THE FILM:

Quirky, frequently funny and wearing its heart on its sleeve, Jojo Rabbit earned a number of fans upon its release last fall, with many claiming it as their favorite film of the year. While I enjoyed writer/producer/director Taika Waititi's dramatic farce, it did not quite bowl me over as it did some. Making fun of Nazis on film is nothing new, and Mel Brooks' The Producers, is one of my favorite comedies. Waititi's film follows a young German boy, Johannes "Jojo" Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), toward the end of World War II as he prepares to join the Deutsches Jungvolk (aka the Hitler Youth). Jojo is a ball of nerves and turns to his imaginary friend, an exaggerated Adolf Hitler (Waititi, pulling quadruple duty), for advice. This plot device is likely to raise a few eyebrows, but, as <...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I am ashamed that I have let life get in the way of seeing movies in the theater over the last couple of years. I used to be the guy that saw everything on the big screen; from critically acclaimed dramas to big-budget action flicks to escapist horror. Lately, I have just not done a great job getting out to the theater, perhaps because the multiplex in my town is not my favorite due to both frequent presentation issues and rowdy audiences. If I can drive the hour to visit the Alamo Drafthouse for a screening I do, and that is where I saw most of the movies I did see in theaters in 2019. I tell you this because Ford v Ferrari is a film I absolutely wanted to support on the big screen. James Mangold is an excellent director, and his cast here, led by Matt Damon and Christian Bale, is superb. As a man who will always be fascinated by speed and cars, thi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Ad Astra is a spectacularly beautiful and awe-inspiring hard-science-fiction masterpiece. Its' inspiring yet also haunting negative-space visuals depict humanity's hubris against, and isolation within, the boundless neutrality of the universe. A colonized Moon desecrated by unchecked capitalism, a space station in Mars that stands as a tribute to chronic loneliness and ennui, a stranded and doomed mission through the solar system desperately searching for a messianic savior in the form of advanced life. It's the near future, our technology has evolved enough for travel between planets, but our planet is dying, and people have lost hope. They look "ad astra" ("to the stars" in Latin) for an answer.

Ad Astra is a loose, unofficial remake of Apocalypse Now, mostly following in the nihilist footsteps of Coppola's cry against humanity's inherent m...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Ah, the holidays. A perfect time for family, fellowship and killing the newest member-by-marriage of the clan with medieval weapons. That is the basic premise of horror/action/comedy Ready or Not, from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, which features a star-making performance from relative-unknown Samara Weaving. After an unsuspecting bride is thrust into a deadly, ritualistic game, she must escape the clutches of an upper-crust family and flee their mansion that quickly becomes a death trap. The film earns its belly laughs, jolts and guffaws with a witty screenplay, razor-sharp black humor, entertaining performances and splatters of gore. Ready or Not is refreshingly up front about its intentions and is ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Depression is a sneaky thief. It doesn't deplete our joy all at once, choosing instead to pick away tiny pieces over a period of time. By the time we find ourselves drifted completely away from the ones we love and shut ourselves to the outside world, it's hard to comprehend how we got there in the first place. The moment we stop blaming others, and ourselves, when we can finally pinpoint the real problem with an open mind, it's a revelation. But the road back to recovery is a perilous journey, and regardless of the help we get, our own resilience and faith in self must weather it alone.

Once a genius architect and now a stay-at-home-mom, Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett) is under the illusion that everything about her day-to-day life is normal. She just happens to hate pretty much any human interaction, is distant to everyone except her daughter Bee (Emma Nelson), does a...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Despite its winning cast and franchise pedigree, Dark Phoenix stayed amid the ashes upon its theatrical release this summer. This twelfth installment in the X-Men franchise is a direct sequel to 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse, and attempts to cram the majority of Marvel Comics' The Dark Phoenix Saga into one two-hour film. No surprise, meddlesome Fox nixed plans to tell this story over two films in the months before its recent merger with Disney, leaving star Sophie Turner stranded in a forgettable action film that does not rank among the series' best. There is enough here to entertain for 114 minutes, and the performances by James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, as returning X-Men, are good. ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The movie where two friends see out their last days of high school with a party or some other event or task designed to right their social flaws of the last few years continues to be an entertaining one as times in high school change. And my wife and I had heard good things about Olivia Wilde's directing debut Booksmart and finally got the chance to check it out recently.

The actress makes her feature debut with a script written by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman. The film focuses on best friends who are seniors in high school. Amy (Kaitlyn Dever, Short Term 12) has been out for a little while, and in the meantime Molly (Beanie Feldstein, Lady Bird) is preparing them both for Yale. People at school...Read the entire review

With the various Hobbit and Lord of the Rings stories getting multiple film treatments, Dome Karukoski decided it was time for author J. R. R. Tolkien (the letters standing for John Ronald Reuel) to be the subject of one. The result gives you a decent idea of what the man himself was like, but not so much as to how his most famous stories came about.

Most of the movie is told in flashback, a format which I've expressed my general dislike of here numerous times. The movie begins with Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) as an army lieutenant in France during the first World War, then flashes back to earlier episodes of his life. We see him a bit younger (played here by Harry Gilby) as he lives in England with his brother Hilary (Guillermo Bedward) and single mother (Laura Donnelly). ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Even though the Laika stop-motion animation studio, based in my town of Portland, Oregon, consistently produces uniquely awe-inspiring, creative, and entertaining animated features, their films have bombed so repeatedly at the box-office that the company is going through some dire financial straits these days. I think the short-term problem of Laika's sustainability derives from their work being patently hard to market. They do tell family-friendly stories, perhaps with a bit more edge that harkens back to harsher fairy tales of old, but they don't compromise from their artistic vision to provide easily packaged and immediately forgettable animated fare with uniformly bright colors and bland pop culture references.

Their aesthetic is a bit darker and bolder, the visuals follow the requirements of each individual story and tone, rather than the expected confines of the t...Read the entire review

James Cameron was considering two projects to take on- Avatar or a movie based on the Japanese manga series "Battle Angel Alita". It was a tough call but he went with Avatar and then decided to spend the foreseeable future making sequels to it. Director Robert Rodriguez was disappointed as he had wanted to see how he would have brought "Alita" to the screen, and after a conversation Rodriguez ended up making the movie himself based on Cameron's script.

The year is 2563, 300 years after "The Fall", the apocalyptic event that destroys most of the world which is a central happening in many of these stories. Mankind rebuilds in a place called Iron City, which sits on earth below the floating city of Za...Read the entire review

The original Lost in Space series (1965-68) was a maddening show, even for many kids watching it when it was new or during the glory days of rerun syndication. Producer-creator Irwin Allen was a master pitchman: the first few episodes of all his TV shows of the period are action-packed spectacles overflowing with incredible eye-candy. Lost in Space's original pilot (minus Dr. Smith and the Robot) had the look of an expensive feature film, with as much breathless action packed into 50 minutes as four or five episodes of any ordinary series. Utilizing top talent culled from 20th Century-Fox and elsewhere, the set design (e.g., the Jupiter 2), props (e.g., the Robot), the music (mostly by John Williams) and especially the special visual effects were all first-rate.

But Allen couldn't tell a good script from a bad one. Unlike the producers of the nearly concurrent Star Trek, ...Read the entire review

The Show:

Not going to lie, think I'm a touch melancholy when it comes to this installment of Peppa Pig. I've reviewed several of these titles for "The Talk" already, largely because my son has liked seeing them and has a little bit of the merchandise from the show. However, I think we may have moved on a little? Someone has started taking note of different shows on Nick Jr., and I'm not sure how to handle it.

Anyway, Peppa Pig The Easter Bunny is a collection of self-explanatory episodes around Easter and the Easter bunny. The web shorts run about 5-6 minutes each and don't overstay their welcome, running just over one hour in total. Ranging from Series 3-5, they get into all of the members of Peppa's family (Daddy and Mommy Pig and Peppa's little brother ...Read the entire review

The Film:

The Movie:

Jonas Akerlund 2019 film Lords Of Chaos, inspired by the book of the same name written by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind, takes a look at the birth of the Norwegian black metal movement that began in the mid-eighties. Tired of his life in conservative Norway, a teenager named Oystein Aarseth (Rory Culkin) decides to start the most extreme metal band on the planet. Now calling himself Euronymous, he teams up with Jan Axel Blomberg, who dubs himself Hellhammer (Anthony De La Torre) and Jorn Stubberud, who takes on the name of Necrobutcher (Jonathan Barnwell) and starts the band Mayhem. It takes them a little while but soon they find the perfect lead singer in the form of a Swedish import named Pelle 'Dead' Ohlin (Jack Kilmer).

The band quickly makes a name for themselves thanks to their dramatic stage presence and their extreme behavior. Euronymous begins to...Read the entire review

And in this corner, released just in time to frighten us on Halloween, we have one of the worst films of 2018, a ghastly gimmick cluster bomb that will have audiences gasping for the air that has been sucked out of the room by the worst acting you will see this century; London Fields! It really ought to be heralded, this monstrosity of a movie, so that future audiences can be forewarned, or else it ought it be completely wiped from our memories, so that none of us who have seen it will have to live with the pain. Rarely, if ever, does cinema swing this hard and miss, unless it's trying to in order to make a point; no ...Read the entire review

The above text introduces this movie, which gives us a good idea of what we're in for. Yes, this is about former Vice-President Dick Cheney, and it's clear from the get-go that it was made by people who don't like him. My own view of the Bush-Cheney era was that it would make at least one good movie someday. (Oliver Stone quickly put out W which I still haven't gotten around to watching.) Vice at first glance looks like your standard political drama, but it's handled in a darkly comic fashion with many of the filmmakers coming from a primarily comedic background.

Christian Bale plays Cheney, and gets most of his mannerisms down pat. The amazing thing however is how he pulls off looking like him, largely...Read the entire review

The Show:

Archer headed into its ninth season and approached the (still?) magical 100-episode mark but placing its characters into an interesting environment. Long ago Sterling Archer moved from the government espionage in a Mad Men era to the same practice in the Miami Vice 80s, to a film noir backdrop in Season Eight. In Season Nine? Well, it's different, in that it's set in the late 1930s and the only parallel I could remotely relate it to would be Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In Season Nine, the characters you've grown to love play similar character but not exact ones. Archer (H. Jon Benjamin, Bob's Burgers) and his mother Mallory (Jessica Walter, Arrested Development) retain their names. From there, Cyril (C...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Melissa McCarthy plays against type in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, an adaptation of Lee Israel's biography of the same name about her elaborate forgeries of letters from deceased poets and writers. A quiet, darkly funny and occasionally sad film from Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl), Can You Ever Forgive Me? sees McCarthy play Israel and Richard E. Grant tackle the role of Israel's friend and con artist Jack Hock. An unlikable, socially awkward and generally irredeemable pair, Israel and Hock are nonetheless redeemed by the actors who play them, as McCarthy and Grant manage to find the humanity in two broken humans. McCarthy's subdued performance is worthy of the praise it got at year's end award ceremonies, and the film presents its larger-than-l...Read the entire review

It would have seemed unlikely that Family Guy, cancelled from network TV after 3 seasons, would end up celebrating its 20th anniversary, but indeed it has. The animated series owes a lot to DVD for its success and rebirth, as the season sets released after its cancellation sold so well that it was soon picked up again. Being one who can't stand the presentation of broadcast TV since the late 90s, this was how I discovered it as I was buying just about everything that came out on DVD at that time. At first glance, it looks like just an animated parody of family sitcoms- Creator Seth MacFarlane voices oafish Peter Griffin, the head of the family, as well as infant son Stewie who is far smarter than his age a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I continue to add to my arsenal of childcare by video by grabbing my third Peppa Pig DVD to review (my first one is reviewed here and my second one is reviewed here), because I…find myself enjoying these? They're worth a laugh, my kid continues to enjoy them, why go against a good thing.

"When I Grow Up" is another in a continually rolling release of Peppa DVDs, similar in variety and format to the others as well. A handful of episodes from the show ranging in various years (in this case, 2009-2018) are included, some that may have a commonality, maybe they don't. But they're not for your enjoyment and belief suspension, they're for your child's.

And they get their universe expanded a little bit by being exposed to doct...Read the entire review

The Movie:

When I looked at my first Peppa Pig DVD a few months ago, I don't think I was prepared for what would come next in my home. Maybe when I was watching these with my two-year-old, it triggered something for him because now, it is his to-go source of entertainment in the mornings while Dad and Mom make his breakfast and on weekdays, meals for school. Buddy, go back to Llama Llama!

I kid. As I've discovered, not only is Peppa available on a lot of YouTube channels, but there is a certain sort of Pixar/Disney/I don't know what, sense of maturity to the cartoons. Not so much that the kids would notice, but in some episodes, it can really be something as quick as a camera look, or a gentle pan in to a character's face, or a loud noise, that can make the parents laugh too. Maybe it's the Stockholm Syndrome talkin...Read the entire review

Far better than one might reasonably have expected, The Old Man & the Gun (2018), despite that awkward title, is a solidly character-driven piece based on a true story, a smallish picture surprisingly shot in Super 16mm (yet also ‘scope) that's charming and involving.

The picture is notable as Robert Redford's final acting role. He announced his retirement from the craft prior to the release of this and Our Souls at Night, a 2016 release co-starring Jane Fonda. I hadn't seen a new Redford movie since The Horse Whisperer, more than 20 years ago, and was startled to see Redford looking every bit of his 82 years. The story, set primarily in the late-1970s, during movie star Redford's peak box office-wise, along with the brief use of film clips of a younger Redford, underscore this.

Seeing him with that saddle leather face and (surely dyed?) shock of red hair, is jarring no...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A couple of weeks ago I bemoaned the fact that First Man, while being an excellent film, received sparse critical or awards recognition during the 2019 season. After I watched Widows, I found myself being mad not only for the scarcity of nominations, but in some portions of the globe, the lack of real recognition whatsoever. Dang family, this is a good flick!

Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) adapted the Lynda La Plante novel that Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) directed. Veronica (Viola Davis, Fences) is dealing with the loss of her husband Harry (Liam Neeson, Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Well acted and topically resonant, The Hate U Give is a satisfying adaptation of Angie Thomas' young adult novel of the same name. This drama, from director George Tillman Jr. (Notorious), follows 16-year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg) as she walks the line between two very different societies. Carter lives in a poor, largely African-American neighborhood, but attends a prep school across town filled with wealthy white students. When Starr's childhood friend, Khalil Harris (Algee Smith), is shot during a traffic stop, Starr becomes an unwitting witness and lightning rod for social justice. The Hate U Give tackles some weighty current affairs and weaves them into a simple, effective coming-of-age drama to produce a satisfying film.

After another of Starr's childhood friends...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I've generally been off of films from the Marvel/Disney and DC/Warner production houses (I think the last film that included a superhero of some sort was Justice League almost a year ago), maybe because of a change of life priorities or whatnot, but I just can't get into them the way I may have before. And when Deadpool came out I enjoyed their winking about things going on both on and off screen relating to comic book blockbuster films. I saw the first in the theater and I think I saw the second there as well, even knowing that it would be more of the same. And I think we may even be a saturation point on those with the release of Once Upon a Deadpool, a PG-13 cut of the sequel that was released last summer.

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

When I heard Shane Black was directing a Predator sequel I was excited. I hoped he could shoot a killer follow-up that mixed action and his trademark, quippy dialogue and character interaction. The Predator as it made it to theaters is disappointingly just OK, thanks in large part to some curious writing decisions and what I assume was plenty of studio interference. The first half of the film promises greatness, but when Black and company move toward the climax, editing coherence, world building and franchise reverence go out the window. The Predator is an entertaining, messy disappointment that had all the makings of a classic. Genre fans will appreciate the return of the Predators to Earth, but Black's film falls perilously closer to Read the entire review

The Movie:

Putting a bunch of recognizable actors into a fairly limited area and seeing the dialogue and experiences that come out of it generally prove to make for an entertaining story. And coming into Bad Times at El Royale, there wasn't much I knew about the film, but the cast looked intriguing enough to the point that hopefully, the story met the level of the actor attraction.

Written and directed by Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods), the El Royale is a hotel known for its location that straddles the California and Nevada border in 1969. The film follows a priest named Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water), an aspiring soul singer named Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo, Widows), an abrasive young w...Read the entire review