Movie Review

If we were to boil Kelly Marie Tran’s character Raya down to her bare essence, it would be this: You can’t lose what you don’t give away. After six years of running from monsters and enemies, she’s bitter and hard, the result of being bitten by betrayal and loss, especially at so young an age. […]

I haven’t published anything since Christmas Day 2020. During November and December, studios send critics all of their awards bait, whether on DVD or digital; my job is to go through all of it and see which one’s worthy of accolades, to separate the wheat from the chaff. Around this time, I’m hit with a […]

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 […]