ABOMINABLE review — 11-Year-Old-Winston Says It Could Snowball Into a Hit
Kid critic Winston Ordoña’s Abominable review says the plot and characters are predictable, yet the lovable monster and the beautiful visuals make DreamWorks’ new animated feature anything but Abominable. Abominable is about how Shanghai teen Yi (Chloe Bennet) has to find a way to return a Yeti home to Mount Everest, crossing thousands of miles with…
JUDY Review – Zellweger Shines Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Judy review — Renée Zellweger’s performance as the troubled Judy Garland far surpasses the rest of the film. It’s an age-old sob-story: Hollywood chews up child actors and spits them out as broken adults. Judy Garland (Darci Shaw) was no exception, but she did have more talent than most. She was already a box office…
AD ASTRA Review — We Get It, It’s Lonely Out in Space
Ad Astra review — the tedium of space travel tests the bravest of astronauts, and audiences as well. The trouble with Ad Astra is that it reflects what’s likely a depressingly accurate depiction of what we can expect space travel to be like for the next couple hundred years: boring. Brad Pitt plays the adult son…
DOWNTON ABBEY Review — Everything You’d Hoped For…and a Little Less
Downton Abbey review — The costumes! The architecture! The upstairs/downstair drama! All your favorite elements, on steroids, are present, but are they enough? I had a huge argument with myself when reviewing Downton Abbey. It’s one of my favorite TV shows of all time, after all. My inner dialogue went something like this. It’s formulaic…
THE GOLDFINCH Review — It Coulda Been Worse…
The Goldfinch review — Expectations flew high for the film adaptation of this best-loved book. But instead of soaring, it takes a dive. Millions of eager readers had such high hopes for the big screen version of Donna Tartt’s complicated and thrilling novel, The Goldfinch. The trailer looked promising — it seemed that filmmakers followed…
HUSTLERS Review — Putting the Stiletto on the Other Foot
Hustlers review — This revenge of the strippers film is surprisingly intriguing—now about J-Lo’s pole dance… Who would have thought that a film about strippers-turned hustlers who scam the wolves of Wall Street by drugging them then maxing out their credit cards could be so significant? Hustlers, based on a 2015 New York magazine article by…
IT CHAPTER TWO Review — Pennywise Creeps Up On You
It Chapter Two review — Long but lively, it’s almost everything fans could hope for. In the Stephen King horror classic, for some reason, every 27 years, muderous evil, often in the form of Pennywise the creepy clown, comes back to haunt the residents of Derry, Maine, and wreck havoc with their very souls. In It…
DON’T LET GO Review — Actually, You CAN Let Go Of This One
Don’t Let Go review — Time travel can be a tricky beast, and the filmmakers couldn’t quite wrestle it into submission. The time travel conceit often presents a slippery slope. Sometimes it works marvelously in movies, other times it’s a mess. Sadly, the latter is the case with Don’t Let Go, a flick with a…
READY OR NOT Review: Ready, Set… Die!
Ready or Not review — Just the right ratio of gore to giggles. Movies always want to rain on our poor people’s parade. I mean, who among us in the 99% hasn’t dreamed of marrying into the 1%’s wealth, and happily living the jet-set life till death do us part? And I’m talking natural death.…
WHERE’D YOU GO BERNADETTE Review — Cate Blanchett Found Her, But the Movie Lost Her
Where’d You Go Bernadette review — Cate Blanchett’s performance surpasses the film. Ever since I read the Maria Semple’s wry and poignant bestselling novel on motherhood, creativity and accommodation, I was excited to see the adaptation on the big screen. And when I heard Cate Blanchett had signed on as the lead, I was over…
