Browsing: review

After the terrible personal disappointment that La La Land was, I was REALLY hoping the state of modern musicals was going to get better with The Greatest Showman.  We all know Hugh Jackman can sing, right?  Because he can, and he’s amazing.  The problem with him in this particular film is the post processing on his singing. Simply […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] Hollywood’s long history of live-action musicals never really has gone away. It always seems that there’s been a lull between your last favorite and the next one to come along but when you look back, there’s always been one every few years. Now for the third holiday season in five years we have […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a strong return to form for the canon entries into the Star Wars pantheon. After a tepid first outing by Disney with Episode VII and the heartbreaking passing of Carrie Fisher, there has been concern in how Rian Johnson would be able to pull it all together. […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] After three films set against the backdrop of World War II, and one of which is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, I hadn’t gone into Darkest Hour with much enthusiasm. I generally expect Gary Oldman to be solid in his performance, but really — have audience really been wallowing around yearning for yet another Churchill […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] Guillermo del Toro is back in top form in The Shape of Water. It’s a mashup of genres, blending monster, romance, and a period setting into an artistic beauty. Doug Jones (whom del Toro also worked with most recently in Crimson Peak) is one of the few actors who can consistently emote through a […]

I have to start this by saying how much I’ve enjoyed the Starz series Outlander since the beginning, and supported almost all the changes from the source materials to the screen. So many of them made perfect sense for the narrative, for entertainment purposes, and for keeping certain cast members around because of how wonderful they […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] The Disaster Artist, a film about the making of a film, exudes a sense of near-obsession with its subject. That subject is The Room, the 2003 indie film that is considered either the most brilliant art-film ever or the worst insult to filmmaking of all time. If Ed Wood and his legendarily bad films like […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] Murder on the Orient Express, based on the classic mystery novel by Agatha Christie and put through the lens of director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays the lead role of Hercule Poirot), is a beautiful adaptation — but still carries with it the eccentricities of having been written in 1934. Now, before racing to the […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] We’ve seen enough JFK films over the years to fill a medium-sized shelf of DVDs, but what we’ve not seen a lot about is his vice-president and the man who would succeed him as the 36th president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson. At the same time, neither have there been throngs […]

[rwp-review-recap id=”0″] Thor: Ragnarok is one of those all-too-rare comics-inspired films that work amazingly well on their own. You don’t need to have watched the preceding 16 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies nor be a longtime comic reader to enjoy the heck out of it. It’s part buddy-cop adventures (along the lines of 48 Hours), part […]