Review – Wonder Woman 1984

I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie on opening day, and I certainly never went to opening day on Christmas. Coronaworld continues to be a strange place. And appropriately enough, this is a strange movie. Someone else already made the joke about not being able to follow the plot after missing Wonder Woman 2 through 1983. It’s an on-target bit of sarcasm, as this doesn’t do much that we haven’t seen in a dozen superhero movies already. Further, other than the presence of retro fashion choices and a shopping mall early in the story, there isn’t much to root this in the title time frame. Mildly amusing

Review – The Christmas Chronicles

Brother and sister face the holidays after the recent loss of their father and without their extra-shift-working mother. Left to their own devices, they end up waylaying Santa Claus, throwing all of Christmas into jeopardy. This would be another run-of-the-mill seasonal movie if not for some unwelcome twists. The disturbed family seems a little too disturbed for comfort, particularly the brother’s membership in a car theft ring, which comes across less as a youthful prank and more of a serious crime. But the real killer is Kurt Russell’s portrayal of Santa as a churlish jerk who acts like he’d rather get drunk and sing karaoke than spread Christmas cheer throughout the world. See if desperate

Review – The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two

Because someone at Netflix watched the first one and said to himself, “What this needed was way more Goldie Hawn.” In her defense, her wooden performance as Mrs. Claus to her real-life partner Kurt Russell’s Santa is far from the worst moment in this galling parade of holiday nonsense. The dysfunctional family from the original is back, this time magically transported from the beach vacation they’ve found ways to hate to the North Pole, where a rebel elf plots to take over Santa’s kingdom and ruin Christmas for everyone. Before the end of the picture we get an odd adaptation of the actual life of St. Nicholas, elves driven insane by a magic potion, Dasher mauled by a Yule Cat, and the whole mess tied up via time travel. Yeesh. See if desperate
 

Review – The Hobbit (1977)

I remember loving this when I first saw it on TV. Of course I was 11 at the time, and standards for quality animation – especially on this side of the Pacific – were generally lower back then. But for the time and place, it’s not bad. The voice cast features some familiar names, including John Huston as Gandalf and Hans Conried as Thorin. In its limited running time, it stays fairly faithful to its well-known source. Mildly amusing

Review – Necessary Evil: The Super-Villains of DC Comics

You get what the title promises. I watched this because I’ve found that I have blank spots in my knowledge of the full DC line of heroes and villains, and these gaps sometimes make me miss questions on Sporcle quizzes. This parade of pictures and talking heads helped expand my knowledge a bit. Mildly amusing

Review – Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown

This is a reasonably good documentary about H.P. Lovecraft. It covers his life, his work and at least a little of his legacy. Some of the talking heads are better at spouting opinions than presenting facts, and the awkward issue of the author’s racism gets variable treatment. But overall this is a solid starting place for viewers new to the subject and an enjoyable parade of familiar faces for those of us with more extensive backgrounds. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghosts of War

Why is it so goddamn hard to combine the war and horror genres? They seem like they’d go well together. Yet this is the umpteenth attempt I’ve seen that starts out solidly enough but then can’t seal the deal. The plot drops a small group of WW2 GIs into a haunted mansion, and at first it plays as a standard ghost story. Then it starts to meander, becoming implausible even with the extra latitude due a supernatural tale. And as if the filmmakers realize it’s going off the rails, they lean into the skid with a shaggy dog twist. They might have gotten away with it if that had been the punchline that ended the joke. But it kept going from there. Perhaps they were trying to draw some kind of awkward parallel between Nazis and ISIS, but any point they were trying to make got lost in the inept storytelling. See if desperate

Review - Scoob!

It takes guts to make a dumb cartoon aimed at 50-year-old audience members.  In keeping with the current trend for packing pictures full of inside jokes, just about everything here is a reference to some element or another of the original Scooby Doo Where Are You? series. Plus they’ve thrown in a bunch of other H-B characters in a fairly transparent attempt to kick-start yet another cinematic universe. There’s a bit of clever business to be found here and there, but for the most part this is a movie designed for a pre-teen mentality yet designed to make sure anyone that age now won’t get many of the jokes. Mildly amusing

Review - Underwater

This isn’t the first movie I’ve seen ruined by the “constant cliffhanger” approach to storytelling. But unlike many of the others that seemed to exist for no other reason than abusing their characters, this one could have been so much better if it had toned down the constant peril and given some of the other elements a chance. Such a shame, too. Of all the underwater Alien clones I’ve seen, the monsters in this one were by far the best. Production design was great. Even the cast was good. If only it hadn’t been such a relentless chore to watch. Mildly amusing

Review - The Wiz

An oh-so-1970s Motown reimagining of The Wizard of Oz? What’s not to love? The cast is a who’s who of Black singers and actors from the era. The musical numbers are great fun. The production design creates an excellent blend of fantasy landscape and gritty New York City. And best of all, the adaptation retains the spirit of Baum’s book – in some ways even more faithfully than the original movie – while at the same time incorporating a whole new set of cultural references. This picture should have a place on any list of quintessential movies from its decade. Worth seeing

Review - Cats

 This whole thing has a fascinating downward arc. It started with actual cats, which of course are excellent. Then in 1939 T.S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The poetry collection was entertaining enough, though surprisingly twee coming from one of the godfathers of moody modernism. In 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber turned Eliot’s poems into a popular musical that – for better or worse – revolutionized the portrayal of felines by people in leotards. And now this. Despite the opportunity presented by nearly 40 years passing between the stage production and this screen adaptation, many of the artistic decisions seem ill-considered. The story leads off with an act of animal abuse. The effects, makeup and costuming create things that look neither like cats nor like people but rather some horrid hybrid designed to appeal only to audience members with a highly specific fetish. Technical problems abound; most noticeable is the characters’ scale variation from nearly human size to cat size to hamster size. With the assembled ensemble of talented singers, dancers and actors, a much better movie should have been made. See if desperate.

Review – Prosecuting Evil

As a young attorney in the Army in 1945, Ben Ferencz was part of the team that set up documentation of war crimes. Then he served as a prosecutor during the post-war Nuremberg trials. He was later instrumental in the creation of the International Criminal Court. Do I even have to tell you that this documentary about his life is absolutely fascinating? Worth seeing

Review – Fantasy Island

As a childhood fan of the putative source material for this movie, I was expecting something else. Clearly I didn’t imagine the return of Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize, especially given that they’re both dead. But I didn’t imagine a mean-spirited “be careful what you wish for” with definite Saw overtones either. Because if I had imagined that at the outset, I could have imagined something else to watch. See if desperate

Abandoned - Capone

This movie starts out in the last year of Al Capone’s life, in his post-gangster, post-prison decline in his mansion in Florida. I waited for 20 minutes or so for flashbacks, plot twists or any kind of distraction from the slow deterioration of a tertiary syph patient. Nope. They might just as easily have made a movie out of the first year of the notorious criminal’s life. It would have involved the same amount of lying around, inarticulate babbling and shitting himself. But at least a baby would have been cheaper than Tom Hardy.

Review - Birds of Prey

Moving farther into the largely Marvel free realm of girl power superhero movies, DC offers up “The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.” To be sure, this isn’t exactly a milestone in the history of feminist cinema. But it’s an entertaining action movie that keeps the story moving and manages some humorous moments along the way. Mildly amusing

Review - Palm Springs

 Groundhog Day for stoners. This time around the protagonist has company, the love interest dragged into the time loop with him. The production manages an entertaining moment or two amid the general silliness. Mildly amusing

Review – Concussion

At the outset I confess that I first took interest in this because I needed a movie for one of my classes to watch that everyone could access for free via one of the library’s video streaming service subscriptions. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was well-produced, engaging and thought-provoking. Will Smith stars as Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pathologist who uncovered the pattern of deadly head injuries routinely suffered by NFL players. Worth seeing

Review – Shazam!

Beyond the Saturday morning kids’ TV series from the 70s, I don’t have much experience with this character. The orphan who could transform himself into a grown man with superpowers seemed to create a lot of awkwardness. But perhaps the fans for whom this production is clearly intended are more accustomed to it. A few cute jokes. Some flashy effects. At least it wasn’t as dreary as many of the other DCEU entries. Mildly amusing

Review – Rise of the Guardians

Holiday mascots and other childhood fantasy figures band together to thwart a shadowy villain’s plot to take over the world. The production bets a lot on taking new approaches to familiar characters. The protagonist is Jack Frost, who obviously isn’t quite as popular as Santa Claus. And they got Hugh Jackman to voice an ill-tempered, feral-looking Easter Bunny. Overall this is polished bit of CGI, what you’d expect from The Nightmare Before Christmas re-imagined by Dreamworks Animation. Mildly amusing

Review – Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop

Without a doubt, this is a weird one. NY Police Officer Gilberto Valle spent a lot of time online sharing his fantasies about killing and eating women. When he was arrested and tried for conspiracy to commit the crimes he described, his defense was that his chats were nothing more than fantasies about things he never planned to do in real life. Thanks in part to his frequent mentions of actual women in his life – particularly his wife – he was convicted, though his conviction was later overturned. Without watching the whole movie, you can probably draw your own conclusions from the summary. Mildly amusing

Review – Athlete A

This documentary follows the work of the reporters who helped uncover the crimes of child molester Larry Nassar and the corruption in USA Gymnastics that let him keep sexually assaulting girls for years. Though this isn’t an easy movie to watch, it’s a vital lesson in the value of the courage shown by Nassar’s victims and the importance of persistence in the face of injustice. Worth seeing

Review – Alita Battle Angel

The line between CGI-intensive live action and straight CGI animation grows ever thinner. A cyborg with huge anime eyes struggles to find her way in a dystopian future, discovering that she’s society’s last hope just in time to set up a (thus far unrealized) sequel. If you’re a fan of the genre, I predict you’ll enjoy this experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Bornless Ones

This could have been a much better movie. They’ve got some good ideas – particularly the demons that heal physical infirmities – and a few solid scares here and there. But it gets lost under a pile of horror movie clichés and other bad creative decisions. Even the name is awkward, vaguely reminiscent of Witchiepoo’s attempts to invent rhymes for “oranges.” See if desperate

Review – The Rift

Leviathan only cheaper and dumber.

Review – Supervan

I found myself genuinely in awe of the sheer plotlessness of this movie. They seem to have some kind of story in mind about a solar-powered, laser-shooting van that defeats an oil exec’s scheme to flood the market with gas-guzzling vehicles, a subject that must have been timely in 1977. The movie was shot in and around Kansas City, so I started watching it hoping for some familiar scenery. But I found myself drawn in and greatly entertained by the bewildering mishmash of story threads and sight gags loosely centered around a “freak out” for custom van owners. Appropriately enough, the star of the show is Vandora, the title vehicle designed by legendary movie vehicle customizer George Barris (who makes brief appearance toward the end of the movie). Mildly amusing

Review – 1917

Director Sam Mendes’s technique is as brilliant as it is distracting. He plays out two hours’ worth of life on a World War One battlefield in what appears to be two takes separated only by a brief period when the protagonist is unconscious. Watching for the micro edits as the camera winds through the scenes was fascinating, but in some parts it took attention away from a story that would have stood perfectly well on its own. Overall, however, the movie does a great job of creating a sense of urgency and tension that fits the subject perfectly. Worth seeing

Review – Midway (2019)

This is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a World War Two movie directed by Roland Emmerich: Independence Day relocated to the Pacific Theater. The effects and epic battle scenes are impressive, the storytelling less so. This is better than Pearl Harbor, but it’s a nearer thing than it should have been. Mildly amusing

Review – West of Hell

In an old Saturday Night Live skit, the ghost of John Lennon replied to everything said to him with its exact opposite. If someone said, “Later, man,” he responded, “Sooner, woman.” I can only suppose that this movie began life as a similar Opposite Day reaction to a Steinbeck novel. Set aboard a train (despite obviously being shot in a room that looked almost nothing like a train car), this is what you’d get if you assigned a group of people who’d never even seen a movie to make as big a wreck as possible out of Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. Tony Todd and Lance Henriksen both desperately need to find better agents. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Disclosure (2020)

This is a fascinating look at the roles transgender people have played in movies and television. The production focuses on interviews with actors and other media professionals, sharing their reactions to how transgender people are portrayed in the media and their experiences working in the industry. Worth seeing

Review – Wish Upon

The old be-careful-what-you-wish-for story gets yet another rehash that adds little to its long line of predecessors. This time around a Chinese music box grants wishes with inevitable Faustian consequences. See if desperate

Review – Malicious

Young married couple Adam and Lisa have it made. With a baby on the way, they’ve just moved into a huge house supplied to them for free by his new employer (math teachers being in such high demand at small liberal arts colleges that they merit such royal treatment, apparently). That makes it extra sad that opening an innocent-looking box unleashes a baby-murdering, marriage-destroying evil spirit. Not even the parapsychologist head of the husband’s department at work can do much to stop the horror or end the movie any faster. See if desperate

Review – The Assent

The trailer made this look like it was going to be way better than it was. A father faces losing custody because 1. he can’t hold down a steady job, 2. he’s a mentally ill artist who specializes in really creepy art, and 3. his son’s possessed by a demon. There’s no help for the first two, but a pair of rogue exorcists step in to intervene with number three. See if desperate

Review – Crawl

During a hurricane, a congregation of alligators escape from a swamp or gator farm and relocate to the suburbs. Doubtless intrigued to have uncovered the only house in Florida with a basement, they settle in and start menacing a college student and her estranged dad. The effects are good enough to make the gator attacks entertaining, even though the movie doesn’t have much else going for it (other than the dog, who appears in the beginning and makes it to the end without being killed or even seriously threatened). Mildly amusing

Review – Red Riding Hood

Amanda Seyfried does a solid job in the title role of this Ren-festy redux of the familiar fairytale. To be sure, it gets embroidered along the way with a werewolf, a love triangle, some paranoia-promoting religious fanatics and the like. But overall it’s an entertaining little horror period piece. Mildly amusing

Review – Patriots Day

Mark “Multiple Racially-Motivated Assaults” Wahlberg stars in this painful parade of copaganda about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. After some quiet lead-up, the bombs detonate and then we’re off to the races. If only the Boston beat cops had been given carte blanche to ignore the FBI and their pesky terrorism experts and go after the suspects with a metro-wide lock-down and shoot-on-sight for the suspects, everything would have turned out much better. Or so we’re assured. See if desperate

Review – Doctor Sleep

Here’s a historic moment in the horror genre: a black female protagonist and a cat both live to the end of the movie. Overall this proves to be a worthy sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining. The villains in particular are some of the most evil characters I’ve ever seen. The story is good and the production values high. Worth seeing

Review – Fail Safe (2000)

The 1964 Cold War classic gets a retro revamp more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union. Recorded in black and white and performed live for broadcast, this production was designed to mimic the look and feel of televised dramas from the 50s and 60s. They even got Walter Cronkite to narrate. The result works reasonably well, thanks in no small part to a cast of familiar faces. Worth seeing

Review – Galaxy of Horrors

An astronaut trapped in cryogenic suspension finds out the hard way what happens when you type “sci fi horror” into a Youtube search and then leave it on autoplay. See if desperate

Review – Da 5 Bloods

I found myself strangely disappointed by this movie. That might be because as soon as I heard that Spike Lee was making a movie about Black soldiers in Vietnam my imagination pictured something so good that no actual picture could live up to it. A cast full of talented actors further raised my expectations. The result wasn’t a terrible movie. But the story was unfocused until it settled into patterns familiar to anyone who’s ever seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Overall not bad, but I expected better. Mildly amusing

Review – Ready or Not

The Most Dangerous Game gets a honeymoon twist. New bride Grace (Samara Weaving) learns that in order to gain acceptance from her new in-laws, she’ll have to survive an evening of their attempts to murder her. Though not exactly clever, the story keeps moving well enough to keep things from getting dull. Mildly amusing

Abandoned – Child’s Play (2019)

I love cats in general and orange cats in particular. So six minutes in when the family’s pet made its first appearance, I ran scrambling to the content advisory list on IMDb. Nope. Oh so much nope.

Review – The Boys in Company C

So this is what Full Metal Jacket might have been like if it had been directed by the guy who made Superman IV. In fairness, this one came out before Kubrick’s, so at least it isn’t a ripoff. Nor is it a terrible movie. Some of the Vietnam War clichés might even be forgiven because back in 1978 they weren’t clichés yet. However, the picture suffers from technical defects and script problems, including a general lack of direction and such a frequent use of the phrase “body count” that if you tried turning it into a drinking game your body would join the count. Mildly amusing

Review – Aquaman

When I was a kid, I thought being able to breathe underwater (like really breathe, not just wear scuba gear for awhile) would be the best superpower ever. Even as an adult, I wouldn’t turn down the offer. So I’m a little surprised Aquaman never floated anywhere near the top of my list of superheroes. Maybe if his Saturday morning Superfriends incarnation had as much panache as Jason Momoa brings to the role, it might have been a different story. The hero’s grumpy snark aside, this is a standard superhero movie with plenty of the genre’s standbys: action-packed story, flashy effects, elaborate stunt work and so on. The only moment of real cringe was the casting of Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Manta (because getting a Black guy to play a criminal named Black Manta …). Mildly amusing

Review – Lights Out

This movie’s plot description sounded so much like Darkness Falls that I had to watch at least a few minutes of it just to be sure I hadn’t seen it already. Turns out it isn’t literally the same story, though it has a lot of similarities. Director David Sandberg expands his chilling little short subject into a feature-length tale, and though the longer version isn’t as scary, it still works reasonably well. Mildly amusing

Review – Joker

I watched this seriously annoying movie when I wasn’t in the mood to be seriously annoyed, and that interfered with my ability to understand how it ever managed to be as popular as it was. In fairness, it does get better around 40 minutes in once the antihero is firmly established as a mentally ill ne’er do well. When he finally starts fighting back, however, the plot becomes more engaging. Joaquin Phoenix spends more time making a serious Oscar bid than playing his role, but otherwise it’s an entertaining piece of moviemaking. If nothing else, it was novel to actually be grateful when Thomas Wayne gets killed. Mildly amusing

Review – Rio

Buried somewhere in here is a message about the evils of the illegal international trade in exotic animals. But it gets largely buried under romcom and prison escape clichés. A rare blue macaw so domesticated he can’t even fly gets sent to Brazil to participate in a breeding program to save his species. When his intended mate would rather return to the wild than procreate, high jinks ensue. Overall this packed about as much entertainment value as its own Angry Birds game app adaptation. Mildly amusing

Review – Knives Out

I can’t claim to know enough about murder mysteries to be able to say for certain whether this works as an actual mystery, a mystery parody, both or neither. But I’m confident that I had fun watching it. Daniel Craig’s Southern drawl is so terrible it’s hard to picture it as anything other than British revenge for Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins. But the rest of the cast does a fine job playing their parts in this tale of the squabbling heirs of a murdered patriarch. Mildly amusing

Review – The Eugenics Crusade

Anyone who thinks Hitler and his cronies invented this shit seriously needs to watch this documentary. It’s a chilling portrait of the rise and fall of the eugenics movement in the United States. Nor does it let us get away with the comforting lie that we learned our lesson in the wake of Nazi atrocities in Germany. Forced sterilization laws remain on the books in many states, and rhetoric about immigrants corrupting the gene pool have obvious parallels in current right wing rhetoric. Worth seeing

Review – Door in the Woods

If you found a chain-wrapped door standing in the middle of nowhere, how likely would you be to think, “Hey, I should grab that ratty-looking thing and install it in my house”? Even if you’d never seen a single horror movie in your entire life, it still just seems like a bad idea. Which of course it turns out to be. I liked the casting of CJ Jones as the family’s personal psychic and helper character. But beyond that the wise decisions are few and far between. The cast spends a considerable chunk of the third act clustered around a table in the woods yapping about what kind of deal they can cut with an evil spirit in order to get their kidnapped child back. And then the demonic presence (or whatever the hell it is) turns out to be named “Empusa.” That started a debate in the audience about whether that sounded more like the name of a small town in western Kansas (welcome to Empusa, population 341), a car model (drive the revolutionary new Subaru Empusa) or a prescription medication (do not take Empusa if you are allergic to Empusa or any of Empusa’s ingredients). See if desperate

Review – The Quiet Ones

After sitting through this effort from Hammer, i felt the need to go back and watch a couple of old pictures from the (allegedly) same studio just to remind myself that they used to make movies that didn’t suck. Apparently the mighty art fallen into dismal little bits of nonsense about psychology academics tormenting a girl who can supposedly conjure a ghost exclusively using the power of her mind. For what it’s worth, saying this is based on the real-life “Philip experiments” is a little like saying Transformers is based on the work of Alan Turing. See if desperate

Review – The Command

The Kursk disaster would have been bad enough if it simply involved a nuclear sub sinking in the Barents Sea. But as this docu-drama observes, loss of life was caused as much by Russian Navy bureaucracy as by the explosion that first damaged the sub. Thus the story here is less about the dangerous lives of sub crews and more about an incompetent government bungling rescue operations and lying to the men’s families. Mildly amusing

Review – The Rocketeer

This should have been better than it was. The graphic novel upon which it was based supplied a perfectly usable story. And Disney should have been better equipped than any other studio to tell a nostalgic story reminiscent of adventure pulp serials from the 1930s. But somehow it just never manages to get off the ground. Mildly amusing

Review – The Vatican Tapes

This starts out as a run-of-the-mill exorcism movie. Apropos of nothing, a young woman finds herself possessed by an evil spirit. As long as the story stays in that lane, it’s an acceptable entry in the sub genre. But then toward the end the plot takes a considerably more apocalyptic turn, either making it more interesting or just running it off the rails, depending on your point of view. See if desperate

Review – Ad Astra

Apocalypse Now in outer space. Literally. Brad Pitt turns in a flat, Ryan-Gosling-esque performance as a man sent to Neptune to put a stop to the solar-system-threatening antics of his insane father (Tommy Lee Jones). Before we’re done, we get moon pirates, space monkeys and Donald Sutherland (not necessarily in that order). Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

The title comes from the Florida trial judge’s description of this picture’s subject, Ted Bundy. Apt as it is, it’s a strange starting point for the approach taken to the telling of his tale. From the perspective of his long-term girlfriend, Bundy comes across less as a vicious murderer and more as a crappy boyfriend, stalker-y but otherwise just a garden variety jerk. Zac Efron looks and plays the part well. Mildly amusing

Review – Our House

You can tell you came from the 80s if you immediately want to follow the title with “in the middle of our street.” And you can tell you’re an indie-film-loving hipster if you like this movie. The story begins with a Tesla-esque attempt to invent wireless household current. Sadly for our already-sad orphans, the experiment 1. doesn’t light lightbulbs and 2. awakens evil spirits in their house. The cast isn’t bad, but they’re wasted on a lackluster script. See if desperate

Review – The Good Dinosaur

This is one of the most beautiful animation showreels I’ve ever seen. The visuals – from the landscapes down to the tiny details – are remarkable feats of CGI. Unfortunately the story and characters are by no means the equal of the images. The classic Disney plot elements – dead parent, hero’s journey, and so on – are all here. They just aren’t used to any particular effect other than loosely stringing together a series of elaborately-constructed scenes. Mildly amusing

Review – The Show

Giancarlo Esposito directs and acts in this heavy-handed condemnation of reality show excesses. After Bachelor-esque contest ends with an unexpected on-air homicide, the show’s star and producer find themselves enthralled by the ratings potential of a snuff series featuring live broadcasts of increasingly elaborate suicides. Before the show reaches its final episode, it’s plumbing the depths of pathos and gore. Mildly amusing

Review – Us

Jordan Peele serves up a delightfully creepy tale of a family that finds itself face to face with doppelgängers seeking to replace them. It isn’t easy to pack intelligent, stylish and violent into a single movie, but this one does the trick. Worth seeing

Review – Ma

Ugh, what a depressing movie. Octavia Spencer plays a woman with no end of icky problems. She has a tragic backstory of high school bullying and abuse. In turn she inflicts Munchausen by proxy on her daughter and goes full-on psycho with some of the neighbor kids. Plus she works at a vet’s office, so we’re stuck for the whole picture wondering what horrible torment is going to be inflicted on animals. I admired the unflinching brutality of the story, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch. See if desperate

Review – Godzilla: King of the Monsters

At this point I’m kinda losing track of what Godzilla movie is a sequel to what other Godzilla movie. Based on the casting, I’m guessing this is a follow-up to the 2014 version. If so, it’s everything the first one was only more so. More monsters. More confusing, plot-stretching nonsense. A little longer. A little more expensive. But for the most part, if you liked the previous one then you’ll probably get a kick out of this one too. Mildly amusing

Review – Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

After re-inventing Sleeping Beauty in the first one, this one didn’t have as obvious a plot direction. So it piles on the special effects and serves them up with familiar pro-nature, pro-fairy themes. The battle at the end drags out far too long, but otherwise this is on par with its predecessor. Mildly amusing

Review – The Secret Life of Pets 2

Animated animals face mild levels of peril, round two. See if desperate

Review – The Death of Stalin

Armando Iannucci brings his farcical fakeumentary style of political satire to bear on the title event. Thus serious-as-a-heart-attack characters such as Khrushchev and Beria find themselves transformed into Altman-esque, bungling bureaucrats. The effect is surprisingly entertaining. There’s just enough absurd, actual history here to make the broad comedy of the fictional parts work. Worth seeing

Review – Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

Not with a bang. The special effects are the star of this final chapter in the Star Wars saga, which is fitting enough. But instead of supporting them with a straightforward space opera plot, J.J. Abrams can’t resist the temptation to employ his hallmark blend of grandiosity and moral ambiguity. If you told me back in 1977 that this is how it would end, my 11-year-old self would have been disappointed. As my 54-year-old self is now. Mildly amusing

Review – Bird Box

Once again humanity finds itself assailed by alien invaders with a bizarrely specific MO. In A Quiet Place the risk was making sounds of any kind, and here laying eyes on the mysterious threat spells instant doom. Sandra Bullock stars as a hapless, blindfolded woman trying to shepherd her kids through a dangerous world of monsters and vicious survivalists. See if desperate

Review – The Curse of La Llorona

This is by far my favorite entry in the Conjuring universe, at least in part because I had no idea until midway through that it was even intended to be part of the set. No Warrens. Only a brief, irrelevant glimpse of Annabelle. Instead of the series standbys, we get a genuinely scary antagonist from Mexican folklore. A social worker and single mom (Linda Cardellini) finds herself pitted against the infamous child-snatching ghost. Worth seeing

Review – Body Bags

This experience taught me a couple of things about my memory. First, I thought I’d already reviewed this movie long ago. I must have seen it before I started writing reviews, because this was definitely a re-watch. And second, I recalled only the middle entry in this three-story set. That’s because the memorable one was at least creative, however strange. The first and third were trips along well-travelled roads. John Carpenter steps out from behind the camera to play the host for the bracket. Mildly amusing

Review – Happy Death Day 2U

Once again sorority sister Tree Gelbman (once again ably played by Jessica Rothe) finds herself stuck in a time loop with a homicidal maniac in a dumb-looking baby mask. At least this time someone else is the killer’s target, and some science nerds may have a time machine solution to the problem. Mildly amusing

Review – Happy Death Day

Poor Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe). She’s stuck in a Groundhog Day cycle of endless repetition, with the added bonus that she’s murdered by a stalker right before every reset. Like Bill Murray’s character in the non-homicidal version, through slow repetition she gradually learns to be a less awful person and eventually figures out who keeps killing her over and over. Occasionally the story takes an amusing turn, but for the most part it’s familiar territory. Mildly amusing

Review – X-Men: Dark Phoenix

This entry in the series puts an end to Fox’s X-Men franchise. The studio drove at least some of the nails into the coffin by under-funding the production after poorer-than-expected box office for the previous entry. Plus – horror of horrors! – they dared to leave Wolverine out of it and focus on a female protagonist. Killing off one of the popular characters probably didn’t help, either. I watched this twice (once on an airplane and then again when I could actually pay attention to it), and both times my reaction was that this was neither as bad as the fan boys seemed to think nor as good as some of the other entries in the set. Mildly amusing

Review – The Darkness

During a trip to the Grand Canyon, a family picks up more than just standard souvenirs when the son strays into the wrong cave and ends up possessed by an evil spirit. When they get home, at first the lad’s strange behavior gets blamed on his autism. But when the physical manifestations begin, it’s off to the predictable races. Mildly amusing

Review – Mobsters

Nearly two decades before Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, this is what star-studded, empty-headed mobster movies looked like. A quartet of faces that would have been familiar to audiences in 1991 (though not so much now) play real life gangsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel. The resulting parade of male bonding and violence would have impressed audiences in its theatrical release, though now it’s more of a “who the heck is that?” experience. Mildly amusing

Review – Angel Has Fallen

After twice saving the President from attacks, Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) finds himself in assassins’ crosshairs. Sure, they’re still trying to kill the Commander in Chief. But this time around they frame the hero as a co-conspirator. So most of this story is taken up with his efforts to evade capture, prove his innocence and thwart the bad guys. The result is just as predictable as it sounds. Mildly amusing

Review – Hellboy (2019)

I just don’t see why this character needed a reboot. The first Hellboy adaptation wasn’t my favorite movie of all time. It wasn’t even my favorite Guillermo del Toro movie. But it was reasonably entertaining. Ron Perlman in particular seemed born to play the lead. And though there isn’t anything especially wrong with this version, it simply seems unnecessary. It’s the cinematic equivalent of how we keep building new houses even though we already have plenty of great old houses standing vacant. Mildly amusing

Review – The Conjuring 2

When I first learned that they were making a movie out of the exploits of Ed and Lorraine Warren, I was afraid that it would turn out to be a petulant defense of the couple’s discredited exorcism operation. They wisely bypassed the issue in the first one and unwisely took it up here. This outing finds the Warrens journeying to London to do battle with an evil presence bedeviling a single mom and her kids. The plot is primarily driven by the mystery surrounding the nature of the antagonist. It’s a ghost. It’s a demon pretending to be a ghost. It’s a child pretending to be a demon pretending to be a ghost. It’s a … well, by the end I didn’t care what it was as long as it was over. See if desperate

Review – 47 Meters Down: Uncaged

The first 47 Meters Down had a couple of things going for it: a simple story and a handful of good jump scares. This one can’t even do that much. The plot in particular is an elaborate mess about teenage girls getting trapped in an underwater cave network infested with blind cave sharks. The closest I came to being entertained by this was when I somehow managed to accidentally turn on the audio descriptions for visually atypical audience members. Hearing a calm voice recounting what I was watching at least confirmed that the dreadfulness wasn’t an optical illusion. See if desperate

Review – Annabelle Comes Home

Pre-teen kids and a basement full of evil artifacts are automatically a bad combination. Actually keeping a basement full of anything dangerous isn’t the height of wisdom if you have an inquisitive child. And or course adding a babysitter to the mix just makes things worse. From the perspective of the evil doll locked up in the Warrens’ collection, this is the opportunity of a supernatural lifetime. See if desperate

Review – Ralph Breaks the Internet

Even the preview openly recognizes that Ralph Wrecks the Internet would have been a better title. But we’ve gotta stick with the trendy language the kids are all using, right? This time around our hero’s video game has become antiquated, lost audience and is in danger of being unplugged and replaced. So Ralph and friends take to the information superhighway to generate some retro buzz. Of course things get out of control, and of course there’s a sappy ending solution to the whole mess. Mildly amusing

Review – Wreck It Ralph

The premise is the star of the show here. Of course Disney did the whole what-if-video-game-characters-were-real-people with Tron decades ago. But the extra wrinkle here is fun: what if the bad guy got tired of being the bad guy? Sadly, after the question gets asked, the answer is mostly formulaic silliness. Mildly amusing

Review – Small Foot

Animators use a secret colony of bigfoots (bigfeet?) to teach ham-handed lessons about friendship, xenophobia, mindless adherence to tradition, the manipulative nature of social media, and maybe even other topics they got to after I lost interest. The technical quality is good but not great, and the storytelling is twee without being charming. Mildly amusing

Review – Puss in Boots

The title character was my favorite part of the Shrek series. So I was greatly disappointed that his solo effort turned out to be so bad. The plot – to the extent that there even is one – is meandering and confusing. And Puss himself manages to seem obnoxious rather than his previous charming self. See if desperate

Review – The Incredibles 2

This one’s a lot like the first round, only now Helen’s the super hero while Bob’s stuck at home with the kids. And the antagonist seems more dangerous this time around. Otherwise if you liked the first one then this one’s unlikely to disappoint. Mildly amusing

Review – Train to Busan

Despite hearing good things about this movie, I avoided it for a long time due to skepticism about any zombie story ever meriting the trouble of reading subtitles. But I’m glad I took a chance on it. A variety of characters get stuck on a train during the zombie apocalypse. Despite the trapped-with-zombies clichés, the story keeps moving nicely. And the budget’s big enough to supply good production values. Worth seeing

Review – Ghost Stories (2020)

Despite the unimaginative title, this quartet of supernatural tales from India is quite good. Though naturally some are better than others, the set is stylish as well as spooky. Mildly amusing

Review – Operation Finale

The story of Aldoph Eichmann’s trial has been told several times, including fact-based and highly fictionalized versions. But oddly there’s been less focus on the dramatic events surrounding his capture in Argentina by Mossad agents. This movie remedies the shortage to good effect, telling the dramatic story with all its highs and lows. Mildly amusing

Review – Dog Soldiers

This is an extended siege between obnoxious British soldiers inside a house and werewolves trying to get in and eat them. The result is noisy, occasionally gory but otherwise pointless. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Report

“Torture” has been cleverly redacted from the middle of the title, though I’m disinclined to figure out how to reproduce the effect in HTML. This is the tale of Senate staffer Daniel Jones, who worked to uncover, document and halt the CIA’s use of torture on detainees. Understandably, it’s both fascinating and depressing. Mildly amusing

Review – Doom: Annihilation

Because there were so many unanswered questions from the first Doom movie. And apparently one of those questions was “could this crap be any dumber?” Yes. Yes it could. See if desperate

Review – Jacob’s Ladder (2019)

I love seeing Black actors being given a chance to play the leads in horror movies rather than just the first people the slasher kills when he runs out of women who’ve had sex. But there was genuinely no point to remaking Jacob’s Ladder. The original is a visually-stunning classic. This is a run-of-the-mill mid-budget horror movie. It would have been much better off doing something original rather than borrowing from a better picture. See if desperate

Review – Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

Dracula is exhausted from his stressful job running a hotel, so his friends and family persuade him to take a cruise. Little do they know that an old enemy lies in wait. By the end the story turns downright Lovecraftian, which is well outside the range of Adam Sandler and his usual circle of collaborators. See if desperate

Review – 93 Days

Fans of movies like Outbreak and Contagion need to watch this. It’s a much more realistic picture of what a deadly epidemic looks like. US audiences who think Ebola fever is limited to grass hut villages could also use this reminder that Lagos is a huge city that’s every bit as modern as its North American counterparts. Though this is nobody’s idea of cheerful, it’s a well-assembled and accurate depiction of one of the worst possible situations. Worth seeing