Movie Reviews

The (not pejoratively) dry, black-humored Lucky Grandma is quite a charmer, thanks largely to veteran actor Tsai Chin, whose illustrious career has spanned six decades. Once a Bond Girl in You Only Live Twice (and coming back for 2006’s Casino Royale, too!), Lucky Grandma brings her back to the action arena… sort of. Don’t be […]

Why do we, as a culture, indulge the self-important need to know so much about the wealthy and the powerful? Do we really respect them for “being just like us” when the trash behind their carefully-curated public image is revealed? Are we attracted to the money, the lifestyles, the cars, the houses, the glitz and […]

NOTE: This film lives and dies by its twists and surprises. In order to keep things enjoyable, I refuse to print spoilers for this one, so please forgive the vagueness. This is a first for me: a murdering Satanic cult movie! Of course, there’s way more to We Summon the Darkness than it being beholden […]

Behind You is a curiously odd low budget experiment. This isn’t to say it’s a bad movie, so don’t take that the wrong way. On the contrary, writers/directors Andrew Mecham and Matthew Whedon have made an admirable and frightening sibling of James Wan’s The Conjuring, confining a family to a sprawling house and filling the movie […]

To be honest, the overly-colorful, incessantly-happy world of Trolls wasn’t something I was looking forward to visiting again. My review of the first film went out unstarred – not to be taken as “zero stars” – because of how at odds the film was with its morals and methods, but the film itself was decidedly not bad. Its […]

Let’s get it right out of the way: yes, James vs. His Future Self is going to get compared to the 2012 Rian Johnson classic, Looper. There’s no two ways around it: both involve a man traveling to the past and battling his younger self in hopes of changing the future, but that’s where the […]