Movie Reviews

Like too many modern movies, there are so many characters in the fantastic and highly entertaining Chinese action film Code of the Assassins (also known as Song of the Assassins, or, if you prefer Chinese, Qing mian Xiuluo) that it's best if you just assume you'll...

Few British spy thrillers have a more stellar reputation than the campy and often existential TV series The Avengers, starring Patrick Macnee as superspy John Steed and a number of different female leads as his variously amateur or equally skilled professional...

Disney owns both Marvel and Star Wars, two ginormous franchises that collectively have significantly influenced our culture in countless ways. But the company has never really experimented with a cross-over, and with good reason; they're different universes. Right?...

Four years ago the Chinese film industry released one of its first big budget sci-fi thrillers, The Wandering Earth, to great acclaim and strong global box office results. When I reviewed it back in 2019, I found it interesting and exciting, partially because of its...

It was just a few years after the end of World War II and color had only just arrived in the science fiction genre a few years earlier with the science-heavy Destination Moon (1950). Director and production genius William Cameron Menzies was engrossed by a short...

The 2001 sci-fi film A.I. - Artificial Intelligence explores a mythic and timeless tale of a mechanical child that joins a family beset by a terrible tragedy. Haley Joel Osment is "David", a startlingly realistic robot who seeks to assuage the pain of his human...

Most of us know a self-proclaimed "foodie" who is not just excited about food, preparation, authenticity, and ingredients but is also impressed with their own knowledge and quick to share their insights with everyone else. We say "this is a nice wine" but they say...

Hear the name "Pinocchio" and you undoubtedly think about the 1940 Disney version, with Pleasure Island and our hero trying to avoid turning into a jackass as a consequence of his selfish behaviors. The original story, however, was published back in 1881 by Carlo...

The 2018 film Black Panther was a tremendous success, far beyond what people expected. The film introduced most filmgoers to Wakanda, a technologically advanced nation hidden in Africa, and created a star out of Chadwick Boseman, who played T'Challa, King of Wakanda,...

One of the tools in a filmmaker's kit is perspective. While almost all shots are square, straight-on, and eye-level, there's a lot that can be conveyed by camera height (think of the wonderful down shot at the opening of North by Northwest) or by using a distorting or...

A film version of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap? It's genius! If only film director Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody) hadn't signed a contract with The Dame (Shirley Henderson) that details filming cannot commence until six months after the end of the play's theatrical...

A few of us humans have a problem, and it's apparently been around for thousands of years: When aliens throughout the galaxy are convicted of the most heinous of crimes, their fate is to be locked in a human brain until that human dies, simultaneously killing the...

There aren't many films with a simpler premise than the new thriller Fall: Two young women climb to the top of an abandoned TV antenna in the desert and get stuck on the top, with no way down. The TV antenna in question is real, it's the 2,000-ft "B67" TV Tower in the...

Alex (Katreeva Phillips) has been pulled homeward from her busy big city life as an investigative journalist: Her estranged father has died. She's long since distanced herself from her family, however, from the moment she drove away from their Texas home with nary a...

Haywood Hollywood Horses has been a mainstay of the horse wrangling business for decades and the Haywood family can trace its ancestry back to the original jockey on the famous Muybridge/Stanford horse of the first moving picture in history. When a freak accident...

Read the front page of any newspaper and it's easy to wonder whether truth and justice are part of the legal system, whether you're in the United States, Nigeria, Pakistan, or Japan. The Japanese film Sandome no satsujin (The Third Murder) is a Japanese courtroom...

An abandoned ghost town in the middle of nowhere, Texas? Sweet! Charismatic young entrepreneur Mark (Andrew C. Fisher) convinces his wife Jenna (Mandy Lee Rubio) that it's the investment opportunity of a lifetime. They buy it, apparently sight unseen. The problem is...

In the 1880s France was simmering with discontent regarding workers rights, along with endless losses from fighting in the French colonies. More importantly, the 1889 World's Fair was just a few years away and the French government sought an iconic monument. Gustave...

Every Halloween horror entrepreneurs take over houses, warehouses, and empty strip malls to turn them into various Tours of Terror; poorly lit spaces with lots of gruesome props and hometown actors pretending to be villains or victims. It's a logical extension of our...

Humanity has been working towards balancing male and female energy since time immemorial. Is true equality what we seek, or is a mutual respect that acknowledges the differences in gender a better goal? The challenge is that people are flawed and just as often...

The original 1986 film Top Gun enjoyed wide success with its pedestrian coming-of-age story significantly enhanced by the testosterone-fueled setting of the US Navy's Top Gun aviation school. The film revolved around hotshot pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell (Tom...