Tag Archives: 2018

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Deadpool 2 (2018) Movie Review

Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, is a Canadian mercenary turned cancer victim who is presented with a cure via a branch of the Weapon X program. Turned into a mutant, Deadpool receives Wolverine’s healing factor, full-body deformity, and increasing mental instability. He often exercises psychopathic tendencies and suffers breaks from reality that manifest themselves as fourth-wall breaking banter. At his most stable, he is a member of X-Force or X-Men. At his most unhinged, he slaughters every superhero in the Marvel universe.

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In the Ryan Reynolds iteration of the character, Deadpool plays nice. Comparatively. Deadpool 2 makes clear up front that it is a film about Continue reading Deadpool 2 (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Life of the Party (2018) Movie Review

Deanna (Melissa McCarthy) and her husband Dan (Matt Walsh) are dropping off their daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) at the sorority house for her final year of college. Maddie isn’t out of the car more than a minute before Dan informs Deanna that he wants a divorce and is selling the house.

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This instigates Deanna to go back to school and finish her degree, which she had to abandon 20 years earlier when she got pregnant. Now she will be attending college in the same graduating class as Continue reading Life of the Party (2018) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Breaking In (2018) Movie Review

I have very little to say about Breaking In. My main takeaway is that it is the definition of average. A conventional home invasion movie that takes itself more seriously than a home invasion movie of this sort ought, there is little to chew on here.

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The story is thin enough that the runtime can be graciously under 90 minutes, but it is also thin enough to make 90 minutes feel too long. Shaun Russell (Gabrielle Union) takes her two children to a hideaway estate in upstate Wisconsin. It is the high-security home of her deceased father, who had some vague ties to criminal Continue reading Breaking In (2018) Movie Review →

Box Office Predictions, Lists

2018 Summer Box Office Predictions

Every year, I like playing a little game of Summer box office predictions. The rules are simple (and the game is played officially at Trivia Club and /Film, if you’re interested): Pick which 10 films, and three dark horse candidates, that you think will gross the most money domestically during the Summer movie season.

This year, the game’s outlets are shifting their definition of what the Summer movie season is in order to include Avengers: Infinity War. Avengers was initially slated for release on the first weekend of May, but Disney pushed its release up a week.

For the sake of this article, I’m just going to keep the traditional definition of Summer movie season, which is the first weekend of May to Labor Day weekend. It kind of makes the predicting harder, given that Avengers is almost certainly going to be the highest grossing movie of the year, and if the film were included in this competition it would be number one with a bullet.

All the same, this year’s crop of Summer movies is pretty strange from a box office standpoint.

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The Top Ten: Continue reading 2018 Summer Box Office Predictions →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Bad Samaritan (2018) Movie Review

Dean Devlin is a producer known for work on big budget, blockbuster action movies: Independence Day, Godzilla (1998), etc. Last year, he made his big screen directorial debut with the heavily panned Geostorm, which itself was a big action film aiming to be a blockbuster.

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With Bad Samaritan, Devlin returns to feature directing. Only, this time the subject matter is a lower-budget dramatic thriller. Sean Falco (Robert Sheehan) is a wannabe photographer who works a valet business with his buddy Derek (Carlito Olivero). To make ends meet, however, the two of them run scams using Continue reading Bad Samaritan (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Overboard (2018) Movie Review

In Overboard, Kate (Anna Faris), a mother of three who is working two jobs in order to support her family and pay her way through nursing school, is hired to clean the yacht of a spoiled, wealthy man who has never worked a day in his life. The man is Leonardo (Eugenio Derbez), and he is about to take over his ailing father’s business.

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That is, until he suffers amnesia after falling off the boat. He wakes up in an Oregon hospital unable to Continue reading Overboard (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

The Endless (2018) Movie Review

The creative pairing of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson have produced three feature films: Resolution, Spring, and now The Endless. I will admit that I have not seen their previous two films (although, they made a short for the anthological horror sequel V/H/S: Viral that I did not care for).

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Without the context of their previous work, and not really knowing anything about The Endless prior to seeing it, I found the experience of the film to be Continue reading The Endless (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It

Lean on Pete (2018) Movie Review

Andrew Haigh’s 2015 film 45 Years is a fantastic film. Quietly fascinating, it dissects a seemingly mundane 45-year marriage at a pivotal point of fracture. His latest film, Lean on Pete, has shades of this. It travels with a 16-year old boy named Charley (Charlie Plummer) at a crucial period of adversity.

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Both Pete and Years watch as the notion of quaint compassion becomes strained to the point of near collapse. Both have a genuine sense of Continue reading Lean on Pete (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it

Super Troopers 2 (2018) Movie Review

You know what? If you like Super Troopers, then you might like Super Troopers 2. If you’re a die hard Broken Lizard fan, then you’ll probably find it uproarious.

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I enjoy Super Troopers just fine. It’s the best thing I’ve seen from Broken Lizard when it comes to feature length affair. And Super Troopers 2 is better than a film like Club Dread, which left me baffled.

I’ll frame it another way. In my sold-out screening of Super Troopers 2, there were Continue reading Super Troopers 2 (2018) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

I Feel Pretty (2018) Movie Review

I Feel Pretty takes on a familiar cinematic conceit—think Big or body-swap comedies—where a woman named Renee (Amy Schumer) hits her head in an accident during SoulCycle and wakes up in the body of a perfectly gorgeous woman. At least, that’s what she thinks in her head.

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In reality, nothing about her outward appearance has changed. Armed with the delusion that she has become a physically different person, however, she Continue reading I Feel Pretty (2018) Movie Review →