Monthly Archives: July 2023

The Japanese Boy Band brawlers “media franchise” “High & Low” may be the craziest thing you ever drop in on as you travel Around the World with Netflix. It is, in many ways, the classic Japanese “give the people (teen … Continue reading →

“This Happy Breed” is a middling if affectionate domestic melodrama that spun out of the creative fervor of playwright Noël Coward‘s most productive years, the 1920s and ’30s. It was Coward’s attempt at peeking in on the working class he … Continue reading →

An onscreen brawl takes over the movie just before the halfway point and lasts for almost an hour in “Walid,” a Malaysian thriller about child trafficking and the burly teacher who decides to beat his way through all manner of … Continue reading →

The third act, home to the show’s resolution and finale, saves “Theater Camp,” a show that’s lacked anything resembling a “show stopper” up to its last scenes. The script is cleverly conceived to conceal the plot’s “big original musical” from … Continue reading →

“Mr. Car and the Knights Templar” is a Polish mash-up of “Indiana Jones,” “National Treasure” “DaVinci Code” and “The Goonies,” a treasure hunt mystery with clues and ancient artifacts with “the power to change the course of history.” It’s a … Continue reading →

Her unseen interviewer asks questions that bring Lokita to tears. It’s not that what the Belgian immigration counselor asks the teenaged girl from Benin about is painful or troubling. Lokita (Joely Mbundu) is lying, and keeping her story straight — … Continue reading →

One can think one has a handle on all every cheese-making nook and cranny of Europe, and then something like “Operation Napoleon” rolls in and makes you realize “Iceland can be cheesy, too!” “Operation Napoleon” a lumbering B-movie about a … Continue reading →

The second film Neflix has made out of Josh Malerman’s dystopian thriller novel “Bird Box” has two veterans of the viral/zombie thriller genre, the Spanish Pastor brothers (“Carriers”), behind the camera, and not the Emmy winning Danish director Susanne Bier, … Continue reading →

There’s always movie money to be made by pandering to a particular audience, be it comic book and sci-fi fanboys and fangirls, foodies, this under-represented race or that disrespected cult. Back when it was called 20th Century Fox, somebody thought … Continue reading →

“War Pony” is a compelling, wholly-lived-in drama that tracks the dead-end lives of two aimless young males of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska. We follow immature-even-for-19 Bill and tweenage Matho as they navigate their opportunity-deprived … Continue reading →