I really enjoyed Cloverfield, the 2008 monster movie in which New York City is decimated. The same people are behind 10 Cloverfield Lane, a different kind of alien invasion movie distantly related, sort of, to Cloverfield. While it isn’t bad, the new film […]
Continue reading »Category: Recent Releases
Eddie the Eagle (2016) ☆ ☆ ☆
Fact-based sports stories should be among the easiest to write and produce, one would think, since the facts, the subjects and the outcomes are publicly known. Sometimes they are and the results are spectacular — see Miracle (2004) or The Rookie (2002) […]
Continue reading »London Has Fallen (2016) ☆ ☆ ☆
As a purely escapist action movie London Has Fallen is exciting and fun. It isn’t as sharply focused as its predecessor, Olympus Has Fallen, but in some ways it’s even scarier. The story has global heads of state traveling to London for […]
Continue reading »Zootopia (2016) ☆ ☆ ☆
Disney animation had fallen behind Pixar’s quality and popularity but Frozen and now Zootopia are closing the gap. Zootopia is a kooky animal-based cop movie with terrific characters and a very political sense of how the world should be. It’s very entertaining […]
Continue reading »The Lady in the Van (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆
It is the people with whom we come in direct contact that most strongly influence us, often in ways we cannot control, or even understand. Such is the case illustrated by the British film The Lady in the Van. Residents along […]
Continue reading »The Revenant (2015) ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
I saw The Revenant a few days before the Oscar ceremony, but am still trying to come to grips with it. Technically it is an amazing achievement; I would have only eliminated two specific shots (both of which involve Leonardo DiCaprio […]
Continue reading »Dirty Grandpa (2016) ☆
I wasn’t going to see this; it isn’t my kind of movie, at least, not any more. Its nonstop vulgarity, profanity, misogyny and stupidity leave me cold. It still stuns me that a two-time Oscar winner agreed to star in […]
Continue reading »Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) ☆ ☆ ☆
Why do some animated movies capture our hearts even more than live action films? Character. The Toy Story gang, Bambi and his friends Thumper and Flower, even Shrek and Fiona — those characters are what lure us into these imaginary worlds […]
Continue reading »Hail, Caesar! (2016) ☆ ☆
Lots of film fans feel the Coen brothers are absolute geniuses, but to me they are hit and miss. For every really good title — and they’ve produced several — there are an equal number of mediocre projects, and a […]
Continue reading »The Finest Hours (2016) ☆ 1/2
The type of heroic instance upon which this film is based would seem to promise a surefire, can’t miss, inspirational, dramatic film adaptation. After all, if it really was the most daring rescue in the history of the United States […]
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