Monthly Archives: February 2017

It’s still as pretty as a toybox, eye candy in the brightest plastic colors and textures. The creators of the second big screen LEGO toys movie stick to the rest of the formula, as well. There’s one original pop song. … Continue reading →

Those “Fifty Shades” dullards are still flirting, fornicating, breaking up and tying up in “Fifty Shades Darker,” a film which promises “darker” but delivers “funnier” — with some of the laughs intentional. It’s a soapy sequel, a drinks-in-the-face/masked ball/helicopter crash/melodramatic … Continue reading →

Paramount has revived “The Ring” cycle with “Rings,” a middling update that has few of the chills and little of the suspense of the J-horror original, or its Hollywood version. The ever-cloudy Pacific Northwest is still home to “the videotape … Continue reading →

The fists fly, the bullets blaze and the mayhem borders on magnificent in “John Wick: Chapter 2,” a sequel that ups the artistic ante even as it boosts the body count of that sleeper hit about the assassin’s assassin played … Continue reading →

There was probably never a time when Gore Verbinski could have made a small scale horror picture about a man trapped in a sanitarium. Think of the glorious excesses of “Mouse Hunt.” And that came before the blank check that the … Continue reading →

It’s early November, 1939. Hitler and the Soviet Union have invaded Poland, Britain and France have honored treaties and World War II has officially begun in Europe. And a mop-topped workman, his teeth clenching a flashlight, his hands and knees … Continue reading →

I have made it a point, for years, to make St. Goodell Day a travel day, having little or no interest in the copyright protected “big game” (the NFL’s version of calling their little sports party “yuuuuge”). So I missed … Continue reading →

Some, but not all of the bright, talented kids who got their big break in the Harry Potter movies have built careers after hanging up their wands. So it’s nice to see that there’s life after Luna Lovegood for Evanna … Continue reading →

The science is sloppy, the sentimentality is sloppier in “The Space Between Us,” a sci-fi romance pairing up agreeable leads in a cut-and-paste script. Sci-fi buffs — imagine “Capricorn One” without the suspense, “Starman” without the pathos, all shot on … Continue reading →

If you’ve ever wondered just how co-dependent the relationship between filmmaker and subject can be in the course of filming a documentary, “Left on Purpose” answers that question. And how. Documentarian Justin Schein harbored a lifelong interest in the Yippies … Continue reading →