Author Archives: Kam Williams

Kayla Tanaka (Nichole Bloom) is a 16 year-old aspiring artist with a promising future provided she keeps her nose to the grindstone while trying to land a college scholarship. But that’s easier said than done since she’s being raised in a rough area of Los Angeles where temptation lurks around every corner. So, one might […]

Unfortunately, the brains behind the latest installment of this animated series abandoned the family-friendly formula which made it so popular with kids of all ages. Instead, they decided to produce a kitchen sink comedy more concerned with generating cheap laughs by any means possible than with spinning a coherent tale that might engage an adult. […]

At first blush, this picture superficially reads like the typical opening of a Dragnet episode. After all, it is set in L.A. and starts with a voiceover informing the audience that what you are about to see is true. However, that’s where the similarities between the classic TV series and Crazy Eyes begin and end, […]

When Columbia Pictures first brought Spider-Man to the big screen in 2002, the Marvel Comics adaptation was such a box-office bonanza that it spawned a couple of equally-phenomenal sequels. Now, just a decade later, the studio has already seen fit to reboot the popular franchise. Although that might strike some as too soon to attempt […]

George Needleman (Eugene Levy) is such a naive chief financial officer that he has no idea that his boss, Walter (Tom Arnold), is running a Ponzi scheme right under his nose. It only dawns on the terminally-nerdy CFO that something is awry when arrived at work one day to find all of his co-workers in […]

The year is 1927, and George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is at the height of a flourishing career as a matinee idol. But that is also the year marking the introduction of talkies, an innovation which would soon signal the demise of the Silent Era. Unfortunately, George is too pampered and insulated to appreciate the fact […]

Six year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) is being raised under the radar in “The Bathtub,” a backwoods bayou located on the swamp side of a Louisiana levee. The self-sufficient tomboy divides her days between attending to her sickly father (Dwight Henry) and living in harmony with a handful of other hardy refugees from civilization. Hushpuppy feels […]

Jake (Jason Yee) is a guy who let his gambling debts spiral out of control. Consequently, he considered himself lucky that his bookie was willing to let himself work off his debt by serving as a chauffeur and bodyguard for a mob-owned escort service run by a pimp named Simon (Ron Yuan) out of a […]

Anybody familiar with the work of Adam Sandler knows he built his career playing dimwitted characters like Billy Madison (1995), Happy Gilmore (1996) and The Waterboy (1998) in coarse comedies appealing to the lowest common denominator of humor. So, I suppose his loyal fan base, at least, won’t be disappointed by this latest offering: a […]

40 years ago, Colin Turnbull gained widespread recognition as the author of “The Mountain People,” an eye-opening book about a little-known tribe living in a remote region of Northern Uganda near the country’s border with Kenya. His damning ethnological study indicted the Ik as selfish, loveless, sadistic monsters who bred indiscriminately, never sang, deserted their […]