One man’s descent into madness keeps us guessing what’s real and what is in his troubled mind. (Not about Chess)
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“Blacklight” Movie Review | A Liam Neeson Comfort Food Flick
If there is a cinematic version of comfort food, Liam Neeson is surely the Chef-not a criticism.
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‘Bite Me’| Horror/Comedy is Kinda Neither, Maybe That’s Not Bad
Whatever its faults may be, the one thing I was worried about was that it would be wacky. It’s not, thank goodness
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‘Exorcist Vengeance’ Horror Review-Speak of the Bloody Devil
Are you up for watching a Charles Bronson Look-Alike, a veteran of-B Movies, kicking some evil butt? Hell, yes!
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Thriller Review: ‘Old Strangers’ | Old Plot, New Context
It’s an all too familiar framework, but the film might be the most current thriller out there, with it’s Covid pandemic era setting.
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‘The King’s Man’ Review | Prequel Loses Some Charm and Fun
This new origin story has some fun, but not the naughty joie de vivre of the other installments. Not as much, anyway.
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Don’t Miss Current Indies!|FLEE -French Dispatch -The Novice
Most of them are not popcorn pics. They are more thoughtful, more artful, and often go unseen by large audiences. Let’s help change that!
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‘West Side Story’ Review | Spielberg Elevates a Classic
It starts with the songs and the singers who voice them. Everything else is icing. In Broadway’s history, these songs, as a group, are the best.
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‘Licorice Pizza’ Review | 3 ½ out of 4 Stars
It’s nostalgic and sunny and light on its feet, even when it veers into the fraught areas that come with being a teenager. I liked it a lot.
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‘Red Pill’ Horror Review | Tough to Swallow
“weaponization of whiteness” is, indeed, a very real form of terror, her realization of the concept onscreen doesn’t quite get there.
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‘House of Gucci’ Review | Lady and the Camp
Gaga pulls faces reminiscent of Liza Minnelli, Leto enters the Camp Performance Hall of Fame. Driver looks embarrassed. Thankfully Pacino doesn’t give AF
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Review: ‘Spencer’ with Kristen Stewart | 2 Out of 4 Stars
With all credit due to a ballsy concept, a stellar cast, and Stewart’s good, but totally over-hyped performance, I was mostly bored.
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Review: ‘Fever Dream’ | Famed Novel Now A Cool & Trippy Film
If you like to re-watch movies to see what you missed the first time, Fever Dream will have you hitting repeat when the credits roll.
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Review: ‘Buddha Mountain’| 3 ½ out of 4 Stars
Something told me from the start that this would be a film worth watching. I love it when that feeling is realized.
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Horror Review: ‘The Nest’ | 1 out of 4 Stars
I don’t drink, but as I struggled through the purported horror flick, The Nest, I kept thinking that it might be the perfect movie to watch drunk.
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Movie Review: ‘Unchained’ | Lock it Up, Lock it Up…
The only fight scenes are poorly choreographed to hide the lack of experience of the actors.You have seen better fight sequences in SNL sketches any given week.
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Disney’s ‘Luca’ | Change Your Pixar Expectations and You’ll Delight In It
And I say: “So what?” PIxar is under no obligation to follow a formula, other than to tell a good story with heart, if no panache. ‘Luca’ has heart
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Review: ‘Werewolves Within’ | You’ll Howl with Laughter
Forget the title, this is about a pack of hilarious eccentrics and their clumsy quest to solve murders.
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George A. Romero’s ‘The Amusement Park’ | Horror or History?
Almost predictably, Romero delivered an unacceptable product to the Lutheran Society and the film went unseen. It was “too disturbing,” they said. Too weird.
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Horror Review: ‘Digging to Death’ | How Deep Is It?
Would’ve been an amazing 30 minute episode of an anthology series.
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‘The Sound of Identity’ | Transgender Opera Diva Makes History
You can’t have a good documentary without fascinating people in it. This is a good doc.
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‘Undergods’ Review: You’ve Never Seen This Movie Before.
Where are we? When is this? What will happen next? The fact that those questions roll around in your head is one of the reasons to recommend Undergods.
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‘Pink Skies Ahead’: Watch Anxiety and Attitude Come Together with the Best Results
It may be potentially heavy subject matter, but this is no boring classroom film – no, it’s a hip, culturally aware script, set in 1998. It’s also funny.
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Review: ‘400 Bullets’ Brings One Helluva Knife to This Gunfight
I try to go into a movie knowing as little as possible, but I’m so glad that I decided to read a bit about 400 Bullets before watching – just a tiny bit of background about the film’s hero made it more enjoyable, put more at stake for the viewer.…
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‘Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story’ – Chilly Thrills, High Adventures
Long before there was such a thing as ESPN – heck, long before cable TV or sports being branded as “eXtreme,” filmmaker Warren Miller was making sports documentaries from the ski slopes of this country and around the world. Even if you were a kid growing up in Texas, probably…
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Oscar Nominee Review: ‘The Father’ Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman Shine
You don’t expect a film about a character with dementia to be haunting, but there are moments in ‘The Father’ that literally gave me chills. It’s not because this is a horror film, it’s because the movie tells parts of its story through the point of view of the character,…
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Oscar Nominee Review: Is ‘Nomadland’ the Best Picture?
It’s so low-key and observational that you worry all the hype will work against people’s expectations. I hope not. Nomadland, officially a 2020 release for awards purposes, is, yes, I’ll say it, one of the year’s very best films. On my personal list, it’s moved just ahead of Promising Young…
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Oscar Nominee Review: ‘Minari’ – Heartwarming, Heartbreaking
Director Lee Isaac Chung is already racking up the accolades this awards season with his semi-autobiographical film, Minari. It’s true that there are certain touchstones present in every immigrant story – I was just thinking about Barry Levinson’s Avalon (already more than 30 years old) and how, even though his…
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Review: French Exit – Just A Oui Bit Weird, But Ooh La La
I like it when characters don’t give a shit whether you like them or not. It gives them the freedom to be their authentic (fictional) selves. French Exit is populated with such characters. They’re not super sweet – at times they’re not even polite or nice – but they’re good…
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Movie Review: Go/Don’t Go 1½ out of 4 Stars
Your mind wanders as you watch Go/Don’t Go, the low-budget Indie written, starring and directed by Alex Knapp, in which it is gradually revealed that he’s the last man on earth, so far as we can tell. Adam (Knapp) is the only guy around. He lives inside his head, remembering…
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Review: “One Night in Miami” |The Oscar Buzz is Real
Clay had defeated reigning heavyweight champ Sonny Liston just the night before, but each man was at the top of his respective game. And yet, they endured the kinds of indignities that no amount of success could alter: the color of their skin.
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‘Assassins’ Review: Is Truth More Bizarre Than Fiction?
By Kyle Osborne If we have learned anything in this age in which we live, it should be: Everything is being recorded on camera, everywhere, all the time. And The recordings rarely tell the whole story. Because of these two bits of reality, documentary filmmaker Ryan White, of whom I…
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Oscar Nominee Review: “Promising Young Woman” A Must See!
By Kyle Osborne Do NOT watch the trailer for this movie. Don’t read any reviews that would spoil it (I promise no spoilers. I mean, never spoilers) and don’t ask anyone about it. Just watch Promising Young Woman as blindly as possible. I’m so glad that I saw it knowing…
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Review: “The Marksman” Hits Just One Target
By Kyle Osborne You know, sometimes all you want from a movie is for it to be completely predictable. You want the good guy to wear a white hat and the bad guy to twirl his handlebar moustache. You don’t want one.single.thing to happen that hasn’t been telegraphed in advance.…
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Review: MLK/FBI 4 Stars. Gripping and Revealing
Review: MLK/FBI | Gripping and Revealing By Kyle Osborne More than half a century after his assassination, one would have thought that we’d seen and heard all there was to learn about Martin Luther King, Jr. Certainly anyone past grade school can recite at least one of the civil rights…
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Oscar Nominee Review: “Soul” | 4 out of 4 Stars
Review: Soul | 4 out of 4 Stars | Rated PG | By Kyle Osborne “Soul,” the latest feature from Pixar Animation is deep. It’s very deep, yet it’s also delightful. How did they do that? I dunno, man. It’s magic. As amazing as the other Pixar films have been along…
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Movie Review: ‘All I Can Say’ – Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon Filmed His Own Doc
All I Can Say | 2 out of 4 Stars | Not Rated By Kyle Osborne The “Bee Girl” was everywhere in 1993. You couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing the video for the Blind Melon song, “No Rain.” Interspersed with the inscrutable girl were the band members, performing a…
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Review: ‘Joker’ | 3 ½ out of 4 Stars | Rated R
“Joker”| 3 ½ out of 4 Stars | Rated R By Kyle Osborne I trashed my original review-I did the present day version of ripping the paper from the typewriter, noisily wadding the paper into a ball and chucking it in the trash can. Why? Because I had fallen into…
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Review: The Russian Five | 3 out of 4 Stars
The Russian Five | 3 out of 4 Stars| Not Rated By Kyle Osborne The true test of whether a sports documentary has done its job comes down to this: did the filmmakers make you care about the athletes on a team in which you are otherwise completely uninterested? Legendary…
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Review: I Feel Pretty with Amy Schumer 3 out of 4 Stars
I Feel Pretty 3 out of 4 stars Rated PG-13 By Kyle Osborne Amy Schumer’s new comedy, “I Feel Pretty,” brings back the charming, relatable everywoman who mass audiences embraced so warmly in 2015’s similar (sort of) rom-com “Trainwreck.” This is good news. Schumer’s early years were niche-successful, but…
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Good, Not Great: Three New Movies That Just Missed The Mark
By Kyle Osborne No, I’m not intentionally trolling and, no, I don’t think my opinion is better than yours. But this past month I’ve seen three movies that, while pretty solid, fell short of my hopes. And what were my hopes based on? They were based on the high praise…
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Movie Review: I, Tonya 4 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne I, Tonya 4 out of 4 Stars I kinda hate that this movie is being positioned as a snarky comedy in certain circles because it is so much better than that. It’s closer to a Shakespearean tragedy than an SNL skit. There are laughs, to be sure,…
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Movie Review: Molly’s Game 3 1/2 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne Molly’s Game 3 ½ out of 4 Stars Director Aaron Sorkin writes a script that snaps, crackles and pops. He loves his own words, some might say he loves his own words a little too much, but in the hands of the right actors, so do we.…
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Movie Review: ‘American Assassin’: Just Shoot Me
American Assassin 1.5 out of 4 stars By Kyle Osborne True to its literal title, ‘American Assassin’ gets right to the point, as vacationers on a pristine beach are mowed down by gunfire from an apparent Muslim terrorist cell. The body count in the first five minutes numbers in the…
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Movie Review: ‘The Visit’
By Kyle Osborne No one has rooted for M Night Shyamalan with more passion than I. ‘Unbreakable’ remains one of my favorite films of the 90’s and, of course, ‘The Sixth Sense’ made him an instant sensation. But let’s face it–he lit the fuses to numerous stink bombs over the…
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Movie Review: ‘Jupiter Ascending’ – Space Camp
By Kyle Osborne Note: This is not a review. It would be dishonest to say that I saw all of “Jupiter Ascending.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s the worst movie I’ve seen in recent memory, and if I were officially giving it a rating, I’d give Zero out of 4…
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Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’ 2 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne I’m not saying that the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothing, but Director Christopher Nolan is walking through the town square in a razor thin thong that his most rabid fans (whose hero worship borders on a proprietary bent) are mistaking for a three-piece suit. “Interstellar,” Nolan’s “Epic”…
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Movie Review” “Sin City: A Dame To Kill For” 4 Out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne Let’s be honest, movies start getting worse, not better, during August and early September. Typically, these few weeks are when Hollywood dumps the films that weren’t good enough for summer and aren’t good enough for late fall and the holidays. Talk about “expendable.” So, it’s nice to…
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Movie Review: ‘The Expendables 3’ Gets 2 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne The four eldest actors of the cast of “The Expendables 3” have a combined age of 265 years. If they had to buy tickets to their own movie, they’d get the senior citizen’s discount. They’re not the Expendables, they’re the Depends-ables. This film isn’t rated PG-13, it’s…
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Movie Review: ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ 2 1/2 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne Would I lose credibility with you if I mentioned that ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ is nowhere near as awful as I thought it’d be? What’s that? I don’t have any credibility to lose? Perfect, because some people are really gonna like it, and I don’t think those…
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Movie Review: ‘Calvary” Profound Message With A Light Touch
By Kyle Osborne We learn in the first minutes of “Calvary”, an Irish film starring the great Brendan Gleeson as the Priest of a small seaside town, that Gleeson is a good priest, a good man. And that is precisely why his life is in mortal danger. Inside the confessional…
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Movie Review: “Guardians of the Galaxy” 3 1/2 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne I was sick of the preview trailer by this past Spring, and having never heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy, I figured that Marvel Comics had finally run out of super heroes to star in zillion dollar movies, and had gotten desperate. Ah, but it’s nice…
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Movie Review: ‘Godzilla’ 3 1/2 out of 4 Stars
By Kyle Osborne According to Hollywood folklore, the titular character in the film that invented the phrase “Summer Blockbuster” was quite temperamental and wasn’t very cooperative. The mechanical shark in “JAWS” was meant to be seen a lot more frequently than what the final cut revealed, but due to problems…
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Movie Review: ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ Has 2 Much There, There
By Kyle Osborne The Spider-Man reboot of 2012 with Andrew Garfield in the title role was great—the youthful exuberance and joke cracking was, to me, more appealing than Tobey Maguire’s sleepy-eyed moodiness. Hey, if we want a brooding super hero, we’ll go to a Dark Knight movie. Now comes “The…
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