Review – The Equalizer (2014)

The folks who made this know the revenge movie formula and are good at sticking to it. Denzel Washington is a proven success playing the everyday Joe who falls back on his government assassin past when a friend is threatened. It’s emotionally satisfying to see him keep the upper hand pretty much the whole time, and it doesn’t exactly hurt that the villains are sex-trafficking Russian mobsters. Mildly amusing

Review – Everybody Wins

Everybody should have won, given the reputations of the director, writer and cast. But nobody brings their A game. Arthur Miller’s script is particularly noteworthy for its awfulness. The dialogue left me wondering if the famous playwright had heard an actual conversation between human beings anytime since maybe the mid 1950s. I don’t even know where to begin with the plot and characters. It’s like he has no idea how to function in a medium that isn’t confined to a single location on a stage. And the end, well, wow. I won’t spoil it for you because if you sit through this whole thing the end will spoil itself. See if desperate

Review – The Menu

Clever and cruel by turns, this stylish production manages to eerily evade its own apparent purpose. As the chef of an ultra-exclusive restaurant sets about murdering his foodie clientele, a woman who ended up at the dinner by mistake struggles to prove that she’s not one of the victim group’s snobbish ilk. And therein lies the difficulty. Production values cost money, and a star-studded cast helps ensure return on investment. As a result, however, the movie becomes an example of the same superficial obsession with wealth that’s being slammed by the story. It’s still fun to watch, it’s just too morally ambiguous to do as much moralizing as it does. Mildly amusing

Review – Joker: Folie a Deux

If you let Charles Manson rewrite Chicago and then stirred in just enough comic book allusions to vaguely connect it to the DCEU, this is what you’d get. Surreal musical meets grimly violent crime drama meets art house message piece meets big budget Hollywood fiasco. If you want the live, at-home Joker 2 experience, take a messy shit on a paper plate and stare at it for two hours. At least that version won’t involve as much singing. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Charlie Says

In my review of a screen adaptation of Lizzie Borden’s story, I expressed the wish that someone would make a version of her tale in which she isn’t actually the killer. My aspiration for Manson murder movies is the opposite: just once I’d like to see the story told as if everyone who showed up for the killing spree was in fact guilty as charged (or not charged, in the case of Linda Kassabian). This time around it’s a version that might as well have been written by Leslie Van Houten’s parole hearing lawyers. Beyond that, this is standard fare. Charlie (Matt Smith) acts crazy. The girls fall for it. People die. Years later, a teacher tries to help the imprisoned killers make sense of it all. Mildly amusing

Review – Death on the Nile (1978)

Agatha Christie had a gift for crafting stories with more than one interesting character, which makes her a natural source for ensemble casting like this. Famous faces from the 1970s (and earlier) perform this familiar piece of complicated skullduggery. Mildly amusing

Review – Nightmare Alley (2021)

This remake of an old noir classic gets off to a good start. The protagonist is sympathetic and his story’s fairly interesting while he’s getting his start as a grifter in a carnival sideshow. But when he breaks into the big time, the plot turns stale and the production starts relying heavily on art direction to keep things compelling. To be sure, the sets and costumes are good. They just aren’t quite enough to breathe life into the trite tale of a good man gone bad. See if desperate

Review – H.H. Holmes: Original Evil

Yes boys and girls, if you can download public domain and royalty free video clips and reword a couple of Wikipedia entries, your project can show up on Amazon Prime Video. The result features a lot of silent movie clips that have nothing at all to do with the narrative. It also spends a bizarrely long time covering the crimes of Jack the Ripper before making the obvious point that Holmes couldn’t possibly have committed them. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering about the distinction between a wealthy and powerful content provider that carefully curates its offerings and YouTube except you’re paying for it. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – The Beekeeper

Hollywood finally appears to be getting the revenge movie formula worked out. The elite killing machine protagonist here is set off when his kindly neighbor commits suicide after falling victim to a phishing scam. I’m not inclined to care a lot about mobsters or international cabals. But as far as I’m concerned, criminals who steal from old folks can definitely all get murdered by retired super commandos. Beyond that, this is a comfortably familiar assembly of action sequences. Mildly amusing

Review – Last Call

The subtitle “When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York” somehow implies that this hadn’t happened before and hasn’t happened since, which of course isn’t accurate. Still, the murders committed by Richard Rogers back in the 1990s provide some food for thought about the question of people that law enforcement does and doesn’t care about, particularly the older, closeted victims who might otherwise have been a priority for the police. Especially noteworthy are the efforts of the LGBT+ community to force homophobic authorities to do their jobs. Mildly amusing

Review – Helter Skelter: An American Myth

If you ever wondered how long you could go on about Charles Manson without repeating yourself, part of the answer is officially “not six hours.” This docuseries features interviews with several people connected with the crimes, including some self-serving stuff from two or three former Family members. It also presents some interesting old footage from the era. But beyond that it doesn’t reveal much that isn’t old news to even the most casual student of Manson’s milieu (and probably of no interest to anyone else). Mildly amusing

Review – Becoming Evil: Serial Killers of the Old West

This title caught my attention based on the implication that the documentary would focus on the lesser-known cases of 19th century American serial killers rather than the usual crew of famous outlaws. Imagine my disappointment when I found that the producers defined “serial killer” so loosely that it included the hackneyed cast of robbers and thugs who didn’t scruple at killing their victims. Even the subjects who killed people on impulse rather than for financial gain seemed to have anger management issues rather than a pathological compulsion to commit murder. So what we end up with is yet another tedious rehash of the careers of Billy the Kid, Jesse James and other all-too-familiar Western legends. To make matters worse, several of the experts interviewed for the documentary are spectacularly terrible storytellers. Throughout most of this movie I found myself pitying the hapless tourists who wander into the wrong roadside attraction and lose precious hours of their vacation time listening to these people rattle on. See if desperate

Review – Jonestown: Paradise Lost

Reenactments combine with survivor interviews to play out the last five days in the existence of the People’s Temple. If you know nothing about what happened, you may find this fascinating. But as a viewer who already knows the morbid details of the mass murder and suicide, I’m far more interested in how the situation got to this point. In retrospect it’s so easy to see Jim Jones as a con artist and a psychopath. When interviewing the victims who managed to elude his homicidal fury, it would be far more fascinating to learn about how they fell under his influence to begin with rather than how they managed to scramble away when it all fell apart. Mildly amusing

Review – Solace

I wonder how many times Anthony Hopkins’s agent has heard “Oh goody, another role in a serial killer movie” from his client. This time around he’s an aging psychic working for the FBI to stop a younger psychic (Colin Farrell) from murdering people to spare them the agonies of terminal illness. Hard to tell if this is a message piece about the value of human life, a sermon about the evils of assisted suicide, or merely a scenery chewing competition between hero and villain. Mildly amusing

Review – Luther: The Fallen Sun

The story line here feels more like a season (or at least a multi-episode arc) rather than a stand-alone movie. If nothing else, the hero goes from hero cop to inmate in a blink-and-you-miss-it, poorly-assembled montage of news clips. Obviously at this point Idris Elba has the title character down pat, and Andy Serkis does a workmanlike job as the despicable villain. But once again the bad guy is just a little too despicable. Nothing that could possibly happen to him would be a balanced comeuppance after such a parade of atrocities. It doesn’t help that the whole thing depends on the hackneyed legend of live pay-per-view snuff sites. Mildly amusing

Review – Boston Strangler (2023)

A chunk of this movie is a typical grim, poorly-lit, disgustingly voyeuristic retelling of an all-too-familiar serial killer’s tale. The new twist here is that the protagonists are Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), two newspaper reporters who battled early 60s sexism and the foot-dragging Boston Police Department to help uncover the Strangler’s identity and put a stop to his crimes. So a lot like Zodiac but with women in the lead. Mildly amusing

Review – Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall

As the title implies, this is a documentary about journalist Kim Wall’s murder and dismemberment at the hands of psychotic entrepreneur Peter Madsen. The case drew media attention in 2018 thanks in no small part to the unusual crime scene: a private submarine owned by the killer. For a guy who had a reputation as a brilliant engineer, he was an incredibly stupid criminal, changing his story several times and leaving a ton of evidence for the police to find. But the more interesting part of the story turns out to be about Wall, who was a promising young reporter before she met her unexpected fate. Mildly amusing

Review – Inventing Anna

Shonda Rhymes starts with a magazine article about a run-of-the-mill con artist and magnifies it into a nine-part miniseries, embellishing along the way. In truth, Anna Sorokin (Julia Garner) – better known to the world as Anna Delvey – barely counts as a con artist. She ran a simple fraud scheme on some high profile New York financiers and spent a lot of time in hotels without paying. So she seems less like a gifted grifter and more like a blend of common thief and delusional child. The trouble with stretching her story from an average-length movie to more than nine hours of screen time is the complete absence of sympathetic characters. Anna herself might have made a good anti-hero, but she provokes too many uncomfortable situations; if you’ve ever had a card declined in a restaurant, she’ll treat you to plenty of chances to relive the experience. Reporter Jessica Pressler’s fictional stand-in, Vivian Kent (Anna Chlumsky), might have seemed heroic if her obsessiveness hadn’t driven her to multiple breaches of journalists’ ethics. Everyone else – from bankers to lawyers to the sycophants who attach themselves to Anna because they think she’s rich – manage to seem loathsome just by being themselves. With no characters worth caring about, this just wasn’t engaging enough to justify its running time. Mildly amusing

Review – Frame 313: The JFK Assassination Theories

One thing that mystifies me about Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists is that “the motorcade route was changed to accommodate the assassins” invalidates almost every theory out there. If that’s true, then obviously the Warren Commission were a pack of liars and fools. But then the Mafia, the pro-Castro Cubans, the anti-Castro Cubans, the KGB and several other suspects identified in this documentary couldn’t possibly have been the main perpetrators. That only leaves a plot within the federal government itself so vast that it swiftly becomes purely ridiculous. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg here. I liked the decision to present five different theories, including the Warren version. But none of them make enough sense to be persuasive. Mildly amusing

Review – JFK Revisited

This may be a new visit, but it’s an old address with a familiar cast of characters. Oliver Stone’s latest foray into Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories doesn’t amount to much more than JFK redone as a documentary, so if you’ve seen the famous version then you can skip this one. Even if this stuff is new to you, this might not be the best starting place. Stone and company serve up a disjointed presentation that jumps randomly from point to point. The construction makes this whole mess sound even crazier than it normally would. And that’s a shame, because there are some important points buried under a thick blanket of Dealey Plaza nitpicking and irrelevant speculation. See if desperate