Filmmaker-writer-activist Michael Moore's only non-documentary film to date, Canadian Bacon (1995) is a broad political satire that, despite many amusing ideas and a fine cast, is curiously mirthless and, 27 years later, with the world spiraling into the abyss as it is, now plays especially toothless and even naïve. Why it's not better than it ought to be has, at least for me, always been a bit of puzzle, but watching MVD Visual's new Blu-ray I think I've been able to unravel some of the film's many problems.

In Niagara Falls, New York, laid off workers from a weapons manufacturing plant owned by billionaire R.J. Hacker (G.D. Spradlin) unenthusiastically greet the unpopular Democratic U.S. President (Alan Alda), his trip intended to console the unem...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Not to be confused with the Nicholas Winding Refn movie of the same name from 2011, 1997's Drive, directed by Steve Wang, introduces us to Toby Wong (Mark Dacascos), a martial arts expert who has been technologically enhanced to make him the ultimate ass kicker. We see this first hand when he takes down some bad guys in the opening scene. From here, he winds up at a dive bar in Los Angeles where he meets aspiring musician Malik Brody (Kadeem Hardison), just as some more bad guys show up only to once again get slaughtered by Wong.

In quick need of an escape route, Wong winds up taking Malik hostage to a certain extent, forcing him to drive him out of the city in his car to escape from those chasing him down. It's here that Wong explains to Brody his situation. As the bad guys, led by Vic Madison (John Pyper-Ferguson) working for the mysterious Mr. Lau (Jam...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Highball is a fascinating little relic from the late '90s. It was co-conceived and directed by Noah Baumbach, who removed his name from the finished product along with co-writers Carlos Jacott and Christopher Reed (the current home video version has their credits restored). Much like Paul Auster and Wayne Wang's Blue in the Face, which was a largely improvised lark that drafted off the production momentum of the much more polished film Smoke, Highball was shot in a week shortly after the production of Baumbach's Mr. Jealousy. Most of the cast is carried over, although the recognizable actors take a ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Miami Blues is a dark comic crime movie from 1990 that has consistently flown under the radar, even by the standards of a "cult classic." It stars a young Alec Baldwin on the verge of stardom (his turn as Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October hit theaters just before this). It's a Jonathan Demme production that was written and directed by fellow graduate of the Roger Corman "school," George Armitage (Vigilante Force, Grosse Pointe Blank), from the book by Cockfighter novelist Charles Willeford.

The end product bears distinct fingerprint...Read the entire review

I'm just gonna be honest here- considering the talent involved in this, the results are a bit disappointing. I don't know the story of what went into the making of this, perhaps it was one of those productions where things just didn't work the way they were supposed to- but for all I know, maybe everyone was happy the way this turned out and it just didn't click with me for whatever reason. "Aliens Clowns & Geeks," written and directed by Richard Elfman (Danny's brother), appears to be marketed as a follow-up to his 1980 cult classic Forbidden Zone, with that referenced right on the front cover. Forbidden Zone wasn't by any means a perfect film but is quite amazing given the time it came out and the resources which personally set Richard Elfman back financially quite a bit. This recent production doesn't really compare, and...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written, produced and directed by Don Murphy and released in 1991, Monday Morning stars Noah Blake as Bobby Parker. High school age, Bobby has grown up poor and spent most of his life living in rougher, tougher neighborhoods. His home life with father, Frank (Paul Henry Itkin) and mother, Marion (Annie O'Donnell), isn't great on the best of days. He winds up as the new kid at Oceana High School and, along with fellow newbie, Bill (Karl Widergott), has immediate trouble fitting in with the rest of the student populace.

James Hedges (Brandon Hooper) is the big man on campus and he and his crew, primarily Chip (Jason Lively) and Mark (Brian Cole), don't take kindly to Bobby and Bill's presence in the school. It upsets the order of things and it's clear that James wants to remain on top. It's also clear that the pair isn't going to get along with James. When ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Fabulous Baker Boys has a premise that seems tailor-made for a happy-go-lucky old Hollywood screwball comedy, with some dazzling musical numbers to boot, but refreshingly decides to play it as a grounded and credible drama.

The setup involves two piano player brothers named Jack and Frank Baker (real-life brothers Jeff and Beau Bridges, respectively), who perform light and accessible jazz tunes to disinterested patrons at various restaurants and clubs across Seattle.

The brothers have been at it for over a decade, and they need something fresh to bring in more money, so they decide to audition for a singer. Cue the gorgeous, talented, but abrasive and undependable Susie (Michelle Pfeiffer), who's the kind of girl who's not even a bit apprehensive about the fact that her previous employment was at an escort service at first meet.

A traditional...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Robert Bierman's 1988 film, Vampire's Kiss, follows a man named Peter Loew (Nicholas Cage), a materialist type who makes quite a nice living for himself working as an executive at a publishing company. Peter's got issues of his own though, and it's for that reason that he's visiting with his psychiatrist, Doctor Glaser (Elizabeth Ashley) on what must seem to her like a constant basis. He's also a swinging single guy, so when he's not at work or at his shrink's he's taking advantage of New York City's nightlife, cruising the bars looking to pick up.

It's on one of these adventures that Peter winds up taking a girl named Jackie (Kasi Lemmons) back to his apartment and just as things are starting to get hot and heavy, a bat comes out of nowhere and puts an end to things. When Peter mentions this to Glaser at his next session, he has to admit that this strang...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Shot in Argentina at Obras Stadium on October 9th, 2005, Megadeth: A Night In Buenos Aires captures a full ninety-five minute set from the long running California-based thrash legends fronted for the better part of four decades by guitarist/vocalist Dave Mustaine. Joined, at this point in the band's history, by Glen Drover on lead guitar, James McDonough on bass and Shawn Drover behind the drum kit, Mustaine and company are in fine form here.

Before the show starts we get to see the band interacting with fans and getting ready for the concert, offering thoughts about how great the fans are and how much they appreciate them. We also see them prep for their flight and get mobbed on the taxi ride to their hotel. At one point the band goes outside with some acoustic guitars and plays for the fans to let them sing along.

After two minutes of that, h...Read the entire review

Bryan Loves You:

I want to be very careful here. Lots of people poured their energy and good intentions into Bryan Loves You, including Tony Todd, George Wendt, Lloyd Kaufman, Brinke Stevens and Tiffany-freaking-Sheppis for crying out loud! But this is a hard movie to love. The purportedly true found-footage tale of an eerie cult that's taken over a small town in 1993 Arizona never sports an ounce of plausibility, lacks any tension, and lacks any performances that rise to the level of believable, and this mostly includes those marquee names. In a word, the movie is boring, and despite this extras-packed Blu-ray re-release, is a waste of your time.

Seth Landau is Jonathan, a therapist who becomes interested in rumors of an Arizona town overtaken by members of a cult devoted to the worship of the title mythical character. (Landau is also the writer and director of the movie, and domi...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Olaf Ittenbach's splatter classic begins in modern day Germany, where a man named Mathias starts having flashbacks that he is the son of the first fallen angel, Premutos. When, on his father's birthday, he discovers an ancient book and an unusual yellow potion, he mutates into a monster bent on resurrecting Premutos and his army of zombies, and literally, all hell breaks loose… conveniently enough at a dinner party that his parents are having!

The story in this film is basic, and that's all that it needs to be. Everything in this movie takes second stage to the gore, which is handed out by the bucketful. Premutos easily rivals Peter Jackson's Braindead in the gore department and the last half hour of the movie really kicks into overdrive with its relentless display of every kind of carnage imaginable. Heads are chopped off, limbs are sev...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Shot over a scant eight days, 2LDK was born when directors Yukihiko Tsutsumi and Ryûhei Kitamura finished their work on the 2002 anthology movie Jam Films so quickly that producer Shin-ya Kawai asked each filmmaker to create separate films each using only two actors and one setting over a week-long period. Kitamura delivered 2003's Aragami and Tsutsumi's film was 2003's 2LDK.

Briskly paced at only sixty-nine minutes in length, the film's unusual name comes from the apartment number of the humble abode inhabited by two Tokyo roommates, Lana (Maho Nonami) and Kimi (Eiko Koike), though it's also a way that apartments can be described in Japan (two bedrooms = 2L, one dining room = D and one kitchen = K!). Kimi comes from a small town and is on the meek and mild side, while Tokyo native Lana is the bolder and brasher of the two lovely young ladi...Read the entire review

A Walk In The Sun:

The year is 2022, and a war is on in Eastern Europe, prompting fears that war might spread. So what better time to revisit A Walk In The Sun? The Lewis Milestone-directed World War II movie, based on Harry Brown's novel of the same name, debuted in 1945, as that conflict was drawing to a close. Though stagy and talky by today's standards, the ultimate effect of the movie is as potent and trenchant as ever.

A platoon of American soldiers lands in Italy with the mission to blow up a bridge. The plot is just that simple, however the story and the way it's told are not.

Warning! If you're the type who doesn't like black and white movies, or those framed in a full-screen 4 x 3 ratio, best move on! (And if so, why are you reading this?) That said, those cinematic constraints aren't the only things that make A Walk In The Sun a viewing challenge, albeit one t...Read the entire review

There's an old adage in Hollywood that goes like this: everyone wants to be first to be second. With three-strip Technicolor, it was more like everyone wanting to be first to be seventh or eighth. Color movies are as old as the medium itself, with hand-colored one-reel shorts dating back to the earliest days of motion pictures in the 1890s. Technicolor's first big innovation, its two-color process, dates all the way back to 1916, and turned up in shorts, as color sequences in otherwise black-and-white films, and even as all-color features into the early 1930s. So color in 1935 was definitely a novelty but hardly new. Three-strip Technicolor, debuting with the Disney cartoon short Flowers and Trees in 1932 (and widely adopted in animation soon after), was a definite improvement, but selling the process was a bit like trying to sell 4K televisions to a public mostly content with their stand...Read the entire review

Ghost Riders:

Ghost Riders (not an undiscovered sequel to any Marvel movie starring Nicolas Cage) starts strong in its own particular right with a heavy God versus The Law trip set in the Wild West of 1886. This 1987 indie feature looks like an overly ambitious attempt to get backyard-VHS horror fans into something a little different, It both is and isn't something a little different, and if this is the first time you are hearing of it, oh SOV horror fan with visions of Microwave Massacre dancing in your head, then I reckon you'll soon understand why this nominal Horror Western flew so long under the radar, even if the level of technical merit puts those other backyard movies to shame.

Ghost Riders (or Ghostriders if the Blu-ray cover art is to be believed) indeed is not your usual Camcorder Auteur affair; its written by Clay McBride and James J. Desmarais, produ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written and directed by storied B-movie maverick Graydon Clark (who cameos in the film as a guy named Bob!), 1984's Final Justice, famously skewered in the tenth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in 1999, follows the exploits of a ‘good ol' boy' type Sheriff from Texas named Thomas Jefferson Geronimo, III (Joe Don Baker). Two mafia hitmen, Joseph Palermo (Venantino Venantini) and his brother Anthony finish up their dirty business in his town and then decide to hightail it across the border into Mexico to avoid the American authorities that might want to bring them to justice. Geronimo gets wind of what's happening and gives chase, killing Anthony right off the bat and capturing Joseph before he can cross the border.

When Geronimo is tasked with escorting Joseph back to Italy, his cronies prepare for his arrival and before you know it, ...Read the entire review

The classic plot device of switched bags that look the same but have far different things inside is the basis for 1987's Dirty Laundry, which might be a perfect example of a 1980s direct-to-video movie. This was in fact issued on VHS by Sony in their earlier effort to be a player in movie distribution a couple years before they bought Columbia Pictures. If the cheesy music score and unmistakably 80s colors don't immediately grab you, the cast list certainly will- we've got legendary singers Frankie Valli AND Sonny Bono playing bad guys, Cousin Oliver himself Robbie Rist, and Olympic runner Carl Lewis!

TV mainstay Leigh McCloskey is the star of our show, playing everyman Jay who dreams of a music career but meanwhile has to run to the laundromat next to the Alpha Beta supermarke...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Mexico's most famous exploitation director, René Cardona, and co-written with his son, 1969's Night Of The Bloody Apes (which was previously released by both Something Weird Video and in a horrid not so special edition by Beverly Wilshire Filmworks and then a third time by BCI Eclipse during their all too brief love affair with Mexican horror on DVD) is a grisly low budget monster movie with wrestlers, gore, nudity and remains one of the best known Mexican horror films of the era.

As to what it's all about? If the title alone isn't enough to pique your interest, a lady wrestler decked out in a devil costume tosses her foe out of the ring and injures her. This sends her to the hospital. After the match, she goes to visit her where she finds that she is lying there in a coma.

Cut to a surgeon named Dr. Krauman who wants nothing more t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, 2015's Tab Hunter Confidential is a documentary that goes into quite a bit of detail about the life and career of one Arthur Andrew Gelien, the American born actor who passed away in 2018 but who came to quite a bit of fame as a teen heart throb in fifties and sixties under his stage name, Tab Hunter.

Born in New York City in 1931, he did some time in the military but in the fifties got into acting where he starred in quite a few western and adventure movies and his star started to rise and he landed a contract with Warner Brothers where he proved to be one of their biggest stars. He also released a few records and had a number one hit in 1957 with the song 'Young Love.' He continued to act into the early nineties, though his marquee value would start to fade once the sixties turned into the seventies, the plus side of this b...Read the entire review

Some years back my friend Stephen Bowie, a television historian, interviewed prolific character actor Jason Wingreen, then about ninety. Wingreen had appeared in hundreds of television shows, including Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Seinfeld, but was probably most familiar the bartender, a semi-regular role, on All in the Family and its follow-up, Archie Bunker's Place. Wingreen seemed happy enough to discuss his long career with Stephen, but he was very insistent, almost obsessive, that Stephen absolutely not share his contact information with anyone else. Why? An acting job from long ago that couldn't have taken up more than an hour of his time was as the voice of Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Though he wasn't even credited in the film and spoke maybe a dozen words, Wingreen was worried Star Wars fans would find him and besi...Read the entire review

The Return of Swamp Thing:

Jim Wynorski has directed everything, including The Bare Wench Project and four sequels. Feel free to infer from that, if you're not familiar with his work, that his oeuvre is decidedly low-brow. It's also pretty much always a good time, such as with this sequel to Wes Craven's only-slightly-more-serious original Swamp Thing. Starring Louis Jourdan, Heather Locklear, Sarah Douglas, and the almighty Dick Durock (who escapes billing on the cover, presumably because the actor was, in essence ACTUALLY SWAMP THING) The Return of Swamp Thing is brought to you in this fairly-packed 30th Anniversary Special Collector's Edition (a couple of years late) to liven up your Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons forevermore.

The DC Comics tragic hero Swamp Thing is a scientist who became melded with the plant life of the swamp after an explosion. Part Eco-war...Read the entire review

Crazy Nights:

Billed as ‘The Wildest Mondo Movie Ever", Crazy Nights comes across more like "The Lamest Frankenstein's Monster of a Mondo Movie Ever" and it's probably all down to our beloved Aristide Massaccesi's bungling and being forced to pivot, or lying to people or something. At any rate, what is presented here as a ‘Mondo Movie' about discos or strip clubs, more or less, is both less and more than the sum of its parts. It's an interminably tedious, yet oddly invigorating sexcapade that could only have come out of late 1970s Italy.

Crazy Nights gives top billing to Amanda Lear. Lear has had an interesting life to say the least, as a sometimes actor, chanteuse, and muse to David Bowie, the band Roxy Music, and Salvador Dali. (A well-known song from her sultry, languid pop music career is "Queen of Chinatown", a song so fraught with husky, ambiguous vocals it is known t...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Tom McLaughlin, One Dark Night opens with a scene where a crowd of cops, media types and curious onlookers have gathered around the home of Karl Rhamarevich Raymar who has just been found dead alongside the bodies of a half dozen or so women. It's a strange scene to be sure, something that is not lost on his daughter Olivia McKenna (Melissa Newman), who learns that her dear departed father had strange telekinetic abilities that allowed him to suck the life force out of other humans! Her husband Allan (Adam West) is understandably concerned.

Meanwhile, a trio of college girls who refer to themselves as ‘The Sisters' and are made up of Kitty (Leslie Speights), Leslie (E.G. Daily) and leader Carol (Robin Evans) are trying to figure out the best way to pledge would be new recruit Julie Wells (Meg Tilly). Their plan is to get her to spend the nig...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written and directed by Mark Rosman, who has since gone on to churn out a lot of comedies and TV work in addition to writing the recent remake of this very film entitled simply Sorority Row, this low budget slasher film from 1983 isn't even close to the best of its breed but it has a certain quirky, nostalgic charm that makes it marginally endearing to fans of the genre.

When the film begins, a woman loses her baby during childbirth. After this scene, we meet Mrs. Slater (Lois Kelso Hunt), a cranky old woman who runs a sorority house populated by a group of foxy and nubile young ladies who are planning to use the house for a big party against her will. They try to keep it a secret but when she walks in on them yapping about it while chugging booze in their pajamas, the secret is a secret no more. Unhappy with things going the way they are, she later disrupts...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Howard Avedis in 1983, Mortuary begins when a man is killed by an unseen assailant, his body left lifeless floating in the swimming pool in his backyard. From here, two teenage boys, Greg (David Wallace) and Jim (Curt Ayers), sneak into a warehouse in the middle of the day where they see Jim's former boss, Hank Andrews (Christopher George), involved in some sort of séance surrounded by women dressed in strange cloaks. Jim notes that he's seen this before at the Mortuary Andrews runs, the place where he used to work. They head out but Jim gets killed out of view of Greg, who wanders around town with his girlfriend, Christie (Mary Beth McDonagh), who just so happens to be the daughter of the man killed in the opening scene. Despite protestations from her mother (Lynda Day George), Christie is certain that her father's death was not the accident that ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

NOTE: The images accompanying this article do not represent the quality of the Blu-ray under review.

The 1997 comedy Mr. Jealousy might be the black sheep of director Noah Baumbach's filmography (not counting the improvised film Highball, from which Baumbach literally removed his name). Mr. Jealousy was snubbed by audiences, pegged as a sophomore slump by critics, and the film's auteur doesn't seem to care much for it either.

It doesn't matter. I've always had a soft spot for this flick. I remember discovering Baumbach's debut Kicking and Screaming as a VHS rental f...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Waco-based drug dealer Billy Ray (Rod Shaft) would seem to have it all: a Corvette with a personalized license plate that says ‘Sleek1' on it, a fancy house, a hot girlfriend named Carmen (Barri Murphy) who just can't wait to get naked and screw him on the couch and a bottle of Shiner! What Carmen doesn't realize, however, is that Billy Ray is involved with some bad dudes who want the diamonds that he's stashed somewhere in the area. They kidnap her man and dangle him from a helicopter until he tells them where they are, and then they drop him in a lake.

A short time later and Billy Ray is dead as a doornail and Carmen is under the protection of F.B.I. agents Clay Osborn (Gregory Scott Cummins of Hack-O-Lantern!) and Earl 'Panama' McKinnon (William Hubbard Knight). These guys answer to Conover (the mighty William Smith of Conan The Barbarian and ...Read the entire review

Among the recent spate of mostly good-to-excellent music documentaries, perhaps the best is one of the first, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? (2006).

Nilsson, who died in 1994 at just 52 (he looked much older than that in later years), enjoyed fleeting commercial success in the early 1970s, peaking creatively with his best album, Nilsson Schmilsson, before embarking upon a long, sad decline of alcohol and cocaine-fueled partying that ruined his health, including his indescribably beautiful singing voice, while his uniquely creative juices were self-sabotaged by self-doubt, fear, and a contrariness that both helped and hurt his career. Director John Scheinfeld's long-in-gestation documentary unblinkingly explores Nilsson's unique place in popular music, its many ups and downs.

Released to Blu-ray by MVD Visual, Who Is Harry Nilsson? was sh...Read the entire review

In the long history of mismastched movie duos, it's hard to think of two men less matched than Malik Brody (Kadeem Hardison) and Toby Wong (Mark Dacascos). Malik is still licking his wounds from his impending divorce, and trying to get his fledgling songwriting career off the ground. Toby is, well, a special agent and martial arts expert with a bionic implant plugged into his chest that gives him additional speed and agility, which he's stolen from the Chinese mob and hopes to sell to a Los Angeles tech company for $5 million cash. Malik needs the money more than he doesn't need the trouble, so he agrees to drive Toby from SF to LA for half the dough. In pursuit: the Gregg Allman-esque hillbilly assassin Vic Madison (John Pyper-Ferguson) and his scuzzy right-hand man Hedgehog (Tracey Walter), who have been hired by Mr. Lau (James Shigeta), who runs the company that installed the implant. Also along ...Read the entire review

Are there any film and television stars working today as positively beloved as Roy Rogers once was?

Born Leonard Slye, Rogers co-founded the Sons of the Pioneers singing cowboys group, then eased into B-Westerns, eventually replacing Gene Autry as Republic Studios' top star in that capacity when Autry joined the Army in 1942. Rogers stopped making B-Westerns in 1952, his The Roy Rogers Show TV program debuting at the end of 1951 and which CBS continued airing in reruns until the fall of 1964, seven years after it had ended. During that time, Rogers (and his wife and co-star, Dale Evans) amassed a fanbase of millions of kids, loyal fans even we they outlived Roy and Dale and became parents and grandparents themselves.

Rogers gave up film acting, apart from a cameo in the Bob Hope comedy Alias Jesse James (1959), the couple preferring to focus on their church work, they being p...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Chuck Berry's impact on music may not have been felt immediately when he released his songs in the 1950s, but it became a deeper appreciation through the years, despite his personal demons and volatility, some of which can be found in Taylor Hackford's film Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock and Roll, in which a 60-something Berry and a 40-something Keith Richards almost come to blows over how Berry's "Carol" should be played at a star-studded concert. As "The Original King of Rock and Roll," a new documentary on Berry by Jon Brewer shows, Chuck was totally right on that, and covers some other facets on Berry's life in this new (and "Fully-Authorized") documentary on Berry.

This film does borrow from film used in Hail! Hail!, along with interview footage from some of the subjects in it, but also includes new in...Read the entire review

Nola (Sabrina Carpenter) has never known anything other than life on the road. She and her father Clint (Steven Ogg) live out of their well-worn VW Westfalia, roaming around in search of odd handyman jobs that keep them fed and the vehicle maintained. Nola isn't unhappy, necessarily: she has a decent relationship with her father, even though she doesn't share his restlessness, and she desperately wants to know more about her mother, Cheryl, who left when she was an infant. The day after Clint finally agrees to take Nola to New Orleans, the place she was born and named after, he dies unexpectedly, forcing Nola to fend for herself as she tries to figure out the next destination on her lifelong road trip.

A glance at the plot of The Short History of the Long Road might inspire comparisons to Nomadland, Chloe Zhao's film about modern American drifters, now up for several major aw...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The births (and deaths) of family members close to me over the last few years have had me on a road about integrative treatment that I was not prepared for, but have since accepted for various reasons. Why wouldn't you decide on some out of the box methods to extend a loved one's quality of life? And it is explained in a way that I wish I'd had before in a documentary called The Dog Doc, a movie about a veterinarian. And I have no pets!

The Cindy Meehl project focuses on Marty Goldstein, a doctor in New York who graduated from Cornell and knew treatment from a conventional perspective, but found that holistic treatment helped with his health, and inspired him to direct it to his animal patients, which have been received mostly with success. The feature looks at several patients who come in and out of the hospital he operates. It interviews the owners of the pets, ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I am not into much of today's music, not necessarily because I have the traditional ‘old' position of modern music, just that I have a lot of other stuff on my plate. So when I look at a group like Delta Rae, on the surface my impression of them is that they're a slightly oversized country act, but looking further, their three albums thus far since forming appear on the folk and alternative music charts, which is intriguing, so I decided to take a longer look.

As it turns out, yes this is a big group! Six people appear on the cover of Coming Home to Carolina, another way of saying the band came home to North Carolina after forming in Durham in 2009. Three of the six people in the band are part of the same family; brothers Ian and Eric Holljes went to school at Duke and take on vocals and guitar, sister Brittany also handles vocals. Rounding out the sextet are G...Read the entire review

Alex Wolff, once half of Nickelodeon's "Naked Brothers Band" (and hopefully since forgiven his parents for putting him in something with that name) makes his directorial debut here and also stars as Nick, a kid whose backstory we learn only in passing as the film progresses. He arrives in New York at the home of Cal (Mike Epps), a former bandmate of his father's who we learn died a few years ago- the movie's title is from a poem that his dad used to read to Nick at bedtime. His mom is currently in rehab so he has nowhere else to go for now.

Though Nick is a bit of a loner who spends his free time getting high, he quickly makes friends with like-minded foul-mouthed classmates Seamus (Skyler Gisondo) and Russell (Tommy Nelson) and invite him to many drug-fueled get-tog...Read the entire review