The one where three teenage burglars (Suburgatory’s Jane Levy among them) decide to break into a blind man’s (“Avatar” villain and professional badass Stephen Lang) house. And if robbing a blind man sounds bad on paper, just wait until you see the secrets this particular blind man is hiding… What Works: First-time film director Fede Alvarez must have…
Category: Mindless Mondays
Movie Review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Just…enough What Works: For me, there is just not much to recommend here. I guess the few brief flashes of fun are mostly found on Eva Green’s cartoon campy face (which you’ve now seen in several other fantasies) and a handful of cool visuals, but mostly this is a huge wash. What Doesn’t: Other critics are saying…
Reviews: Creative Control, The Invitation, High Rise, Cop Car, Green Room
Several indie-thrillers have slipped through the cracks this year, until now… Cop Car…Technically, this film came out in 2015 but it’s theaterical release is a small fraction of the people who’ll watch this at home and perhaps years later. It’s about two boys who run away from home only to stumble upon a (seemingly) abandoned cop…
Quick Reviews: The Mermaid, The Wave, The Last Man on the Moon, Everybody Wants Some
Every once and a while, a movie slips through the cracks, and that’s when it’s time for “quick reviews”… Everybody Wants Some…Richard Linklater (“Boyhood,” “Before” trilogy, “Dazed and Confused” of which this movie is a spiritual sequel to) has built a career out of the tricky feat of making naturalistic indies that are actually enjoyable…
Please Watch My Short Film “Falling Towers”
First completed short film under the Alabama Liberal YouTube Channel (subscribe please), Playlist One Man Movies, movies made by one person, filmed in one day, from idea to finished film in one week, on a budget of no more than one dollar… Please watch, like, and comment
Book Review: the Terrific “Movie Freak”
Great books about movies are rare, and books that manage to truly capture the feeling movies can give you (like Patton Oswalt’s “Silver Screen Fiend”) are even rarer. Yet Owen Gleiberman’s “Movie Freak” may be the best book about movies I’ve ever read, and is the best book ever written about the lure of films, as evidenced from the book’s…
Book Reviews: “The Girls,” “Barkskins,” and “Lily and the Octopus”
It may seem like a cop-out to praise all three of these very different books, but they take wildly divergent paths to being equally terrific… Barkskins by Annie Proulx…A big, bold, ambitious book that practically has “Great Novel” stamped on the book cover. It’s about two “barkskins” (tree cutters) who settle in New France and…
“Hell or High Water” Is the Perfect Film to End the Summer
In a season of big-budget flops, “Hell or High Water” is the most purely enjoyable movie of the Summer. On a budget less than one-tenth that of “Suicide Squad,” “Independence Day 2,” and various other trash spectacles promising thrills but leaving me with a numb feeling—like I’d just watched someone else have the time of their…
Movie Review: “Don’t Think Twice” Perhaps the Best Comedy About Comedy
As someone who’s on the peripheral edge of being a comedian, I’ve always sought-out films, TV shows, books, or anything that can give us a peek behind the The Order of the Clowns, an exclusive unisex fraternity that has been breached in films from the biopic “Lenny” to Seinfeld’s documentary “Comedian” to Marc Maron’s podcast…
Movie Review: Can “Jason Bourne” Get Beyond Himself?
A few years back, when Jeremy Renner tried his hand as a Bourne-replacement in “The Bourne Legacy” I wrote an article about just how damn similar all the Bourne movies were—same basic plot, American character-actor CIA baddie, more internatonal-character actor rival assassin, outlandish car chase through a city towards the end with more hand-to-hand fights…
Movie Review: Kubo and the Two Strings
A beautifully-animated movie that will probably appeal more to adults than kids. What Works: The visual style is the main draw here, and it is enhanced by an actual theater experience, getting to see all the incredibly nuanced visual details. From the movie’s opening moments—an immense ocean wave sweeping over the audience—it lulls you into a…
Movie Review: Sausage Party
It’s so tough to review a movie that does everything exactly right until the ending, and then blows it. Do you grade the 95% of the movie you really loved or the last 5% you rememebered as the last thing you saw before leaving the theater? What Works: Seth Rogen wanted to make a movie about the stupidity…
Movie Review: “Nerve” Just Might Make You Feel Young Again
Sure, sure, sure, maaaaaybe it would have been nice to post this review back when the movie was in theaters. If you’re into that sort of thing, but why be so predictable as all that? What Works: The movie is about a virtual game of “Dare” (there’s very little truth) where people offer you money to…