Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024)
Opening Birmingham Alabama’s 26th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival [...]
Tag: two stars
Twisters (2024)
Twisters isn’t exactly a sequel to Jan de Bont’s beloved 1996 tornado spectacle, its more of a remake-quel with, again, impressive visual effects and eardrum-rattling sound design placed around the story of a bunch of thrill-seeking hillbilly scientists who are about as deep as the puddle in your driveway. It gives you what you want, […]
House Party (2023)
It’s a new year – 2023. The holiday season has ended, the parties are over, and the guests have all gone home. The bad news is that the new remake of the 90s sleeper hit House Party is not going to keep the party going. This is one of those movies that defines an empty-house January release. […]
Bones and All (2022)
Seven minutes into Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Bones and All, there’s a violent assault to which may scare most people. A teenager sneaks out to a slumber party and, while playing on the floor with another girl, bites the skin off of her index finger. There is screaming, blood, chaos and afterwards she and her father […]
Tower (2016)
The times are sadly appropriate for a documentary like Tower. At a moment in our history when rampant shootings in Orlando Florida, Aurora Colorado and the bombing in Boston are reminding us that domestic terrorism is alive and well, it is important to remember that it is not a new problem. 2016 marks the 50th […]
Snowden (2016)
Where you stand with Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden depends largely on where you sit. If you believe that Edward Snowden was a hero who brought to light a corrupt government that was using post-9/11 paranoia as an excuse to become an omnipresent and all-intrusive Big Brother then the movie will be right up your alley. […]
Suicide Squad (2016)
It may be just the nature of the premise itself, but Suicide Squad feels oddly scummy. There’s a pall of filth and grime that seems to permeate this movie not just from the production design but from the characters themselves. Watching the movie you feel like you’re hanging out with a bunch of prison lifers […]
Nerve (2016)
Nerve is a safe, tepid treatment of a subject that is so current you’d swear the movie was made only yesterday. It’s about our all-consuming obsession with apps and online games that arrives just at the moment when half of the country is mired in ‘Pokémon Go‘ and the other half wishes they’d just put […]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2013)
Do you remember that scene in Crocodile Dundee where Mick sees a TV in his hotel room and tells his companion that he’s only seen television once? He then turns on the set and sees “I Love Lucy” and says “Yup, that’s what I saw.” That’s kind how I feel about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: […]
