Oh, Mama, The Meddler gives Susan Sarandon a juicy role

Don’t let the title fool you. Sure, The Meddler features a mom who sticks her nose into places that exasperate her grown daughter in all ways possible. No make that the brain, voice and moxie of mother Marnie, who followed her grown kid Lori to Los Angeles from the East Coast, only to have a…

DeNiro does everything his way in The Comedian

Jackie Burke is a piece of work. As long as you accept that the guy played by Robert DeNiro in The Comedian will always say and do something that will make you cringe, cower or cry more likely than laugh, you’ll get along with the struggling-to-find work former sitcom star just fine. When we first…

The Big Sick makes me feel good about romantic comedy

Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani really lived The Big Sick. And the writer and stand-up comic/actor had enough smarts – and guts – to take their how’d-we-meet story to paper together and allow producer Judd Apatow and director Michael Showalter put the touches on it for the big screen. Lucky us. This is an…

My purpose today is praise this doggone movie

One in-theater viewing of the trailer for A Dog’s Purpose was enough for me to cross it off my first-run list. Devoted dog man that I am, the tears came through the second sit-through of the preview for this adaptation of the novel by W. Bruce Cameron about the spirit of a pooch that keeps…

Year By the Sea fills us one day by the sea

Something wasn’t sitting right in Joan’s life for some time. So when her realtor friend let slip at their son’s wedding reception that husband Robin had put their suburban New York home on the market, she reaches her tipping point. No, she decided, she was not moving with him to Kansas. Much to his dismay,…

Why Him? You can say that again

The rich get richer, they say. And all the good looking significant others, too, right? No matter what they seem like when you get a good look at what they’re really like. So it seems in in Why Him? a comedy written by Ian Helfer and directed by John Hamburg and stocked by some pretty…