The Help is a lot like Crash, The Blind Side, and other presumably well-meaning but largely tone-deaf movies about race that don’t happen to star Sandra Bullock (as a longtime devotee of both Demolition Man and The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down, I have to believe sweet Sandy’s heart is in the right place). However […]

“Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of loving, or do we love our masters behind a facade of loathing?”  Balram  It is fitting that the first words heard in The White Tiger are spoken by Jay-Z. On the soundtrack as the movie begins is “Beware of the Boys,” Jay’s collaboration with British Indian […]

The longer you watch I, Frankenstein, the harder it is to believe that it is an actual theatrical feature and not just a bad TV movie made for the Syfy channel. Despite big-name, reliably good actors like Aaron Eckhart, Bill Nighy, and Miranda Otto, and special effects that, at their best, at least look like […]

For over 30 years now, ever since his debut feature She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, Spike Lee has been one of the most innovative and provocative filmmakers of our time. As expressed numerous times throughout his many films, Lee’s highest goal is to “wake up” and uplift all oppressed and deluded people, but he […]

As anyone who has read my in-depth review of Beethoven knows, family movies from the 1990s are often covert founts of darkness and despair, sometimes to the point that it is nigh impossible to see them any other way. Another great example of this curious phenomenon is the 1994 film Baby’s Day Out, which depicts […]

Birdemic: Shock and Terror was clearly made without the benefit of anyone who knew absolutely anything about filmmaking within a hundred yards of the set. Witness production values and acting that make Tommy Wiseau’s notorious 2003 classic The Room look like a legitimate masterpiece. Witness sound editing and mixing apparently done by a pair of […]

Allow me to be the absolute first to say, 2020 was a strange year, and not least of all for movies. Beyond the fact that I no longer work in the industry after 20 years of doing almost nothing else for a living, there came a time about a month ago when critics began dropping […]

Right from the opening frame of the 1998 straight-to-video thriller Diary of a Serial Killer (aka Rough Draft), it is obviously a cheesy affair. The score, with its heavy saxophone wailing and bombastic drum-machine track, feels more like something from the 80s than the late 90s, and the rest of the movie feels the same way. Our protagonist, […]