Movie Reviews

By Bob Garver               Back in 2019, “Joker” managed to make over $1 billion at the global box office and earn itself 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and a Best Actor win for Joaquin Phoenix. I recall respecting the movie for Phoenix’s performance and the inspired idea to paint him as a Scorsese-style…

By Bob Garver      For better or worse, late September this year is certainly the time for animated robot movies. Fortunately, we got the “worse” out of the way last week with “Transformers One.” Now we can sit back and enjoy the “better” with “The Wild Robot.” Many people did indeed sit back and enjoy this…

By Bob Garver      I actually had high hopes going into “Transformers One.” Not because I’m a big fan of the toys or really anything about the property, but because this movie promised to correct some of the mistakes made by its predecessors. Namely, I was excited that there wouldn’t be any live-action actors. For some…

By Bob Garver      “Speak No Evil” is a remake of a 2022 Danish movie with a famously vile twist. I went into this film expecting it to have the same twist. That’s not to say that I expected it to have the same “ending,” exactly, as I knew the film might deviate from the source…

By Bob Garver In preparation for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” I watched the original film from 1988. I found that I liked “some” things about it, like the set and character designs and much of the humor, but it’s not a film I would recommend overall. The special effects weren’t well-integrated (even for the 80’s), motivations between…

By Bob Garver   Nobody is going to mistake cut-rate biopic “Reagan” for a great movie. At best, it’s a pretty standard greatest-hits collection of important moments in the former President’s life. At worst, it’s a laughably underfunded production made by people who, for whatever reason, want to sell America on Ronald Reagan in 2024.…

By Bob Garver I was on vacation two weekends ago, so I missed the chance to review this movie when it nearly took down “Deadpool & Wolverine” for the #1 spot at the box office. Two weeks later, the film has dropped to #3, but it still outperformed everything that opened this past weekend, not…

By Bob Garver “Alien: Romulus” started out at a disadvantage with me because I haven’t liked any of the “Alien” films that came before it. I’m not just talking about the heavily-maligned third and fourth installments from the 90’s, the “Predator” crossovers from the 2000’s, or the uneven Michael Fassbender arc of the 2010’s. I…

By Bob Garver   With “Trap,” writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has given us a half-decent movie. By which I mean that half of it is… decent. The first half delivers the taut thriller we’ve been promised, and it’s not great or anything, but it’s reasonably suspenseful and enjoyable. And then the movie becomes garbage. Not…

By Bob Garver If nothing else, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is Disney taking a victory lap for acquiring 20th Century Fox and the Marvel properties it controlled. We got a taste of this last year in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” when the advertising bragged about bringing in Patrick Stewart’s Professor X from the…

By Bob Garver It’s usually at the end of the review that I talk about a film’s MPAA rating, but I’ll twist it up for “Twisters.” Or rather, for its 1996 predecessor “Twister” and its all-time terribly-worded rating justification. The film was rated PG-13 for “intense depiction of very bad weather.” Yes, the depiction was…

By Bob Garver The gruesome horror movie “Longlegs” pulled something of an upset at this past weekend’s domestic box office. It wasn’t enough to upset “Despicable Me 4” for the #1 spot, but it did do the best among new releases. Great reviews were seemingly enough to pull the family-unfriendly indie darling into the #2…

By Bob Garver           For a franchise that has been fairly consistent with its style of PG animated humor, the “Despicable Me” movies are kind of all over the place for me. I couldn’t stand the first one, loved the second one, thought the first “Minions” spinoff had its moments, felt the shtick was…

By Bob Garver “A Quiet Place: Day One” made a grave miscalculation with its advertising. Scenes were filmed with the intention of putting them in the trailers, but not the movie. This way, when people saw the movie, they wouldn’t be able to properly anticipate the surprises and story progression. To that end, the advertising…

By Bob Garver Watching “The Bikeriders,” the word “inauthentic” kept driving through my mind. For example, I wasn’t buying pretty-boy Austin Butler as a tough biker. There is a planet where Butler can come off as intimidating and that planet is called Arrakis. Here on Earth, he looks like a clean-cut actor making a calculated…

By Bob Garver Back in 2015, Disney and Pixar introduced us to 11-year-old Riley and the squabbling emotions inside her prepubescent head. To make a long story short, Joy (Amy Poehler) tried to retain dominance over the girl, but Sadness (Phyllis Smith) kept creeping her way in. The struggle led to both emotions getting kicked…

By Bob Garver   “Garfield and Friends,” based on comic strips by Jim Davis, was one of my favorite cartoons growing up. With all due respect to the show’s talented writers and other voice actors, the best thing about the show was Lorenzo Music’s performance as the title tabby. Music’s voice, which somehow always sounded…

In this era of constant reboots and re-imaginings and the like, “Planet of the Apes” has had a pretty successful run. 2011’s “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was such a big hit both commercially and critically that pundits were talking about an unprecedented motion-capture-based Oscar nomination for Andy Serkis as lead ape Caesar…

By Bob Garver There has been a push in recent years for the Oscars to add an award for stunt work. I’m all for it, sure, give some often-unrecognized professionals their moment in the sun. My guess is it’s going to happen eventually, given the passion of the advocates and no apparent strong argument against…

By Bob Garver               After last week’s heavy, serious, ultraviolent “Civil War,” I needed a movie like the lighter, sillier, also ultraviolent “Abigail.” Is this film as intelligent and thought-provoking as last week’s offering – a film that still rules the box office, by the way? No. Is this film going to leave much…

By Bob Garver               “Civil War” presents one of the most intriguing premises of the year, maybe of the last several years: what if Texas and California were to secede from the United States and join forces to wage war against their former home country? In short, everyone would lose. The economy would tank…