Tag: Movie Reviews
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (’12 review)
4 outta 5 If you were a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy you’d have to be rather jaded to walk out of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, part 1 of the prequel trilogy to Lord of the Rings, and think that it doesn’t fit perfectly well into the established series. Fans of…
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Kraven The Hunter
3 outta 5 Kraven The Hunter is the latest, and potentially final, attempt by Sony Pictures to spin off various Spider-Man characters into their own franchise, without actually using the webbed wall-crawler himself. The Venom series has been consistently fun and wacky throughout all three installments, although it has been more mixed (to say politely)…
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Nutcrackers
4 outta 5 Nutcrackers is one of those comedies about a busy working guy who, for various reasons, must learn to settle down as they inherit guardianship of rambunctious children, which has been done many, many times before. Now Nutcrackers may not get many points for originality, but it does have a sort of chaotic…
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Moana 2
3 outta 5 Moana 2 is a decent sequel to Moana, a film that was released in 2016 and has gone on to become one of the most streamed movies of all time (couple of dozens of billion views). So, the sequel was inevitable, even if it was originally announced as a Disney Plus spinoff…
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Moana (2016 Review)
4 outta 5 The Disney animated movie template is a sturdy framework to hang multiple flicks on. Once in awhile Disney breaks out of it with something like Zootopia or subvert conventions such as with Frozen. Their latest effort, Moana, works rather well inside of the Disney framework involving princesses, exploration, magic, monsters and musical…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
BigAl Reviews 