Movie Reviews

By: Bob Garver If nothing else, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is Disney taking a victory lap for acquiring 20th Century Fox and the Marvel properties it controlled. We got a taste of this last year in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” when the advertising bragged about bringing in Patrick Stewart’s Professor X from the…

By: Bob Garver             It’s usually at the end of the review that I talk about a film’s MPAA rating, but I’ll twist it up for “Twisters.” Or rather, for its 1996 predecessor “Twister” and its all-time terribly-worded rating justification. The film was rated PG-13 for “intense depiction of very…

         The gruesome horror movie “Longlegs” pulled something of an upset at this past weekend’s domestic box office. It wasn’t enough to upset “Despicable Me 4” for the #1 spot, but it did do the best among new releases. Great reviews were seemingly enough to pull the family-unfriendly indie darling into the…

            For a franchise that has been fairly consistent with its style of PG animated humor, the “Despicable Me” movies are kind of all over the place for me. I couldn’t stand the first one, loved the second one, thought the first “Minions” spinoff had its moments, felt the shtick…

“A Quiet Place: Day One” made a grave miscalculation with its advertising. Scenes were filmed with the intention of putting them in the trailers, but not the movie. This way, when people saw the movie, they wouldn’t be able to properly anticipate the surprises and story progression. To that end, the advertising succeeded, I was indeed…

          Watching “The Bikeriders,” the word “inauthentic” kept driving through my mind. For example, I wasn’t buying pretty-boy Austin Butler as a tough biker. There is a planet where Butler can come off as intimidating and that planet is called Arrakis. Here on Earth, he looks like a clean-cut actor making…

Back in 2015, Disney and Pixar introduced us to 11-year-old Riley and the squabbling emotions inside her prepubescent head. To make a long story short, Joy (Amy Poehler) tried to retain dominance over the girl, but Sadness (Phyllis Smith) kept creeping her way in. The struggle led to both emotions getting kicked out of Riley’s…

          I’m not going to go into a lot of depth about the story in “Bad Boys: Ride or Die.” Miami detectives Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett …

“Garfield and Friends,” based on comic strips by Jim Davis, was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. With all due respect to the show’s talented writers and other voice actors, …

         2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” was one of the most critically-lauded action movies not just of its year, not just of its decade, but of all time. I will forever curse “Pitch Perfect 2” for opening the same weekend and doing better at the box office, thus keeping me from reviewing…