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