The Drama
Rating 7/10 There’s something oddly compelling about watching people squirm through an uncomfortable situation. The Drama is about as generic a title as you can get, but it announces its intentions boldly. What starts as a breezy relationship story soon escalates into full-on disgrace. Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattinson) and Emma Harwood (Zendaya) meet by chance […]
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
Rating 6/10 The title immediately evokes Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a 1969 snapshot of changing social norms. That film was unmistakably of its moment, a conversation-driven drama where the stakes came from emotional boundaries, not body counts. This one runs a group through a wall of bullets, time loops, and existential dread. […]
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Rating 5/10 Sometimes, I see a movie simply because it’s such a part of the cultural zeitgeist that it can’t be ignored. Meaning it may not connect with me, but it does with many others. I approach the effort like a cultural anthropologist, trying to understand the cinematic passions of a vast segment of the […]
Anaconda
Rating 3/10 I trust my instincts about what releases to avoid. So when a new Anaconda dropped on Christmas (of all days) in 2025, everything in me said: ” You can skip this one.” The reviews weren’t great, but it became a modest hit. So when it slithered onto Netflix three months later, on March […]
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Rating 5/10 I’ll be honest. I didn’t get the title. I originally thought it was about the 1990s grunge rock band fronted by Kurt Cobain. Nope. Not even close. For the uninitiated (that includes me), Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol are the duo behind a cult Canadian comedy series. They portray semi-fictionalized versions of themselves: […]
Project Hail Mary
Rating 9/10 Project Hail Mary is the kind of movie people claim Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. It’s a large-scale, crowd-pleasing science fiction rooted in a belief in humanity. It even introduces an environmental angle that attributes Earth’s crisis to a cosmic anomaly rather than the usual lecture of how “humans are the worst.” The mood […]
Reminders of Him
Rating 4/10 In just a few years, Colleen Hoover has gone from bestselling author to a force in Hollywood. Her novels follow a similar path carved out by other authors like Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook), John Green (The Fault in Our Stars), and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight). Turn sentimental but highly readable works into box office […]
Undertone
Rating 5/10 Do you enjoy scary flicks that spend 80% of their runtime slowly building exposition, only to unload a dump of excitement in the final 20% that doesn’t make any sense? Well, have I got a movie for you! Evy (Nina Kiri) is a young woman who returns to her childhood home to care […]
The Bride!
Rating 5/10 Exclamation points in movie titles suggest a certain desperation to me. Like the studio was worried audiences might disregard the name unless it literally shouts at them from the poster. Occasionally, the confidence is justified: Oliver!, Oklahoma!, Help!, and Airplane! have all aged well. The Bride! arrives with the same breathless punctuation, though […]
Hoppers
Rating 5/10 Pixar’s Hoppers is one of the strangest movies the studio has ever produced. It’s loud, chaotic, and constantly shifting gears between an environmental sermon and cartoon lunacy. It throws so many ideas at the viewer that it never decides on what kind of story it wants to tell. Mabel Tanaka (Piper Curda) grows […]