A great use of a mulligan. After the visually pleasing, but narrative mess that was 2012’s Prometheus, and the continued misses in the video game arena, the Alien franchise has been on life support for years. To be fair, Prometheus turned something of a profit and the critical reception was favorable, but the majority of…

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Once upon a time a director set out to tell his version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. That director had a grand vision of using his unique frantic style of cinematography and a pile of 3-D effects to bring King Arthur, dirt, and a…

Alien: Covenant. New movies in the Alien franchise are anticipated with the same level of excitement and nervousness as the Terminator movies: Both have an unassailable 80’s pedigree and are subject to an unforgiving gauntlet of public scrutiny upon every subsequent release. With Terminator, the studio’s response appears to be to re-hash precisely the same…

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Well, it had to end sometime. Marvel was on amazing streak of great movie after great movie, but nothing goes on forever. Kind of like United States’ good standing in the world, but that’s a discussion for another time. Back in 2014, we all wondered how a movie featuring…

There is a strong body of evidence in Man on Fire (2004) to suggest that the Tripods in War of the Worlds began losing interest in galactic conquest as a result of Dakota Fanning’s perpetual screaming. It was a painful example of lax parenting and a dysfunctional familial structure having an adverse effect on those…

As you might already know, I’m a huge fan of history. Whenever there is a movie about a historical event, I’m in. I did not know that The Lost City of Z was non-fiction, having not read the book, nor did I do any research prior to the screening. All I knew about it was…

In 1999, George Carlin recorded a set called You Are All Diseased, in which he did a segment ranting about the then current obsession with children. Not that that obsession has abated at all over the last two decades, but he specifically went off about parents overloading their children with structure and play dates. After…

To quote myself from my Beauty and the Beast review, “I realize I am not the intended audience for this film.” The difference with Going in Style is that I should be. Just because the average age of its three stars (Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, and Michael Caine) is 82 doesn’t mean that non-octogenarians can’t…