Greenland 2: Migration (2026)

★★½
Unexpectedly, I enjoyed this sequel to Greenland (2020), though only to a certain extent. The story again follows a family's journey through chaos in search of safety, but this time the whole thing just comes together in a much more satisfying way. Oh, I have issues with some ridiculous plot developments and questionable science, and I'll get into all that. Greenland 2: Migration is not the best example of this genre. It is, however, serviceable in delivering the goods, and it features a passionate performance by Gerard Butler that makes him better suited to high-concept disaster movies over Dwayne Johnson.

The Man (2005)

★
The Man isn't so much a movie as it is a feature-length experiment to see how two actors with wildly conflicting styles can occupy the same scene and come through unscathed. This particular experiment is a complete failure, as other necessary ingredients, namely a strong story, are missing. Samuel L. Jackson is playing another of his no-nonsense tough guys, while Eugene Levy is channeling his Jim's Dad character from American Pie.

Anaconda (2025)

★½
Tom Gormican's Anaconda is a clunky man-vs.-nature comedy that contains one hysterical joke that fully earns its laugh but has absolutely nothing else going for it. It is not a remake of the 1997 original starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube but rather an acknowledgement that the 1997 original was a movie, and that it is ripe for a remake by a small group of filmmakers. Calling this a small group is an understatement. It's just four people—two actors and two on crew. The premise of this story is that Ronald "Griff" Griffen (Paul Rudd) acquired the rights to the Anaconda source material and desires to make it into a movie. He recruits childhood buddy Doug (Jack Black) to direct, friend Claire (Thandiwe Newton) to costar and other friend Kenny (Steve Zahn) to record sound, with jobs interchangeable depending on who needs to appear on screen.

Scre4m (2011)

★★★
Kevin Williamson used the time well between Scream 3 and Scre4m. In those eleven years, he saved up enough good ideas and had the opportunity to watch how horror movies were evolving in the new millennium. His movie is shockingly prescient. Social media is making stars out of anyone who can acquire a large following by creating and posting videos (I hate the word "content") that show everything from the ordinary to the outrageous, but the extent to which some creators will go to gain validation has gotten worse since this movie came out in 2011. Scre4m exposes the dark and ugly side of online fame. Watching someone find a lost kitten sounds benign until you realize it was staged.

Eye of the Beholder (2000)

★★
In an interview for T.V. Guide, Ewan McGregor was discussing his role in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace. He said that he appeared in this big-budgeted movie because of the prestige of the series, but that he would continue to do all the small, independent efforts that he truly enjoys doing. In one of his comments, he said that he would never "taint [his] soul with crap like Independence Day." Well, I guess that didn't stop him from appearing in Eye of the Beholder, which isn't crap but comes close to it by employing a weak story with even weaker plot connections.

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.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

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.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

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.

Spring Breakers (2013)

★★★½
Did Harmony Korine ever attend spring break? I wondered that as I watched Spring Breakers, a movie that could be seen either as an exaggerated account from someone who absorbed the imagery of spring break through years of watching spring break movies or an accurate on-location report from a real spring break gathering but amped up to highlight the hedonistic nature of the annual event. Someone could come away with either interpretation or maybe another that I haven't considered yet. Korine is a cinematic wild child who doesn't shy away from excess, so the spring break setting is the perfect place for him to indulge in his tendencies. He walks a tight rope here, and this time he pulls it off. I've seen Gummo, which featured a fragmented narrative about the residents of a poor town, though it was unsatisfactory because his camera was more fascinated with behavior than providing any insight into that behavior. The unreliable narrator seemed to distance him and us from his subjects.

Abandon (2002)

★★
With all the recent films featuring twist endings, Abandon comes across as pretty bland. Part of the fun of watching this kind of film is to replay the movie in our minds to connect the dots and see if the story played fair. Movies like Angel Heart, The Sixth Sense and Memento engage our thought processes and are impressive for their execution. Abandon doesn't inspire any kind of mental rewinding. The movie is presented in a straightforward manner before arriving at a conclusion that is weak and barely requires a double take.

The Hunger Games (2012)

★★★½
The Hunger Games books carry the label of dystopian young adult fiction, but much like Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels (Have Space Suit—Will Travel is a standout), Suzanne Collins's stories have broad appeal that reaches well beyond the Y.A. demographic. She writes at a very high level and incorporates complex themes into a fast-paced narrative focused on combat and survival. Series protagonist Katniss Everdeen is plucky, cunning and resilient. She navigates a deadly contest planned and manipulated by gamemakers who have accepted the yearly sacrifice of children as a part of life. Their world of Panem consists of a highly centralized and authoritarian capital city (called the Capitol) and its 12 districts of varying degrees of poverty and disenchantment. Collins advances the plot efficiently and succeeds in simultaneously conveying Panem's geopolitical environment and maintaining a clear focus on Katniss's journey.

Nope (2022)

★★½
Capsule Review

I'd like to believe Jordan Peele is the newest innovative horror movie director on the scene, and perhaps when he has a larger body of work, we can recognize him as such and acknowledge a few weaknesses along the way. It's not like John Carpenter and Wes Craven always knocked it out of the park. His latest film, Nope, is a little bit of sci-fi and a little bit of horror. It involves a U.F.O. that hovers over a Southern California horse ranch and the owners (brother and sister played by Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer) who try to record it. The Haywood siblings are also dealing with the negative fallout from the death of their father and a nearby Old West theme park owner who wants to buy their land. The players are all in some way involved with the mysterious U.F.O., which has certain rules that don't seem to be followed consistently enough to get a good grasp of how it works. Uneven pacing takes momentum out of the movie. It's an okay effort that doesn't match the ominous dread of Peele's debut Get Out.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Die My Love (2025)

★★★½
Capsule Review

Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love is a scorching and uncompromising examination of a woman's mental deterioration starting with her postpartum depression and following her through a maddening descent into the darkest recesses of her mind. The sequence of events unravels. How much is authentic? Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star as Grace and Jackson, who move into an old family home and aim to start a family there. After the birth of her child, Grace experiences depression and boredom, but she also exhibits odd behavior like crawling on the ground and hallucinating. While the movie progresses more or less in a linear fashion, there are seemingly unrelated sidesteps in the narrative and drastic jumps in time that illustrate Grace's fragmented state of mind. Lawrence's performance is stellar. John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence is a clear inspiration, but Ramsay's movie stands on its own with its surreal imagery to carry it.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

American Pie (1999)

★★★
American Pie came along when I needed it. I've lauded 1999 on this website as my favorite movie year. Personally, though, I was in a bit of a funk that summer. I enjoyed South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me before this, but they weren't enough. American Pie snapped me out of it. Everything was okay going forward. Jim Levenstein's foibles were more than just easy lowbrow attempts at humor in a high school sex comedy. They were keen observations of a confusing and irrational period of life during which the ability to have second thoughts about one's actions has yet to emerge as a stabilizing force. Jim and his buddies make decisions that teenagers would make and are convinced that their actions are correct, but these decisions originate from a point of view unshaped by real world experience.

Bugonia (2025)

★★★½
Capsule Review

Director Yorgos Lanthimos takes the premise of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! and, with a keen eye and experienced hand, elevates it to soaring heights. That's okay. It's happened before. Vanilla Sky was superior to the original Spanish film Open Your Eyes. In Bugonia, cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap the C.E.O. of a pharmaceutical company and hold her hostage on the belief that she is an alien from outer space on a mission to destroy humanity. Michelle (Emma Stone) tries to convince them she is not an alien, but they don't listen, which leads to a power struggle between the two sides to see who will emerge victorious (either them, by getting on to her "spaceship," or her, by escaping). Lanthimos improves upon the original by establishing the paranoia of the abductors before the abduction takes place, by allowing the abductee to assert her position strongly and by placing less emphasis on the law enforcement subplot. The result is a more accomplished film that delivers a powerful punch.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Save the Green Planet! (2003)

★★★
Capsule Review

Paranoia fuels this little shocker from South Korea. In Save the Green Planet!, a loner and conspiracy theorist kidnaps a high-profile C.E.O. and holds him hostage because he is convinced that this public figure is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) and his girlfriend Suni (Hwang Jeong) bind and gag their victim Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik) and torture him until he confesses. I watched this after watching the American remake Bugonia, and the remake is the better version of the same story. Writer and director Jang Joon-hwan came up with this highly original concept and filmed it with passion, but his completed project had room to improve. Kang's manipulation of Lee towards the end plays too quickly. I preferred Emma Stone's calculating persuasion. Jang's movie is a great template, but on its own as a study of paranoia and the extremes someone could take it, Save the Green Planet! works well enough.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Café au Lait (1994)

★★½
Capsule Review

Lola (Julie Mauduech) is pregnant, and the question of who the father is dominates the story early. There are two possibilities, but the answer to the question is resolved before we expect it. Rather than keep us in suspense, director Mathieu Kassovitz (who also wrote and stars) uses the question to examine how the two potential fathers feel drawn to Lola and how the men might feel about each other. His story creates an interesting dynamic that sees Felix (Kassovitz) and Jamal (Hubert Koundé) at first as competitors and eventually as partners to ensure Lola's comfort during the later stages of her pregnancy. Their collaboration is tenuous at best, resulting in outburst and reconciliation and back again. The actors are good enough to perform what the script asks of them, but there isn't much narrative thrust to make for an engrossing story. The actors and costar Vincent Cassel as Felix's friend would reunite in La Haine, which is nothing like Café au Lait and much more accomplished.

© 2023 Silver Screen Reviews

The Last American Virgin (1982)

★
I had a Karen once. Her name was Maria, so I get it. The Last American Virgin has this reputation for being brutally honest about the unfairness of unrequited love and the heartache that follows when the realization settles in that all your best intentions were for naught. Writer and director Boaz Davidson culminates his T&A show with this hard lesson, but he doesn't earn it because of his inability (or unwillingness) to present his characters as anything other than sex-starved teens looking for their next fix. The denouement is there for shock value. It does not serve the purpose its defenders say it does because the characters are shallow, the narrative is scattershot, the sex is sleazy, and the acting is substandard, which prevents us from being truly invested in the story.