What could have been a fairly charming and fun movie about a down-on-her-luck Australian woman who gets fired and embarks on a career as a Dolly Parton impersonator instead becomes an almost incoherent mish-mash of nearly every genre going—part comedy, part romance, part drama, and part musical, with a little […]
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The Old Way
Nicolas Cage as menacing outlaw Colton Briggs in his first bona fide Western? Sign me up, right? Unfortunately, what we get pales in comparison to what could have been in this low-budget release that would have been direct-to-VHS back in the day. The basic, forgettable script by Carl Lucas and […]
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The People We Hate at the Wedding
Based on the 2016 bestseller, this no-holds-barred dysfunctional family comedy centers on a pair of black sheep siblings who have to travel to England for their posh half-sister’s wedding, much to their delight of their collective mother. Starring Allison Janney, Kristen Bell, and Ben Platt, it’s a little bit raunchy, […]
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Raymond & Ray
Written and directed by Rodrigo García (son of Gabriel García Márquez) and produced by Alfonso Cuarón, this largely two-man show stars Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke as pseudo-estranged half-brothers forced to reunite for their insufferable father’s funeral. Mostly It comes off like a stage play with dialogue that thinks it’s […]
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Me Time
Kevin Hart and Mark Wahlberg star as life-long friends in this tired Netflix comedy from writer-director John Hamburg, who brought us the clunkers ‘Meet the Fockers’ and ‘Along Came Polly’, among others. Hart is the responsible stay-at-home dad, and Wahlberg is the wild party man-boy, so naturally, the oil-and-water situation […]
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Spiderhead
In the near future, inmates at a loosey-goosey prison run by Chris Hemsworth are subjected to mind-altering drug experiments gauging paranoia, lust, and happiness (among other things). Despite a solid cast (which also includes Miles Teller and Jurnee Smollett), this quarantine-shot dud fails in its mission to come off as […]
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Memory
Liam Neeson continues his streak of blah-to-mediocre shoot-’em-up thrillers with a fairly lousy effort about a hitman starting to lose his mind. The story works, but the woeful script can’t keep up, and director Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”, “Goldeneye”) can only do so much to try to make us care. […]
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Sonic the Hedgehog 2
I’m not sure the world’s population was beating down any doors demanding a sequel to the 2020 original, and the filmmakers, it seems, fed on that general apathy. The result is a largely boring, often head-scratching exercise in what-am-I-watchingness. Sure, you can stick your kids in front of it and […]
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Scream (2022)
It’s clear, with the arrival of the fifth installment in the series that revolutionized the horror genre in the mid-90s, that the franchise is not getting better with age. Relying far too much on meta-humor and silly callbacks, the film lands with a blood-soaked thud. Sure, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, […]
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Warning
This disjointed sci-fi mess keeps chugging along like it will actually get somewhere, but in the end (actually well before the end), it just comes off like a cheap, pedestrian Black Mirror ripoff. A half-dozen disparate stories in the near future are tied together only by the fact that they […]
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