Tag: Movie Reviews
-
Gladiator II
4 outta 5 Gladiator II may be guilty of copying and pasting a few things from the 2000 original Gladiator film but it’s okay because one is going to want to see Gladiator stuff in a Gladiator film. There is a lot more flab on this sequel even if the movies are pretty much the…
-
Spellbound
3 outta 5 Spellbound is a film by Skydance Animation that was released exclusively on Netflix that is trying really hard to emulate the singing Disney princess animated formula. And it kind of succeeds! It may be a bit basic copy and paste in some places, the wistful princess with a cutesy animal sidekick, transformative…
-
Red One
3 outta 5 Red One is an action-comedy Christmas film, which feels a lot like the superhero FX blockbusters of the last few years, with big brawls and lots of quips. It is trying so hard to be bombastic and outsized it ends up being a bit too long, cutting out about fifteen minutes from…
-
Brothers
4 outta 5 Brothers is an amusingly zany movie about low rent crooks that also doubles as a dysfunctional family reunion story. It is billed as an “action comedy” but there probably isn’t a lot of action, aside from one madcap chase on a golf course, and the finale features some big mishaps involving a…
-
The Apprentice
4 outta 5 The Apprentice is the biographical film about the early days of Donald Trump that shows nasty events and rich people being terrible. Biographical movies come with a disclaimer that this was based on real events, but certain events and names have been fictionalized. That disclaimer is usually at the end of the…
-
Venom: The Last Dance
4 outta 5 Venom: The Last Dance is a fun entry into a comic book superhero series that has always been a bit askew. It offers more spectacle than the first film although it isn’t as full on crazy as the second film was. This movie strips out a few elements from the series that…
-
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021 review)
4 outta 5 Venom: Let There Be Carnage noticeably improves upon its predecessor by leaning into how ridiculously crazy the concept is. Tonally it bounces all over the place, much like how the lead character is bouncing off the walls arguing with himself. Somewhat surprisingly, there is a genuinely effective thematic core here about toxic…
-
Venom (2018 review)
3 outta 5 Venom is a movie that could easily be called dumb, cheesy and corny. But that is not necessarily bad. Cheesy is still be enjoyable even as the horror movie serious elements clash mostly with the comedy elements. This is a bit strange because director Ruben Fleischer deftly mixed horror and comedy in…
-
Saturday Night
4 outta 5 Saturday Night is an entertaining bit of mythmaking about the first time that NBC’s comedy institution Saturday Night Live went on the air (before it added Live to the title). It is a bit of an obscure topic for an entire movie, even though the show remains popular to this day, and…
-
The 4:30 Movie
4 outta 5 The 4:30 Movie by writer/director Kevin Smith is him cobbling together well worn thematic bits from his previous films but in an entertaining way. This is pretty much Smith’s third film adapting his rise from QuickStop convenience store to filmmaker after Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Clerks III so it’s…
BigAl Reviews 