The boy from Mars and a girl from Earth make their own space

Director Peter Chelsom has delivered to this world with The Space Between Us two movies in one. The first is a space story, a tale of a frantically motivated businessman driven to bring humankind to a colony on Mars. Gary Oldman plays organization patriarch Nathaniel Shepherd as a complex dude who won’t take no for…

Natalie Portman pours her soul into Jackie

Natalie Portman deserves every honor that comes her way for Jackie. She takes this complicated part from the mind of director Pablo Larrain and pen of screenwriter Noah Oppenheim and makes sure audiences for sure think yes, that is what we remember of our Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy in this critical time of U.S. history, be…

What would one teen boy take from 3 diverse 20th Century Women?

If you lived through 1979, parts big and small of Mike Mills’ Women of a Certain Age will smack you upside the head. The writer and director fashioned this sometimes searing and sometimes sleepy 118-minute period piece after his relationship with his mother, and filled it with the way the people and place in their…

Patriots Day strikes the right blow for heroes rising from the terror

The heroes rose immediately from amid the victims that horrible sunny April morning at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and Patriots Day does one hell of a job reminding us all about how high they had to climb from that gut punch. Director and co-writer Peter Berg brings us back to that tragic…

We all won because these Hidden Figures reached for the stars

The nation was full of hope and fears in so many ways back in 1961 when these folks at NASA were busting butt to keep up with the Russians, a President on small screens seen by huge groups voicing dreams and concerns as fragmented groups wondered if they could come together to accomplish this greater…

Woody Allen’s Cafe Society lets us love his characters but not his whole story

Woody Allen did a lot right in his direction of Cafe Society, the Hollywood legend’s period piece about a New York City kid coming of age in the 1930s. Bobby Dorfman moves to Tinseltown and takes up under the tutelage of his bigwig agent uncle Phil Stern, hoping to learn about the life and maybe…

They didn’t get any better than The Nice Guys in 2016

I sat and pondered with the list of first-run and Blu-Ray/DVDs I’d watched these past 12 months, thinking about the effect they’d had on me in the theater or on the flat screen. Yes, there was good work in front of my eyes once a week, drama, comedy, all sorts of genres in the nooks…

They didn’t get any worse than The Brothers Grimsby in 2016

There were some stinkers on my list this year. I try to pick good ones on my weekly trip to the theater of a first-run show or selection from the Blu-Ray/DVD collection at work at the Liverpool Public library for my Monday movie reviews here. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. And so I give you…

Gosling, Stone sing, dance their way into a faraway La La Land

Director and writer Damien Chazelle wastes not one moment to let everybody know La La Land is going to bring everybody back to the days when Hollywood musicals were big, bold and bright. The first five or so of his 128 minutes of this beautifully shot and choreographed picture are spent on an L.A. Freeway,…

Mike and Dave find the dates they deserve

Zac Efron has not been on what you’d call a winning streak with me. I hated Neighbors. If humanly possible, I despised Dirty Grandpa even more. Too despicable. Too deplorable. Too demeaning. D-minus. And yet I checked out Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates from my place of work having seen the trailer and doing…