I have been a movie fan for most of my life and a film critic since 1986 (my first published review was for "Platoon"). Since that time I have written for several news and entertainment publications in California, Utah and Idaho. Big fan of the Academy Awards - but wish it would go back to the five-minute dinner it was in May, 1929. A former member of the San Diego Film Critics Society and current co-host of "The Movie Guys," each Sunday afternoon on KOGO AM 600 in San Diego with Kevin Finnerty.
A confusing, convoluted plot, Ron Howard’s uninspired direction and less than stellar acting mar Inferno, the third installment of the popular (at least as far as book sales go) “Da Vinci Code” franchise, but then again, we all know about some of the third-film duds in cinematic history (“Superman 3,” “Rocky 3,” “The Hangover Part…
Well, the title of this action-thriller, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, warns you to “never go back,” but when the first movie bankrolls more than $100 million, that adage seems to go right out the proverbial window. Part of the fun (although some would say “ridiculousness”) of films like “Jack Reacher” — and the James…
There’s certainly no accounting as to why Ben Affleck (“Gone Girl”) would choose this, The Accountant, a tepid and convoluted thriller to star in, but all I know is I wish I could deduct the two-plus hours I spent at the cinema to see it; time I will never get back in a refund next…
First of all, despite the title, The Birth of a Nation, this film is in no way connected to the 1915 silent classic directed by D. W. Griffith. Secondly, I was led to the “Confessions Of Nat Turner” (the real jailhouse interviews in 1831, not the 1967 William Styron novel) from an article in “The…
Like last year’s “The 33,” which told of the survival and rescue of a group of Chileans trapped in a gold mine in 2010, Lionsgate’s Deepwater Horizon, produced by and starring Mark Wahlberg (“Ted 2”), along with John Malkovich, Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson, relates the horrifying experience of another true life disaster culled from…
It’s difficult to make a comedy these days without it devolving into either juvenile slapstick buffoonery or an ignorant vulgarity-laden vehicle for the nation’s lowest common denominators. It’s especially hard when such a film’s protagonist is so completely devoid of intelligence or even common sense as to be totally unrelatable and unsympathetic throughout. Oh, and…
Whether one thinks Edward Snowden is a patriot or a traitor for revealing CIA and NSA (National Security Agency) secrets will probably not depend on this movie, Snowden, as those who believe one way or the other will still hold those opinions after this 2-hour, 15-minute presentation. Still, director Oliver Stone (“Savages,” but better known…
