Category: movie reviews

The Big Trail (1930). Jaw-dropping location visuals and a very young and adorable John Wayne in his first lead role makes up for terrible sound, a bad script, and lame acting. That cinematography though. Wow.

Stella Dallas (1937). Well-acted soaper about a smothering mom with atrocious fashion sense who will do anything to advance her daughter socially. Barbara Stanwyck is always great, and fits this loud, tacky broad role like a glove.

The Philadelphia Experiment (1984). Conspiracy based sci-fi with likable leads is fun in spite of awful (even for the day) FX. The world-threatening vortex looks like a giant space anus. And they are always shooting stuff up there. Just stop.

Miss Potter (2006). Renee Zellweger does another English accent in this charming, old-fashioned period piece about the life of Beatrix Potter. Excellent production values, with well-written, warmly acted characters. Unexpectedly delightful.

Zombieland (2009). This was my favorite flick of the month. It was funny, it was sad, it had surprising heart and really good performances. And it had that epic Bill Murray cameo. An A+ horror comedy.

Deep Cover (2025). This is a really solid and very funny caper-crime-comedy about failed actors/comedians working for the London police to bust crime. Or are they? Well-plotted and written, with excellent and very funny performances. and holds up start to finish. This one was a real surprise.

Will I make it to 100? Not at this rate! Stay tuned!

Decided to give it a try in spite of hearing some unfavorable things about it. My guarded attitude going into it kept my expectations pretty low, which is why I ended up actually enjoying it. Aside from the glorious, creative visuals, it’s no world beater, but Hugh Jackman has a lot of energy and is, as always, enjoyable to watch (even though I don’t like his singing). The music is mediocre, but inoffensive. An accurate bio of P. T. Barnum would be pretty fantastic, as he was a very surprising/troubling mixed bag of a person. This is not that movie. But there are worse ways to kill a couple of hours. And as I said, it’s so pretty.

This movie is just weird. Hear me out: it starts out as a kind of goofy musical about a travelling medicine show, and ends up as a scathing indictment of corporate power and corruption, mixed with marital drama, and a character study of the corrosive effect of greed on the human soul. With the occasional silly musical number. It’s very hard to get a handle on what is going on, and I truly doubt that anyone associated with this film had a clue. It stars Irene Dunne, one of my favorites, and Randolph Scott, who is gorgeous. Both are very appealing and do their best. But what a head-scratcher this one is.

This is Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, don’t bother to change my mind. For tight storytelling, an ever-tightening sense of suspense and dread, combined with sharp writing and terrific performances, he’s simply never topped it. Yeah, the shark could be better, but you don’t see it often, and then only at the end, so who cares? And one of the greatest compliments I was ever paid was when I was told, “You’re just like Matt Hooper.”

YES!

Here it is: possibly the most ridiculously plotted film in history. It involves a deranged small town doctor, an escaped circus gorilla, and…polio. There’s really no describing it adequately, especially since the editor seems to have been drunk, so it’s quite difficult to follow what’s going on at key points. Boris Karloff is in fine form, as usual, and the monkey suit is particularly hilarious. Great and gloriously cheesy stuff.

I like a good bad movie, and this one sort of qualifies. It helps that I watched it accompanied by the expert riffing of the guys at Rifftrax, which made it a lot more fun than it had a right to be. The fact that the deformed serial killer of the title is a person with actual deformities dampens the fun more than a little. But still, the plotting, acting, and production are so bad, it demands all the mockery coming its way.

I checked this out with sort of a bad attitude, because I couldn’t imagine Gene Tierney being funny and I don’t usually care for Henry Fonda. But boy, was I wrong. It seems like a rip-off of the classic “Lady Eve” — OK, it obviously IS — but I actually enjoyed this one quite a bit more. The plot concerns Tierney luring affluent young men into marriage, then absconding with their money before the wedding. Fonda is her mark. But she falls in love with him instead. Go figure. Tierney is delightful, Fonda is fantastic, and the writing is first-rate. Glad I caught this one. It’s free on YouTube.