Movie Reviews

The original 1971 Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory was easily one of the best family films of its era with the earnest Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) winner of the Golden Ticket and a lot more and a wonderful Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, the eccentric owner of...

I've been a fan of the Gojira (Godzilla) movies since the release of the very first of the series back in 1954. Toho Studios had a surprise hit on its hands with the release of the first film and consequently pivoted from a thoughtful and introspective post-war angst...

Like many big cities, Seoul, South Korea, is dotted with enormous apartment complexes, buildings that rise ten or more stories into the sky and house hundreds of families. For many Koreans, these apartments aren't a path to homeownership, they are the home they seek...

When the TV series Ms. Marvel premiered in 2022, a lot of traditional Marvel Cinematic Universe fans were surprised and delighted to find that the protagonist, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), was of Indian descent and lived in a family that was wrestling with balancing...

Alas, poor Nessie! For almost a hundred years, the poor misunderstood dinosaur has been lurking deep in Loch Ness, in the cold northern reaches of Scotland. First reported in 1933, it has become one of the more famous cryptids in modern mythology, with various...

Whether the excellent Train to Busan reminded Asian filmmakers of the spine-tingling fun and fear of zombies, or just caused every other filmmaker to try and emulate director Sang-ho Yeon's hit horror export, there are a lot more zombies in Korea, China, and elsewhere...

John (Byron Mann) is a handsome, self-confident man of action who finds himself in a hotel bar, trying to pick up the beautiful Jane (Helena Mattsson). To get her attention he hands her the keys to his Lamborghini, insisting that it's now her car, not his, which she...

If you're a naysayer who believes that it's only Hollywood that can produce big-budget action nonsense, you'll be surprised by Wolf Pack (Lang qun). It's jam-packed with exciting stunts and action sequences that are barely tied together with a rather banal plot. The...

One of the most common tropes in horror movies is that a group of young, likable characters are going to find themselves in in a dangerous and scary situation. Camping, a cabin in the woods, a boat, a trip to an exotic locale, all revolve around the likeability of the...

It's the near future and most of the major powers are working together to expand the exploration and exploitation of space, including an international station orbiting the moon. South Korea has decided to go its own path, however, pulling its top scientists back home...

Some films beg you to take them seriously. People aren't heading to see Oppenheimer because of Cillian Murphy's comic timing and pratfalls. But we filmgoers have proven again and again that comic mayhem stories, particularly those with great visual effects, are a...

I visited Disneyland dozens of times while growing up in Southern California. It was the #1 destination for our visitors, school trips, and even my high school marching band. While the park has grown and evolved over the years, two rides at the amusement park have...

There's a certain vibe that seems to be the foundation of most all Asian martial arts movies. They're set in an unspecified historic era where there are no guns and no electricity and it's generally a sullen martial arts hero stepping up to protect an innocent peasant...

The history of humanity has been all too intertwined with us inventing bigger and more efficient ways to kill each other. Spears beget bows and arrows, gunpowder begets cannonballs and artillery, along with rifles and pistols. Knives became swords, and little bombs...

Hurricanes. The bane of everyone's existence in Louisiana, almost as annoying as the omnipresent alligators. The weather's awful and a hurricane's about to flood the tiny town of Lutree. As luck would have it, there's a prison bus passing by town with five...

I subscribed to MoviePass when it first showed up and found it a fantastic deal. For $35 I could literally go see up to 30 movies each month. Catch one each week and it was paying for itself! I wrote about it back in 2014 in glowing terms: MoviePass, A Film Lover's...

Mr. Phelps (Peter Graves) might be long since past his prime as the head of 1960s TV hit "Mission: Impossible" but the basic concept of a secret team surreptitiously funded by the government and tasked with the missions that no other agency could accomplish remains....

A while back I reviewed the wonderful film Shin Godzilla, a very modern take on the popular mythological monster who has been alternatively destroying and saving Tokyo for almost 70 years. What made the film so appealing was that the production team managed to blend...

Storytellers have been fascinated with the idea of artificial beings for centuries, from the animated statues of the golem mythology to the robot domestic partners of The Stepford Wives and the "more human than human" replicants of Blade Runner. The more modern spin...

Imagine a film that's a mashup of Scanners, Memento, and Inception, where things are endlessly unwrapped to be shown as other than what you - and the protagonist - thinks is going on. Those are the main inspirations for the twisty, entertaining sci-fi thriller...

There's a lot going on in the 1947 French noir thriller Quai des Orfèvres (literally "Headquarters"), an early police procedural that has plenty of plot twists and tough, gritty elements to keep viewers glued to the film. It also has a great, if not entirely...