O, what benevolent god has finally paired Steve Carell with Tina Fey – two huge, crushable comedy icons, likable and pulchritudinous! Alas, who has written them a vehicle that on the surface seems like a sure thing but in execution, achieves so little with their epic potential? You may be surprised to hear that the [...]

While Hot Tub Time Machine presents itself as a retro-tripping raunchfest like H.O.T.S. meets The Hangover, in actuality it has a lot more of the sort of sweetness that existed in those 80’s teen raunchfests it lampoons. Like Snakes on a Plane, you want to see Hot Tub Time Machine because of its simple titular [...]

Nope, it’s not the car one. Nor is it the bizarre musical version with the similar premise. This is a straight-talking, incredibly violent action-drama about dudes who reclaim artificial organs when the buyer defaults on their payment plan. On the surface, Repo Men is just a gory sci-fi excuse for some close-quarters knife fights (never [...]

I actually kind of blame this movie for crumbling my will to review movies for a record-breaking dry spell. When I saw Youth in Revolt, I was unaware of its original source material; it seems that C.D. Payne’s novel is actually much more adventurous and deviant than just a sweet boy acting like a sociopathic [...]

What? You didn’t hear about this one? It’s 2019, and most of the world is populated by vampires. Sexy, huh? Stephanie Meyer heaven. However, when now the doughy vampires have glazed Monday morning, er, evening stares riding the subway to their tedious accountant jobs, rather than sexy blood-foam raves in underground clubs, you know the [...]

Let’s face it. When the poster of a the movie gives away the ending, you know that romantic comedies have utterly given up even pretending that there is any suspense as to whether our heroes will find love together. Most aficionados of the genre of course could care less, since it’s the journey that makes [...]

I am loath to confess this, but I really did not like this movie. On the one hand, the time seemed to fly by in that I was waiting for the actual story to begin and then what? 40 minutes already? On the other hand, I found everything so melodramatic and capricious that I couldn’t [...]

Writer/director Robert Siegel previously made a dramatic splash with his wonderful screenplay for The Wrestler. With Big Fan, Siegel shows his continued facility for taking a sad sack character who might otherwise be branded as a loser and making him sympathetic, even a little heroic in a quietly desperate way. Patton Oswalt turned in a [...]

With a brief background on Nelson Mandela morphing from political prisoner/terrorist to president of a new South Africa, Invictus then leaps into the real focus of the story: Mandela’s drive to unify his countrymen through the national rugby team (long associated with apartheid) and their push for the World Cup. It’s an inspirational story, a [...]

If this wasn’t a true story, it would seem incredibly pat and manipulative and impossibly rapid.  The Blind Side was based on the book Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, by Michael Lewis, and follows the amazing story of Michael Oher from the underbelly of society to the spotlight.  The story seems rushed, fueling its [...]