Monthly Archives: May 2022

What a tin-eared foot-fault of a comedy “40-Love” is. Built around ineptly sketched-in characters not saved by the actors playing them, stumbling through scene after illogical and painfully-unfunny-but-meant-to-be-funny scenes, the number of actual laughs it produces you can count on … Continue reading →

Tiffany Haddish and Tia Carrere also star in this Koy-engineered August release. They say Lou Diamond Phillips is also in it. Not getting a “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” indie/working class and funny vibe from this. More upscale and contrived, as in … Continue reading →

Hollywood’s long affair with James A. Michener, the World War II Navy veteran whose “Tales of the South Pacific” launched a Pulitzer-prize winning literary career, began with a sort of proof-of-concept film. Long before the musical “South Pacific,” United Artists, … Continue reading →

If he didn’t learn to play the accordion as prep I’ll be very disappointed in “The Chosen One.” Very disappointed. Roku has this fall release, which is great news. EVERYbody’ll see it. Well, those of us who love free (with … Continue reading →

“In a New York Minute” is a film anthology that tells three loosely-connected stories about the female Chinese-American experience in New York. It’s a melodrama that traffics in diaspora generalizations that aren’t necessarily the most flattering, and whose messaging and … Continue reading →

June 16, it’s your turn to “Go to hell.”

The Mexican “40 Years Young (Cuarentones)” is a midlife crisis romantic dramedy that’s so slow that I had to check to make sure Netflix wasn’t experiencing screen-freeze. Its 81 drab minutes pass by like a long, labored comic death rattle. … Continue reading →

Hard to get a bead on exactly what’s happening in this creepy trailer to a May 17 release. Haunted place? Haunted people? An older woman with Alzheimer’s is hunted by a horror in Herefordshire. Always alliterate.

It was a city remote enough from the rest of the world’s experience or knowledge of Chinese geography that we couldn’t place it on a map. But Wuhan’s name would enter the consciousness in infamy as a global pandemic burst … Continue reading →

Thrillers beyond number have been built on the “throw a bunch of characters together and ‘test’ them” trope. So why not “Escape the Field?” Characters wakes up in a tractless/endless corn patch, with a single sinister scarecrow watching over it. … Continue reading →