A young girl’s inner emotions struggle to cope with major change in Pixar‘s intriguing animated film Inside Out. 11-year-old Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) has lived a bit of a charmed existence up to this point in her young life. She’s popular with all of her friends, she’s a natural hockey player and she has two […]
Olivia Cooke is a fine young actress. I like her. I really do, especially in Bates Motel. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to pick the right movies. In the last year, she appeared in The Signal, The Quiet Ones and Ouija. I didn’t like any of those films. Her acting wasn’t the cause of the problems. […]
They were as synonymous with America as apple pie and baseball. No band in American history has had more songs on the music charts than The Beach Boys. Their upbeat melodies and distinct vocal harmonizing would often mark the dawn of summer for an entire nation. For all of their success, their history had almost […]
Disaster movies are an entirely different breed. In most cases, they are over-the-top special effects showcases where the goal is to see how much destruction they can cram into the running time. Unfortunately, special effects are getting cheaper and more prevalent, so today’s disaster movies show no restraint. San Andreas is such a movie. It […]
A determined L.A. fireman struggles to save his endangered family in the earthquake thriller San Andreas. Just below California’s beautiful coastal cities lies a restless sleeping giant capable of reducing its towering skylines to a hulking mass of twisted wreckage with one fatal blow. Should the giant awake, in the form of a long-overdue earthquake, […]
A talented artificial intelligence expert is called on to evaluate his boss’s latest evolutionary achievement in the riveting sci-fi drama Ex Machina. The promise of advanced artificial intelligence serves as the centerpiece of countless Hollywood films. 1927’s Metropolis captivated audiences with its cautionary tale of a dystopian future ruled by smart machines. Our own tech […]
A discredited former New York Times journalist finds that a potential killer adopted his identity in True Story. That certainly sounds like a recipe for a potentially thrilling drama. The film even starts us off with a highly engaging, deeply disturbing opening sequence. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. This is a big-fish story that […]
Unnecessarily confusing for half of the film.
A struggling middle-aged couple is drawn to the energy of young bohemian lovers in While We’re Young. Every long-term relationship reaches a point when you wake up and realize that your romance has inadvertently evolved into routine. It’s inevitable for most of us. Life is pretty much dictated by routines. We eat. We sleep. We brush […]
Many movie franchises peter out over time to become pale reflections of what made them good at the beginning. I would have laughed if someone ever suggested that Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th series would end up in space or that the titular character of the Leprechaun movies would rap in a bar. […]
A riveting true story about a Jewish refugee’s fight to recover stolen works of art plays out in Woman in Gold. Helen Mirren, sporting a pair of colored contact lenses that entirely transform her look, stars as Maria Altmann, whose well-to-do family was decimated by the Nazis during their occupation of Austria during World War […]
A corporate mercenary has to deal with heavy consequences after a high-profile hit sends him into exile in The Gunman. Terrier (Sean Penn) works as a covert security operative for a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). In more direct terms, he’s a corporate hit man working for a group of international mining companies in the Congo. When […]