David (2025)

★★★
Capsule Review

Beautiful animation highlights this biblical tale of David and his rise to the throne as king of Israel. The opening scenes were breathtaking, and the level of detail remains consistently high as the story unfolds. David takes down the hulking Goliath to end the first act, with the rest of the movie covering David's adult life as King Saul grows jealous of the young shepherd who does not desire to usurp his ruler. Plotting, characterization and voice acting are all adequate, and the songs are a mix of catchy tunes and forgettable filler. The movie's greatest strength is its successful presentation of the Biblical story as a children's musical while maintaining a reasonably close approximation of the account as recorded in the Old Testament. I was hoping this would reach the soaring heights of 1998's The Prince of Egypt, but it does not, but then again, that set the bar very high.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Sicario (2015)

★★★
Capsule Review

A deliberately slow pace is not the end all be all to building suspense. Sicario is a crime drama involving U.S. law enforcement and Mexican drug traffickers, and everything about it indicates a top end production. It has a stellar cast, a gifted director (Denis Villeneuve) and amazing cinematography. There are two masterful sequences. The film opens with a raid on a house with suspected human traffickers. Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), who participated in the raid, is then recruited to join a task force that is targeting a drug lord. Macer and her new comrades execute a tense infiltration into Ciudad Juárez to take custody of the drug lord's associate and bring him back over the border. Beyond these two scenes, the movie chugs along at a plodding pace with little else going for it except arguments between Kate and task force lead Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). Benicio del Toro also stars, but he also appeared in the superior crime/drug movie Traffic from 2000. This is a solid movie but not something I would revisit.

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Ready or Not (2019)

★★★
Ready or Not is the kind of horror movie for which the creators probably had a blast brainstorming different ideas and compounding those ideas with more to arrive at a final draft that is simply fun to make and fun to watch once filmed. It can be produced at a reasonable cost and marketed purely on an idea, and if that idea is sufficiently intriguing, it can act as a hook that can reel in curious viewers and reward them with a good show. The movie isn't scary in the sense that it's terrifying. It isn't scary all that much, but it is inventive. If a horror movie doesn't deliver on the usual expectations by design but has a different agenda, then it can still be deemed a success. Yes, there is blood, violence, screaming and suspense, but they are the foundation for the clever and sometimes humorous unraveling of a story that starts simple enough before leading to surprising places.

Werewolves (2024)

★★
Capsule Review

Werewolves is a relentlessly mediocre werewolf movie that has a neat concept but executes it with little flair. It's basically another disaster movie in which the main character must navigate a treacherous landscape to make it back to his family. I've seen a bunch of these. The year before, a supermoon turned all humans who were exposed to it into werewolves. Worldwide chaos ensued. A year later, the same event will happen again. A team of scientists is working frantically to develop a serum to make humans immune to the moon's effects. When the lab facility is compromised, Wesley Marshall (Frank Grillo) and Amy Chen (Katrina Law) are the only survivors. They make their way across a city infested with werewolves. Back home, Wesley's family is housed inside a fortified home, but the werewolves outside won't give up. This all sounds good, but there's little excitement and fewer scares. The special effects are effective, though.

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The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

★★★
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man series was doing so well that reports of rebooting the story and starting over a mere ten years after the first installment was crazy talk when it was announced. That was my impression anyway. Could a new crew continue the momentum Raimi had established? The Amazing Spider-Man mostly succeeds. The first half parallels the original film's origin story, but there are subtle changes to ensure that this is not a duplicate. Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) visits Oscorp and gets bitten by an experimental spider that grants him superpowers. There is the period of discovery during which Peter embarrasses himself when he can't control his new skills. Like Toby Maguire's Peter Parker trajectory, Garfield's wears improvised disguises before developing his permanent costume. He eventually learns to control his powers and becomes a plucky young crime fighter who appears to have fun teasing criminals while punishing them for breaking the law.