis and suspect she deserves a break for being on Family Guy for so long, this movie was a troubled project by the (now) sisters that made the "Matrix" movies...
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
reviewed 2016.03.08
Well, we got it over with, today...
reviewed 2016.02.04
This is a spy movie in which a new agency is created to tackle special cases on a global basis. It pulls together a disparate cast of rogues and puts them against .. a dispirate cast of rogues. Set in the sexy sixties, a US agent and a USSR agent join forces to prevent a rogue Italian billionaire from founding a terrorist organization armed with nuclear weapons.The movie's tone and pacing and pu..
reviewed 2015.11.22
This is a lack-luster animated movie about the son of the Easter Bunny, who decides to move to LA and be in an obnoxious, self-indulgent, and boring movie...
reviewed 2015.11.17
A friend leant me this, which turned out to be only okay. It's about four purportedly adults who return to the suburban home of their youth when their father dies. None of them is particularly likeable and some have problems that seem too large to be sustainable. Like, you wouldn't address a marriage this far gone?They get together for a big snit, really, making it harder for their mother..
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
reviewed 2015.10.02
My son's interested in these movies, so we've been slowly seeing them through...
reviewed 2015.09.14
I can't explain how I agreed to see this paint-by-numbers revenge piece about a woman who discovers she is not a girlfriend but the other woman...
reviewed 2015.07.23
This is a story about a princess with special magical abilities that let her control ice and snow...
reviewed 2015.07.08
This is a buddy-cop movie in which two jerks in the precinct take up an important case following the deaths of the actual stars...
reviewed 2015.06.10
This 2013 Star Trek movie was such a mess I couldn't sit through the whole thing...
reviewed 2015.04.01
This is a movie in which an experimental drug sets a very average fellow free to do great things...
reviewed 2014.11.07
I bit off more than I could chew with this one, walking away at some point to let me son soldier on while I did some chores...
reviewed 2014.07.20
This is a story of a psychologically damaged veteran of world war two who returns to normal life after a stint in the care of a psychiatric ward...
reviewed 2014.06.21
This is the unnecessary third movie in the "Pitch Black" series...
reviewed 2014.06.11
I was attracted to this flick originally because I learned that it featured an orbital named Elysium - just like an unpublished novel of mine...
reviewed 2014.03.21
I tried showing my son this movie but he didn't get it or think it was at all good...
reviewed 2014.02.08
This is a science fiction flick set in a considerably-distant future where humanity is combing the stars looking for things to plunder from planets that are already occupied by intelligent species we don't understand. Frankly, that's probably how we'll roll and I'm glad it looks rather that we'll simply mess up this planet and die out having never taken our shit that far.But I digress...
reviewed 2014.02.07
This is a science fiction story featuring aliens that have come to Earth to harvest men...
reviewed 2013.12.15
So, they've rebooted "The Hulk" movies...
reviewed 2013.12.14
This is a Pixar movie, but you can scarcely recognize the genius behind "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo" in this abysmal straight-to-DVD release that incredibly somehow makes "Cars" look good...
Transformers: Dark of The Moon
reviewed 2013.10.11
This is the second sequel to the splashy first from six years ago...
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
reviewed 2013.09.11
This is the sequel to the original Transformers movie from 2007, which was entertaining. I saw that one in the cinema, before I had kids. Sigh.Anyway, this thing is a complete mess. It reverses the supposedly momentous death of the Big Bad in the previous movie, and introduces a new Uber Boss to cannon. He doesn't survive, needless to say.What has survived in abundance is product placement, it..
reviewed 2013.07.15
Everything about the Iron Man character in these marvel movies rubs me the wrong way. Since seeing the original Iron Man movie on a plane at some point, I've avoided these things. But The Boy wants to watch them so here I am.In this movie New York is threatened by Loki the Norse god, who's apparently well past his Trickster years and into his Adversary phase...
reviewed 2013.07.03
I won't belabor this: this 2009 film is the most disappointing comic book adaptation I can recall...
reviewed 2013.05.23
I really wanted this prequel to the first Alien movie to recapture the dread, world-building, character-driven narrative, and over-all vibe of that original movie...
reviewed 2013.04.17
This movie features a 29-year-old actor playing a seventeen year old, in a retelling of Peter Parker's becoming Spider-Man...
reviewed 2013.03.07
This is a movie about a couple who are dealing with middle age...
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
reviewed 2013.02.25
I have no idea how this mess of a movie got released. It looked interesting enough in the trailers, but by the ten minute mark I felt more like I was being patronized or perhaps insulted than anything. It's a tired, stitched-together pastiche and the actors look like they were going through the motions. Seriously, the star looks like he regrets being there.And since when are mermaids vampires? W..
reviewed 2013.02.03
This is a sequel to the original Hangover, which was set in Las Vegas...
reviewed 2013.01.25
This is a tale of a couple who divorce after the spark is lost in their marriage...
reviewed 2012.12.14
This is a much-celebrated animated movie from much-celebrated Pixar...
reviewed 2012.12.13
I get the gritty tone of the recent Bond films...
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
reviewed 2012.11.23
Well, this year is turning out be really something. A lousy James Bond movie, a Tarantino movie I'll avoid at all costs, and now a really disappointing adaptation of The Hobbit, which is one of my favorite books.I understand why they made this movie (and its forthcoming sequels(!)) after the success of "Lord of the Rings" but I think it's doing the book a..
reviewed 2012.09.02
This is a science-fiction story set in a near future dystopia that is looking more and more likely by the day. Retrograde scavengers slaughter one another over scraps left over from the obviously collapsed global civilization that proceeded them. One tip this movie shares; when someone offers you a meal of "some meat I found" it's human flesh.Our hero comes to a town where a madman possesses the..
reviewed 2012.04.15
We got about fifteen minutes into this when I realized that I hated everybody in it. I looked up the director and realized that it was Woody Allen. This told me that it would remain indulgent and awful. We watched something else.It's not often that I'm put off to a point that I won't bother with a movie...
reviewed 2012.01.18
This is a low-key Sci-Fi story about some kids who decide that something's up in their mid-western town...
reviewed 2011.12.12
This is, as the title suggests, a movie in which aliens trade gunfire with cowboys of the late 19th Century...
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
reviewed 2011.08.15
Sadly, the ground broken with the previous Harry Potter movies is forgotten in this confused mess...
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
reviewed 2011.08.12
It's at times like these, as I watch movies set in a British private school (which I believe they euphemistically call public schools) that I'm very glad I grew up in Alberta, home of rugged individualism and piss-poor, half-assed schooling...
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
reviewed 2011.08.11
A friend gave me his Harry Potter movies to watch. They're about a young boy who returns for a third year at his school of wizardry and this time there's an escaped prisoner on the loose who's looking for our rather unlikable little British hero.As before, it helps that the actors are growing up...
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
reviewed 2011.08.09
A friend gave me his Harry Potter movies to watch. They're about a young boy who returns for a second year at his school of wizardry and spends a lot of time going through all the same stuff. Watch him buy a wand! Watch him run into shitty classmates... There's a magic flying car now because only plebs use the train I guess?The acting is marginally better this time because the kids are not small..
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
reviewed 2011.08.07
A friend gave me his Harry Potter movies to watch...
reviewed 2011.06.15
Once in a while a movie comes along with a big splash and everybody raves about it, but it's actually crap...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
reviewed 2011.06.13
This is an incredibly unpleasant movie in which the terrible past of some young women who were abused by their family and the family's circle is explored. The titular character is a damaged but brilliant and determined girl who's survived not only the abuse but also the ministrations of the state, who placed her back into the care of another vicious abuser.It's very well put together, and the ca..
reviewed 2011.02.20
This is a liberal retelling of the classic detective story, by Guy Ritchie...
reviewed 2010.12.30
I was put off by the trailers for this movie, then more so by the incredible success of it...
reviewed 2010.08.03
This is a story of a young girl who tells stories...
reviewed 2010.06.04
This is a story about a semi-retired Cold War spy whose daughter is kidnapped along with a friend while traveling in Europe...
reviewed 2010.05.20
This is a movie about brothers who led a life of crime in the years prior to World War II, only to have leadership thrust upon them when the war comes and their Jewish community is forced to live in the woods...
reviewed 2010.05.07
They've "rebooted" Star Trek...
reviewed 2009.11.17
This is a spy flick set in the Middle East...
reviewed 2009.09.09
This might have been called "Everything you Wanted to Know About Washington DC But Were Afraid to Find Out"...
reviewed 2009.05.10
This year continues its losing streak. This is the third Spider-Man movie directed by Sam Raimi, and I think the toll is becoming a bit much. There were several villains in this story, and the degree to which Peter Parker suffers both normal young-person indignities and from the super-hero stuff is simply too much. No one can keep it together through such a thing.I think they should have kept th..
reviewed 2009.03.11
I was very disappointed with this film by Bill Maher. Maher's a funny and intelligent individual and I figured that this would be insightful and entertaining. Instead I found it poorly written and off-putting.While I understand Maher's frustration with organized religion as a source -- or exacerbation -- of many conflicts in the world I didn't care for his methods in this investigation...
reviewed 2009.03.04
Well, 2009 is not off to a strong start, movie-wise...
reviewed 2009.02.25
I couldn't sit through more than 30 minutes of this movie. Nothing about the miserable duo who make up the story's protagonists appealed to me.The whole flick seemed so heavily laced with so very familiar themes (the suburbs represent petty bourgeois snobbery; suburban housewives feel isolated; the man of the house in the 50's felt unappreciated) that I didn't see why I'd stick around...
reviewed 2009.01.12
Awful. The charm of the first two movies in the series is gone, the fun is gone, and the even one of the stars is missing. Avoid this, the way Rachel Weise wisely did.Repeat: this movie is without redeeming features and will only disappoint...
reviewed 2008.12.16
This is a very uneven movie that wanders in and out of different styles and tones...
reviewed 2008.08.27
So it's come to this...
reviewed 2008.06.11
This is the story of a thoroughly unlikable bit-player in the criminal underworld who's decided to start working with the authorities...
reviewed 2008.05.11
This is a very stylish and imaginatively-filmed/animated period piece set in antiquity...
reviewed 2008.04.17
Easily one of the worst movies I've seen. Let's put it in the bottom fifty. Purile, ridiculous, unpleasant and made without much care.Also, I can't help notice that Amy Smart featured in this wretched affair...
reviewed 2008.02.07
This is am ambitious story about a man struggling to save his wife from cancer...
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
reviewed 2008.01.07
No. Bad Tim Burton. Bad!This is a movie featuring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter...
reviewed 2007.12.26
This English comedy starts out well over the top and just keeps climbing. As with most British comedy, it features repression, blackmail and incontinence: all fine fare. But it seems to suffer from the sheer volume of pathetic jerks and their many dysfunctional relationships.Watchable, but you can find better stuff from most of the actors this thing...
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
reviewed 2007.12.16
This is one of the last movies we saw in the cinema before our son was born. A sad way to see off many years of avid movie-going!While this film's cinematography was memorable and the performances generally apt, I didn't appreciate its trudging plot, listless pacing or underwhelming sense of any conflict...
reviewed 2007.12.08
This is a gangster movie...
reviewed 2007.09.19
This is a story assassination during the Cold War era...
reviewed 2007.08.07
This is an incessantly unpleasant and sexist movie based on a comic book series from the early '90s...
reviewed 2006.11.03
This is a movie about four adopted brothers who re-unite to bury their mother who was gunned down in a robbery...
reviewed 2006.10.17
This is a sci-fi flick that shifts gears half way through...
reviewed 2006.10.02
This is an irritating movie with an irritating lead...
reviewed 2006.09.17
This is a polished and high-speed spy thriller about a husband and wife who are both secretly - and unknown to each other - assassins...
reviewed 2006.08.19
This is an unlikely movie about a guy who somehow remains a virgin until the age of forty...
reviewed 2006.07.12
We watched this silly re-telling of "King Kong" by Peter Jackson and featuring Jack Black...
reviewed 2006.06.18
This is the story of two charlatans peddling meaningless fixes to small towns after having ginned up some kind of local threat to those towns...
reviewed 2006.05.22
This is a movie about two fellows from different backgrounds who hire on as shepherds, tending a flock that's grazing in a high-altitude summer pasture...
reviewed 2006.01.05
This is an extremely violent gangster flick that starts with a fellow in a small town who's making a living with a greasy spoon. He's got a loving (and smoking hot) wife and all is well. Then two thugs arrive in town, and violence breaks out leaving the intruders dead. Our hero, maybe an ex-mafia killer, comes out on top but in doing so he makes the news...
reviewed 2005.10.01
You know how it goes with airline movies...
reviewed 2005.09.12
I hate seeing good actors wasted in a dumb movie. And John Leguizamo's appearing in this stinker is a fine example. This movie is poorly written, implausibly plotted, full of slack acting, and strangely paced. Watching it was sometimes difficult. I don't know why it got reasonable reviews.This is a remake of a film from the 70's...
reviewed 2005.04.25
We saw this movie tonight. It's something of a modern classic, but I wasn't sure what to expect. It turns out to be a very character-driven story about a surgeon who runs an orphanage and trains one of his charges to become a doctor. He even goes as far as drafting some documentation for the young man as he's set to go out and join the adult world.The young man has other ideas, and takes a job p..
reviewed 2005.03.18
This is a movie about a senior executive who winds up, through some kind of corporate restructuring, with a boss from a very different corporate culture who's in his late twenties. The younger man then starts dating the daughter of the main character.This is two movies in one...
reviewed 2005.03.04
This is a zombie apocalypse movie from George Romero, who invented the genre...
reviewed 2005.01.21
This is an animated flick with no fewer than three directors. It's a very paint-by-numbers story of a little guy who wants to make it big, and who captilizes on the mistaken belief that he's killed a shark in order to become a bigshot. I won't bother with the rest of the obvious story.Aside from the lackluster story, some of the voice work wasn't particularly imaginative...
reviewed 2005.01.12
This is a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio with a supporting ensemble including Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda. This might be about all you need to know.DiCaprio plays the driven and talented Howard Hughes in a manner that suggests he wants to be treated as a grown up actor (but doesn't seem to he knows how)...
reviewed 2005.01.09
This is a movie about two gangs of treasure seekers who jointly discover that there is a clue to the location of an immense wealth located on the back of the US Declaration of Independence.While this simple action/adventure flick was better than I'd expected, I wasn't really expecting much. Nicholas Cage is an odd choice for the lead role in this movie, which was a low-key Indian Jones type.I..
reviewed 2004.12.28
Product placement. That's what they did with this classic collection of works by Isaac Asimov. One of the principal works of science fiction in the 20th century reduced to a vehicle for converse shoes and suped-up vehicles.How bad was it? At two points in this movie, characters make sudden references to the hero's footwear...
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
reviewed 2004.12.27
When I was leaving the cinema at the end of the third volume of the Lord of the Rings movie, I realized that I'd just witnessed the high point of my movie-going career, and that it would be mostly downhill from there.I had no idea how quickly and how far that downward ride would go, until the 1/4 mark of Anchorman...
reviewed 2004.12.25
Hee hee! Exactly what I was expecting...
reviewed 2004.12.19
This movie left me flat. Aside from the unfortunate failings of the character story to engage, the pace throughout the first half is slow enough that the movie doesn't really engage until the second half. And that's a lot of waiting around.It is essentially a tale of two men...
reviewed 2004.12.02
This is a tale about a fellow who gets trapped in an airport terminal when his passport is stripped from him due to a coup in his homeland...
reviewed 2004.11.18
This is a telling of an unpleasant and unfortunately true incident in the early 80's, in which the former porn star John Holmes (played by Val Kilmer) attempted to play two criminal gangs off of one another...
reviewed 2004.11.13
This is the nasty original version of the recent American movie The Grudge. It's a much more confused version of the same story, with a plot that's pieced together in a manner that is often hard to follow. In fact, it was hard to figure out exactly who some of the characters were, until you work out clues from the sets (I won't get into it).Whereas the U...
reviewed 2004.11.08
Somewhere in this movie lurked the remains of a more intelligent, better-written movie...
reviewed 2004.10.25
This movie was one of the greatest disappointments I've had at the cinema since... well, since the first Star Wars prequel, I guess.This movie had a lot of irritating bits, but one of them was really inexcusable...
reviewed 2004.10.10
OK, OK, I get it...
reviewed 2004.06.11
This is a sequel of sorts to the excellent "Pitch Black"...
reviewed 2004.05.22
I wasn't a fan of the first Shrek movie. It lived 'up' to my expectations that Myers would be rehashing his old shtick. I mean, why does the Ogre have the same accent as his characters from So I married an Ax Murderer and Austin Powers...?But the sequel actually wasn't as dull and uninspired as I was expecting...
reviewed 2004.04.15
This is a movie about a woman who is beaten, shot, and left for dead by a bizarre international gang. Style always plays a big part in Tarantino movies, but here it seems to be in the driver's seat. Anything more than the most cursory plot comes second in this film, while comic-book violence and drama run wild.It's amusing and it's slick and what the hell it's a Tarantino film...
reviewed 2004.04.11
This is a bizarre Japanese/Polish collaboration directed by the fellow who directed Ghost in the Shell...
reviewed 2004.04.10
I believe that this was an animated TV series. It involves a robot created by a wise old inventor. The robot has an incomplete ethical unit (his "Gemini" heart), and this four-part, incomplete story follows his attempt at making his way in the world.With a plot involving his "evil" (oooo) brethren (other robots made by the same genius but twisted by the strangely malicious Professor Gil) and h..
reviewed 2004.01.18
This is a Tim Burton flick...
reviewed 2003.11.15
This is a caper flick starring Nick Nolte. I understand that the man actually took to using heroin to prepare for the roll he had in this movie. I'm not impressed, and I wasn't terribly impressed with this movie either.It suffered from a bit of the same 'overly clever' writing that all movies in this genre do (see 'Heist' by David Mamet)...
reviewed 2003.11.12
Wow. This is a 'horror/thriller' about a bunch of sexy young people fighting against the mountain men who rule the woods of a remote patch of West Virginia. The movie starts out reasonably well, but slips into a paint-by-numbers formula at some point in the middle, and it never emerges.There were some original bits of gore and dismemberment in this film (which is saying something), and the pre..
reviewed 2003.11.06
There aren't too many movies circulating with two endings on one rental VHS tape. This is one of them, and I think that the inclusion of a less-bullshitty second ending on this one speaks to the lack of direction that pervades the entire film.It's about a plague that erupts in the UK...
reviewed 2003.09.29
I really can't see what all of the fuss was about with this movie. Jack Nicholson plays a cranky retiree who doesn't appreciate his wife or communicate with his daughter. He misses the routine of work, and loathes his daughter's fiance's family. A good start.Except things don't really go anywhere from there...
reviewed 2003.09.27
There was nothing really wrong with this movie, but it somehow didn't work. Bill Murray plays a gangster. Robert DeNiro plays a cop. Uma Thurman plays a woman beholden to Murray. David Caruso plays Murray's brawling buddy. And everything progresses without anything unexpected popping up.This movie contains the idea of the mobster in therapy that became one of the corner stones of 'The Sopra..
reviewed 2003.09.20
This is a caper movie with an all-star cast...
reviewed 2003.08.28
At the end of the previous Hallowe'en movie, "H20", Michael's head is convincingly cut off with an axe. Needless to say, the first minutes of this one are spent explaining that away.Then the next are spent killing off, after at least ten Hallowe'en movies, the heroine. There. I said it. She dies.After that, it's really just an exercise in post-Scream slashing...
reviewed 2003.08.10
I'd heard that this was an American take on the Akira Kurosawa flick "Rashomon". I rather liked Rashomon, and thought, "They might have pulled it off despite the dreadful trailers..."Wrong. So wrong.I'm a reasonably bright person, and I've rarely come away with a movie thinking 'What the hell?' And when I have, the answers have usually sunk in during the next few hours, or during conversation..
reviewed 2003.06.04
This movie is spellbinding in its crapulence...
reviewed 2003.06.04
I downloaded this, thinking I was getting the new version. I like Michael Caine, generally, but I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw that Benny Hill was in this version.This movie was just plain bad...
reviewed 2003.05.19
Forget what it's about. What the hell was Eddie Murphy thinking? Getting into a movie with Owen Wilson!While occasionally funny, this duo doesn't really work...
reviewed 2003.05.10
I didn't really know what to expect from this one...
reviewed 2003.03.29
This is a movie about a quiet Englishman who - after years in a mind-numbing job at a bank, and years of loneliness - decides to send away for a mail-order bride from Russia. What he gets instead, is a scam. He soon finds himself stripped and tied up to a toilet in a hotel bathroom, having just robbed his own bank.The strange thing is, that's when the movie gets uninteresting...
reviewed 2003.03.28
This is a flick based upon a Stephen King story, and it shows. How? By being in equal measures creepy, quite clever, and the details of characters and setting.It starts with four life-long friends...
reviewed 2003.02.13
Let's see how short I can make this review: here goes.Daredevil: predictable crap.There, done in three words...
reviewed 2003.01.13
This is a movie that I wanted to like. It's got Denis Leary playing a cop, Steve Buscemi playing his partner, and Elizabeth Hurley playing the love interest. And it has a supporting cast that includes Luis Guzman and Chris Noth. Noth even plays a cop. What's more, it's a somewhat goofy comedy with at least two subplots and characters that seem all set to go places.But t..
reviewed 2002.10.14
This review contains spoilers, be warned.This is an Aussie period flick set in the 1800's, when real ladies were compulsive gamblers, Anglican priests were neurotic and corrupt, and 'the common man' was likely worse...
reviewed 2002.10.06
This is a movie that drifts from legal drama to thriller as it wanders through the story of a lawyer and her husband (an ex-soldier who turns out to be a wanted war criminal).The story is a bit stop-and-start, and the characters (played by Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, and James Cavaziel (recently, of 'Count of Monte Cristo')seem to morph as the movie wears on...
reviewed 2002.09.08
I found this bizarre Chow Yun-Fat movie in the local rental outfit's small (and dwindling) foreign section, and rented it because I thought it would be an interesting taste of mid-90's HK action weirdness.I was part right. I couldn't have forseen that the first third of the movie would have been set and filmed in the neighbourhood of Vancouver that I moved from just last month.In short; this ..
reviewed 2002.08.25
This one gets points primarily for its send-up of most action flicks of its kind...
reviewed 2002.07.02
I'm writing this review a full two weeks after I watched the flick, because I've been trying to decide what the point of the thing really was...
reviewed 2002.04.26
This is a movie about two CIA agents...
reviewed 2002.04.26
Wow...
reviewed 2002.03.31
Aside from being an amusing look at the American take on British life in 1960, this movie about a woman being hounded by a maniac suffers from one horrible flaw; it's plot can be entirely deduced by reading the summary on the cassette box...
reviewed 2002.03.16
It was the rave reviews of Ben Kingsley's performance in this one that drew me to see this flick. Kingsley has been one of my favourite actors for a long time, and I thought it would be interesting to see him try his hand at a gangster. It wasn't.I'm not sure exactly what the intention was with this film, but Kingsley's menacing appearance and pathetic instability didn't quite jibe with the re..
reviewed 2002.03.09
This is another version of "The Three Musketeers" by Alexander Dumas...
reviewed 2002.01.15
This is a movie about a teenage girl graduating from high school and trying to figure out what to do with her life. It's got Thora Birch playing a role that's fairly similar to the one she played in American Beauty and Steve Buscemi playing a similar role to the one he played in Trees Lounge (e.g. something close to how I picture the actor being like, himself).I won't g..
reviewed 2002.01.05
This is a David Mamet flick, and that shows in the pacing, the dialogue, and the grim, over-real violence...
reviewed 2002.01.05
This flick has a great cast, and what promises to be a complex plot, but it somehow fails to fall into place...
reviewed 2002.01.02
This is an amusing attempt at Sci-Fi by John Carpenter starring Natasha Henstridge and Ice Cube...
reviewed 2001.12.12
This is a flick about two robbers (played by Robert De Niro and Edward Norten). It iss supposed to be slick and it's supposed to be tense. It is neither.Seens that should be tense - such as the actual robbery - are sapped by being drawn out way too long...
reviewed 2001.11.07
I finally saw this...
reviewed 2001.10.15
This is a Morgan Freeman flick, where he plays a cop specialising in serial killers...
reviewed 2001.09.16
I'm well pleased that we saw this at the discount cinema for $4...
reviewed 2001.09.11
Sequels are never as good as the originals, and this is yet another sequel...
reviewed 2001.09.10
I thought this might be cute, because I like its stars...
reviewed 2001.09.07
This is about as good as it gets when the predictable hand of Adam Sandler has touched a movie...
Planet of the Apes (the remake)
reviewed 2001.09.03
I'm not sure what it is about Tim Burton...
reviewed 2001.08.31
I was disppointed by this one. But, I suppose you get what you pay for.The story was disturbingly pat, the animation a touch out-dated, and the characters couldn't find a place between raunchy caricatures and realistic people.I'd heard that Shrek was supposed to lampoon a lot of teh old fairy tale shtick, but I suspect they were trying to dumb the whole thing down for the kids, because the hum..
reviewed 2001.06.18
This is, of course, the third in the Prophecy series starring Christopher Walken. In this chapter, our angel-who-fell-to-earth is keeping an eye on the unfortunate half-man, half-angel that's been sired to lead a revolution against God. It's the weakest of the movies, though Walken is at his leathery best.Since the VCR I watched it on was a 25-year-old clunker, I think I missed a fair bit of the..
reviewed 2001.04.14
This is an unbelievably bad movie. It's not purposefully "bad" in the way that Rocky Horror Picture Show is, or even entertainingly bad Anaconda is bad.I mean, it's not Armageddon bad, mind you (only one movie is that bad), but it commits the following atrocities:
reviewed 2001.01.15
This movie surprised my, mildly...
reviewed 2001.01.03
Ah, the sixties...
reviewed 2000.12.22
Hmm! I find myself impressed by two Sandra Bullock movies in one year...
reviewed 2000.12.02
It's hard to imagine a light-hearted thing like this being both porrly written and acted, but that's just what you get with the Bachelor The supporting cast are the only ones capable of a performance, it seems, with both of the leads delivering their lines as if reading from a teleprompter.It's really dreadful...
reviewed 2000.11.24
With a straight out of the original series, an excellent supporting cast, and many a fine layer of cheese, this is an amusing use of two hours. But I'll bet you already knew that.One odd thing was the incessant use of the Matrix style action...
reviewed 2000.11.15
Three things stand out in this movie; it delivers a reasonably substantial plot, it is actually suspenseful (yes, Hollywood can still do that?!) and it's good to see Ford playing a different role for once.Other than that, I'd say that both Ford and Pfeiffer are sub-par actors, and that their paring here doesn't work (and please God tell Pfeiffer to eat something!)...
reviewed 2000.11.02
The original Shaft movies were cult faves, but were actually pretty lame...
reviewed 2000.10.02
Okay...
reviewed 2000.09.24
I was somehow expecting more from this film...
reviewed 2000.09.02
Incredibly, no less an author than William Shakespeare is given writing credits for this - they think this was Taming of the Shrew!It's a teen flick, and a reasonably amusing one, but it's still a teen flick, for Christ's sake!..
reviewed 2000.08.31
I'm not sure what happened with this movie - it was like the makers decided half way through that they wanted to switch from a reasonably creepy thriller to a really dumb action flick about a rapist...
reviewed 2000.08.12
Man...
reviewed 2000.08.11
This movie was based on a book which, admittedly, I simply skimmed as my girlfriend was reading it...
reviewed 2000.07.30
Amusing, but somewhat too awkward to really fly...
reviewed 2000.07.20
Long and dull, and full of shots of the original American flag waving...
reviewed 2000.07.19
Amongst the worst movies I've ever seen...
reviewed 2000.07.07
This is a silly B flick about three female friends and three male friends...
reviewed 2000.06.30
This one was pretty dull, I have to say...
reviewed 2000.06.05
Ho hum...
reviewed 2000.06.01
Terrible...
reviewed 2000.05.27
Well, it's a silly bit of a flick, and not too memorable...
reviewed 2000.04.18
Having already seen Joe Vs...
reviewed 2000.04.15
The only notable thing about this movie was that during our viewing, the fire alarm went off in the mall in which the cinema is located...
reviewed 2000.02.15
This movie is yet another of the well built, plot rich HK cop stories starring Chow Yun Fat...
reviewed 2000.02.15
Let me summarize this movie by relating a scene from its denouement: a child points out at the ash-covered crowd of firefighters, cops, citizens, and reporters, and says: 'Everyone's the same color'. This is set in L.A., and there was enough ham-fisted commentary on L.A.'s race relations that the meaning is clear: The Volcano showed us that we could just all get along.Don't get me started on the..
reviewed 2000.01.15
Sometimes Hollywood "gets the idea for a movie" by taking two or three of its stars and turning them loose in front of the camera. Sometimes they add a plot. This usually happens when said stars are looking for some easy cash and are possibly past the peak of their respective careers.The premise of this one is that a mobster (Robert DeNiro) wants out of the mob, and is having trouble figuring th..
reviewed 1999.12.28
Given that Gibson directed this one, I have to give him a bit of credit because I don't think he's that bright and I think this was his first time...
reviewed 1999.11.12
Fncking godawful. I rented this - despite my general rule never to see anything with Eric Roberts, due to his singular bad taste in movies - because it was suggested by someone at the little shop where I rent flicks.It aims for zany and slick, but it achieves cheesy and insulting...
reviewed 1999.11.05
Crap...
reviewed 1999.10.17
Amusing but dumb...
reviewed 1999.10.10
Goddamn bizarre...
reviewed 1999.10.08
This is a somewhat odd movie...
reviewed 1999.10.05
Good by comparison with Big Daddy, a movie utterly unrelated other than I saw it on the same night, this one was nothing special. It's about a lowly editor who wants to be a reporter. She works for a Chicago newspaper that's foundering due to bad management, and is sent to high school to get the scoop on what kids are up to these days.It's a pointless assignment, and the movie offers litt..
reviewed 1999.09.17
This is a movie with Patricia Arquette, Gabriel Byrne and Jonathan Pryce about an atheist who starts exhibiting stigmata after she's possessed by the spirit of a holy man who stole and translated the Gospel According to Jesus from the Catholic Church (and the Cardinal in charge of such dox, as played by Jonathan Pryce)...
reviewed 1999.09.12
This is a charming but flawed comedic romance by Ron Howard. It features McConaughey's role as a the 'star' of a real-life 24-hour TV show that follows him no matter where he goes. It depicts the breakup of his brother's relationship with his fiancée, his subsequent involvement with her, and the following fallout.Bonus points for including the title My Brother Pissed On Me as a movie-within-a-m..
reviewed 1999.09.03
My Gods, was this boring...
reviewed 1999.08.29
This was the previous film adaption of the French novel that also spawned the entirely less worthy Cruel Intentions. The only other thing linking the two is the presence in both of Kurtz, who played a bit part in the opening scene in Intentions, and who plays Thurman's mother in this period piece set in 18th century France.The movie is about two dueling aristocrats, whose playing field is the ar..
reviewed 1999.08.28
This one was better than I expected, but I expected I'd walk out...
reviewed 1999.07.23
First let me say that I'm not a Robin Williams fan.The first part of this movie is about the central character and his happy family of a son, a daughter, and a lovely wife...
reviewed 1999.07.23
Bloody boring...
reviewed 1999.07.18
Hurly Burly is about a Hollywood casting agent, his partner/roomate, and his friends. The gang thrives on cocaine, abusive sex with a string of women, and hurtling around Mulholland. Cell phones, BMWs, all the usual yuppie stereotypes are in full effect.This film is longer that it should be...
reviewed 1999.07.16
A charmless flick about two small-town brothers (played by the respective Bills) and the loser friend of the older sibling. The three find a plane that's crashed in the woods. In the plane is a bag of cash. The three decide to keep the loot, which proves their downfall a la Shallow Grave and a dozen other flicks with similar plot and superior execution.While Bill & Billy prove their thorough act..
reviewed 1999.07.10
This one isn't for the squeamish...
reviewed 1999.07.09
Still Crazy is a movie about a bunch of aging rockers who string together the old band for a twenty-year reunion festival. The first half of the movie is about digging up the band members. The second half is about their attempts at working together once again.It's entertaining, and endearing, but something's slightly missing...
reviewed 1999.07.03
This movie is ably filmed, alternately in colour film (present) and black-and-white videotape and film (the past)...
reviewed 1999.06.29
Steel Magnolias is a cult movie with a vast following: the majority of the N...
Austin Powers - The Spy Who Shagged Me
reviewed 1999.06.24
I didn't really enjoy this one. It was a cardboard copy of the first - which hadn't really been cinematography - with rehashed jokes and a strangely stiff, almost bored performance by Meyers.It's also a pretty obnoxious film...
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
reviewed 1999.06.05
Not what I was hoping, after a decade and a half (and more build-up and speculation than anything since moon landing). In short, the sense of fun that kept the first series from getting stiff and ridiculous (e.g. like the Star Trek movies) is gone, replaced by a cutesy reliance on superchildren and godawful CG characters.More frightening is the addition of a moralistic montage on the evils of ga..
H20 - Halloween 20 Years Later
reviewed 1999.04.27
Michael finally gets his head hacked off by his little sister, who had turned into a drunken psychotic in the twenty years following Michael's initial bouts of homicidal Halloween hell-raising...
reviewed 1999.04.22
Beatty plays a burnout politician who's exhausted his ability to stay afloat in the sea of hypocrisy, compromise, and bribery that his career has become...
reviewed 1999.04.21
Cute...
reviewed 1999.04.17
This one picks up with a re-reeling of the last two thousand frames of the first film, and carries right on...
reviewed 1999.04.08
This is a thinly veiled piece about segregated, racist America in the '50s...
reviewed 1999.04.02
As dreary and disheartening as In the Company of Men, the writer/director's last flick, this film is about a number of dysfunctional and largely unpleasant thirty-something characters, and the relationships that form within their small circle.Early on, Stiller's character actually gives away the plot: it's all about sex...
reviewed 1999.04.02
Very raunchy, including near-continuous nudity and some scenes many viewers will find disturbing, this flick is about three teenage losers on an unintentional killing spree in California. They pursue a manage-a-trois with bored fatalism, and wind up in a good deal of trouble.Recurring themes such as the number 666 and minor characters mistaking the lead character for former loves (or love slave..
reviewed 1999.03.21
Entertaining but a little disappointing. Aging gangsters and loser rich-kid dimwits. It can only go so far. The plot is about two kidnappings. The first is of the twentyish daughter of a wealthy figure (who never appears in the film). The second is of a reformed gangster, an associate of the father with connections to people who can fix the first kidnapping.After a few shootings, a severed ..
reviewed 1999.03.20
This was an entertaining movie...
reviewed 1999.03.12
This movie stinks...
reviewed 1999.02.20
Not too good...
reviewed 1999.02.07
The same as Scream, I guess...
reviewed 1999.02.03
I suspect that this was intended to be an action/comedy, but the thin humor is almost entirely based around violence...
reviewed 1999.01.26
This one has a great cast but is kind of slow. And chock full o' pregnancies, I must say. And longing looks. And a surprising English accent from our heroine.This movie hinges around the schism that forms between two paths our hero's life take when she a) catches her train and finds her live-in mooching lover in bed with another woman, and begins a new life or b) fails to catch him in the act, a..
reviewed 1999.01.23
Four or five stand-alone stories make up this slow-paced flick...
reviewed 1999.01.02
Crrrrrrap, and I do mean that in a tired-plot and cliché-overkill kinda way...
reviewed 1998.12.26
Ouch...
reviewed 1998.12.16
This is an animated movie about a desperate ant who wants to free his colony from the oppression of a gang of locusts...
reviewed 1998.12.15
Pretty...
reviewed 1998.11.28
This is a comedic movie with a softly dramatic core (like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) featuring a fellow who gradually becomes aware that his life is a hermetically sealed reality show and that he is essentially property of the show's producers...
reviewed 1998.09.28
This is a movie about a law student who is dragged back into the underground gambling scene when a friend gets out of prison...
reviewed 1998.08.17
The dear old Earth is threatened with an extinction-event meteor impact, and only a pack of loser rough necks can help because reasons! Watch as very realistic characters played by Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi, and many more men throw their lives away in the lowest-stakes ham-fest ever committed to film...
reviewed 1998.07.12
I guess there must have been a contractual obligation at play here because I can't otherwise explain how John Woo got involved in this mess...
reviewed 1998.05.21
This movie is about a loser in life who is struggling to get it right...
reviewed 1998.02.16
Only caught the last half of this, but it seemed a little stupid...
reviewed 1998.02.01
Unfortunately amateur film-making...
reviewed 1998.01.25
This dull, obnoxious, and ridiculous movie had one or two touches, but it was mostly patronizing bullshit...
reviewed 1998.01.22
I'd listened to my roomates and good friend Jonathan on this one, assured all round that it was quite good...
reviewed 1998.01.16
I think Kevin whatsit (who did Clerks and Mall-rats) wants to be Canadian...
reviewed 1998.01.09
This film was good for a Dennis Quaid effort, but it was strangely slow and the dialogue predictable...
reviewed 1998.01.08
This flick suffered from "I read the book" syndrome in that I spent some time debating with myself on their choices for actors, etc (overall - good)...
reviewed 1997.07.26
Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford, hamming it up, trying to be dominant male...
reviewed 1997.07.23
The "directorial debut" of the fellow from Swimming With Sharks, Seven, and The Usual Suspects...
reviewed 1997.07.21
Absolutely the lamest sci-fi I've seen in some time. Everything from the unexplored politics and theology to the dismal depictions of future was undercooked. From the amazing and unexplained prescience of a robot character on whose advice the main character bases her decisions technology, to the surprising stupidity of the future human scientists glares like a bad dream.This is the usual CRAP wh..
reviewed 1997.07.15
Terrible...
reviewed 1997.07.14
Bullshit movie about a circuit of losers who bowl for a living...
reviewed 1997.07.08
Lousy...
reviewed 1997.07.07
A gangster movie about four young urban black ladies who decide that bank robbing is the only viable alternative to prostitution, unemployment, or suicide...
reviewed 1997.07.06
This is the best film I have seen in a while...
reviewed 1997.07.04
A very funny account of Howard Stern's life and times. His fights with management, the FCC, and everyone else. His love of his wife and his claims of being widely misunderstood are the apparent themes.Nothing like hindsight to put a spin on past movie reviews...
reviewed 1997.06.06
Jesus this was terrible...
reviewed 1997.05.31
A movie about a group of would-be Hollywood actors on the prowl for women and careers...
reviewed 1997.05.30
Supremely bad to a cartoonish level...
reviewed 1997.05.30
Reality Bites is a disappointingly uninteresting movie...
reviewed 1997.04.19
This is a quintessentially Canadian movie...
reviewed 1997.04.08
For a formulaic Hollywood flick, this one is an entertaining, slick film...
reviewed 1997.04.08
Well, it was an unseasonably warm night, so we rented two flicks -- for the price of one, even: Living life to the max! This movie was, in a word, boring...
reviewed 1997.04.07
Things are definitely looking up for April! This movie is about the first night on the job for a rookie cop (played by Lea Thompson)...
reviewed 1997.04.01
Well, it can only go uphill for April from here...
reviewed 1997.03.31
Well, this month had its moments, but they were all Star Wars movies...
reviewed 1997.03.17
The final - and nicely improved - chapter of the Star Wars trilogy...
reviewed 1997.03.12
This is an older Jackie Chan movie from HK...
reviewed 1997.03.01
This was a lousy movie...
reviewed 1997.02.20
I was astounded...
reviewed 1997.02.15
This one is about an electrical blackout which appears to have effected the entire North American continent...
Things to Do in Denver when You're Dead
reviewed 1997.02.14
A very typical American '90s gangster movie...
reviewed 1997.02.04
I suspect that you have to be a fan of the game to get this film...
reviewed 1997.01.31
This kinky little Ontario-filmed and produced film follows the hero (Henry Czerny) through a few days in a small town filled with the type of aren't-we-sleazy characters you expect to find in a Canadian film...
reviewed 1997.01.26
I found this a third-rate anime with uninspired animation and story. The animation style in particular - which I think was intended to be heavy and moody - instead is inaccessible and yet also seems to have cut corners. It was like "Heavy Metal" with a certain frenetic jitter.I know that this was based on a series of books and that this is (or was) meant to kick off a series of movies, but I fou..
reviewed 1997.01.24
The quasi-sequel to A Fish Called Wanda...
reviewed 1997.01.20
You know how some movies are made around the leading cast, and they tack on a story of some kind and then half-ass it? This is one of those, with Sandra Bullock, Samuel Jackson, and Matthew McConnaughy...
reviewed 1997.01.11
A B kung-fu flick about an HK cop who loses his wife and rescues his son while bringing a host of baddies to brutal justice...
reviewed 1997.01.10
This is animated piece set in historical Japan during the Shogunate. It is a very well-done action period piece, involving a lone ronin, eight daemons, and a treacherous government spy. The demons are trying to overthrow the government, and it's up to the ronin to stop them.It is extremely violent in a fast cartoon style, which comes with the territory and is why we partake of this genre...
reviewed 1997.01.01
This is a slasher pic, a spoof...