This movie had me sold just on the basis of its setting being a 2,000 foot TV transmission tower. The Sacramento TV market is served by several towers of that height located in the town of Walnut Grove between Sacramento and Stockton. Even with the quality of content from TV stations these days being in the toilet, I still can't help but look up at the towers whenever I go by. Same goes for transmission towers in other areas, such as San Francisco's famous Sutro Tower. That said, the thought of going to the top of those things to work on them terrifies me, and I certainly wouldn't put myself through that to keep any of today's TV on the air.

The main setting of the movie Fall is a fictitious tower, one that was set up in the middle of a desert seemingly in Arizona. First questio...Read the entire review

Dirty Dancing:

17-year-old Frances "Baby" Houseman (an otherworldly Jennifer Grey) tries to enjoy a final summer at a Catskills resort before starting the life her parents want her to live; joining the Peace Corps, going to college to earn a degree both prestigious and progressive, and marrying rich. When cock-of-the-walk dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze in a steely turn) struts on by, first seeming like a mere ne'er-do-well before we learn of his staff position, Baby gets a little weak in the knees; her coming of age story coming to life to hits from the '60s and contemporary pop songs from the movie soundtrack, which as you've all guessed by now, is Dirty Dancing, here in a 35th Anniversary edition.

Dirty Dancing originally debuted in 1987, when I, as a lonely and luckless high-school senior, had nobody to take to the movies. Since this swoony romance wasn't o...Read the entire review

The Movie:

With everything that's gone on in Hollywood and America over the last few years, taking a film and titling it Men could go in a lot of different directions for a movie watcher. Even making it a horror film could give it a few different options for telling a story! When one of the more gifted artist voices is at the helm of such a story that he wrote, then it makes things all the more interesting.

Written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina), Men follows Harper (Jesse Buckley, Beast) as she seeks solace in a small country cottage following the death of her husband. Once she gets to the town of Cotson, she encounters Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear, Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I love a good disaster movie. Deep Impact. Twister. Dante's Peak. I try to find the biggest screen, loudest sound bar and coldest beer in sight before sitting back and letting the action roll. Roland Emmerich has become a purveyor of disaster epics, starting with Independence Day, moving to The Day After Tomorrow, and destroying much of earth in 2012. His movies do not always land perfectly but, with the exception of 10,000 ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The elevator pitch for C'mon C'mon, writer Mike Mills' beautifully and refreshingly humanist exploration of life through a child's mind, sounds like a cringe-worthy piece of saccharine Oscar-bait: A childless and independent-minded journalist is (Joaquin Phoenix) saddled with his precautious nine-year-old nephew (Woody Norman) while touring the country for work.

At first, the awkward man-child struggles to relate to his nephew, even though his work involves interviewing children his age about their views on life. Eventually, the uncle connects to his inner-child, while the nephew learns the meaning of responsibility. Cue five Oscar nominations and zero wins for the feel-good movie of 1992.

Yet Mills, like a cinematic magician of the highest prowess and stamina, avoids every single temptation for this premise to go horribly wrong, all the while creating the mo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) returns with another character-driven, '70s-styled drama taking viewers on a trip through the lifestyles of the poor and struggling. His new film Red Rocket is spiked with plenty of humor -- mostly pretty dark and ironic -- and his lead Simon Rex seems game to play up his party-boy-doofus comic persona while adding layers of disturbing psychology to his shtick.

Rex's character, Mikey, is a middle-aged porn star who returns to his tiny Texas hometown, flat broke and covered in bruises. He sweet-talks his way back into the home of his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss), supposedly until he can make a new start. Mikey does actually attempt t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The feature film debut of writer/director Rose Glass, 2019's Saint Maud tells the story of a young woman named Maud (Morfydd Clark) who, early in the film, starts her new job in the massive old home of Amanda Kohl (Jennifer Ehle). Once a famous dancer, Amanda now has stage 4 leukemia and Maud is to be her new live-in caregiver. Amanda has lost the use of her legs and is confined to a wheelchair.

Despite the warning from the woman she replaces about Amanda's temperament, the two initially hit it off. Maud does nothing to hide her devout religious beliefs, telling Amanda that God is always with her and that sometimes she can even feel Him inside her. Amanda plays along, amused by her new companion but not about to change her ways. Fond of drink and smoke, Amanda also entertains a gentleman caller one night, and when Maud comes home and finds her stinking dr...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I remember the context of L.A. Story more than I did the events in it, which may be more of a testament to the filmography of its star more than anything. Steve Martin was a couple of years past Roxanne (which by the way still holds up a bunch of years later) and I guess the fates had lined up to where he could do another film with his wife Victoria Tennant after they'd done All of Me (which also holds up a bunch of years later) and I guess L.A. Story came of it. Or so I'll convince myself I guess.

Martin wrote the film that Mick Jackson (Temple Grandin), and stars as Harris, a TV weatherman looking for a little more meaning in life. At lunch he encounters Sara (Tennant), a journalist looking to write something about Los Angeles for a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The folly of man lies in its egotistical illusion that it can cheat death and nature through self-appointed aggrandizement. No matter how great a king becomes, he will eventually share the soil with a lowly pauper, the greenery of mother earth absorbing their bodies in equal measure. Writer-director David Lowery\'s (Pete\'s Dragon, A Ghost Story) haunting and hypnotizing masterwork, half Arthurian mythology and half contemplative medieval horror, sends its brave knight Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) through a journey that begins with faux chivalry and meticulously breaks him down to the vulnerable core of any human being who eventually comes face-to-face with the inevitability of nature and the finality of their time in it.

Lowery based his film on an actual Arthurian legend, a morality tale of heroism that sees our knight setting on a journey to meet the titular character, wh...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I continue to enjoy stumbling across films that are new to me as a DVD Talk reviewer. Despite a cast that includes David Carradine and Bruce Campbell, I had not even heard of Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat before seeing that Lionsgate was going to release it on Blu-ray as part of its "Vestron Video Collector's Series." In case you are not familiar, the line seeks to honor the 1980s home-video distributor by, according to the studio's Facebook page, releasing "a line of classic films across all genres just the way you remember them, but better;" with an emphasis on original artwork, restored transfers and newly produced extras. Anthony Hickox's (Waxwork) horror-comedy concerns a group of vampires that have moved to the desert and begun subsisting on synthetic blood instead of killing hum...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I cannot say I was really jonesing for a sequel to The Hitman's Bodyguard, the entertaining but totally forgettable 2017 action flick in which Ryan Reynolds plays a bodyguard charged with protecting Samuel L. Jackson's hitman on his journey to testify against a dictator. The two leads return here, as does Salma Hayek, for a violent, profane second chapter that feels like it could have been made a decade ago thanks to some outdated and underwhelming humor. Reynolds and Jackson obviously have success in comedic and action roles, but Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard is the kind of loud, generic action film that is destined for cable TV. Patrick Hughes returns to direct but leaves little impression, and the film's three screenwriters struggle to mix action, drama and comedy into a cohesive whole. Perhaps the mos...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Remember when it wasn't Halloween if it wasn't Saw? The popular horror franchise spawned from the 2004 hit from James Wan churned out six quick sequels over the next six years. Unfortunately, the law of diminishing returns mandated increasingly mediocre movies, and the delayed seventh sequel, Jigsaw, was not the successful resurrection the franchise desired. Now, Darren Lynn Bousman, director of Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV, returns with a spinoff film, Spiral: From the Book of Saw. With its flashy marketing and poster campaign, I wa...Read the entire review

Sports bore the hell out of me, but I still have a weakness for cheerleaders. Their skimpy outfits with short skirts get me every time. Of course I could never land one given that my general personality is just about the opposite of theirs, but that can't stop me from looking. Bring it On and its direct-to-video sequels are long-time favorites, and I highly recommend the long out of print "Cheerleaders Collection" from Anchor Bay if you can get your hands on it, which features three great 70s cheerleader-themed sexploitation movies. "Cheer! Rally! Kill!" isn't in the same league; this is a collection of five Lifetime movies all with the word "Cheerleader" in the title that keep things TV-safe but are still mildly amusing- all but one of them seems to have the message that cheerleaders are simply bad people and you should neither become...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Minari is a great film, upholding the informal tradition of intimacy in American indie cinema. Certain cinephiles like to armchair quarterback the Academy Awards and, being of that sort, I would eagerly join the crowd who would have given the most recent Best Picture Oscar to this quiet character study set in the underexposed middle of the United States. Not that the actual winner, Nomadland, is without merit, but the family story of Minari -- so brilliantly brought to life by the pitch-perfect cast -- is more immediate and, to this viewer, more resonant.

Set in the 1980s, Minari is a semi-autobiographical remembrance by writer-director Lee Isaac Chung. Chung's stand-in is David (Alan Kim), a shy little ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

A film as generic as its title, City of Lies takes an interesting topic - the unsolved murder of rapper Notorious B.I.G. - and places it amid a bland police procedural. Shot more than four years ago by Director Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer), City of Lies wants desperately to be a Zodiac copycat but has trouble planning its narrative. Johnny Depp gives a decent performance as the Los Angeles Police Department detective who followed the case for 20 years, but Forest Whitaker, as a journalist also searching for answers, seems to mumble through most of his performance. Diehard fans of the Biggie/Tupac saga may find something of interest here, but there are countless other documentaries, articles and the source material for t...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I apparently lost track of the Wrong Turn franchise over the last decade. I did not realize there had already been five sequels to Rob Schmidt's 2003 original about a group of inbred cannibals hunting teenage campers in the West Virginia mountains. That movie is not exactly good, but it is an entertaining B-movie. It also stars Eliza Dushku, who is awesome. I was not champing at the bit for another sequel or reboot, but I am happy to report this 2021 Wrong Turn (or Wrong Turn: Foundation internationally) is an example of how you refresh a concept and make it relevant for today's audiences. Directed by Mike P. Nelson and written by Alan McElroy, who wrote the original and other horror flicks like Halloween 4: The Return of ...Read the entire review

After both of their respective long-term relationships end, Abby (Kat Dennings) has a plan to ease her heartbreak: spend Thanksgiving with her lifelong best friend Molly (Malin Akerman). Unbeknownst to Abby, Molly's solution to heartbreak involves a handsome philanthropist rebound, Jeff (Jack Donnelly). Before Molly can tell Abby that Jeff will be present, Molly's friends Lauren (Aisha Tyler) and Dan (Deon Cole) beg to come over after their plans fall through, plus, Molly's mother Helen (Jane Seymour) shows up uninvited. Before long, what was supposed to be a one-on-one friend hang has turned into a crowded holiday celebration, with several potential new paramours for Abby, Molly's older ex Gunnar (Ryan Hanson), and several other friends and acquaintances in tow (Christine Taylor, Chelsea Peretti, and more).

As the midbudget film goes extinct in Hollywood, there has been an increase in low-bud...Read the entire review

The front cover makes this look like another run-of-the-mill teen romance, but the romance elements are secondary and feel a bit tacked on. The real focus is mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia to be exact. Adam (Charlie Plummer) not only hears voices all around him, but also sees people who aren't really there who serve as bodyguards and guardian angels. (One tough bodyguard is portrayed by Lobo Sebastian, carrying a baseball bat and ready to use it on anyone who gives Adam trouble, and a vulgar alter-ego played by Devon Bostick, who appeared as Roderick in director Thor Freudenthal's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, gives him pointers on dealing with the opposite sex.) Adam also has a hard time at home with his father having run off a few years ago, leaving him with his mother (Molly Parker) who is reasonably supportive but has recently bro...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

If Dutch Director Paul Verhoeven's name appears in the opening credits, you know you're in for a good time. The master of social satire, violent action and graphic sexuality, Verhoeven is the filmmaker behind such immortal classics as Robocop, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers and Showgirls. His 1990 science-fiction film Total Recall is based on Philip K. Dick's short story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale," and stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as a construction worker plagued with dreams of Mars who ultimately ends up in a fantastical espionage fight for his life. This $50-million-plus thriller w...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The first half hour or so of Death of Me is promising. Vacationing couple Christine (Maggie Q) and Neil (Luke Hemsworth) awaken in their Thailand hotel room with bitchin' hangovers and no memory of how they got back the night before. The room is covered with dirt, the couple's clothing and toiletry items are strewn about everywhere, and the news reports that a deadly typhoon is approaching the island. The couple tries to hightail it back to society but finds themselves without passports and very much out of luck at the ferry terminal. Back at the compound, travel photographer Neil begins scrolling through his pictures to see what the hell happened the night before. He and Christine initially are drinking at a local bar, where they are offered a mysterious shot by one of the servers. Cut to a disturbing video on Neil's phone that appears to show him have sex...Read the entire review

The Show:

As I write this, we're in the wake of Warner Brothers going a long way to remove movie going experiences as we know them. It's part of a continuing surreal nature of 2020, which also included the unexpected success of the Canadian television show Schitt's Creek. With everyone on lockdown a lot of what seemed to come out around my demographic was word about this show, one that my wife has watched all the way through not once but twice this year. So, may as well grab the physical media and take a look at all this.

The name of the show is of a fictitious town, one that finds new citizens in the Rose family; Johnny (Eugene Levy, Best in Show) is a video-store owner whose bus...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz's Antebellum is a provocative film with some big ideas that unfortunately offers very little substance to back up its controversial plot devices. This review is going to contain massive spoilers, as this is a movie I cannot imagine discussing without diving into the plot's hardly kept secrets. The directors also wrote the screenplay, and one of the film's six (!) producers worked on Get Out. This movie would not exist without Get Out, which it basically rips off, with plot points also similar to this year's The Hunt. From what I recall, the studio put the tell right there in the trailer, which is a shame, but Antebellum blows its cover less than halfway in anyway. Lead Janelle Mo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

One of those rare anime features that even people not into anime know about, Ghost In The Shell is widely considered one of the best of its kind, and for a very good reason. A remarkably high concept Blade Runner inspired slice of cyberpunk sci-fi, it's exciting, tense, stylish and even pretty thought provoking.

Set in the (not so distant anymore!) future of 2029, the film takes place in a world that has established massive worldwide information networks and where cyborgs are almost completely indistinguishable from humans. Wreaking havoc on this network is a sort of cyber-terrorist who is known only as The Puppet Master. His trick? To install, through the network, false memories into people who are then coerced into acting on his behalf. The Puppet Master exists entirely in the network at first, but soon makes it clear that he wants a body of his own.

The Movie:

There tends to be an American Gothic level of sorts when one dives into the Ozarks or Appalachian regions for example, regions who hummed along during the middle part of the 20th century only to be left neglected or abandoned now. Sling Blade and Winter's Bone handled those areas well, now Inherit the Viper takes a swing at things using a contemporary topic.

Written by Andrew Crabtree and directed by Anthony Jerjen in his feature debut, Inherit the Viper looks at three brothers and sister in Alabama who are on various points of the opiod dealing business. Kip Conley (Josh Hartnett, 30 Days of Night) tries to stay out of things these days, even while his sister Josie (Margarita Levieva, Adventureland) actively s...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I Googled how much it would be to score an adrenaline shot to the heart from the black market, and no matter how you slice it, you're looking at least a thousands bucks. A Blu-ray copy of Uncut Gems, on the other hand, is a solid $19.99. I think that's a better deal if you're looking for an anxiety-ridden, manic ride that grips you from the first minute and doesn't let go until the last. Writer/directors Josh and Benny Safdie have established a reputation for themselves as the enfents terrible auteurs of raw and gritty drama/thrillers that show an unvarnished look at the dregs of society, established in the terrific indie-real aesthetic of Heaven Knows What and Good Time.

Good Time itself, a hectic single-night adventure of a low-rent criminal (A great performance by Robert Pattinson) struggling to score cash to get his brother out o...Read the entire review

Cell phones have been among the best and worst inventions in recent years. They keep us in constant contact and give us lots of information, but can sometimes be the only thing we pay attention to. I know this as I was among the last people to even get a cell phone and after upgrading to an iPhone I now try not to be one of "those people" but have still wasted more time with it than I care to admit. That's the basis of Jexi, which has been called a less intelligent version of Her (a movie I felt was silly and overrated) and I also found similar to 1984's Electric Dreams (which was also quite silly, but at least has been more fun to watch with age.)

Adam DeVine is Phil, who would rather stay at home with his phone than join co-workers for fun after wo...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Waves plays out like a Lifetime Channel melodrama directed by an immensely talented up-and-coming auteur. It looks beautiful, shows a distinct and invigorating voice from director Trey Edward Shults, a hypnotic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, powerful and emotionally resonant performances… Yet all of it is in the service of an entirely too predictable, unbalanced, and aggressively maudlin and manipulative script. If the script wasn't also by Schults, I could have imagined one of those industry scenarios where a rising filmmaker is given bad material and tries their best to inject life into it through solid and unique execution.

Waves is a family melodrama that reads like a double feature, with two distinct stories splitting the 135 minute runtime. It's overlong and underdeveloped at the same time. The two stories, each worthy of 90-minute fe...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Man there was a lot about The Hurt Locker that I had forgotten about since it came out almost a dozen years ago. I forgot about there being three notable members of the MCU, I forgot some of the visual style and tension that absorbed so much of it. But what I forgot about bore itself out as I was watching it again for the first time since I think it hit video shelves.

Mark Boal (Detroit) wrote a script that Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) directed. In it, we see a bomb squad in Iraq, specifically a hotshot rules flauting disposal expert (Jeremy Renner, Captain America Civil War), the section chief (Anthony Mackie, Read the entire review

The Movie:

I am not completely sure where a biopic on Judy Garland stands on the wokescale these days, but it does appear to be something that one can strip away from other roles that would seem to be more popularly beloved; honestly I do not know what type of love that the woman playing Harriet Tubman is getting (other than at one point Julia Roberts was getting some attention), but it seems like…some good woman is getting attention for Best Actress? I dunno, I'm just asking.

Anyway, Tom Edge adapted Peter Quilter's stageplay that Rupert Goold (True Story) directed. The focus of the story is the several years Garland spent in London before her accidental overdose in 1969. Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones's Baby) plays Garland, bouncing back into he...Read the entire review

Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club didn't get a fair shake when it was new, but corrections have been made... 35 years later. This year's The Cotton Club Encore is an exception to the rule that filmmakers revising their own movies is a bad idea. Back in 1984, the positive reviews were not enthusiastic, and the negative reviews wanted us to believe that Coppola had surrendered his crown as America's most creative, commercial director. Was there some kind of Hollywood backlash against Francis Coppola?

Perhaps Apocalypse Now was a hard act to follow, both creatively and financially. Francis took on more commercial projects, and simply applied the stylishness he thought they needed. Robert Evans was behind The Cotton Club, a gangster/musical hybrid that was never going to be as historically realistic a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Apparently there is a resurgence or even "comeback" for Shia LaBeouf in some film circles which, well, OK I guess. But there has been some praise for his work bandied about in Honey Boy but also The Peanut Butter Falcon, which was a film that quietly came and went to a fair amount of adulation earlier in 2019 and hopefully will see a similar resurgence now that it's on video and on demand.

The film is written and directed by Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz, and LaBeouf plays Tyler, a boat hand who burns some fishing gear of Duncan's (John Hawkes, The Sessions) and flees. Tyler runs into Zak (Zack Gottsagen), a young person with Down Syndrome who continually tries to run away from his care facility and caretaker Eleanor (Dakota Johnson, Read the entire review

The Movie:

I seem to remember at one point that after Sylvester Stallone had done the Rocky and Rambo movies that he wanted to broaden his acting range and was taking on, well, not necessarily daring material, but different in tone compared to those that had made him a ton of cash. That's where Lock Up comes into play.

Written by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart, the latter of whom was part of the screenwriting team that did Die Hard, John Flynn (Best Seller) directed the film where Sly plays Frank Leone, a mechanic and inmate currently serving time in a low security prison. He is transferred to a maximum security, the work of a vengeful prison war...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Olivia Wilde provides a brave, affecting, and largely overlooked performance in A Vigilante, from writer/director Sarah Daggar-Nickson. Those expecting Death Wish-style revenge porn will not find it here, as Daggar-Nickson is most concerned with focusing on the torment of an abused woman. We earn glimpses into protagonist Sadie's life as the lean, austere film moves forward, but are left with questions about her transformation into a violent guardian angel. Sadie's new career is helping abused women and children, and she travels from house to house making sure their abusers do not repeat their sins.

What Daggar-Nickson makes immediately clear is that Sadie - like many domestic violence victims - lives in constant torment. Her barren, depressing house is not a home; she sleeps with a k...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

There are few certainties in life absent death, taxes and the realization that one does not fuck with Liam Neeson's family. Norwegian film director Hans Petter Moland makes his American debut with Cold Pursuit, a darkly comedic thriller and remake of his 2014 film In Order of Disappearance. Neeson plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow operator in fictional Kehoe, Colorado, who is named "Citizen of the Year" on the same night his son Kyle (Micheal Richardson) dies from a forced heroin overdose from members of a Denver drug cartel. Despondent, Nels considers taking his own life before deciding to avenge his son's murder. He seeks advice from his brother and former mob enforcer Brock (William Forsythe), who sends him on a bloody path toward cartel drug lord Trevor "Viking" Cal...Read the entire review

The Film: