Category: Movie Reviews

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 […]

The primary problem with Snow White and the Huntsman is that it was released right on the heels of Mirror Mirror. Sure, a new version of Snow White has been brought to the big screen about once a decade since its debut in 1902, but how much of a call could there be for another […]

One sign that scriptwriters have run out of fresh ideas is when they lazily recycle the shopworn, time-travel theme in order to extend an expiring film series. This ill-advised approach has been employed over the years in service of such sorry sequels as The Three Stooges Meet Hercules (1962), Escape from the Planet of the […]

Though ostensibly inspired by the Hasbro board game of the same name, “Battleship” is a special f/x-driven, sci-fi adventure that actually has much more in common with bombastic blockbusters like “Armageddon” (1998), “Transformers” (2007) and “Independence Day” (1996). To its credit, this variation on the theme does devote considerable attention to developing a back story […]

Dark Shadows was a daytime soap opera which originally aired at 4 PM on ABC-TV on weekday afternoons from 1966 to 1971. What made the program unique for the romance genre was its Gothic storyline revolving around Barnabas Collins, a 200 year-old vampire as earnest in his search for blood as for a reunion with […]