The Prodigy is the first true horror release of 2019 (Escape Room was more of a thriller than straight horror), and fans of the genre will be pleased to know that it delivers some solid scares. There have been plenty of movies about creepy children, the one that’s always first to come to mind is The Omen,…
Tag: film review
Serenity – The First Bonkers Film of the Year
It’s difficult to really know what to say about Serenity, but for the record, it’s certainly one of the boldest movies I’ve seen in awhile. It pulls an insane kind of bait-and-switch halfway through, and it’s a move that will excite some and completely repel others. What exactly does that mean? What exactly is it?…
The Kid Who Would Be King – A New Family Classic
We’re in a sort of renaissance of children / family movies lately. Animation has been reigning in that department for several years now, but recently, with the exception of last December’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, it seems to be taking a backseat to genuinely engaging live-action, kid-friendly films. 2019 looks to be continuing this trend,…
Escape Room – A Genuinely Fun Thriller That Completely Faceplants at the Finish Line
A new year means new movies, but the month of January is a notoriously slow time at the theater. Infamously known as the dumping ground of Hollywood, January and February are the two months of the year where movie studios take out the trash, releasing films that they have little faith in during a time…
Mary Poppins Returns – A Delightful Return to Cherry Tree Lane
This holiday season, Disney is continuing their rampage of exploiting audiences’ nostalgia by cranking out sequels and remakes of their beloved classics, and it’s 1964’s timeless Mary Poppins that’s currently up to bat. I’m a harsh judge of Disney’s current film slate, but for all its manipulative wickedness, they’ve somehow managed to release a genuinely…
Roma – The Power of Memory
Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón is one of the greatest visionaries of our time. That’s not opinion at this point, it’s simply a fact. So when he comes out with his first film since 2013’s awards-sweeping Gravity, which was his first film since 2006’s awards-sweeping Children of Men, and he calls it “the most essential movie”…
Mowgli – A Dark Imagining of the Classic Tale
Years ago, motion-capture performance legend Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes) had the idea to create a live-action adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. With his expertise in mo-cap, Serkis gathered an all-star cast to play the animals in the story, and the stage was set for a groundbreaking technical…
Green Book – A Guilt-Free Guide to Racism for White People, By White People
Green Book is being sold as a feel-good road trip movie through the 1960s American south. It seems like the perfect holiday movie for all families; a drama about connecting with others, no matter how different you are, sprinkled with moments of good-natured humor and a lot of heart. Unfortunately, Green Book is a story about American…
The Grinch – “Max! Fetch Me My Sedative!”
Illumination’s The Grinch feels like a movie we’ve seen before. Not in the kind of movie it is or how it goes about its business, it just feels like we got this movie years ago already. How has it not happened until now? Maybe the feeling comes from the whole thing being instantly forgettable. The Grinch isn’t…
“First Man” – The Price of Progress
When it comes to movies about space, you usually end up with a couple of different options. There are the more technical, behind-the-scenes dramas of the specifications surrounding space missions (Hidden Figures), or tales of survival in the harshest environment in existence, combined with majestic imagery of the final frontier (Apollo 13, Gravity). First Man…
