michael's movie reviews
Recommended
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 2023.10.02
This is a "found footage" movie about a live streamer who decides to spend a night in a haunted home...
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 2023.09.22
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...
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 2023.07.01
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 2023.06.30
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 2023.06.17
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...
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 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 2022.11.26
My daughter and I watched the original story about a young girl whose father disappears at sea...
reviewed 2022.11.12
This is a fun story about a kid who moves to a small town with her parents...
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...
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 2022.08.04
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 2022.07.23
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 an unpleasant little Sci-Fi number that features a number of inmates at a facility who are serving lengthy sentences...
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...
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 2022.05.07
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 2022.04.02
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 2022.02.21
This is a Fantasy story about the seventh son of a seventh son - a supposed marker of great ability as a wizard...
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 2022.01.15
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 2022.01.01
Today my son and I watched our fourth James Bond movie, for the fourth actor to take on the role...
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
reviewed 2021.12.21
This is the second Bond film that I watched with my son...
reviewed 2021.12.04
This is a Chinese-produced movie on Netflix that my daughter and I watched for "Movie Night"...
reviewed 2021.12.03
Burned out after another brutal week at work, I sat in front of Netflix and took a chance on this movie about a beautiful young Russian woman who winds up working for the KGB in the waning days of the USSR...
reviewed 2021.11.16
It's been quite some time since I watched this Sci-Fi/thriller...
reviewed 2021.10.30
Following hot on the heals of "Army of the Dead" comes a prequel about the German safe-cracker...
reviewed 2021.10.10
In this story, a girl finds a yeti cowering on the roof-top of her building. Before you can say "road trip", she's entrained a couple of likely lads in an effort to get the poor thing home.This animated feature has a distinct drawing style and moves along at a good clip (it is barely 91 minutes long, including title screens and credits)...
reviewed 2021.09.18
We watched this with the kids...
reviewed 2021.09.13
This is the story of a detective who is sent to his former precinct in Los Angeles to complete some paperwork...
reviewed 2021.08.28
This is a story about a man and daughter who lose their wife/mother and the father can't shake that his wife was allowed to die due to some mix of medical and pharmacological incompetence and/or conspiracy...
Penguins of Madagascar: The Movie
reviewed 2021.08.22
This is a spy farce starring the penguins from the Madagascar movie which I want to say was fifteen years ago or more. As absurd as a spy movie featuring anarchic penguins might sound, this also includes their origin story and a bonkers plot by villains to turn humans into animals.It's mostly harmless...
reviewed 2021.08.15
This is a whodunnit set in a mansion...
reviewed 2021.08.14
In this film, a girl in Miami finds a kinkajou (a rare monkey thing) while on a trip in Cuba...
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
reviewed 2021.07.10
This is a sci-fi action film about a pair of agents for a galaxy-spanning government military force of some kind. It's a time in the distant future when humanity's left Earth behind to travel the stars in a massive man-made world-city that's home to countless other species.The cast is young and hot and there's plenty of interesting sets and scenes and an almost unbelievable combination of chase ..
reviewed 2021.07.03
This is an animated flick that re-purposes twenty-something Hansel and Gretel as investigators for the society of magicians that maintains order by tracking down missing peoples of all types...
reviewed 2021.05.30
This is a movie about a trio of siblings that move into a rambling and decrepit home of a deceased relative after the separation of their parents...
reviewed 2021.05.29
This is an Adam Sandler movie. OK, let's do this.The two main characters are losers and decide to fake their deaths in order to start again. With fake identities in hand, they head off to somewhere warm and slide into new lives. Not realizing that they're pretending to be recently murdered people, they quickly find themselves in trouble and don't understand the context.Or that's what Sandler's..
reviewed 2021.05.27
This is a style-over-substance heist movie set in a fictional Las Vegas that's been over-run with zombies. The zombies are now evolving into something new so the government's going to nuke Las Vegas (to the satisfaction of literally everyone globally). Before that happens, a great amount of money has to be retrieved from a casino vault by the gangster owner of the casino.It's a zombie flick, so ..
reviewed 2021.05.22
Set during the Spanish civil war, this is a zombie movie...
True Memoirs of an International Assassin
reviewed 2021.05.18
This is the tale of a novelist who writes spy thrillers...
The Mitchells vs. The Machines
reviewed 2021.05.02
This is an animated flick we watched on "movie night"...
Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase
reviewed 2021.04.03
This is a story of a girl who's drawn into a ghost story...
reviewed 2021.02.23
It's been many years since I was happily surprised by this gritty Angles-and-Demons flick featuring a human who has learned many occult secrets and now spends his unhappy days fighting "Lu"cifer and his minions...
reviewed 2021.02.17
This is a spy spoof in which Rowan Atkinson plays a dimwitted secret agent of mostly good nature...
reviewed 2021.02.09
This is a Korean piece of Sci-Fi that I quite enjoyed...
reviewed 2021.01.30
This is an entertaining film that's basically "The Goonies" in Hawaii plus girls...
The House with a Clock in Its Walls
reviewed 2021.01.09
This is a spooky family flick about a boy who goes to stay with his uncle, who is something of a witch...
Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
reviewed 2020.12.25
This is a musical number about a genius inventor who is ripped off by his apprentice...
reviewed 2020.11.28
This is the '80s classic featuring a bunch of kids who decide to explore a house where they think some evil-doing is afoot...
reviewed 2020.11.21
This is a kids' movie from a Chinese studio that features an ancient tale from that same country of a goddess who winds up stranded on the moon / living in association with the moon...
reviewed 2020.11.17
This is a fun Sci-Fi flick about a cop whose son is becoming a petty crook. In an effort to track the boy down one night, he discovers that an alien invasion is underway. Impossibly, he decides to and then actually boards the alien craft. During his attempt to liberate his son while in the ship, it travels to Asia and an entire new sequence begins.The story is pretty different from the usual ali..
reviewed 2020.11.07
Today we watched a movie the kids only know from memes. We'd tried to watch it when The Boy was younger, but he panicked at the idea of an alien in the very earlier scene where Elliot - the main character - meets the E.T. This time, with him being twelve and his sister made of sterner stuff, we had no such trouble.I hadn't seen this in maaany years, and I was not surprised to find it somewhat da..
reviewed 2020.09.24
This is an imaginative new story about the young sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, who defies her older brothers by striking out to find their mother, who seems quite fixed on not being found, for reasons unknown...
reviewed 2020.08.05
For "Movie Night" my daughter and I watched this flick about a robot that's escaped the Evil Clutches of a boy genius who's been driven somewhat mad and then loses control of the AI he's created...
reviewed 2020.07.23
This is a story of a band of mercenaries and former soldiers who come together to rob a drug lord...
reviewed 2020.05.23
This is a movie in which a man returns to the house of his parents following an eight month stay in an institution...
reviewed 2020.05.02
This was a surprisingly good action film about a mercenary who's sent into Bangladesh to extract a kidnapped child...
reviewed 2020.04.25
This is a science fiction movie about a future that feels a lot more realistic than Star Trek ever did...
reviewed 2020.02.26
This is a telling of Alan Turing's contributions to the British war effort in the Second World War...
reviewed 2020.01.12
The way this movie was advertised didn't appeal to me, somehow...
reviewed 2019.12.18
Well, in for a dime, in for a dollar. We all watched the original, causing sequels. In this, just the second of eighteen that would eventually be made, the Pets get mixed up in a circus, tangling with the dreadful owner of said in a battle ranging far beyond the normal realm of a few square blocks of Manhattan.There's plenty worse out there for kids...
reviewed 2019.11.12
My eleven-year-old son and I watched this in the run-up to Christmas...
reviewed 2019.10.16
This is, at first glance, a murder investigation...
reviewed 2019.09.29
This is an interesting story that feels like an adaptation from a stage production...
reviewed 2019.09.28
This is a story of a young man who goes out in search of his estranged father...
reviewed 2019.09.14
This is a splashy fun flick set in a future where cities are now mobile affairs, roaming the countryside and taking what they need directly...
reviewed 2019.09.09
This is the sequel to the only good zombie movie in recent years, "Zombieland", released a full decade earlier...
reviewed 2019.08.23
This is a near-future science fiction piece in which a car mechanic who loses his wife and the use of his limbs in an assault after his automated car crashes...
reviewed 2019.08.14
This is a movie featuring a male lead who always plays mild-mannered sweat-hearts and a female lead who always plays abrasive people with poor judgment and/or socialization...
reviewed 2019.08.12
Somehow, the early PC game "Doom" spawned a genre of movies...
reviewed 2019.08.11
Where to start...
reviewed 2019.07.18
This is an implausible tale of a crook who is freed from hospital by a nurse...
reviewed 2019.07.15
This is a direct-to-whatever movie from Disney...
Asterix - the Secret of the Magic Potion
reviewed 2019.06.30
This is a charming attempt at bringing the Asterix books from many a Boomer and Gen-X childhood to the flat screen...
reviewed 2019.06.18
This is a good Adam Sandler movie...
reviewed 2019.05.09
This is a sci-fi piece about a crew that hunts space whales! The crew is comprised of various scruffy types with their own agendas...
reviewed 2019.05.08
This is the story of a snow-plow driver from a mountainous area of Scandinavia. His son is killed, and he devotes his life to unmaking the crime syndicate responsible. A sort of Norse "Death Wish". Which would be "Dødsønske". His quest leads him to trigger a war between a domestic gang and a second band of violent thugs from Serbia*. It's entertaining and that's the point.Recommended...
reviewed 2019.04.24
It's Marky Mark vs Ip Man in a spy story that leans very heavily on violence in an un-named South-East Asian city (it was filmed in Bogota!)...
reviewed 2019.04.22
This is the story of three retirees who decide to pursue a life of crime to pay the bills after they're screwed by the company for which they'd all given a life's labor. Now being sucked dry by a bank (the scandal) it's time to arm themselves and knock off that bank.Things don't go according to plan, of course, and it's the consequences that drive half this thing...
reviewed 2019.04.02
This is a movie in which a soldier, having been framed, agrees to travel to a space colony to rescue the daughter of the President of the US or some similar political body...
reviewed 2019.03.31
Sometimes you see a movie whose premise appears to be to assemble certain actors and let them do their thing...
reviewed 2019.01.06
The kids like super-hero movies, so we're watching a bunch...
reviewed 2019.01.05
This is an uneven movie that grew on me as it went on...
reviewed 2018.12.17
This is a charming Christmas story featuring a brother and sister who are spending X'mas eve alone (mum's working; dad's dead)...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
reviewed 2018.09.21
This is the grand finale of the "Harry Potter" movies and I think it's only to be seen if you've seen part one. Because it's mostly a huge wizard fight in the school grounds. It's not clear exactly why that should be the final battle scene but I imagine it's because everyone's so invested in the school, its inhabitants, and its mythology.Recommended...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
reviewed 2018.09.20
The kids have been watching the "Harry Potter" movies without me because I watched them all once years ago and refused to do so again. But now we're covering films I haven't seen so I rejoined.I'm more-or-less starting from scratch, so I am all but coming at this from the point of view of a new-comer...
reviewed 2018.09.17
This is an animated story about an advanced "security" droid and the human girl it befriends...
reviewed 2018.08.30
This is a clever zombie movie set in Korea...
reviewed 2018.08.15
This is a movie in which a bartender is dragged into the underworld of crime...
reviewed 2018.08.12
Two high school nerds attempt to throw a party...
reviewed 2018.08.07
This is a story of Armageddon; peaceful cities of citizens going through their lives in a near-future setting that seems to be getting on pretty well. One person is plagued by visions of a coming invasion but this is suppressed and all is well (if told in an overly-restrained way).Then the invasion starts as foretold.And then the invaders are found to be human, though they're clearly arriving ..
reviewed 2018.05.26
This is a retelling of an animated movie from several years ago, but the story lines deviate considerably...
reviewed 2018.05.07
This is a telling of the eradication of the culture of the marginal islands in the Gulf along Louisiana...
reviewed 2018.04.17
This is a buddy movie in which a tough bounty hunter and a skittish accountant are thrust together by circumstances. The accountant's been working for the mob but skipped bail to flee his former employers and the authorities. Everyone else in the movie is either after the accountant or is a bystander.I enjoyed the story, the friction/tension between the two leads, the dialog, and the overall vib..
reviewed 2018.04.15
A couple of years ago I wrote one of my mini-reviews about "Jupiter Ascending", a Mila Kunis movie that eh, didn't work. I wrote, "Better luck next time", and I'm happy to report that this, the next time, worked.This is an accidental spy story about two room-mates who find themselves tangled in some bewildering and deadly spy stuff after one friend's charming boyfriend breaks up with her...
reviewed 2018.03.17
This is a mockumentary/found-footage flick about a house (nest?) of vampires living in the modern age...
reviewed 2018.02.23
This is a movie about gun-running during the Bush administration and the massive orgy of mis-allocation of resources across the global "war on terror"...
reviewed 2018.01.18
This is a movie about a twentyish drop-out who meets a girl with some very strange dating requirements...
reviewed 2017.11.23
This is a delightful Christmas movie featuring an office Christmas party that gets a tad out of control...
reviewed 2017.11.20
This is a perfectly-paced animated short about a rising flood that causes one aging gentlemen to progressively build new stories onto his home. When he drops his pipe into the rising waters, it's a cause for him to re-explore all of the previous levels and what each layer of his home taught him through the events that happened when he lived at each.It's delicately drawn, it's virtually silent, a..
reviewed 2017.11.09
This is a crass and awkward retelling of a classic sci-fi/fantasy story in which people find a lost world of dinosaurs and lizardfolk under the Earth's surface. The tone is decidedly self-mocking satire and the actors seem to be having the time of their lives. While told in a linear fashion, it tends to veer and jump around quite a bit but given the insane and immature dialog that's just fine.I ..
Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
reviewed 2017.10.22
This is a movie telling of a book I have read to my son...
reviewed 2017.10.06
This is the story of a girl who sets out to save her tiny Polynesian island, which is dying from creeping black plague that infects the food and eventually can be seen in the air...
reviewed 2017.09.27
This is an animated kids movie featuring a super-villain as its central character...
reviewed 2017.08.04
This is a Cold War piece about a lawyer who is hired by the US military to negotiate the freedom of a spy who has been captured by the Soviets...
reviewed 2017.07.07
This is an engrossing tale about two teens who keep waking up in each other's bodies; one boy, one girl...
reviewed 2017.07.07
This is a film about a semi-sentient animal named Okja; she's a genetically modified super-pig, larger and tastier than ever and stationed by an eccentrically-run company with a young girl in Korea. Naturally, when it's time for processed meat the girl stands up to fight the system. She finds the ready support of eco-rebels hell-bent on taking down the company and setting free the super-pigs.I n..
reviewed 2017.06.30
If you're going to watch a Transformers movie, let it be this one...
I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
reviewed 2017.06.11
This is a movie about a loser name Ruth whose home is robbed...
reviewed 2017.02.18
There's a variant of the film noir where the detective is accidental...
reviewed 2017.02.06
This is a Demons-and-Angels bit of Fantasy about an immortal "Witch Hunter" who, in the modern time, gets wrapped up in an effort by (un-Hunted?) Witches to bring about the end times. It's got a great cast and the tone is consistent but at the price of being a bit on the self-serious side.I enjoyed the combination of characters, sets, and action and while it's hella CGI-heavy that is the times w..
reviewed 2016.12.23
This is a "Star Wars" story, telling the tale of the many Bothans that died bringing Princess Leia the plans for the Death Star -- as referenced in the very first "Star Wars" in 1977...
Captain America: The First Avenger
reviewed 2016.10.14
We watched this for "movie night" with the kids...
reviewed 2016.10.04
Finally, a Super Hero movie I enjoyed. It's the story of a convict who meets a girl whose father is a mad scientist. The scientist's experimental technology grants our hero a strange power -- shrinking down to any imagineable size while retaining his abilities and strength. (You have to remember these are based on comic books; I really wonder how much of this is just Gen-X fan-service.)What make..
reviewed 2016.09.23
This is an update of an early science fiction story from a full Century ago...
reviewed 2016.06.30
This is an animated telling of the Rapunzel story with some updates...
reviewed 2016.05.23
I wanted an action flick, and this appeared on a streaming service...
reviewed 2016.02.17
This is a Wes Anderson movie in which a hotelier runs afoul of the "pock-marked fascists" in the years leading up to and including WWII...
reviewed 2016.01.10
This is anime with the lid off...
reviewed 2015.12.02
This is a story of retribution via a stranger who comes to town and decides to put things right with his fists. You know, like the mid-'80s Code of Vengeance or whatever came out when you were fourteen. Wait, that was a rip-off of a show called "Equalizer"? Never heard of it.The story starts with our man long since retired from some unspecified..
reviewed 2015.09.01
This is a distant sequel to the '80s Mad Max movies, which were guns-and-motorbikes romps through a post-apocalyptic Earth. With increasing plot complexity, the earlier movies wended their way through the descent of 20th Century society and the slow emergence of something else.By the time of this fourth installment, almost all signs of the Before Times ar..
reviewed 2015.08.17
This is the telling of a bunch of hot young Hollywood types who are Left Behind when the Rapture comes...
reviewed 2015.06.22
This is a tale set in 1970 Los Angeles, in which the stoner element is strong but the old guard elements of society still remain in some force...
reviewed 2015.04.26
This was a fun flick about some guys who decide to strike back against their horrible bosses ...
reviewed 2015.04.16
This is a sequel to an animated movie that united Norsemen and dragons...
reviewed 2015.03.24
This is a super-hero movie based on the Marvel Thor comic books, which I never read...
reviewed 2015.02.27
This is the third in the series of the "The Hangover" movies...
reviewed 2015.01.14
I saw this a second time, recently, and felt that some of its shine had worn off...
reviewed 2014.11.17
This is a horror movie within a sci-fi movie about a world-wide effort by humanity to appease the old gods using a systematic approach to sacrifice. In this system, things are somewhat left to chance and there's the possibility that the victims can escape their fate. It's just unlikely.But when the various would-be victims in different locations beat the odds the gods will demand their due, and ..
reviewed 2014.06.23
During the passage of a comet, a group of friends have a dinner party...
reviewed 2014.05.16
I watched this with my son for "movie night". It's about a video game character from the 8-bit days who longs to see the world outside his game (after forty-fifty years?). So he heads out to the other games in the store and has some adventures. And then he becomes involved in the strange case of a displaced royal lineage in one of the games.It's an original idea and executed well...
reviewed 2014.05.07
This is a science fiction film about a fellow who falls in love with a synthetic intelligent that's partially resident in his "phone"...
reviewed 2014.04.13
This is an animated movie from Japan's Ghibli studio...
reviewed 2014.01.08
This is the tale of inmates of a high-speed train that is circling the Earth on a track spanning a global frozen wasteland...
reviewed 2013.07.14
This is a movie that attempts to tell the tale of the Cabin in the Woods from the point of view of the supposed inbred hillbillies that terrorize the urban teenagers. In this telling, two confused fellows arrive at a work site to witness a series of grisly accidental deaths. Coming to believe that it's a "death cult" they do what it takes to survive.I thoroughly enjoyed this lunatic goofy piece...
reviewed 2013.04.08
Only the incredibly self-serious X-Men franchise could start a superhero movie with a scene from a Nazi prison camp. They're obviously trying to ground the fantastical world of super-powered mutants in a historical context. With the underlying themes of these movies are intolerance and persecution, so there are few historical choices that are going to resonate so well with an audience.Having set..
reviewed 2013.03.15
This is a story about a grievously injured soldier who is put into service in a simulation in order to stop a bombing of a train...
reviewed 2012.10.14
This is an amusing story with a great cast about a struggling writer whose unstable and mercurial friend tries to draw him out...
reviewed 2012.09.29
You can probably understand everything you need to know about this movie from the title...
reviewed 2012.09.03
This is an animated movie about a villain with minions, a lair, and a mad scientist...
reviewed 2012.08.14
This is a science-fiction flick in which an assassin kills people sent through a chute from the future...
reviewed 2012.07.19
This is an animated kids movie about a collection of zoo animals that wind up being shipped off to the African island nation of Madagascar...
reviewed 2012.06.02
This is a movie about a retired CIA spy who is classified "RED": Retired, Extremely Dangerous...
reviewed 2012.05.22
A bored couple living in New Jersey head to Manhattan for a night on the town in an effort to save their stale marriage...
reviewed 2012.03.21
The gang from the first installment is back for more in this animated sequel. The land is threatened once again, and things look grim for our heroes. For some reason, the lead panda character seems not to have made much progress as a warrior since we last saw him, and now we have upped the ante on the angst he feels on being the only panda in the kingdom.The action is superb, the banter is good,..
reviewed 2012.01.22
This is the story of a non-super young man who takes it upon himself to become a crime-fighting superhero. He quickly sustains several injuries. He then undergoes treatment that somehow changes his nervous system and he winds up with low sensitivity to pain. So encouraged, he redoubles his efforts and winds up tangling with the mob.They respond by trying to kill him, and he is only saved when tw..
reviewed 2011.11.13
This is an ambitious book based on the children's book by the same name...
reviewed 2011.10.02
This is a .. fantasy movie? about trolls in Norway and the people who hunt them. Following a young film crew into the high, near-arctic wilderness, we watch a professional trollhunter deal with a set of ever-larger quarry. Soon the crew is drawn into close contact with the monsters, some of which are truly gigantic.I quite enjoyed everything about this, from the tragic death in the film crew to ..
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
reviewed 2011.08.14
At last, we have a good Harry Potter movie. I've lost count as to which this is, the fourth or fifth, perhaps?Anyway, it's a good deal more sophisticated this time out and between the writing and a superb effort by the supporting cast member who plays a visiting bureaucrat like a British-flavored Soviet "Political Officer", it feels high-stakes and grounded in some sort of normalcy...
reviewed 2011.08.13
This is a movie about four friends who head to Las Vegas for a bachelor party...
reviewed 2011.07.15
This is an interesting bank heist movie that takes the unusual step of showing you the back-story of the robbers...
reviewed 2011.06.24
When I first saw the original "Toy Story" I wouldn't have guessed that there would be a trilogy or that I'd watch the final one with my three-year-old son...
reviewed 2011.05.02
This is a science fiction story in which humans have since the early 1980's shared the planet with aliens that touched down in South Africa...
reviewed 2011.04.25
This is a classic Western about a girl who encourages an aging US Marshall too pursue the man who killed her father...
reviewed 2011.02.07
This is a stop-motion animated movie done in a perfect style in which two realities are tenuously connected through various cat-flaps in an old house...
reviewed 2010.09.30
I'm not usually a fan of horror, but this is a very well done piece with lots of "home video footage" that shows a couple slowly being tormented by a possession...
reviewed 2010.09.18
This is a film set in a low-income urban neighborhood somewhere in the UK...
reviewed 2010.06.22
This is a sci-fi monster flick in which New York is invaded quite out of the blue by a towering creature dozens of meters tall (if not more) and dripping its young onto the city as it rampages about...
reviewed 2010.05.03
This is a story about some British gangsters...
reviewed 2010.04.13
When you live in Japan you tend to miss the latest trends in North America. So it was that I didn't know about the zombie and vampire movements in cinema. Hooray!Since "The Night of the Living Dead", which I enjoyed, I haven't enjoyed many others. "28 Days Later" was good but the zombies were fast, and therefor more ghouls than zombies. This one was a happy and refreshing break.It features a n..
reviewed 2010.02.06
A couple of weeks ago I wrote that I suspected I'd already seen the best film of the year with "Wall-E"...
reviewed 2009.12.22
This is a slick telling of an actual bank robbery that occurred in a certain former Imperial capital in Year of Our Lord 1971. I love saying it that way, makes it seem so long ago. You know, the year T-Rex released Electric Warrior.Anyway, the gang who pull it off were talked into it for the easy money but what they didn't count on was what would happen when they started prizing open strong boxe..
reviewed 2009.11.04
This is a light-hearted Man In a Hole and Buddy Cop hybrid featuring two stoner anti-heroes who witness a murder and become targets themselves...
reviewed 2009.10.22
This is a super-hero movie with a crime drama skin...
reviewed 2009.08.04
Having recently seen "Children of Men" I was happily surprised to track down another Clive Owen movie at the Tsutaya. It was a .. "gun comedy"? "Bullet-gore festival"? Ah, there's no category for this one. It's a hilariously over-the-top shoot 'em up that starts when a woman in labor walks past a man waiting at a bus stop.It ends with an astronomical body count, the man at the bus stop having ta..
reviewed 2009.07.23
This is a movie about two men in the final year of their life...
reviewed 2009.06.30
This is an animated telling of the 1500+ year-old-epic by the same name...
reviewed 2009.06.18
This is a good fantasy movie about a star that falls to Earth in the form of a young woman...
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
reviewed 2009.06.03
This is a tough story about two fuck-up brothers who decide to rob their parents' jewelry store...
reviewed 2009.04.25
I ennoyed this miserably violent Western about a group of men who try to bring a notorious robber to justice. Included in this group is a local citizen who helped track the robber. It's somewhat more psychological than movies of this genre go, and what I found interesting was how the relationship between the two leads developed.Aside from that, it's a straight-up formula piece with stage-coaches..
reviewed 2009.01.06
I quite enjoyed this bizarre telling of a Vietnam war movie shoot in south-east Asia that swerves into an unintended collision with reality when the core cast is cut adrift in an area controlled by drug gangs...
reviewed 2008.12.15
All there really is to say about this movie is that it isn't up to the first two in the series...
reviewed 2008.12.03
First, a note on what this movie is or is not "for the franchise". I've heard a lot of complaints about this movie. That it's "no longer bond". That the old magic is gone.I disagree...
reviewed 2008.11.20
This is a smart flick about the "war on terror". It features the tale of an civilian agent of the CIA, employed to go under cover to uncover and upset extremist Muslim terrorist activities globally. It also follows the two CIA agents who know nothing of his assignment but who come across the civilian's trail repeatedly in pursuit of their own dealings with the same extremist organizations.Sett..
reviewed 2008.07.07
This is a sequel to the horror movie that brought us "fast zombies"...
reviewed 2008.04.17
This is a science fiction story, and a real mixed bag. The basic premise is that the Sun is failing and humanity has worked out how to reboot it by delivering some kind of machine and material into the star. This is the tale of the crew and their many struggles.I'm not sure that the science holds up but the story takes us to some interesting places...
reviewed 2008.02.23
This is a movie of the early days of the oil industry, depicting a ruthless and power-mad man who effectively loses his humanity in his effort to make a vast fortune and exert his control over everyone and everything around him...
reviewed 2008.01.19
This is a clever science fiction film that tracks three stories that are interwoven in a way that is at first utterly impossible to guess.As things go on, it slowly becomes that the main character (in his three guises) is not exactly human. He's more of a god, actually, incidentally deluded by the irresistable nature of the artificial world he's created. Our world, that is.Two things sto..
reviewed 2007.12.29
Beware: this is a long movie, and one that seems to pick up its pace from the era in which it's set: the 70's.Happily, it's also quite a good one...
reviewed 2007.12.18
This is a movie about two louts who crash weddings with the intention of meeting women. It appears to work like a charm, and the early part of the movie features any number of hot young things hopping into bed with the two leading men. Things get complicated when one of them falls in love with his latest mark, while the other finds that he's been the target rather than the hunter.It's mostly har..
reviewed 2007.07.24
This is the third of the "Bourne" movies, featuring a former CIA agent who has lost all his memory and despite being hunted by various violent parties is attempting to patch together a new life (and self of identity)...
reviewed 2007.04.23
Back in the Pleistocene, there were adventure books written by a man named Clive Cussler and starring a larger-than-life character called Dirk Pitt (seriously)...
reviewed 2007.04.12
This is a movie about an arms dealer who rides a knife's edge between a successful - and lucrative - career and the legal boundaries of the industry...
reviewed 2006.11.28
This is a movie about a retired founder of a software company* who's single once again after his girlfriend leaves...
reviewed 2006.11.18
This is an animated flick about a robot who lives in Robot City and wants to be an inventor to make ...
reviewed 2006.09.23
This is a story about a group of spelunkers who enter a cave system where they are beset by some kind of subterranean race...
reviewed 2006.09.03
This is a stop-motion animated musical from Tim Burton, and boy does it show...
reviewed 2006.04.01
Kick kick kick, screech, one-liner blam blam blam! One-liner, body-blow, great fall.Bonus for the most annoying Heavies in movie history...
reviewed 2006.02.25
This is an interesting flick about a man who's kidnapped and held in a room for twenty years. Over the years, his only contact with other people is when they come to replace his mattress every couple of years. Then they wheel in a TV, and he's let in on how much he's missed.Then, quite suddenly, he's allowed to break free.The purpose of his release eventually becomes apparent, but only a..
reviewed 2006.01.02
This is a worthy successor to the Bourne Identity, which is a rare enough thing for any sequel, but all the more so given that this one was written without the participation of the late author of the original story.It picks up the story of the refugee couple that was doing all of the running in the first story, and throws into the mix new layers of corruption and CIA machinations...
Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
reviewed 2005.12.26
Wallace and Gromit holds a special place in my heart...
reviewed 2005.05.22
This is a film about a collection of thirty-somethings drifting through lonely lives in Montreal.The female lead is in a lousy relationship with an slob who robs convenience stores for a living. She has grown weary of the world of petty armed robbery, but feels at this point that it would be pointless to leave because she'd just wind up as miserable somewhere else.The lead male is a Czech pro..
reviewed 2005.05.21
This is an impressive little bio-pic about the father of modern sex research, Alfred Kinsey. He was an entymologist who switched into the field of sex research as a result of his own sexual experiences and his anecdotal discovery that everyone in society seemed to be pervasively ignorant of sex.The movie follows his research and the publication of the results...
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
reviewed 2005.05.19
At last, the prequels climb into the realm of the original series. This is the 'final' installment of the series, and it delves into the descent of an angry young man into fascism. The man of course is Aniken Skywalker, father of Luke and Leia from the original. And the fascist result is none other than one of the most recognizable villains in movie histroy; Darth Vader.This movie is a real s..
reviewed 2005.02.19
This is an interesting story about the state of abortion in the UK in the 1950's. It follows the story of a working-class woman who does abortions (for free) for women of all circles even in an era when abortions were difficult to acquire even for the wealthy.When one of her abortions somehow goes awry, an investigation drags her entire family into the fray, with each family member reacting acc..
reviewed 2005.01.11
This is a flick set in the Gobi desert. It chronicles the unhappy tale of a fatal plane crash in that enourmous stretch of dry sand and rock, involving the crew of a failed oil rig and their pilots.The survivors are faced with an utterly inhospitable environment, a band of bandits, and their suspicion that they've been written off by the company that was flying them through the terrain.Dennis ..
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
reviewed 2005.01.10
This movie is an odd one. Full of weird little self-referential loops and half-formed sub-stories, it lurches forward with an attenuated pace and almost surreal fluidity. Things seem to happen without rhyme or reason, as if they occur simply to give the characters something to do or talk about. Like it was a Star Trek: The Next Generation movie where everyone is mildly intoxicated.That said, the..
reviewed 2004.12.21
This is the third in the Blade movies...
reviewed 2004.12.20
This charming flick is about a cabbie and the freelance hitman that has him do his driving while on a job. The cabbie learns of the killer's intentions through the unfortunate means of the first victim on the list landing on his cab. From there, things only get worse, until at last one of them is left to ride around on the unmanned LRT system, dead.It's a well made film, with no spare bits to ..
reviewed 2004.12.14
This is the story of a Frechman who's on the lam. He's fleeing the authorities because of his past as a collaborater with the puppet Vichy regime of southern France, at which point he played a minor role in the war-time execution of seven Jews in a small village. The plot hinges on the support he's received from the Church, who provide shelter and money to keep him in a minimal existence.Though ..
reviewed 2004.12.06
This is a mockumentary about parking attendants. It is low budget, and it is Canadian. And it is everything that you hope for from a low-budget mockumentary, and few of the things you fear of low-budget Canadian movies.Rather than obsessive or pretentious or cutesy, it's well paced, filled with cringe-factor-ten characters, and original...
reviewed 2004.11.14
I never saw the first part of this story, the early-90's "before sunrise"...
reviewed 2004.10.30
This is a solid job at a horror/zombie movie...
reviewed 2004.10.29
This movie is actually pretty terrifying...
reviewed 2004.10.29
This is the movie that Hayden Christensen needed to redeem himself from his prominent participation in the loathsome Star Wars prequels. Having watched him stiffly make the best of the terrible writing in those movies, it was hard to see the actor. Here, he's still hard to see, but it's because he's disappeared into his role.He plays disgraced 'journalist' (or fictionalist) Stephen ..
reviewed 2004.10.24
This is a priceless zombie semi-spoof featuring a cast of everyday folk whose quiet, dismal existences are interrupted by an outbreak of zombievirus in their neighbourhood.The sense of humour - both grisly and quirky, perhaps a movie first - is just right for the subject...
reviewed 2004.07.03
The strongest "comic book" movie ever...
reviewed 2004.06.18
This is an outstanding flick featuring in the incomperable Bruce Campbell. It's about Elvis, set in the current time. He's an aged, bitter, and incapacitated man, living in a retirement home that is also home to JFK (played, perhaps surprisingly, by Ossie Davis) and the Lone Ranger.At the outset of the movie, he's a delipidated shell of his former self, fighting a cancerous node on his penis a..
reviewed 2004.05.29
I ran a horrible risk after seeing this movie. I told my brother that I'd been to see it. This was a risk because he holds a Masters degree in Classics, which means he studied stuff like Homer's work in quite some details. And he was quite prepared to go to some length to point out where Hollywood had taken liberties with the real story.And apparently, those liberties were vast...
reviewed 2004.04.09
This is a Quebecois film about a number of 20- and 30-somethings, all trekking south-west from Quebec to Montreal on the same highway on the same day. It's got a domestic dispute, a hopeless office crush, a friendship entangled in problems regarding a woman, and some letches on the prowl.There are a number of clever bits in this 'relationship comedy' (if that's a genre) and the characters are fo..
reviewed 2004.03.07
This is an amusing/ghoulish and surreal French animated flick about a grandmother who sets off to rescue her cyclist grandson when he is kidnapped by the wine mafia. There isn't a lot of dialogue, but there are plenty of scenes of seniors snapping off musical comedy as they dodge bullets. And frogs, there are plenty of frogs. Most of which wind up as food by way of granade-propulsion.I recomm..
reviewed 2004.03.03
This is a delightful little romp about two sibling Japanese children who starve to death in the aftermath of world war two. As if the burning death of the mother, the death at sea of the father, and the episode where the kids are cheated by their aunt weren't bad enough, you get to watch a four year old die of starvation as this movie comes to a close. Yep.Probably very accurate, too, I imagine...
reviewed 2003.12.28
This is one of my favourite silly comedies, and it's French. It's about two men who are about as different as it's possible to be. One is suave, sophisticated, vicious, dishonest and arrogant. The other is sincere, bumbling, and heartbroken.The former invites the latter to a dinner party in which each guest brings an idiot to compete in an undeclared battle of idiocy...
reviewed 2003.11.11
This is a beautifully-shot, minimally-written telling of the escape by three 'half-caste' aborigine girls from a camp in Western Australia...
reviewed 2003.10.28
This is an odd film that makes me wonder if there's not a better book out there that tells the same tale. It's about a wreck of a man (played, in usual fashion, by Ralph Fiennes) who arrives at a half-way house plagued by the memories of his childhood.Unfortunately, the retelling of that childhood is a bit uneven...
reviewed 2003.10.14
This is an interesting little number set during the closing days of the first Gulf War...
reviewed 2003.10.13
This is an interesting film about a small family in a tiny fishing village in New England. The mother and father are stuck in an uncommunicative rut in which the tension is heightened when the son starts dating a woman five+ years older than he his. When the girlfriend's jealous ex-husband turns up to reclaim his position in the family he abandoned, things explode.And then the movie begins...
reviewed 2003.09.26
I rented this one with my mum and my new girlfriend after the g/f and I had gone on at some length to rave about Bill Murray's performance in 'Lost in Translation'. I'd first seen 'Groundhog Day' years ago when it first came out, and thought that it would be worth another look.It was...
reviewed 2003.09.10
This is a movie about migrating birds. It's a documentary, of sorts, though its focus is the imagery of the flying birds, the scenery through which they're flying, and a few simple themes (endurance, hardship, instinct).It may not tell you much about the birds your looking at (many aren't even named, and quite a few are in it for maybe only 90 seconds or so), and there isn't a hell of a lot of v..
reviewed 2003.08.22
This is an action movie featuring a member of the elite SWAT unit who is demoted after his partner injures a hostage during the resolution of a bank robbery...
reviewed 2003.07.10
Before I get into the movie itself, I want to talk about where I saw it...
reviewed 2003.06.25
This movie has surprising depth, and has a pacing that strikes an excellent note. Don't go if you're expecting a 2.5-hour "Hulk smash!" Go if you're expecting what I found: the finest treatments of a comic-book character that I can remember.Ang Lee is really as versatile and skilled as everyone seems to think he is...
reviewed 2003.05.31
This is a fine flick. I've found that animated movies are becoming more popular, and as they've been doing so, their quality has been in free-fall. This one is a break from the trend, being at once beautifully crafted, amusing, and original (sort of).It loses points for some of the too-well-trod Disney paths that it follows (you can just see the mother's death coming) and perhaps lays it on a ..
reviewed 2003.05.12
This is the second X-men movie...
reviewed 2003.04.14
I was a bit leery about this one, but it turned out to be quite worthwhile...
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
reviewed 2003.04.02
This is a supposedly autobiographic story about Chuck Barris, the inventor of the "Dating Game" and the "Gong Show"...
reviewed 2003.03.12
This is a British movie about an Indian-British girl who wants to be a soccer player...
reviewed 2002.12.30
This is a film starring Jennifer Beals and Brendan Fraser as a sister and brother. The sister becomes pregnant, and agrees to the suggestion by her geneticist husband that she submit the child (via the amniotic fluid in the womb) to a battery of genetic tests for various things.The test suggests that just like Fraser's uncle-to-be, the child (a boy) will be gay...
reviewed 2002.12.08
This is a sci-fi flick about a psychologist who is called to a distant space research centre to get to the bottom of some recent events. Things have gone very strange on the centre that orbits what may be a (bizarre) planet (ie, "Solaris"). When he (George Clooney) gets there, he learns all about the source of the strangeness indeed.It's a pretty heady movie...
reviewed 2002.12.07
This movie is as Canadian as they get...
reviewed 2002.12.01
This is by far my favourite Disney pic...
reviewed 2002.12.01
This is a Disney animated flick that takes Treasure Island into space...
reviewed 2002.11.23
This is actually pretty good...
reviewed 2002.11.13
This is an American/Japanese gangster flick starring Takeshi Kitano...
reviewed 2002.11.05
Well, no two ways about it, this is one of the most intense, frightening flicks I've seen in some time...
reviewed 2002.11.01
This is an odd Japanese film about a fellow who returns early from a midnight fishing trip on a tip from an anonymous letter to find his wife in bed with another man. He stabs the man, kills the wife, and spends the next eight years in prison. This all happens as the opening credits are still playing.The flick picks up with his release from prison, and his attempted rehabilitation as a barber...
reviewed 2002.10.24
This is a very odd Japanese film about a boy who sets out to visit his estranged mother...
reviewed 2002.10.05
I'm going to go out on a limb and imagine that I'll be one of the few people who enjoyed this one as much as I did...
reviewed 2002.09.22
This is a recent Val Kilmer movie about a man living the speed-freak lifestyle in crummy ol' LA. He's pretty much reached rock bottom as a snitch working for some creepy DEA cops and spending his days in a haze of methamphetamine.But he's also a trumpet player who's lost his wife, and who is seeking revenge against the crooks who executed her when he and she turned up at the wrong place (another..
reviewed 2002.09.20
I've seen this period comedy about two destitute actors (Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci) on the lam on a cruise ship something like three times...
reviewed 2002.09.12
This is a creepy German movie about a serial murderer of children...
reviewed 2002.09.08
This is a French flick about two detectives (Jean Reno, Vincent Cassel) following two separate crimes (a murder at a University in an isolated town in France's mountainous east, and the break-in of a crypt in a cemetary)...
reviewed 2002.09.02
This is a film about a Scottish woman (played by the excellent Cate Blanchett) who becomes a spy in Vichy France during WWII. It's a hazardous job that she undertakes in an attempt to find her love, a downed pilot.Along the way, she finds herself surrounded by duplicitous scum and killers and relying on partners who are either of dubious merit or tempermental wildmen...
reviewed 2002.08.28
First off, I have to say that I saw this one with my brother and his wife. I'm not sure what the missus thought, but my brother hated it. I didn't; I thought it was richly cliched, but worth watching.This is a Sci-Fi piece based on one of Philip K...
reviewed 2002.08.20
I saw this on TV, but I thought I'd comment anyway because I liked it."Dick" is a comedy about the fall of the Nixon administration...
reviewed 2002.08.19
This is an adaptation of the Sci-Fi novel by the same name, by author HG Wells. It's about a scientist in 19th century America who invents a time machine in order to travel back to the night of his fiancee's death in an attempt to undo that event. He fails, and winds up bouncing around the future all the way up to 800,000 AD, when the world is a very, very different place.The movie is well made,..
reviewed 2002.08.12
Upon a second viewing, I have to upgrade my rating on this flick. Yes, it's a silly vampire story (as my brother pointed out). The vampires are replaced with bad guys of native American folklore, true, but similarities between the Wendigo in this one and run-of-the-mill vampires is too much.The plot is essentially this: a fnck-up in the US army (played by a hungry-looking Guy Pierce) is sent to ..
reviewed 2002.08.01
When I emerged from this one, I was certain that I hadn't slept for six days...
reviewed 2002.07.26
This is a movie about a temp named Josh who's a wannabe novelist and a bit of a fuckup...
reviewed 2002.07.22
This is a movie by the same (German) director as Run, Lola, Run...
reviewed 2002.07.10
Well, well, Tom Cruise can act after all...
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
reviewed 2002.06.21
This is a story about three Australian drag performers who take their shtick on the road to do a performance in the Outback...
reviewed 2002.06.21
What a great flick...
reviewed 2002.06.15
Saw this on the digital projector down in Richmond. It was visually improved, but some of the plot problems are still there. My favourite nit to pick: if C-3PO lived on the Lars family farm for 'many years', how come he didn't react as if he'd ever seen it when he and R2-D2 returned twenty years later in "Episode IV"?[ spoiler ]It turns out that they explain this at the end of the "third" mov..
reviewed 2002.05.19
This is an interesting American flick featuring William H...
Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones
reviewed 2002.05.16
I went and saw the first showing of the new Star Wars movie last night. It was an improvement. Quite different from the previous one, and substantially different from the first trilogy, too. I have to say, I'm not sure that anything from "Episode I" matters to this movie, however. Maybe the meeting of Padme and Anakin? Did Qui-Gon ever matter?Movie making has certainly changed in the last 25 yea..
reviewed 2002.04.27
This is a slightly odd French film about a young man and his family and a killer from his past...
reviewed 2002.04.01
Blade II feels quite a bit like an unintended sequel, picking up the two central characters in very different positions from where we last saw them. The human/vampire cross-breed is still doing his thing, slaughtering vampires because. He's manipulated into attempting to stop a super-species of vampires, working for the vampire nation.This thing is right on the edge of the line into B-movie terr..
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (Cavedwellers)
reviewed 2002.03.30
Man, it just doesn't get any worse than the original movie 'Cave dwellers' that gets torn to ribbons in this episode...
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (Pod People)
reviewed 2002.03.30
The Mystery Science Theatre flicks are always so bizarre there's no real placing them amongst the 'normal' movie universe...
reviewed 2002.03.30
I picked up this flick for $5 at a video store that was closing down, along with the others in the original series (I declined the offer of 'Episode I')...
reviewed 2002.03.29
This is a film dating to 1963 by Akira Kurosawa...
reviewed 2002.03.23
This is an animated kid's movie set in the ice age. It features a mammoth, a giant sloth, and a saber-tooth tiger who band together to attempt the return of a lost human infant to its tribe.I think this one is aimed at a particularly young crowd...
reviewed 2002.03.09
This is an adaptation of the novel by Alexandre Dumas. It's about a young sailor with a beautiful fiancee, a strong sense of honour, and a promising career. All of these things are stripped away when he is wrongfully accused of treason and sent to hell on Earth in the form of a remote island prison.He eventually gets free, and all hell breaks loose.This is a quite beautiful movie, well cast,..
reviewed 2002.03.05
This is a silly bit of science fiction/comedy about a couple of professors at a community college who discover extra-terrestrial life in a meteorite. Their discovery is made known to the government, which promptly intervenes and screws everything up. Soon ET life is threatening to take over the world, and it's up to our two professors and some team-mates to save the humanity from extinction.It's..
reviewed 2002.03.02
I can't believe it took me 20 years to see this flick. It's a sci-fi thriller set in Antarctica and featuring Kurt Russell, and it's about an alien life-form that causes all kinds of grief after it gets dug out of the ice by some Norwegians.This movie scores its points almost entirely on its depiction of the break-down in the staff of the research station once The Thing gets loose...
reviewed 2002.02.18
This is a Woody Allen flick, starring Woody Allen (naturally) opposite Helen Hunt...
reviewed 2002.01.18
This is a flick about a family that comes together after years of failure and heartbreak...
reviewed 2002.01.12
This is a Jon Favreau flick. He wrote it and stars in it (along with Vince Vaughn). Favreau is a wannabe boxer and they're both construction workers serving an LA mobster (played with uncanny skill by Peter Falk). When they get the chance to get into the 'bigs' as goons for Falk, they jump at the chance to do a job in NYC.So they set off...
reviewed 2002.01.12
This is a flick about a young woman who is sent away by family and friends to a camp where she'll be "set straight". Her friends and family have come to the conclusion that she's a lesbian, and that she needs the help of a school that purports to 'straighten' gay teens.Needless to say, the dorm rooms separating the girls from the boys turn out to be a less than ideal scenario for this purpose...
What's The Worst That Could Happen
reviewed 2002.01.02
This is an amusing flick with Martin Lawrence and Danny DeVito. Lawrence plays a thief, who breaks into the home of the wealthy DeVito only to be robbed in turn. The item that DeVito's millionaire steals is a 'lucky ring'; an item given him by his new girlfriend. The ring has significance because it had belonged to her father, a gambler.Though a bit tedious in points - with cliches, a plot that ..
reviewed 2001.12.11
This is a 25-year-old flick by the writer/director of Taxi Driver. It's a drama starring got Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel and - surprising - Richard Pryor as three guys on the auto line in Detroit. They're working for a union that's become complacent and corrupt, and are making so little that the characters played by Keitel and Pryor have night jobs.The trio are convinced that the union is scre..
reviewed 2001.12.04
This is a musical flick by Baz Luhrmann set in Paris in 1900...
reviewed 2001.11.28
This is a Sci-Fi flick, and quite a good one...
reviewed 2001.11.20
This is an animated flick from Pixar. It stars the voices of John Goodman and Billy Crystal as monsters who work for the power company. Their job is to travel to the bedrooms of human children (via closet doors) and scare them. The cries of the children are then captured and converted into energy in the monster's world.All is well with this setup until a devious colleague (Steve Buscemi doing..
reviewed 2001.11.10
This is a Jet Li ultraviolence sci-fi flick...
reviewed 2001.11.06
This is a ghost story, set in the English Channel island of Jersey in the post-war era...
reviewed 2001.11.04
This is a movie about Jack the Ripper. It's got a heroine addict as a protagonist, a prostitute with a heart of gold, and Robbie Coltrane. Sprinled with some extremely unpleasant scenes, and shot almost entirely at night in London's Whitechapel district, it's one damn dark film.It's well paced, well cast, and the plot even managed to surprise me...
reviewed 2001.10.20
The Mexican is a tale about an antique Mexican pistol and the pack of thugs and losers who try to obtain it once it turns up. Brad Pitt plays yer loser, Julia Roberts plays his common-law-wife, and James Gand*lfini plays one of the thugs.This was far more entertaining than I'd expected. It was by now means a great movie, but it was actually well worth watching.It has a plot, it has formulaic M..
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
reviewed 2001.09.10
This is Kevin Smith's latest flick...
reviewed 2001.08.17
This is a low-budget German flick about a hard-boiled, homosexual detective's fight against a carnivorous condom. It is every bit as good as that sound, I assure you. Right from the opening scene - where a University professor on the make is attempting to 'pass' a student at a sh*tty hotel, only to have his penis bitten off by a complementary condom - you know that this is entertainment.With an ..
reviewed 2001.08.07
This movie is about the filming of the German horror classic Nosferatu...
reviewed 2001.07.20
This movie surprised me; it was better than I expected by a fair margin. It's about a small-town waitress (Zellwegger as Betty) who witnesses her husband's brutal murder and loses her grip on reality. Unhappily, there's an alternate reality waiting in her favourite soap.Believing that she's destined for a wonderful life with a fictional character, our girl Betty takes a car borrowed from her h..
reviewed 2001.07.16
This is Atom Egoyan's latest movie. It revolves around a pregnant young woman from Ireland, who's searching for her boyfriend. He's told her he's left for England to work in a lawnmower plant. In reality, he's joined the British army (something he can't have them knowing, back home).Her search lands her in the clutches of Hoskins's ageing bachelor, a chef who watches tapes of his late mother'..
reviewed 2001.07.15
I've only seen Li in one or two other (N. American) flicks, butbetween them, I'm starting to get an image of a someone wth a taste for making movies about violence.This is a fairly bare-bones action flick, in which Li - as an agent of mainland China - turns up in France to aid in a drug-smuggling investigation...
reviewed 2001.07.14
This is the first completely computer-animated movies I've seen...
reviewed 2001.06.08
Just before Benicio Del Toro won an oscar for his part in the strange movie Traffic, he co-starred in this gangster flick with Ryan Phillipe. The two of them are small time hoods who stumble upon an opportunity for a kid-napping, and leap in before looking.Their kidnappee is a pregnant surrogate mother (played by the seemingly unaging Juliette Lewis) who is in way over her head wit..
reviewed 2001.06.08
This is a surprising flick from Germany. It is essentially the telling of three variations on the same troubled day in the life of our heroine, her parents, her lover, several peripheral characters, and a certain bank.It's a fast-paced flick, with the lead character actually running extensively throughout much of the film, and the dialog running throughout...
reviewed 2001.05.11
This is - surprise - a Japanese flick. In Japan, there are a number of people who have immigrated from South America. These people are the children of Japanese emigrants who left Japan in the years following WWII.One of the main characters in this movie is such an immigrant...
reviewed 2001.03.11
Saw Traffic last night. Good flick. But long. And too many stars. It's certainly got its paint-by-numbers moments, and I rather felt that some of the actors might not have been sure of their direction but a number of the younger cast in particular really carried it.God knows the drug situation needs attention...
reviewed 2001.02.02
Today, Sara and I went to see "All about my Mother" at the outdoor cinema by Lady Whatsit's Chair, along with Jo and Rob...
reviewed 2001.01.15
This is a surprisingly well-filmed flick with a decent plot, good acting, and an interesting premise...
reviewed 2000.12.30
Ah, David Mamet, you've done it again...
reviewed 2000.12.17
Amazing...
reviewed 2000.12.14
This is an overly realistic portrait of life in the wild and woolly corners of the world where hard-working imperialist corporate scum gets kidnapped by equally scummy drug lords and desperados...
reviewed 2000.12.02
This flick is about an ordinary man (marriage in trouble, one kid, job as a security guard) who survives an extraordinary train crash. When he does (and he's the sole survivor), he's contacted by a wealthy comic book collector who believes that the survivor has special powers.Needless to say, the collector turns out to be right...
reviewed 2000.11.20
This is a brutal telling of a true story about a lesbian who finds life livable in the guise of a man. She's only 21, but has wracked up enough trouble by the time she finds herself in a small Texan town, where she falls in love with a local girl.Things goes horribly, horribly wrong for the heroine in this brutal flick, and it's not for the faint of heart...
reviewed 2000.11.18
I liked this movie, but not as much as I wanted to...
reviewed 2000.11.16
I first saw this flick on a plane, and didn't think much of it. I reluctantly agreed to rent it with Sara, and was surprised that despite its definite (and purposeful) B feel, and some pretty patchy writing, this actually works as a comedy.Willis plays a former mob killer who moves to Montreal to (supposedly) get away from it all...
reviewed 2000.11.10
Funny, fast, violent...
reviewed 2000.11.04
This flick is about the Aussie and American team that ran the relay dish in rural Australia that had the good fortune to carry the tranmissions from Apollo 11 during the moon landing...
reviewed 2000.10.16
This is an English comedy I'd wanted to see...
reviewed 2000.10.15
I have never before included a really good movie I saw on television, but this one has stuck with me for the past two months, so here it is.First of all, the style and tenor of this movie really hooked me (even though I only happened on it because we'd returned from the Olympics closing cemermonies fireworks down at the Harbour Bridge, and I wanted to see what was happening at the beginning of t..
reviewed 2000.09.18
This movie is about a fellow (Cusack), who runs a music shop with two equally able and elitist staff. The movie is about his inability to function, whether as a partner to his girlfriend, as a business man, or just being honest with himself. It follows his disasterous relationship with his girlfriend, and digs into his past relationships as well.The movie is studded with funny scenes, and Blac..
reviewed 2000.09.12
This is a bizarre little flick about two brothers who take it upon themselves to annihilate the local mafia organisation. They - along with a laughable sidekick who defects from the mob - procede to destory an entire criminal world.It's beautifully - if somewhat confusingly - shot, and worth a watch...
reviewed 2000.09.01
Aside from a dead theme involving the main character's dead brother (who appears as some kind of ghost in a few scenes), this is a pretty straightforward Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels in sunny Australia. It's got a slick plot and a handful of worthwhile characters, and the direction is spot on.It's a very Australian flick, and as unasuming as hell...
reviewed 2000.08.20
We saw this only because we'd decided to wander into one cinema after having walked out of Shanghai Noon. We did it just for cheap thrills.The movie, though, turned out to be worth watching, so we stayed...
reviewed 2000.08.20
Ah, Jackie. He's back in top form after a string of duds that marked his first attempts at the North American film world. This is a very entertaining film, which retains Chan's wacky humour and expands his territory to lampoon both traditional Chinese and Western cultures.Though one or two gags were repeated (such as the rescue of the two leads by Chan's stalwart Indian wife) and one or two sc..
reviewed 2000.08.19
This is an Aussie film about their most famous real-life criminal, a 'stand-over man' name Mark 'Chopper' Read. Read is an irredeemably violent man, and a paranoid psychotic with a taste for the limelight. He thrashes about in a hopeless downward spiral, hurting everyone in his life.It is very very Australian, and worth watching from that standpoint alone...
reviewed 2000.08.12
Again with Tobey MacGuire. Lucky for us this fellow can act. This is a flick about a young orphan who leaves the orphanage to find his fortune, and winds up picking apples on a farm near the ocean. There he learns something of life.It's an easy-paced story about human things...
reviewed 2000.08.05
Wonder Boys is a movie about an author who holds down a tenured position at the University of Pittsburgh, played by Michael Douglas in the first role in which I've enjoyed watching him since the first Romancing the Stone. He's got a couple of worrisome students, a worrisome editor, a departed wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a stolen car. How could this plot miss.It's a very entertaining flick, ..
reviewed 2000.07.13
This is the movie based on the long-running comic book series by the same name. It is set in the near future, when human mutants have developed (supposedly as the next step in human evolution). The mutants tend to posess unusual abilities and even superhuman powers. They are therefore hated by the bulk of humanity, and that friction sets the backdrop for the action in this flick.Having grown ..
reviewed 2000.07.10
This is a flick about a kid growing up in Sweden...
reviewed 2000.07.07
This is a detective story, featuring a washed up drunk and a bunch of demented low-lifes. It's got a plot that unwinds with a gritty, unapologetic pace.It's set in L...
reviewed 2000.06.12
Set in a poor English city, this grey tale depicts a Pakistani-English family trying to cope with the generation gap between immigrant parents (or in this case, the father) and first-generation children...
reviewed 2000.06.11
A flick about the first author to tackle the sleeze and debauchery of Hollywood as a setting for fiction...
reviewed 2000.05.20
Actually pretty terrifying at times, this is about a small cast of people invited to spend the night in a crazy old mansion, supposedly on a study about insomnia...
reviewed 2000.05.16
This is an extremely Australian movie about a 'dole blodger' (that's "welfare bum" to Canadians) of Greek extraction (hence 'WOG': backronym'd to Western Oriental Gentleman) who makes trouble for the government by first crashing into the car transporting the minister responsible for employment, then suing her for damages, and striking back on TV when publicly humiliated.It's also a love story be..
reviewed 2000.05.14
Gladiator is a brilliantly filmed piece about a Roman General who's fighting in the 'Germania' campaigns in the second Century CE. He is named by his pal the Emperor to take on the mantel, as the older man foresees his imminent death. That's where the General's trouble begins: he's immediately the target of a thousand political enemies.Soon, his home is destroyed, his wife and boy are dead, and ..
reviewed 2000.04.26
Julie Roberts plays a plucky single mom with bills to pay who gets nailed in a car crash in an early frame. She loses the subsequent law suit, but decides that the lawyer owes her something, and demands a job with his firm. Then she takes up a research project, and away we go. Soon she's taking on an energy utility due to groundwater contamination.Entertaining and harmless, the outcome is forego..
reviewed 2000.04.22
This one was utterly misrepresented in the ads...
reviewed 2000.04.20
I've always wanted to see this film, which was created in the late 60s. It's about a cop who's tasked with protecting a mafia informer, and fails utterly. It's what comes next that's the focus of the film. This includes car chases, a stolen corpse, some moody, stylish clothing, a couple of shoot-outs and of course a political agenda.The pacing is uneven (this was made in 1970, so that might not ..
reviewed 2000.04.15
Good dumb humor...
reviewed 2000.04.10
This is an excellent French film about a professional killer, his apprentice, his client, and his rivals...
reviewed 2000.03.15
This is a quiet flick about an American movie star and the Englishman she meets while shopping for books in a small district of London...
reviewed 2000.03.15
This is an Australian flick about a getaway driver who inadvertently winds up in teamed up with a runaway Japanese housewife...
reviewed 2000.02.15
Primary Colours is a supposedly fictional account of a American Presidential candidate who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bill Clinton, both physically, politically, and in his philandering & crookedness...
reviewed 2000.02.15
Another in the endless stream of who-will-survive-the-encounter-with-a-deadly-force-of-nature flicks, this one is about a buncha cops, game wardens, scientists and a crocophile who get together to fuck around with a giant crocodile that's living in a small New England lake...
reviewed 2000.02.15
This is about a bumbling fellow going through a mid-life crisis, and the wife he leaves early in the movie to become a play-write...
reviewed 2000.02.15
This is a bleak affair about a family of three sisters and the various people floating around them...
reviewed 2000.01.15
This is a teen movie. It's about four guys who make a pact that they'll get laid by graduation, and perhaps unsurprisingly, three of them do. Along the way, a number of other problems get sorted out, and everyone has a mostly good time.I was actually entertained by this flick...
reviewed 1999.12.15
A pretty little farce about a small village in Ireland, pop. 50. The townspeople learn that one of their number has won the lottery, and a scheme is hatched to bilk the lottery corporation of their winnings when they discover that the winner has died before making the claim.It's got the pre-requisite love story, the pre-requisite local scumbag who wants more than her share, etc...
reviewed 1999.12.15
Silly, but a good flick...
reviewed 1999.12.15
This is a brutal, unrelenting tale about a small-town sheriff whose alcoholism, rage, and bitterness drive him to paranoia, dementia, and violence. He (Nolte, in the best performance I've ever seen) punches his daughter, loses his job, burns a house, kills a family member, yanks one of his teeth with pliers, and generally has a miserable time.It's not an easy movie to watch, but it's very well ..
reviewed 1999.11.12
A war movie that seems real. Probably the first one I've ever imagined that depicted the real thing correctly. Stunningly awful depictions.Aside from its setting, filming (brilliantly hand-held camerawork), and acting (aside from Hank's usual dramatic overacting, the cast was superb), the tale is pretty straightforward...
reviewed 1999.11.03
Holy Moly. Much better than I expected. A very good job by Burton, and great performances by the leads. The swordsman who played Darth Maul in the recent Star Wars flick plays the horseman in the appropriate scenes with such horrifying skill it has to be seen to be believed.Set in the late 18th century, this has a high dose of ghoulish over-the-top grey-on-black sets and eery, misty wooded backd..
reviewed 1999.11.03
Another good job by both of the leads in this one. It's about a couple that breaks up inexorably over years of child rearing, career juggling, and personality differences. Then one day in a parking lot they make up.What's good about this flick is the exacting detail of the relationship between the married couple...
reviewed 1999.10.24
This is a romantic comedy set up when the female lead saves the brother of the male lead from being crushed by a train...
reviewed 1999.10.02
Rilly rilly good...
reviewed 1999.08.31
This is a very good film, and yes, it starts Bruce Willis...
reviewed 1999.08.22
Silly but amusing, this is a sometimes awkward flick that dives into the world of comic book heroes without shame...
reviewed 1999.08.03
This is a miserable tale of a boy who grows up in an unnamed town in Ireland with two parents who fight bitterly, a best friend who abandons him, and a world of adults who hate him. He's a nasty, violent, brutish boy, and as the years go by and life gets worse, he matches the blows with his own ever worsening violence and psychosis.If you're up to it, this is quite a tale...
reviewed 1999.07.30
This is a Japanese movie about a cop who loses his way during a bad patch. His five-year-old child is dead, his wife is struggling, and then cops start getting shot in an investigation of the Yakusa. One young colleague dead, his partner ("Horibe") confined to a wheelchair, and his wife ailing in a hospital, our man loses his job and begins a new life.With a solemn, immobile expression, Kitano s..
reviewed 1999.07.30
When you watch some of Martin's earlier works, it's incredible how far he's come. This is a good thriller about a mathematician, believe it or not. He invents a process, and starts getting in trouble. Why? Because the process is a 'market'-related thing, which is worth so much money the mathematician has to write it down to convey the figure to his employers.Immediately, corporate thieves (Marti..
reviewed 1999.07.26
This is a surprising film, as are most of Hal Hartley's other works, with wonderful throwaway dialogue and a cast of rich, real characters.This is a rare film...
reviewed 1999.07.19
This movie scared me, pure and simple...
reviewed 1999.07.16
I'd wanted to see this one for ages, and wasn't disappointed...
reviewed 1999.07.13
In a word? Vile...
reviewed 1999.07.05
This is a very funny little Irish film about two decent men on a gangster's errand. The cinematography, the storyline, and the characters are very entertaining, as is the introduction to each scene by an amusing summary. Its setting, characters, and violence are all very very Irish, which makes this all the more endearing (I just got back from Ireland myself).One of the would-be gangsters is a..
reviewed 1999.06.27
This was surprisingly good, given the intense hype surrounding the film. Excellent performances from the cast and a great story line make it very worth watching. Even Robbins can't deflate this with his usual dreadful shtick, which he supresses admirably.The movie's about a mathematical genius & speed reader who was born to a broken working class home in Boston...
reviewed 1999.06.26
This is a gritty American gangster movie about four junkies and their doomed relationships...
reviewed 1999.06.25
This was Tarantino's sendup of his own genre of gangster flick...
reviewed 1999.05.15
Ridiculously over-the-top, but pretty amusing. The lead female is little more than a stupid, empty one dimensional character, much less worth watchig than the subtitled horror of the bad guy, a very undead 3000-year-old mummy.It's an action comedy, very much along the lines of the Raiders of the Lost Ark genre...
reviewed 1999.04.17
So this is the flick that started it all! Halloween is a surprising thing: it's a real movie...
reviewed 1999.04.16
Keanu Reaves played someone like himself, I think - he's got that Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise way of churning out the same character over and over. But it suits this flick to a tee. This is a sci-fi thriller set in a (somewhat) future where our boy is a coder with a sideline in some unspecified Bad Thing (software of some kind - it comes on 3.5" floppies).The world our hero knows meets a hitch when s..
reviewed 1999.03.14
In a word? Breasts...
reviewed 1999.03.10
I have trouble taking Ethan Hawke seriously, which detracted from what was otherwise a nice little sci-fi story...
reviewed 1999.03.10
This was a gritty little number that came and went through the theatres without much ado, but which deserves a look...
reviewed 1999.03.03
This flick starts out on pretty shaky ground, with a cliched corner-store explosion, a BANG BANG BANG shootout in a lamp shop, and a couple of badly overracted bit parts. I was ready to leave in about fifteen minutes. But suddenly - about a quarter of the way through - it becomes a surprisingly decent flick.I've actually got a modicum of respect for Wahlberg's acting...
reviewed 1999.02.25
An amusing series of relationship shorts threaded together as the would-be attendees of a new year's party on the eve of that most momentous year, 1982...
reviewed 1999.01.25
About a jesuit priest making a miserable journey to the mission among the Hurons, all the way from Quebec...
reviewed 1999.01.15
I enjoyed this...
reviewed 1999.01.14
Surprisingly good...
reviewed 1998.12.28
This is an animated movie about an ant who wants to free his colony from the repression of its own social order. Man, I feel like I just wrote this review, but that was A Bug's Life, the unfortunate twin of this that we saw just a couple of days ago. I sometimes wonder what the heck is the point of all this movie going.Anyway, our hero ventures out in the..
reviewed 1998.07.17
This is a screwball comedy designed to teeter at the edge of being too obnoxious...
reviewed 1998.02.21
So bad, so deliciously bad! About a killer who gets dissolved by acid and on a molecular level is bound to ...
reviewed 1998.02.16
This little film from England starts off strong...
reviewed 1998.02.10
This is a typical Atom Egoyan film...
reviewed 1998.02.08
A well-shot but overly overdone flick by Martin Scorcese...
reviewed 1998.01.10
This movie has been in the theaters for months by the time I saw it, but the Carleton theater was full - and for good reason...
reviewed 1998.01.07
This is an animated story about a young lady in China who disguises herself as a man to join the army in her aging father's place...
reviewed 1998.01.04
Named after a play (Cosi Fan tutti), this mildly funny 'romantic comedy' from Autralia by the fellow who made Murial's Wedding...
reviewed 1997.07.26
Hilarious late-90s moody bungling-ganster flick, as was Bottle Rocket...
reviewed 1997.07.24
I suppose this was the original, but it's hard to take as seriously now that so much of what this film did became a staple and from there a cliche...
reviewed 1997.07.20
Buddy movie with two goofs, one black, one white...
reviewed 1997.07.13
Absolutely the best sci-fi produced in some time...
reviewed 1997.07.10
A lovely little film set in the 17th century, when England still ruled Massachusetts, and people got slaughtered for witchcraft...
reviewed 1997.07.05
Sci-fi from the USA...
reviewed 1997.07.03
Very self-aggrandizing, but what can one expect from a movie made by a pornographer about himself? Interesting in that I hadn't realized that Flint had been crippled by a sniper, for instance...
reviewed 1997.06.08
This quiet little film features a shy, overweight fellow who falls in love with Liv Taylor (who wouldn't??)...
reviewed 1997.05.04
May is off to a goofy start with this ridiculous flick...
Star Wars (drinking game edition)
reviewed 1997.04.29
Well, this was the drinking game version of the movie, where you take a shot every time Luke whines, R2's head spins, an old Jedi rambles about the force, someone gets strangled, someone complains about the Millennium Falcon, Han brags about the Falcon, etc., etc.I was wobbly by the time they made it to the cantina, but one of the rules is drink every time an elaborately made up alien gets no li..
reviewed 1997.04.15
Mmmm, Meg Ryan. This movie was amusing, and it was surprisingly consistent for a Hollywood production. No one gets off easily, and love doesn't exactly conquer all in this film in which the two stars are hell bent on torturing the significant others that left them. Do the stars fall for each other in the process? But he's so nerdy and she's so cool.Recommended...
reviewed 1997.04.12
This is about an offbeat comedy as you'll get from the U...
reviewed 1997.04.10
Bruce Willis playing His Role as the unwitting action hero, gun in his hand, hurt scowl on his face...
reviewed 1997.03.23
This nasty little flick follows a convicted killer who returns to his home town, and returns to as normal a life as a mentally handicapped (or whatever the hell the appropriate term is this semi-decade) ex-con could hope for...
reviewed 1997.03.16
This is a depressing Russian film which won raves at the Cannes film festival, but is just to grim and pointless to get into...
reviewed 1997.03.14
This is Tom Hank's much-reported first directorial attempt, and his first screenplay (to my knowledge)...
reviewed 1997.03.14
Starring Kevin Costner, Rene Russo, Cheech Marin, and Don Johnston, which seems to have been the point. It's about a loser golfer who can't accept that he must take less than perfection in life. His whole focus is on golf, where he plays to win and nothing less. Of course, he fails. Johnson seems to be around because he's the only actor Hollywood has who can be more annoying than Costner.At time..
reviewed 1997.03.08
This is about a kid who gets into a fight with his girlfriend and accidentally kills her...
reviewed 1997.02.19
A quasi-sequel to The Brothers McMullen, this is another relationships movie starring the same crew as the first film, minus the older brother and plus the guy who plays Frasier's dad on TV...
reviewed 1997.02.14
A film from Montreal with that Canadian weirdness-for-the-sake-of-it and depressing French grittiness...
reviewed 1997.02.07
Morgan Freeman, Keanu Reeves star in an action/spy piece about scientists who discover fusion...
reviewed 1997.01.25
This was a pretty film, but a little long...
reviewed 1997.01.25
This is a flick from Taiwan about a small family - a man and his three daughters...
reviewed 1997.01.24
This is a flick about two sisters who are singers. One, played by Jennifer Leigh, is the troubled sort, a junkie who burns through her friends in the usual arc of self-destruction as a star. Mare Winnigham plays the straight one, a respected performer in her own right.The basic tale is a good one, without a lot of unnecessary drama and angst...
reviewed 1997.01.14
The crowd went and saw this one...
reviewed 1997.01.11
"Jackie Chan's First Strike" is the best in several outings. And yes, I watch them all.Chan breaks into the 007 tradition, going so far as to add the dull moments...