Review – Darkest Hour

After a long career of putting his personal touches on familiar characters, Gary Oldman finally got his Oscar for this one. I freely concede the possibility that someone who likes Winston Churchill more than I do would have found this more entertaining than I did. Mildly amusing

Review – All the Way

Bryan Cranston does a solid job playing Lyndon Johnson, not that mastering a walking wad of clichés like LBJ is exactly the height of the thespian craft. And that’s a shame, because the politics and emotions surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act called out for an exploration of Johnson’s nuances rather than his cartoonish bombast. With such a stellar cast, a better movie might have been made. Mildly amusing

Review – The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

The Conjuring series seems to be paralleling the zeitgeist of the Republican Party. When the first one came out in 2013, its standard horror movie approach coincided with the final days of the GOP as a mainstream political party. By the time the second one rolled around in 2016, movie and party both had taken a hard turn into the realm of fanatical self-righteousness. And now in 2021 we’ve got a Qanon-esque demonic conspiracy that’s equal parts elaborate, nonsensical and pointless. The Warrens even use their flim-flam as a legal argument, which in the real world was soundly and justly rejected by the court. How much more Trumpian can they get? I like a good demonic possession as much as the next horror movie fan, but this series is taking things to places where it just isn’t fun anymore. See if desperate

Review – Thunder Force

For the most part we’ve got yet another quirky-dumb Melissa McCarthy comedy, this time about a pair of mis-matched best friends who gain superpowers and battle villains who are trying to take over Chicago. But a couple of points stood out. I was genuinely awestruck that they’d ask Octavia Spencer to play a Black woman whose super power was invisibility and then show absolutely no self-awareness about it. And I had to check the trivia notes to find out how they faked the scenes where characters eat raw chicken just so I could sleep at night. See if desperate

Review – Blood Vessel

There’s the tiniest germ of a good concept here: among the art treasures looted by the Nazis was a pair of ornate coffins containing vampires. Sadly, all the potential that had to weave into an entertaining story is squandered by the decision to stash them in the cargo hold of a deserted ship that happens to end up boarded by the occupants of a life raft. Predictably enough, this hodgepodge of Allied soldiers and sailors spend more time bickering with each other than they devote to doing anything practical to save their own lives. Even the title is a dumb pun. See if desperate

Review – Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula

I’m not sure what – if any – actual connection this South Korean zombie apocalypse picture has with Train to Busan other than name and theme. But if it’s a follow-up, it’s a worthy one. It’s sort of a Dawn of the Dead to the first one’s Night of the Living Dead, with the story starting four years after the start of the zombie plague and the remaining population of South Korea in full survival mode. Action and gore abounds as a small group of smugglers try to get a truck full of American money past a vicious gang and a few million zombies. The plot takes some intriguing twists, which adds nicely to the well-crafted scares and chase scenes. Worth seeing

Review – For We Are Many

Hard to dispute the title’s thesis, as 13 bad little stories are definitely “many.” And they aren’t all bad. But most of them are amateurish, silly, even dull. The subject at hand is demons, and the promo paragraph’s promise of an international team effort turns out to be mostly from the UK and USA. See if desperate