This is a terrific film, somewhat commercially constricted by its generic title. It’s the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a firefighting team from Prescott, Arizona, that became the first municipal firefighting unit to become certified as “hotshots,” the highest […]
Continue reading »Month: November 2017
A Bad Moms Christmas (2017) ☆ ☆
Those naughty ladies are back in a Christmas movie that will be gone and forgotten long before Christmas. This is a sequel of sorts to the 2016 comedy Bad Moms, with Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell and Kathryn Hahn reprising their roles […]
Continue reading »Blade Runner 2049 (2017) ☆ ☆ 1/2
If the world really does end up looking like it does in Blade Runner (1982) and this belated sequel, we’re all in trouble. I must confess that I’ve never been a big Blade Runner fan. I love science-fiction but these noirish, ultra-stylized […]
Continue reading »LBJ (2016) ☆ ☆ ☆
LBJ is indeed a historical portrait of our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But it certainly is not his life story. This film takes a very narrow view of the man who became president with John F. Kennedy was assassinated. […]
Continue reading »Geostorm (2017) ☆ 1/2
I generally enjoy disaster films, no matter how dumb or exploitive they are, but they seem to be getting worse as the years go by. At least the 1970s versions were all-star filled blockbusters. Now all it takes is the […]
Continue reading »The Foreigner (2017) ☆ ☆ ☆
As senior-citizen action films go, this one is pretty good. That’s not really fair; star / producer Jackie Chan is only 63, and is still better equipped to tackle movie terrorists than most of us will ever be. And let’s […]
Continue reading »The Snowman (2017) ☆ ☆
Internationally set-crime thrillers can be great (see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, or The Secret in Their Eyes for elegant proof), but this one is a mess of a movie. Set in Norway, it is beautifully photographed and handsomely acted, but […]
Continue reading »Victoria and Abdul (2017) ☆ ☆ ☆
Tis the season for British (and Indian) history films, what with Viceroy’s House and this comedy-drama, both of which explore the uneasy relationship between an occupied nation and its occupier. Victoria and Abdul documents the largely unknown-to-the-public story of how Queen […]
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