Movie Reviews

          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…

My biggest complaint about writer/director/star John Krasinski’s new movie “IF”… is that it’s a movie. What I mean is that Krasinski clearly has some broad ideas for worldbuilding and there are many interesting characters in the mix, but the movie has to rush so much to stay within the “movie” format of a two-hour runtime…

In this era of constant reboots and re-imaginings and the like, “Planet of the Apes” has had a pretty successful run. 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was such a big hit both commercially and critically that pundits were talking about an unprecedented motion-capture-based Oscar nomination for Andy Serkis as lead ape Caesar…

There has been a push in recent years for the Oscars to add an award for stunt work. I’m all for it, sure, give some often-unrecognized professionals their moment in the sun. My guess is …

Since “Challengers” begins practically at the end of its story, I think I’ll begin this review by talking about the movie’s ending. It ends, as we see in early scenes and is …

          After last week’s heavy, serious, ultraviolent “Civil War,” I needed a movie like the lighter, sillier, also ultraviolent “Abigail.” …