Movie Reviews

There’s a realness to Disney/Pixar’s Soul that rises above its animation, music, and script. It has a life, vibrancy, and urgency which recalls shades of Inside Out, a similar story where two beings must work together to find home, but Soul takes a different path. Here, writer Mike Jones and co-directors/writers Pete Docter and Kemp […]

For a film dramatizing an emotionally-loaded real-life story, All My Life doesn’t manage to share these emotions with its audience and make them a part of it. Instead, we’re given a feel-good, greatest hits-style montage instead of a movie. It has the effect of holding one at arm’s length, as if to save them from […]

In 1993, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused – a film focusing on the tumultuous final day of school in 1976 – showed audiences the chasm between personal struggles and teenage ennui being bridged by mischief, disappointment, love, enlightenment, and a blowout party. Most of the film centered on rising seniors and their want to carve […]

Opening Friday, December 4 in theaters, virtual theaters, digital download, and On Demand. Every now and again, a movie comes along which hits you in a place that makes you feel like you haven’t lived up to your brain’s full potential. A movie that relishes in smarts without being too smart as to be inaccessible. It’s […]

The conceit of Getting to Know You is readily familiar, where strangers pretend to be spouses and genuine feelings get in the way of their playacting. However, writer/director Joan Carr-Wiggin admirably steers it away from the cliché and the used, guiding the film to better places where things don’t work out the way we want […]

What the hell happened to Andrzej Bartkowiak, the legendary cinematographer behind Speed and films helmed by the likes of Sidney Lumet and Joel Schumacher, and director of guilty pleasures Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave? His new film, Dead Reckoning, is an absolute dud, awash in superficial tension and a severe lack of […]