Branching Out (2024)

Branching Out could have been a nice little family drama, but they ruined it by putting the plot on autopilot and letting it settle into your average predictable Hallmark romance.   Amelia (Sarah Drew) is a single mother by choice. Her nine-year-old daughter Ruby (Cora Bella) is assigned, as a school project, to make a...

Tyson (1995)

Tyson makes a big deal about what it is that makes a man a hero or a coward, but the movie is too timorous to venture an opinion as to which category Mike Tyson (Michael Jai White) belongs in. According to Tyson’s first manager Cus D’Amato (George C. Scott), “It's what the hero does that...

Noaptea Ursului (2019)

Noaptea Ursului is Romania’s unnecessary, unintelligible answer to Richard Linklater’s Suburbia. Like Linklater, writer/director Paul-Razvan Macovei repurposed Waiting for Godot. The key difference is that Linklater took the despair of Beckett’s play and topped it: “His heroes aren't waiting as a mission, but as a lifestyle.” Macovei’s characters, on the other hand, have no style.  Suburbia...

Asphalt City (2023)

Starring Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Michael Pitt, and Myke Tyson, Asphalt City certainly runs the gamut from the tippy top of the acting profession, through the ‘good, not great’ category, and all the way down to ‘what the hell were they thinking?’  Early in his career, Sheridan would overperform when paired with a heavyweight like McConaughey...

The August Virgin (2019)

At first, I thought that The August Virgin (original title: La Virgen de Agosto) aspired to be, or at least wanted us to think that it was, a spiritual successor to "the comedies from the '30s ... these popular and apparently escapist comedies ... more advanced in terms of traditions and morals, with those wonderful...

The Taste of Things (2023)

The late, great Gene Siskel liked to ask, ‘Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?’ After watching The Taste of Things (original title: La passion de Dodin Bouffant), I might tweak the question to whether a film is more interesting than a documentary of the same actors making...

Parachute (2023)

‘The Animal’ Batista as a dinner theater director whose murder mysteries are hopelessly predictable is a stroke of genius (and yes, I know what his real name is, but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Would a ‘Bautista Bomb’ be as devastating? Somehow, I don’t think so).  Comparably brilliant is Joel McHale as...

Life Like (2019)

Dickens is often discussed in Life Like, but the movie takes its literary cues (and quite openly, I think) from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was, of course, turned into Blade Runner) and Pinocchio (by way of A.I. Artificial Intelligence). It would have benefited the script to be more of the former and less...

Miller’s Girl (2024)

The titular Miller’s Girl puts on airs of being an author — but then so does writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett, which explains high school senior Cairo Sweet’s (Jenna Ortega) penchant for narration, a device that belongs in books (and maybe documentaries) but is otherwise flaccid, sloppy writing (also, Cairo Sweet? Really? As made up as...