JOEL.MOBI

This is bad. I won't review it further. I don't get paid by the word. Maybe just be grateful that I took this bullet for you. That's it. It's over. Go away.

Travis Knight, Hollywood's favorite nepo baby, has made another really good movie. Wildwood is a beautiful piece of stop-motion animation, and if you enjoy LAIKA's other films, I recommend it. The story follows Prue, a girl living in Portland whose…

I was skeptical about Whalefall going in. A guy gets swallowed by a whale and engages in a gory fight to survive. That didn't sound like something I particularly wanted to watch, since I'm not a fan of the body…

Samuel L. Jackson is the president of the United States, somebody is trying to overthrow the government, and the presidential limousine protecting him turns out to be a ridiculously overpowered tank on wheels. That's the movie. Jackson and his Secret…

This is an amusing dark comedy about two orphaned siblings who have spent decades living on a remote Scottish island, defending it against anybody who turns up. Their parents died when they were young, and they've largely raised themselves. Their…

I wanted A Talent for Murder to be more fun than it was. Helen Mirren plays Patricia Highsmith, the author of the Tom Ripley novels, as an unpleasant recluse who knows a great deal about murder and enjoys making her…

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, an android waiting in a store to be purchased as a companion for a child. She eventually goes home with a girl dealing with a mysterious illness, and much of the movie follows Klara as she…

I saw Wicker with friends, a group of mostly women, and enjoyed the experience more than I expected. Olivia Colman plays an unmarried fisherwoman in an old-fashioned village where everybody apparently has something to say about her lack of a…

I went into You Can See Everything knowing relatively little about Elizabeth Holmes beyond the headlines. I hadn’t watched The Dropout, and I wasn’t particularly invested in the case. I came out of this nearly three-hour movie wondering whether she…

I have mixed feelings about parts of Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, but I really liked the movie. It’s gorgeously shot, consistently interesting and long enough that you’re going to feel the length. It also contains plenty…

Misty Green is a really solid film about a talented actress who can’t seem to get her career, or much of anything else in her life, back on track. She’s had enough success to know what she’s capable of, but…

California Schemin’ follows two aspiring Scottish rappers who discover that the music industry is considerably more interested in them when they stop being Scottish. After getting dismissed as a pair of guys from Dundee, they reinvent themselves as Californians, adopt…

I caught Sense and Sensibility by myself during an afternoon when I didn’t have much else going on. I thought it was well made and well acted, and I was really, really bored. I didn’t enjoy much of anything about…

This didn’t really work for me, but I’m going to be as generous as possible, because I think twelve-year-old me would have absolutely loved this movie. A lot of video game adaptations cater to millennials reminiscing about the games we…

John Turturro plays an aging pickpocket still plying his trade in a city where people increasingly don’t carry anything worth stealing. Everybody has a phone, nobody has cash, and his particular set of skills is becoming obsolete. At home, he’s…

Mahershala Ali is excellent here, and Adia Joëlle was amazing as his daughter. The family story worked especially well thanks to the two of them. I had trouble buying some of the contrived conflict and didn’t think it entirely earned…

Lowest to Lowerest… Animals is like a dumbed-down version of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, which was already a dumbed-down version of Kurosawa’s High and Low. We keep working our way down. If you’re free on a Sunday afternoon and…

Angel and the Badman was just sort of bad, which is disappointing because I’ve enjoyed a lot of what Angel Studios has released this year. This is a remake of the 1947 John Wayne Western of the same name. Zachary…

The Social Reckoning is very good for most of its running time, but Aaron Sorkin pushes it toward an ending that doesn’t do justice to the more interesting movie he’s already made. I enjoyed it, and there’s a lot here…

I liked Verity, even though I don’t think it’s a good movie. I was never bored and never lost interest, and I like watching these actors. But with Josh Hartnett, Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in a trashy thriller based…

This is a farce about a farce being revived by people living in a farcical world created by people who responded to a real crisis as though it were a farce. Starring Tom Cruise. Directed by Alejandro Iñárritu. I would…

Heart of the Beast picks up with Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier finally returning home from World War II, just 80 years behind schedule. Brad Pitt has aged considerably better than most veterans of the European campaign, and he’s replaced his…

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! has a premise that should be right up my alley: an international, multilingual story about grief, romance and dance, with some magical realism mixed in. I’m a sucker for magical realism. But despite all the ingredients…

Charlie Harper is being sold, at least to some extent, as a rom-com. That’s not really what it is. This is a relationship drama about two people who fall in love young and then have to deal with the fact…