Monthly Archives: October 2023

The easiest “tell” when you’re trying to figure out if what you’re watching is a B-movie or something further down the action budget alphabet is in the effects. How do the gunshots look and sound? How realistic is the bloody … Continue reading →

You have never seen Sandra Oh like this. The “Sideways/Killing Eve/The Same Storm” dramatic star has given us a dose of deadpan, here and there. But in “Quiz Lady,” she vamps through a ditzy, unfiltered and comically mercurial turn as … Continue reading →

What a shock to the British system the satire “The Admirable Crichton” must have been when it premiered on stage in 1902. Written by J.M. Barrie, the Scottish novelist and playwright who had himself quite a year in 1902 — … Continue reading →

The Spanish thriller “Viejos,” aka “The Elderly,” is a creepy, doom-laden sci-fi parable that doesn’t quite close the deal, a film of slow-building suspense whose climax lacks the clarity of intent and the level of terror in the performances to … Continue reading →

“Pain Hustlers” is a “true story” inspired drama whose tone and story arc match that of the real “triumph of medicine” to “tragedy invented by Big Pharma” saga of opioids, the “pain” drug that many maintain “broke America.” The film … Continue reading →

Colombian-born Spanish actor Juan Pablo Raba vamps, flashes his teeth, sings a bit and wears the icecream-colored suit of a Central American dictator with panache in “Freelance,” a very dumb John Cena action comedy that Raba pretty much steals. “You … Continue reading →

Characters have a blase, matter-of-fact acceptance of the central premise of the horror video game turned film “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” that a threadbare animatronic band of characters from a long-closed pizza joint have supernaturally come to life. You can … Continue reading →

Yeah, not every movie critic would spend a year on refresher Spanish courses and a week in Panama just to “research” a review on John Cena’s Banana Republic action comedy “Freelance.” A movie about a Central American country going through … Continue reading →

Doolin, Ireland is a village of 300 souls that you pass through on your way to the County Clare’s famed Cliffs of Moher on the stark, windswept and treeless west coast of the country. You might notice Doolin, ponder its … Continue reading →

I’d lost touch with “The Ring” universe, assuming, like most Western filmgoers, that 2017’s failed reboot “Rings” was the end of the hairy horror harpy from the well tale. Silly me. The “cursed video” whose viewers die mysterious deaths within … Continue reading →