⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. In a very strict culture, two people who love each other must get married first before they are allowed to get close to each other. If intimacy occurs before marriage, it can be punishable with something as harsh as a death sentence. Nazli and Emre, escaping their homes, hope […]
Two siblings and three of their friends en route to visit their grandfather’s grave in Texas end up falling victim to a family of cannibalistic psychopaths and must survive the terrors of Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his family. This is one of those cornerstones of horror that you’re always aware of even if you’ve never […]
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Not everyone’s going to have an easy life. So this is about a young man (Tom Holland). He goes from college dropout to Army medic, and he serves two years in the Iraq war. He has PTSD when he returns home, which leads to drug addiction. This is an expensive habit to maintain, so he […]
Robbing Banks with PTSD – Cherry (2021)
If Hollywood is going to give screenwriting Oscar nominations to “Borat” movies, brace yourself for pranks, pranks and more pranks pictures. “Bad Trip” is more at the “Bad Grandpa” with Johnny Knoxville end of the practical joke pictures spectrum. A little edge, a few confrontations with angry rural America, waaaay too many bodily function/bodily fluid […]
Netflixable? A “Bad Trip” that goes a prank or two too far
It may be tempting to write “#Alive” off as just another zombie movie. In a way that’s what it is. This South Korean survival thriller from director and co-writer Cho Il-hyung doesn’t bring anything particularly new and it certainly doesn’t reinvent the horror sub-genre. At the same time, it’s hard not to enjoy its nimble […]
“Six Minutes to Midnight” is the sort of high gloss “programmer” Hollywood and Pinewood (and Shepperton, etc.) used to turn out by the dozens. The plot has Nazis, spies, action and preposterous coincidences and improbabilities, a “talks too much” villain, cheap thrills and sentimental sop. But thanks to a game cast and a clever and […]
Movie Review: On the eve of war, it’s “Six Minutes to Midnight”
Hey everyone! After a rough start to the South by Southwest Film Festival Day 2 proved to be much better. In fact, I liked all 6 films I watched today to one degree or another. Hooray! So let’s get started with the recaps! I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) I have to say COVID is proving […]
SXSW Day 2 Log (I’m Fine, Twyla Moves, US vs Reality Winner, Here Before, Tom Petty, Recovery)
Hey everyone! Today begins the first day of the South by Southwest Film Festival of SXSW. This is my first year attending the festival and of course I attended virtually this year. Hopefully next year I can go down to Austin and attend in person (which is something I was planning to do last year […]
SXSW Day 1 Log (Kid Candidate, Introducing Selma, Islands,Demi Lovato, Hysterical, The Lost Sons)
Sound or the lack of it is an under-appreciated element of cinema, so much so that films that pay extra attention to it stand out. The Oscar-nominated “Sound of Metal” is wholly conceived around loud noise and learning to live in silent deafness. The filmmakers behind “Rose Plays Julie” take care to use muffled sound, […]
Movie Review: “Rose Plays Julie”
“The Courier” is an engrossing espionage thriller set, as so many of them are, at that one point when the Cold War seemed most likely to turn nuclear hot. Well-acted and early ’60s period perfect, about the worst you can say about it is that it’s a washed-out copy of “Bridge of Spies,” which is […]
Movie Review: “The Courier” plays his part in Preventing WWIII
A young woman (Lene Kqiku) awakes drugged and restrained in a strange house, but her captor may be more than he appears. I encountered this short film on Amazon Prime. The premise sounded interesting and with a runtime of only 7.5 I was intrigued. It does a good job of giving the film an undercurrent […]
Hutch Mansell is a mild-mannered everyday average Joe. His days are an endless cycle of monotony – get up, catch the bus, go to work, come back home, go to bed. The only real highlights of his week are his morning cups of coffee and missing the trash truck every Tuesday. Even his family seems […]
Following the enormous success of “Hamilton” what better time for Warner Brothers to release “In the Heights”. This musical drama is an adaptation of a Tony-winning stage play by Quiara Alegría Hudes and “Hamilton” mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda. Jon M. Chu of “Crazy Rich Asians” fame directs the film from a screenplay written by Hudes with […]
First Glance: “In the Heights”
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. There is no bigger moment than the birth of a child. The newborn brought to life should be cherished and celebrated. It seems nothing could stop life from being happily ever after, except for one event, the worst nightmare of any parent – the kidnapping of the child. It’s […]
⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. We always need someone who can encourage us to do things like write, sing, or study. Anything that can help us improve and get better. Or just uplift our mood so we can focus on the positive side of our life and be happier. Written and directed by Marion […]
SXSW 2021: “Ma Belle, My Beauty”
I stumbled into “detectorists” when it hit Netflix some years back. But the streaming service had just the first two seasons of it, and while I binged it and absolutely adored it, I never got around to writing about it. Coming back to the series, after a third season of it brought things to a […]
Series Review: Return to “detectorists”
Gruesome violence and grisly backwoods “surgery,” blood and stitches and axes and arrows, sharp stone shards left as booby-traps for the unwary dominate “In the Earth.” Kind of what you’d expect from a thriller built around mycorrhizal research deep in the forests of Britain, eh? The pandemic picture from the director of “Free Fire,” “High […]
Movie Review: In a Pandemic, Maybe Nature Won’t Share what’s “In the Earth”
Steven Soderbergh’s latest film may not have been shot on an iPhone, but it cut down production fuss in other ways. Over three-quarters of the screenplay was shot on the Queen Mary 2, in a crossing from New York to London, and the cast almost entirely improvised their lines, taking their cues from a rough […]
Soderbergh: Let Them All Talk (2020)
“Long Live Rock,” a doc about the undying devotion of aging white folks to their favorite metal bands, is littered with tattoo stories, accident stories, mosh pit and crowd surfing tales and a few yarns that begin with “We were drunk, so” or “We were so drunk,” oft told from the front porch of a […]
This Johnny Depp thriller/police procedural was in the can long before Depp’s career imploded with allegations of physical abuse of his ex-wife Amber Heard. This March 19 (April 9 on VOD) story about the cops, what they knew and what they didn’t reveal about the two rappers’ shootings also stars Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Glenn […]
Movie Preview: The Biggie/Tupac Murders movie — “City of Lies” — finally is headed our way
