Director Garry Marshall has made a third or fourth career out of making movies based on sentimental holidays. He’s made Valentine’s Day (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011) and now Mother’s Day. Can’t wait for Flag Day or Arbor Day. Marshall’s […]
Continue reading »Category: Recent Releases
Captain America: Civil War (2016) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Another big superhero movie comes to town, and once again I cannot get too excited. Comic book fans love this stuff, but it seems about as arbitrary to me as the world of magic, where anything can happen at any […]
Continue reading »A Hologram for the King (2016) ☆ ☆ ☆
Part culture clash, part character study, A Hologram for the King is a complex film built upon a very thin premise. The premise is that an Information Technology salesman (Tom Hanks) journeys to Saudi Arabia to persuade its ruler to purchase […]
Continue reading »The Lunatic’ler (2016) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Most of what I watch, and what I think most movie-goers watch, is mainstream entertainment. The stuff that costs millions of dollars to produce, dominates the entertainment landscape and sometimes actually creeps into the culture. But for every mainstream movie […]
Continue reading »Criminal (2016) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Criminal is the second Ryan Reynolds personality-switching movie in the last two years; the third, if you count Deadpool (the other was Self/Less). If there really is such a thing as a personality-switching genre, then Reynolds has absolutely cornered it. However, […]
Continue reading »Hello, My Name is Doris (2016) ☆ 1/2
Actresses over 40 often complain, or certainly used to, about the lack of good roles for them. That situation has improved, yet along with the good roles come others that are stupid or misguided, in my opinion, and this is […]
Continue reading »Eye in the Sky (2016) ☆ ☆ 1/2
Modern warfare is wholly different than it used to be, as evidenced by Eye in the Sky, in which suspected terrorists in Kenya are targeted for capture by British and American forces, and then as the situation escalates, termination. But this […]
Continue reading »Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) ☆ ☆
What a terrible title — “v” should be “vs.” (this isn’t a court case, after all) and there is no justice, either for Batman or Superman. The “Dawn of Justice” refers to the origin of the Justice League, which is […]
Continue reading »Deadpool (2016) ☆ ☆
I’ve always distrusted superhero movies, mainly because they are so arbitrary. Superpowers are like magic; the power is always present but the ways in which they are, or can be, used are as enigmatic as a scriptwriter’s imagination. Superman, for […]
Continue reading »Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016) ☆ ☆ 1/2
The war in Afghanistan is the setting of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the title being a military phonetic alphabet version of WTF, which sets the tone of the piece immediately. It’s kind of “MASH meets the 21st century,” with journalism and ambition the […]
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