michael's movie reviews
Strongly recommended
reviewed 2024.02.23
This is a Gojira movie from Toho, the originators of the genre...
reviewed 2024.01.03
This is the sequel to the gritty and seminal "Fistful of Dollars"...
reviewed 2023.12.03
After an extremely long work week, I managed to sit down with a movie for the first time in a while...
reviewed 2023.11.10
I needed a break after some very long weeks of late...
reviewed 2023.10.01
Tonight for "movie night", my daughter and I watched a Japanese movie inspired by Beauty and the Beast...
reviewed 2023.07.20
I was slowly engrossed in this movie after a shaky start in which its clearly dated setting initially had me cringing. It's an old World War Two flick set in the sadly real war crime that was the forced-labor construction of the railway between Bangkok and Rangoon.It features a gaggle of British soldiers that was ordered to surrender to the Japanese in Singapore...
reviewed 2023.07.01
This movie is honestly an excellent action film...
reviewed 2023.06.23
I watched this again with my daughter and I really enjoyed it...
reviewed 2023.02.14
I last saw this movie about twenty years ago...
reviewed 2023.01.21
For movie night, we watched this sequel to the "Puss in Boots" spinoff of "Shrek 2", which came out way back in 2004...
reviewed 2022.11.27
This action-comedy is so much over-the-top fun that I watched it a second time with my kids within days of my first, solo viewing...
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
reviewed 2022.10.25
This is an infectiously chaotic story about a famous but fading movie star who is invited to the home of a Spanish billionaire for a $1 million project of unknown purpose...
reviewed 2022.03.15
This is a particularly good animated kids' movie. We watched it for "movie night" and I'm glad we chose it. It's gorgeously illustrated and has charming lead characters/voices. Its story revolves around the evil at the core of a once harmonious world, and the lead's desperate mission to find a dragon to fight back.I'd easily watch this again...
reviewed 2022.02.24
This is a comic book movie based on real comic books that I have actually read*...
reviewed 2022.01.22
This is an animated story of a human girl who wakes up to discover she's become a troll...
reviewed 2021.10.10
This is by far the best of the Men in Black movies about human cops chasing a bunch of alies around Earth...
reviewed 2021.09.19
Another semi-lockdown quarantine movie review with the kids...
reviewed 2021.08.11
This is an over-the-top cop-in-trouble movie in the vein of "Bad Boys II"...
reviewed 2021.07.20
It's about a young fellow who is being raised by a single mother. He's harboring a crush on a child-hood friend (a girl raised by a single dad) and is still trying to meet and impress her although she's become an in-demand model.Our hero finds a magic lamp containing a genie in the form of a dragon...
reviewed 2021.06.24
This is a movie about a pissed-off semi-sentient car tire that discovers it has psionic abilities...
reviewed 2021.01.07
This is a gritty telling of true events in mid-Century France...
reviewed 2020.11.22
This is a classic science fiction movie from twenty years ago, before financial crises, calamitous presidencies, and terrorist strikes at the heart of the global financial industry. It's the one that gave us red-pill/blue-pill, "the matrix", and scenes of dodging bullets mid-flight. There's a lot of tight leather and sunglasses and posturing.The plot is this: a hacker is plying his trade when he..
reviewed 2020.08.09
This film is a ...
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
reviewed 2020.08.09
This is the tale of a young man who learns how to set up a wind-driven pump to bring up ground-water and save his family's farm in a time of drought and conflict in rural Malawi...
reviewed 2020.05.12
This strangely-named movie is one of the best thriller/action films I've ever seen...
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
reviewed 2020.04.05
"Badges? We don't got to show you no stinking badges!" This line came as a surprise toward the end of this gritty 1948 tale about some desperate Americans in Mexico who successfully mine gold out of a hillside. Two of them are basically homeless drifters, who meet early in the film and eventually meet the experienced prospector who makes the mine possible.The pacing of the movie is somewhat slow..
reviewed 2020.04.05
This is a movie about a tough who works as a door man in the early 1960s. His club closes for renovations, and he needs income as things were already pretty tight. The mob is interested, but he doesn't want to work for them doing "things" as they describe it.Across town there's a concert pianist who needs a driver who can handle himself, because the pianist is touring the Southern US states and ..
reviewed 2020.03.16
This is the story of what becomes of little Danny from The Shining. You remember Danny! "Danny's not here right now, Mrs. Torrence," Danny. Yeah.Anyway, the answer is: not much...
reviewed 2020.02.22
This is a gangster film from the United Kingdom, cleverly told as recounting of a movie plot being pitched by somebody knee-deep in the story himself. It's about a long-time drug dealer who's made it to the top and has stayed there through ruthless violence. He's now trying to sell up and clear out, which attracts unwanted attention and sets a bloody course of action.This movie's made by the sa..
reviewed 2019.11.15
This is a retelling of the classic Agatha Christie movie...
reviewed 2019.07.25
My daughter loves shark attack stuff, so naturally we watched this when the chance came...
reviewed 2019.02.24
This is a movie about two girls who are taken from their families and the efforts to bring them back, both by the police and one of the fathers...
reviewed 2018.10.23
This is the story of two men who join LA's police force in the time when the city (and continent) are being overrun by the drug trade...
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
reviewed 2018.09.18
This is hands-down the best super-hero movie I've seen...
reviewed 2018.04.30
This is the tale of four high school kids that get swept up in an ancient video game that transports them to an in-game world of high stakes adventure...
Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
reviewed 2018.03.27
This is the story of an aging actor who decides on one final big splash...
reviewed 2017.03.29
This is a movie about a person involved by an agency in fighting certain crimes in the past...
reviewed 2016.11.28
This is a story of a man who is shipwrecked on a deserted island...
reviewed 2016.08.02
I was amazed at how much I enjoyed this comedy about an out-of-shape, middle-aged analyst who is sent into the field to handle a sensitive case of a stolen nuclear weapon...
reviewed 2016.06.08
This is a gripping story about a man who is evicted from his house during the Great Financial Crisis, but through a series of events winds up working for the crooks that had him evicted...
reviewed 2015.10.12
This is an animated movie set in a near-future San Francisco ...
reviewed 2015.08.02
This is the story of Sleeping Beauty's wicked witch, who it turns out is rather a pained and resentful survivor with a lot riding on her slender shoulders - she's the queen of a fey realm beset on all sides by truly moronic humans, and she has herself been personally betrayed by the one who now sits on the throne...
reviewed 2015.07.02
This is an engaging animated movie set in Mexico -- and its after-life...
reviewed 2015.05.09
This is a movie about an astronaut who's on a mission when debris strikes the station they're working on, trashing it and the shuttle that brought them. She then decides to get back to Earth. On her own.I found it beautifully made, well-scripted, and tonally consistent (which I find important)...
reviewed 2015.02.07
This is a quirky science fiction piece about some journalists who decide to check out a weirdo inventor who is working on a time travel device...
reviewed 2015.01.28
This is an under-rated science fiction piece about a pair of humans assigned to oversee robotic drones that patrol a quadrant of the dying Earth...
reviewed 2014.12.23
This is a movie about a young man in the early days of the AIDS crisis who contracts the disease from a junkie prostitute...
reviewed 2014.10.04
This is a feature-length advertisement for all things Lego, and I found it quite entertaining...
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
reviewed 2014.08.06
I showed The Boy this bizarre but lovable movie about a mopey kid who wins a much-sought-after prize to tour a chocolate factory run by a famous recluse...
reviewed 2013.11.27
This is an excellent animated kids' movie about an elderly man who is being pressured to give up his home by callous real-estate agents...
reviewed 2013.09.24
This is a fictionalized telling of the capture and execution of Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks...
reviewed 2013.06.30
This is an animated movie set in a mythical Earth in which Norsemen of the viking era are at war with dragons. A young man encounters a strange dragon of a very rare type and attempts to befriend it. What follows is the usual generation-gap story plus dragons and not a small helping of scrawny inventor versus brawny fighters.My son, aged five, enjoyed this...
reviewed 2013.06.08
This is a spy - or perhaps, counter-spy - story about a retiree who is called back to active duty to unmask a mole in Britain's intelligence division...
reviewed 2013.05.23
This is a movie about two men with young sons in the same town...
reviewed 2012.09.12
This is a documentary about the great financial crisis, narrated by Matt Damon...
reviewed 2012.05.05
This is the story of a family of three who agree to take up the care of an isolated hotel in the mountains during the off season...
reviewed 2012.02.11
This is a story about some corner of the US south where a young lady grows up in a white household with black servants...
reviewed 2011.10.30
This is a story about two detectives who arrive at a psychiatric hospital on an island...
reviewed 2011.09.27
This is a movie I've returned to several times in my mind since recently seeing it...
reviewed 2011.04.17
This is a vampire movie that's actually good...
reviewed 2011.03.15
This is the story of a girl in an impoverished mountain district who faces the loss of the family home - and the paying woodlot attached. It's an area of real menace, controlling - and controlled by - the trade in amphetamines and opioids. She has to find and return her surely dead father's corpse to save it and keep the remnants of family together, small siblings and a brain damaged mother.Her ..
reviewed 2010.11.30
This is a superb story about a man who with the ability to travel in time...
reviewed 2010.08.21
I watched this with The Boy, who seemed to have fun despite being only 2 1/2. It's about a Panda being raised in the city by a ramen-slinging Goose. The Panda's heroes are the nations greatest warriors, a team of martial artists that protect the kingdom. He longs to join that world, but the reality is he's gotta serve noodles.But then he's told to take the delivery cart to the high place where t..
reviewed 2010.02.14
In this Cold War movie, a reporter becomes obsessed with a story following the suspicious death of one of his colleagues following an expose written by the reporter...
reviewed 2010.01.01
Well it's New Year's Day, and it's been thirteen years to the day since I started my capsule movie reviews. Today I re-watched the '80s classic "Aliens", and realized that I hadn't written a review.This is a War movie with a Sci-Fi sleeve...
reviewed 2009.10.07
This is an interesting movie about a sour old war veteran and his unlikely interaction with a Vietnamese-American youth in his neighborhood following the kid trying to steal the old man's car...
reviewed 2008.06.25
This is an unlikely movie about a rat that's moved by cuisine...
reviewed 2008.03.07
I really enjoyed this movie, though it was filled with psychopaths trying to kill each other...
reviewed 2007.10.09
This is the story of Truman Capote, the writer...
reviewed 2007.05.11
This is a story about one man's quest to find out what really happened to his murdered wife...
reviewed 2007.02.07
I came across this indie time travel movie quite by chance, and I'm glad I did...
reviewed 2005.04.11
This is a teenage movie that goes way out on a limb and features real teenagers (okay, the actors are a bit older, but my point is that the characters are realistic)...
reviewed 2005.01.16
This movie has the same name and broad plot outline as the original (from 1962) but updates it in several ways with major changes to the story and characters...
reviewed 2005.01.01
This is a tale about a man who is fished out of the sea and revived, only to discover that he's got no memory and no explanation for the bullet holes in his back, the LED naming a numbered bank account that was implanted into his back, or his propensity for languages and violence...
reviewed 2004.11.12
This is an animated movie from the brilliant folks at Pixar. It's about an aging pair of superheroes, a husband and wife relegated to a drab life in the suburbs following the banishment of superheroes by the government.Featuring some of the most consistent characters, animation, and dialogue yet seen in a Pixar flick, it's clear that the genre is developing on the right track...
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
reviewed 2003.12.18
Holy...
reviewed 2003.09.23
This is one of the best movies I've seen in quite some time...
reviewed 2003.07.05
This is a movie about a Pianist in Poland named "Spielman" who escapes a Nazi round-up as the Jewish Warsaw ghetto is being dismantled...
reviewed 2003.01.05
This is a grim story about a young veteran searching for meaning while struggling with slowly worsening mental health issues...
reviewed 2002.11.13
This is kinky Mexican flick (the English title would be 'And your mother, too') about a 30-something woman and two teenage boys who go on a road trip. It was greeted with a great deal of hoopla, as certain films seem to be, and while I don't think it deserved all the fanfare, this is an interesting flick.The film seems - while you're watching it - to be about the dismally venal boys, but morphs ..
reviewed 2002.10.16
This is a movie about a handful of lowlifes who congeal into a family of sorts that I recommend whole-heartedly...
reviewed 2002.09.29
This is a comedy that combines class warfare, sex, murder, and satire. It's set in the UK in the 1930's, and involves a gathering of some of the country's upper crust at a 'country home' (e.g. mansion) for a turkey shoot. It follows everything that's happening "above stairs" and "below stairs", and throws the relationship between the two societies into sharp relief.With entertaining performances..
reviewed 2002.08.08
This is a ghost story set in Spain during that country's 1930s civil war. It features a boy sent to an orphanage following the death of his father at the front. The boy is confronted by a bizarre staff, a cruel population of orphans, and one of the creepiest ghosts ever to grace film.The plot is very original, involving the ghost's death and the staff of the orphanage in a way that only comes to..
reviewed 2002.07.23
This is a movie by Trey Parker of South Park notoriety...
reviewed 2002.05.20
This is the third time I've seen this one, and I've noticed something. As with The Fly, I can see this one every five years or so and not remember a damn thing about it. Which is good, because it's certainly worth seeing repeatedly.The movie is about the crew of a small space vessel that's en route to the Solar system from deep space towing a large ore refinery...
reviewed 2002.03.31
I've always thought that this was the best of the original "Star Wars" movies. The story is the richest, the dialog and acting the strongest, and there are no ewoks or animated characters. It's also the one in which the heroes constantly take it in the teeth.In this movie, our heroes are first forced to flee their base when it is discovered and attacked (badly) by the Empire...
reviewed 2002.02.09
This is a French flick, from Jean-Pierre Jeunet the director of Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, and Alien Resurrection...
reviewed 2002.01.20
Another amazing movie from the director of 'Pi'. While it deals with the by-now familiar theme of "drugs are bad, m'kay", it's also a harrowing tale of the destruction of people and the abandoning of their dreams.And while the cinematography, music, and sets build an aura of impending destruction, nothing in the movie quite prepares you for the last fifteen minutes...
reviewed 2001.12.29
What other rating could I give this flick? To see as large and rich a book reduced to a feature film with its tone and depth intact was a refreshing surprise...
reviewed 2001.11.08
This is a movie about three escaped convicts and their adventures in the small town of Happy, Texas...
reviewed 2001.08.18
This is an excellent flick that I'd been wanting to see since I was in Sydney. It's set in the early 70's, and is about a young (15 year old) writer who wants to be a rock journalist. He hooks up with an up-and-coming band called "Stillwater", and stays with them from a concert in San Diego to a near-fatal plan ride out of New York.It's simply an outstanding flick...
reviewed 2001.01.04
I was really stunned by how much I liked this movie. It strikes a perfect note, somehow. I've always enjoyed the Coen brothers' stuff (if not Clooney's), and I'd say this one is their best yet. I was drawn into this one hook, line, and sinker.Now I have to read Ulysees...
reviewed 2000.07.30
One of the best movies I've ever seen...
reviewed 2000.06.20
An excellent tale about a recovering drunk...
reviewed 1999.12.15
This is a brilliant adaptation of Shakespear's play. I really enjoyed it's light-hearted, whimsical presentation and the great stage-like sets and costumes.This is so charming and beautifully crafted, it's one I'd actually like to buy, some time...
reviewed 1999.11.11
This is a quiet little comedic thing about a number of characters in a small town (Omaha) high school...
reviewed 1999.10.05
This is a sci-fi flick about an invasion by aliens from Mars. They're weird little freaks, and they're here to kick ass. Set in various locales across the US, it depicts humans as a stupid, alcoholic race of incompetent primitives. The martians, by comparison, are an organized, sadistic race of nihilists.This is great! Very funny...
reviewed 1999.07.26
This is a beautiful movie about a violin...
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
reviewed 1999.05.28
This is a gangster movie, in which some brash young lads get taken by the establishment and must now do the bidding of the masters of the underworld...
reviewed 1999.04.26
This was one of the best movies I've seen in a while. DeNiro plays a spin doctor who must make the save of a lifetime to get the president out of a disasterous scandal (he's slept with a girl guide!) just before the elections. Hoffman is the Hollywood producer DeNiro contracts to make his scheme work.The scheme is war...
reviewed 1998.10.23
I wasn't expecting much from this vampire flick but I was happily surprised...
reviewed 1998.10.02
This weird little number is about a love triangle between a private school student, his young teacher, and the wealthy father of some of the other students...
reviewed 1998.09.09
This is a grim comedy about the plight of the poor, down-trodden masses and what happens when they've finally had enough and decide to start grinding up the rich and serving them to each other...
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
reviewed 1998.06.28
This is the insane and loosely-factual telling of a two week period in "our foul year of the Lord 1971" when Hunter S Thompson went to Las Vegas on first one assignment and then another only to live a life of such excess that it would take on the sort of mythical status that they make a movie 25 years later...
reviewed 1998.05.03
This was a surprisingly good movie about what appears to have been a catastrophic era for all involved: the 1970s porn industry in California...
reviewed 1998.04.17
This is a movie about the eternally crooked police department of Los Angeles...
reviewed 1998.04.04
This is a grim sci-fi piece about a man struggling to piece together his own identity and life...
Mission Condor (Armour of God 2)
reviewed 1997.07.18
The best of Jackie Chan's movies...
reviewed 1997.06.21
Old and weird, but still as nightmarish as I suspect it originally was. This is a Vietnam flick with little illusion to why America lost. The main character is sent on a mission to kill a rogue member of the same US forces. He's way up river and is thought to have gone native. But it's just PTSD; about a billion tonnes of it.There is some great photography here, and it makes full use of the pop ..
reviewed 1997.04.05
This is an excellent movie...
reviewed 1997.02.02
This is a number about a young man who's swept up in big events when he buys a droid with a bad motivator...
reviewed 1997.01.31
Three excellent stop-motion short flicks by Nick Park. The first, The Wrong Trousers pits the dog Gromit and his hapless owener Wallace against a roomer they take in. The roomer is a penguin who robs banks. The animation has to be seen to be believed, and the story is funny as hell.The second film was A Fine Day Out, in which Wallace & Gromit go to the moon on a day trip...
reviewed 1997.01.16
This is a story about a room full of toys...