Reviews

Before you watch this movie, look at the interview that inspired it. Letorneau is fresh out of a psychiatrist hospital, and CLEARLY has not yet adjusted to her medications. Fualaau, who for what appears to be the first time, finally understands that he was the victim of an adult predator. Not only does he understand that he has been victimized, but he understands that he is married to his abuser and has children with her.

Does a man child's pain sound like fodder for a black comedy to you?!?! Me, neither.

The actors in this movie are terrific. In the right hands, they might have been part of a good movie. However, this is not a good movie. It's a gimmicky attempt to milk one more buck out of a tragedy.

I found it distasteful. I think it revictimizes the victim.

High school is indeed hell on earth. Most of us only have to spent four years there. Imagine the horror of the four years becoming eternity!

On the surface, this series is one more supernatural teen drama churned out by Netflix for the TikTok generation. The impossibly attractive cast of twenty to thirty year olds don't look like teenagers, the script is redundant and predictable, and every character is a trope that has wandered in from another supernatural teen drama.

What sets this series apart is the writing. The writers stubbornly resist the urge to have any character be all good or all bad. They rely instead on the Jungian idea that characters (and people) are motivated by "shadows."

The shadow is the part of personality that is repressed by our conscious selves. We hide it from ourselves, but the people around us see it come out in our self defeating actions.

In this case, our heroine, Maddie, has a boyfriend who loves her, a bright future at Northwestern, and two ride or die friends who adore her. However, in the dark basement of her high school, Maddie loses everything,

The mystery here is an actual mystery. The characters are likable and interesting. The story is sadly familiar to everyone who has lived with an alcoholic, and the ending is intriguing.

Watch it. You'll like it.

Losers tend to be full of themselves, but what sets Amy apart is just how full of herself she was. She needed drugs, alcohol and colloidal silver, not food and water like normal people. She was a very sick girl.

Sick people attract people as sick as they are, and Amy collected a dozen of them. Together they didn't try to feed the hungry or clothe the poor. They got high, had sex, abandoned their children, and scammed people out of money with snake oil remedies.

These people were imbeciles, junkies, felons and fools. They needed psychiatric help, and, instead, got drunk and took drugs. The result was the stupidity you would expect, but at least this cult didn't kill Sharon Tate. That's about the only good thing to say about them.

My heart goes out to both the families of these people, and to the people of Crestone, who had to put up with them.

Contrary to the opinion pieces written in the NYT by those who believe that Amber Heard is some kind of #metoo Joan of Arc, the jurors in the trial found that Heard lied, lied again and continues to lie. Everything she said is in the trial transcript. Everything she did is available on YouTube.

Why make a documentary? Because the producer/writer/editor, like the opinion writers who failed to see the trial or read the transcript, wants a redo for Amber Heard.

The problem is that most of us can read a trial transcript without the scatterbrained help Hollywood.

Run, don't walk, away from this fiasco. Also BELIEVE ALL EVIDENCE, not all opinion.

In 1929, Virginia Woolf argued that centuries of calcified gender roles and financial disparity had prevented women from realizing their true potential. To become whole, she thought they needed agency, control over their own lives that she expressed in the idea of "a room of her own."

For Woolf, that room was her own writing garret in a house she shared with her husband. For Valeria, the heroine of this movie, it is the craft room in the apartment she shares with her husband, Raul. That room is where she makes the furniture she sells for a living.

Valeria's room is the first thing she has to give up when she becomes pregnant. The next is apparently anything she is entitled to say or think about her own body, which is what we see as her husband and family decide what is best for her without even acknowledging that she is in the room. And so develops the theme of the movie.

Not all women want children. They may love them and want what is best for them, but they know that they don't what to take care of them. They also may not be attracted to or want to love a man.

The idea of being voluntarily childless and with another is hard enough in the US, but almost impossible in a place like Mexico where gender roles are more deeply defined. Valeria CAN'T be the woman Raul and her family want her to be, even if she wants to be. Her struggle to please them makes her feel like her very bones are breaking.

This movie uses the Mexican legend of "La Huesera" to tell women to embrace who they are. La Huesera is a spirit who collects wolf bones. When she has enough bones, she calls the wolf's spirit to come back to inhibit them. When the wolf does, they both run free.

In this movie, Valeria has to make hard choices to run free. But she does.

The movie isn't a horror movie. It's a parable about accepting yourself as you are, no matter what the cost is.

I have no doubt that the Sacklers are the monsters that the protagonists say they are. I also have no doubt that the Sacklers would do it all again, if they weren't in prison.

But the Sacklers are not the reason Nan (or anyone else) got addicted. The people who got addicted made the decision to keep taking drugs when they no longer needed them. The problem is the addict.

Blame shifting about opioids has been great for politicians (and promoters like Nan) but it hasn't been great for opiate manufacturing, doctors or patients in pain. They have been denied appropriate levels of pain relief because the Sacklers were greedy, but because the addicts were even greedier.

When a film maker obscures a truth like that, it says the film maker is too self absorbed to see anyone else's point of view. And that ruined this documentary for me. Too self indulgent. Too whiny.

The movie is plagued by a tired idea everyone has already seen in dozens of other movies. Within the first ten minutes of the film, the viewer knows who the villains are and who the heroine is.

Fresh young faces, the lack of tedious CGI, and fairly decent production values combine to do a good job of holding the viewer's interest, but aren't sufficient to make this into a good movie. Still, it's great to see young filmmakers get a chance like this one, and I hope this group makes a better movie next time.

As for this film, the company should start with a better script, better editing, and better zombies.

The problem with making a documentary series for an international audience is how to explain the story without explaining the intricate history of criminals, money laundering and the Vatican church. In Italy, the Vatican is more powerful than either political party is in the U. S. Its ties with money laundering go back to Hitler, and its ability to influence world politics is unfathomable to those of us who believe we live in a democracy.

Is it a tedious story? Yes. Is it something every American Catholic should see? Hell, yes.

As the U. S. SCOTUS acts as the Vatican's agent in removing the rights of women, as parishes all over the world are having to pay the victims of child molestation by priests, as U. S. Bishops are urging the refusal of communion to the American president who was duly elected, is it so hard to believe it would cover up the kidnapping and murder of a girl?

It isn't fiction. It's horrible,

Ignore the moments in the film that lapse into mushy sentimentality. Black not only loves his family, but he loves the culture that spawned them, even when they don't themselves understand what loving him back means.

I am an Army Brat from a conservative Southern family, and I spent a long time working for Zions Bank. I truly understand his faith in his family and in the Mormon church. I know that the opposition to same sex marriage is homophobia. I believe that there will come a reconciliation with between gay children and their religious families, but I believe it more after seeing the film.

Don't give up.

Both the original Swedish and its American counterpart borrow the Stephen King theme of making the horrors of adolescence into real monsters. The lead characters, Oskar and Ellie, are latchkey kids in a dismal blue collar town. Oskar lives and unhappy life of being bullied at school and making his own dinner alone at night. Ellie spends all her life looking out a window and hoping for a friend. They cure their loneliness by befriending each other.

The book on which the movies is based is much more horrifying that either movie suggests. The relationship between Ellie (or Abby) and her father is not wholesome. Ellie's history is truly brutal. The ending is more graphic and gothic than hopeful.

Each movie gets further from the original novel.

So far, the series follows the path taken by the movies. It doesn't ask why. It doesn't care why. Instead, it wants to cure Ellie, when those of us who saw the movie know that Ellie doesn't want a cure.

Whether or not the search of the "original" monster can sustain the series yet, I can't tell. It seems to meander, has way too many characters, and so far does little to develop the two principal characters. Since they are the heart of both the book and the films, that may be a problem as time goes on.

Still, given the current state of drek when it comes to originality in Hollywood, I would rather watch the remake of remake of the film version of a novel than about 90% of programming.

The actors are good. The story is interesting. And i hope the show continues to expand the story.

Let's give it a chance.

My ex husband was from Pasadena, a town just down the road from Texas City, where Red Rocket was filmed. Like everyone on the Cancer Coast, his family was a mixture of college educated engineers and "oil field trash." The trash was drug addicts, alcoholics and sex workers. They would start out well, and then end up as junkies on the Galveston Beach.

Red Rocket captures that sliver of humanity in a way that Is both hilarious and heartbreaking. People stuck in the oppressive misery of the heat poverty use each other up, but try to support each other. There's a family structure in all that misery.

Sex work destroys the sex worker, and the sex worker takes the people who love him along for the ride.

This is a fantastic movie, but it was painful.

Bernthal isn't Gere, but he is every bit as handsome. And, since that day on Walking Dead when he shaved his head with his shirt off, he has been noticed by every woman with a television screen.

What I like about this series is the background on Julian supplied by the writers. It acknowledges the smarminess of lives of sex workers in a way that that upends the fantasy in movies. Sadly, most sex workers have endured enormous childhood abuse that teaches them how to turn off in intimacy. Because they couldn't trust the very people who were supposed to care for them as children, they learn at an early age just how unsafe it is to be themselves.

The first episode shows us exactly where Julian feels safe. He likes prison because he has food and shelter, and he understands the rules. If something bad is going to happen, he goes to his safe place. Freedom brings him a lot more problems. He isn't sure he can be free as a gigolo, but he knows he can make a living at it.

This series is about the vulnerable Julian. It has promise.

The first half of the movie has some genuinely terrifying moments, especially for anyone who has driven alone through the emptiness of the Southwest desert. There are still sundown towns in this country, and, for the first twenty minutes of the film, the family is in the kind of trouble no white person can imagine,

However, the script makes a quick detour, then another detour, and then doubles back with a plot twist. Latifah, Ludicris and Beau Bridges try to keep the action on pace, but the writing really can't keep up with them.

Don't expect much, and enjoy the ride. Latifah makes a good action hero.

In folklore along the Mexican border, La Llorona terrifies young children. She is who your mother will send you to, If you are bad, and you will hear her crying like a donkey as she drowns you in the river. Then you will have to walk with her in grief for eternity,

In this movie, La Llorona is a sanitized mess of CGI and limp jump scares. She is just one more American monster, falsely connected to the Day of the Dead.

Beat a piñata with a baseball bat. Eat a plate of tacos. Plan your next trip to San Antonio's Riverwalk. Dance El Tapatío,

Do anything but waste time on this movie.

There's a lot to like in this period piece taken from the homoerotic diaries of Anne Lister. The costumes and set designs are a feast for the eyes. Suranne Jones and Sophie Rundle own their roles as the dynamic Lister and her whiny companion/wife, Ann Walker, .

That said, the series is basically a soap opera based on the familiar romantic trope of "will they get together or not" and, by the end of the first season, I didn't care anymore. I was sick to death of British classicism and the same rehashed plot lines I have seen in every romcom.

Enough.

Well, I see I am here on IMDB with all the other survivors of childhood abuse.

This series captures (in a way I have personally never seen before) the way living with abuse places the child in the upside down world. Kids are told to talk to their parents when someone hurts them, but how does a kid talk to the parent who just beat him or her to bleeding? They don't. They just figure out how to survive until they can get away,

Everyone failed this child until he met a lawyer who himself had been abused,

He can't hurt you anymore, Anthony. Peace and love to you.

Comanches were Plains Indians whose culture revolved around horses and nomadic hunting. In the 1700s, they would have lived in Colorado, but not in the mountains. They lived on bison, not mountain lions and deer. The entire tribe hunted together, and women were not relegated to medicine making.

Kudos to the team for making a movie starring the tribe that never surrendered, but filming the movie in the Canadian Rockies ruined the historical context for me.

Still, I liked the film.

Dutch Marich wrote, produced and directed this combination mockumentary, found footage and horror movie shot entirely in the White Mountains of Nevada. He owes much of his realistic "write what you know" style to "The Blair Witch Project," but clearly understands how to make a cleaner and more polished film.

To my surprise, this movie held my interest from the moment it started. The characters were sharply so sharply drawn and the tension so sustained that it wasn't until the movie was over that I realized the whole film has followed the pandemic distancing rules of only having a single character in any shot. It was scary, and scary in a grinding and tense way.

Hey, all you fantasy film makers who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on superhero CGI - look up this Dutch kid. He is better at making a movie than all of you. And i can't wait to see all the other movies shot in Ruth, Nevada.

For reasons I don't understand, this movie is was shot in South Africa using South African actors, but all of them worked hard to sound as if they were American. The accent doesn't sound American as much as it just sounds weird.

Although it is shot in Africa, the movie makes no attempts to show the beauty of the continent. Nor does it show any of the magnificent animals that the characters fear. Virtually every scene in the movie is so dull that it could have been shot on a soundstage,

The script is awful and the acting is worse.

No. No. No.

Darren Starr turned a series of tongue in cheek columns about an NYC party girl into Sex and the City. The episodes he wrote and the characters he created were a fun and incisive look at the importance of female friendship for women. When he left the series, it devolved into consumerism, ageism and white privilege from which the franchise never returned.

Uncoupled is Star's look at what happens when 50ish gay man is suddenly dumped by his long term lover. It has the same freshness and understanding of relationships between unmarried couples as the early SATC shows did. The lead actor is as flawed and interesting as Carrie Bradshaw was.

But, welp, it also has the same consumerism and ageism. Thanks to the luminous Tisha Campbell, it is not as glaringly white, but it is just as predictable.

With NPH, the show is a fun slice of cake with a scoop of ice cream. Without NPH, it would be a trip to the dentist,

There is little intriguing about the worn out premise, of the script, but there are still a few things to enjoy in this psychological melodrama. Sandra Oh gives a sturdy performance as the phobic isolationist on her California farm, and Dylan McDermott is a reliable co star. The traditional hanboks are beautiful.

But then there are the plot holes. What clingy Korean mother goes back to her country when he daughter is in the United States? How did a woman get married and have a child while never being around eléctricity? How did she go to school, afford a farm and learn to produce honey without electricity? Wouldn't Child Protective Services show up for a kid that has never ridden in a car?

Suspend all logic and you might enjoy the rest of the movie.

If you like any of the five predictable premises on which Netflix bases a series, you are in luck. In this case, it's one of the many variations of "The Dirty Dozen" in which criminals are freed from prison in order to take on suicidal missions to save the government. The prisoner in question is played by the incredibly handsome Ryan Gosling, and, in a turn of fate for a Netflix production, can actually act.

The plot leaps off the premise into a muddled combination of "Man from UNCLE" meets Ted Bundy, but you get the idea. This is a movie about action, not realism. Lots of things blow up. Lots of men use karate to fight. Everything is loud.

BUT wouldn't it have made more sense to use the acting skills of the line up instead of wasting $200 million blowing up things on a green screen?

I will give it a 6 for effort and Ryan.

Two 70s stars lead the cast of this tax write off, but are only on the screen for five minutes. The rest is a predictable gore fest with a couple of fun jump scares.

I have seen better, but I have seen worse. And at least it wasn't two hours of CGI.

A young woman dies in an Oklahoma City from the injuries she has received in a hit and run. The doctors and police suspect foul play, but it isn't until they don't find out that she isn't who she says she is that the mystery begins to unfold. Slowly, but surely, the horror of her life unfolds.

This is one of the best, and most well constructed, documentaries, I have ever seen. The director tells the story in the chronology that the police and the FBI a discover it. The result is the stomach churning story of sociopath and the damage he has done.

See it because his victims deserve to have their stories told, but, beware, that is disturbing.