Category: Monday Morning Movie Reviewer

More 2013 releases to dump… Movie 43…This film is widely considered one of the worst of 2013 and it’s easy to see why. It’s an anthology film that somehow gets A-list talent like Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet to show up in a skit about a guy who has a pair of balls on his…

In my cram to review just about every movie that came out in 2013, I present four that slipped through the cracks… Only God Forgives…What It’s About: Ryan Gosling reteams with his Drive director to make a movie about violence and revenge in Thailand. His brother commits a crime, then a rogue cop enforces order…

In my end of the year cram to watch as many movies as I possibly can in a run-up to grading all of them in a couple days, I watched two “cult” comedies I was only barely aware of when they hit theaters early in 2013. [Cult seems to growing into an operative word meaning “only 100…

2013 was widely heralded as a good year for “black” cinema (12 Years a Slave, The Butler, Mandela, Fruitvale Station, and three different black Christmas movies) but how about the indie dramas or documentaries that slipped through the cracks? War Witch…A young girl in a rural Ugandan village is forced to shoot her parents in the first…

Even more “Down the Road” movies. The Bad News: None of these reviews are for the five new Christmas releases that came out today. The Good News: There’s been 15 reviews on the site today, and some of these movies are on Netflix so you don’t even have to leave your house to watch them….

More “down the road” movies nobody much cares about, but it’s Christmas… The Family…What It’s About: Robert DeNiro plays a former mobster who enters witness protection with his family running away to the South of France. However, all is not idyllic when cultures clash, his kids run into different problems fitting in, a grumpy U.S….

Every once and a while, a movie slips through the cracks while in theaters and I catch up with it down the road. Proudly presenting “down the road”… The East…What It’s About: An anti-corporate collective called The East attempts to out corporations doing evil, while Britt Marling works for a private security firm that protects…

I was rooting for this movie, and I can say that it (mostly) delivers. It won’t satisfy all the fans of the original (what would?) and it’s not quite as successful as the Arrested Development reboot (which is underrated in its innovation), but I think most people will be happy that it doesn’t suck. What…

So I thought splitting The Hobbit series into three different movies was a pretty desperate cash-grab on Peter Jackson’s part, and even if that still might turn out to be the case, I’ll admit that I’m glad he did it. For one thing, there’s something downright cozy about snuggling into the theater for an overlong…

If you like Eddie Vedder songs, depressing photography of abandoned steel towns, and really depressing characters getting beaten down by unfortunate circumstances, well…you’ll still probably leave this movie a little bummed out. It’s marketed as a downbeat, realistic rescue film where Christian Bale’s ex-con has to go up into the mountains between Pennsylvania and New Jersey to…

A fairly generic Disney film that packed no surprises or true laughs. What Works: A fairly generic Disney film that packed no surprises or true laughs. [Families will like this.] What Doesn’t: A fairly generic Disney film that packed no surprises or true laughs. [But I didn’t.] What I Would Have Done Differently: The Winter…

Nobody but nobody went to see this movie last weekend, and it’s barely still in theaters now. Why they opened an obvious Spring release during Thanksgiving, I’ll never know…there’s counter-programming and then there’s just stupidity. What Works: It’s Spike Lee’s remake of a South Korean thriller (which I haven’t seen but is supposed to be…