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⭐ 5/10 My goodness I thought this movie was atrocious. On par with all the flimsy hollow super hero movies basically since Endgame. Watching it outside the hype of its release is interesting, and I get that for fans of the comics or whatever its satisfying just to see a new depiction, but this was a boring and empty viewing experience. First off, it looks terrible! Congrats on getting rid of the Snyder bleakness, but instead you've just made everything ultra blue and saturated. The fights are incoherent CGI messes, just nothing interesting to look at here. The actors are fine, and the chipper attitudes are refreshing given the past couple years of DC movies, but I had to really fight the urge to just be on my phone. How about the story? Something about pocket universes, a baby alien's and its dad, war in the middle east? I'll get back to the Israel/Palestine of it all, but this quickly gets in to comic mumbo-jumbo and I just did not care. There is an interesting scene earl...

⭐7.5/10 This is a super campy 90s horror-comedy that Jess chose under my strict spooky season regime. And she picked a winner! This one features 90s icons Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, as well as Bruce Willis in a bit of an odd role for him, but it worked nicely.  It's a movie about these two super hateable women vying for the attention of Bruce Willis by trying to stay young and hot, which leads them down a dark path. It's super silly and weird, and definitely has all the qualities of a cult classic. It's a theatre kid movie, but I laughed a lot and had a good time.  I don't have that much else to say! I liked it! I thought it actually touched on themes of beauty and pressure for ageing women in some very interesting ways, but again, it's silly, it's not trying to change the world. It's fun to watch and perfect for the season so long as you can stomach some yucky body horror with some laughably dated effects. 

⭐ 7.5/10 This is nostalgia bait for me. I remember watching this movie al the time and just loving it. Steve Martin, Tom Welling, Hilary Duff, Ashton Kutcher, it is such an attack of the early 2000s and makes me feel relaxed. Cheaper by the Dozen, is a remake of a movie based on a book, and while the old movie and book are honestly, really sad and depressing, this movie keeps the family unit message intact without bringing in a bunch of super dark and depressing outcomes. The story is quite simple, a father and mother of 12 are offered opportunities to follow their dreams (specifically career based dreams) and they decide to pursue them while dragging their massive family along kicking and screaming. It is during this time of overwork, on the father's part, and cross country travel on the mother's part, that the family begins to pull apart. Quickly the mother and father become aware that they will soon have to pick between holding onto their careers or keeping their family tog...

⭐ 7/10 This movie is a whack movie. At its core it is about conservation which is.... a little gross in the context of the film. I'll be real I'm not entirely sure what to think about what's going on here because its just so odd.  This movie takes place in the beautiful German Alps at a Neo-retro European ski resort. This movie follows the eldest daughter of a family of 4 named Gretchen. Gretchen is a complicated teenage girl dealing with a slew of things. The loss of her mom, the remarriage of her dad, reintegrating into a family dynamic with a new mother figure and a new step sister, and relocation to a different country in a different continent. These challenges alone make for a difficult circumstance, but integrating into this new beautiful environment becomes harder than expected when we meet Herr König, the owner of the ski resort Gretchen and her family are working on expanding. As her architect father and König are working during the day, Gretchen hides in her room...

⭐8/10 This is a shorter documentary about last season's Pistons. I've always thought it's funny that I will write reviews about any 2 hour movie I watch, but will watch a million Pistons games and consume 6 Pistons podcasts and whatever, and make no mention of it. Naturally, nobody cares about the Pistons but me, but this documentary is a good way of discussing the media I consume more than any other.  Moreover, I can discuss the funnest season of basketball I've ever watched outside of maybe the Cavs 2016 run. This documentary is great at highlighting what a joy this team was last year. They went from one of the worst NBA teams in history to not just an okay team, but a legitimately good one, and it's hard to attribute anything to this improvement besides the good vibes. They made minor roster adjustments, but this team's run felt magical, something perfect for a documentary like this.  It also highlighted what a wild year it was. They start 0-4 and...

⭐8/10 I'm always on the lookout for a spooky season movie that I can watch with Jess, and this one came to me like in a dream. It's exactly what I wanted. A parody of horror movies but it gets the tone just right and is constantly charming. I'm not super familiar with this universe, but the one thing I remembered was that Wallace is an inventor who's inventions always involve finding the hardest, silliest ways to get what he wants. For instance, his alarm clock puts cheese in front of him so he wakes up, but then retracts so that he hits his head against the trap door every morning. Genius! Everything is so dumb and it's one of those movies that you know was a hoot to make.  But in this movie, Wallace and Gromit are humane pest control agents that keep rabbits out of gardens (again, using the dumbest contraptions conceived), and eventually they have to take down a monster that is eating everyone's vegetables before the big vegetable celebration. What...

⭐ 9/10 I saw this movie in theatres when it came out, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. With One Battle After Another being talked about so much, I thought I would revisit PTA's previous movie, one that I thought I liked but most remember being confused by. It is just so bizarre, a movie that starts so seriously but then gets kind of funny, and then twisted. It's about a dress maker who is very particular in all aspects of life. He comes across a woman, she sort of becomes his muse, they sort of fall in love, and then it becomes a power struggle. What drew me back in, and is probably the lasting memory of this movie, is the Daniel Day Lewis performance. He is so so magnetic as this obsessive genius, a character type I always love on screen. Every little facial tick is perfection, this guy feels like a completely real person. DDL did his classic method thing, learning how to make dresses apparently, and I truly think it pays off here. Even the way he looks at c...

⭐ 10/10 The hype was high, despite thinking Licorice Pizza was a dud, and this completely exceeded expectations. PTA rarely misses, and has made one of my all time favourites, and while this one may not be on the Mount Rushmore it was a wonderful time at the movies with friends.  Since I basically have nothing negative to say (maybe the ending was a bit too nice/corny?) I can just list what is great. The acting, the score, the writing, the laughs, this movie has it all. But what I think will make this memorable for me is that it feels modern, of the moment. Seeing people in cages is bracing, and the scenes with Benicio wandering around the safe house comforting people on the corners of the screen felt way too real. But at its core this is a movie of a father trying to get back to his daughter, and I watched this waiting for the arrival of my daughter. Can't say I had the strongest emotional connection in that way, but it was timely, and the frantic energy of Leo throughout this fe...

⭐9/10 Yes, I'm allowed to post comedy specials because I make the rules around here. Comedy isn't funny to write about, so I won't take long, but I would just like to say that I was early on the bandwagon, watching him live in Toronto when he was kinda starting out. I love him. He is Cam from Modern Family but with some bite and mental illness.  This special is pretty much all gold. I had heard a lot of these jokes before, but this is a perfect entry point into his work if you haven't seen him. I don't love when comedians try to get too serious, and he does that a bit here, but it's a good balance.  Yeah, watch it. It's on Crave/ HBO. 

⭐9.5/10 I feel like I've got somewhat complicated thoughts on this one. This movie, from Paul Thomas Anderson, is being touted as the greatest film of the last decade. I watched it opening night and loved it, but was also perplexed as to why it was getting such praise. It is fun and engaging, but it doesn't exactly seem as if it's trying to be a work of undeniable genius like There Will Be Blood or the like. But I will admit that I've been thinking about this movie all weekend, but also not sure if it's because I'm supposed to believe it's genius or because it actually is...  Either way, this movie rocks. It is about Leonardo DiCaprio as a former American revolutionary who has a daughter and they get mixed up in trouble as his past still haunts him. That's not really the plot, but really all I want to say without giving too much away. But the thing that struck me was that this is a big budget action movie. PTA doesn't really make those......

⭐ 10/10 This movie is perfect. Perfect. And before anyone tells me that I am overstating it, no, watch it. The Coen brothers are (in my opinion) unmatched in their ability to tell a story. Now this movie is based on a book so one could argue that it isn't really them telling the story, but still, they have this ability to make words come to life in a mesmerizing way. The book is unreal, Cormac McCarthy is my favourite author and this book is one of his best, so this movie might have been a slam dunk waiting to happen, but it isn't even just about how good they are at telling the story, they're good at making Cormac McCarthy come to life in this movie. In his books, Cormac feels like an unnamed narrator; one so integrated in the story that he feels like another character, disembodied and vibrant. This movie doesn't have a narrator or anything, but there feels like there is a soul in this movie, a ghost that haunts the dialogue, an essence that fills each character, an i...

⭐ 9.5/10 I know that this might be a super high rating for this movie but I honestly don't care because I want to give it a straight up 10, however, that might be slightly too high of praise. Barely. I have watched all of Ari Aster's other movies and I have to say I am 100 percent a fan boy of his. I remember the first time I saw The Strange Thing about the Johnsons and if you haven't seen that movie, there is no way I can describe to you how disturbing that movie is. Hereditary gave me nightmares when I first saw it at the age of 20. At that time I hadn't been sincerely frightened by a horror movie in a long time. Despite that, Aster made it happen. I felt the same mix of awe and uneasy when I saw his movie Midsommar. Less scary than Hereditary but an unbelievably good movie nonetheless. But it wasn't until I saw Beau is Afraid that I truly got the vision. Despite the mixed reviews, I couldn't get over how locked into that movie I was. It was abstract, funny, ...

⭐8/10 This was Jess's choice when she got back home, the first movie I watched after my blood-soaked week of boy movies. And this is also a boy movie! Death at a funeral? There has to be at least one murder right?  This is a British comedy about Mr Darcy's dad dying and everything going wrong at the funeral. We watched the first half one night and it was okay and we weren't sure we would go back. But the second half absolutely makes up for it as things completely spiral and we were dying by the end.  So yeah, good movie, not a ton to add. Some great moments, but also a few that didn't really land, especially in that first half. I would say it's a crowd pleaser, but with a lot of these British comedies it can get pretty outrageous and absurd at times and is maybe not for everyone. But it was for me!

⭐6.5/10 I was anticipating this adaptation of a book I read this year, but I admit I kinda had low expectations. This is a story about a group of seniors in a retirement home who try to solve cold cases who then get wrapped up in a real life crime. I thought it had potential, but wasn't sure how it would work as a movie and was pretty worried about how it would be Netflixified.  My favorite thing about Osman and TMC is that it is very funny, but a bookish funny, and not in a way that would really translate to screen. This movie tries to be funny, and sometimes succeeds, but whereas that's the whole point of the book, this one just tries to get off a few Marvel-esque jokes. It focuses on the plot of the book, and while I thought the mystery of the book was tons of fun, pretty complex and thoughtfully developed, it is maybe not enough to carry a film on its own.  Or maybe it could have, but we'll never know because this movie butchers a few key features of the boo...

⭐7.5/10 The last movie from my run while Jess was away. The Killer! The perfect name for a movie to cap off this series.  This is a movie that follows a professional hitman, and it follows him very closely, being inside his brain. A character study, if you will. He is good at his job because he is super logical and careful, and you see the wild lengths he goes to do his job well. But also he is a sociopath, so you see how this kind of story would unfold for a guy who is unable to feel things, or at least who has trained himself not to feel things. It's all about how empathy is weakness, and fear is the mind killer or something like that. But then things go wrong and the goons are sent after him, and so this is actually a Jason Bourne movie if Jason Bourne was super unlikeable. It's still the same cold, calculated, hyper-competent protagonist, but this character is supposed to have no redeeming qualities.  Except he also kinda does? I guess that's my issue with t...

⭐7.5/10 The marathon of movies I can't watch with Jess continues! I was struck by the similarities between this one and History of Violence, both these kinda odd hyper-masculine movies from the early 2000s with similar themes. Both classic "I'm worried your baby thinks people can't change"-type movies where our heros have dark pasts that they are trying to run from, only to learn that you can't escape old habits... I found much of this movie to be not great. I find the premise to mostly be silly, and again some strange male fantasy where I could kill everybody in the room, but my desire to change is holding me back. But if you provoke me I'll have no choice! Not great. But in this instance, I found the writing to be much more passable and most importantly I found the romance at the heart of it to be a bit more compelling. Annette Benning plays the love interest, and while I don't think her role is exactly advancing the feminist cause, I do ...

⭐4/10 I thought this one was really bad. I went in with an open mind and an open heart, so much so that during those early moments of utterly generic setup and corny dialogue, I was thinking, surely this is commentary on traditional Hollywood action cinema with intentionally cliche writing and over-dramatic delivery?  It's not that. It's just not a good movie. In brief, this movie is about sweet Viggo Mortenson being confronted by some cartoon villains, but oddly enough kills them both with no issues and becomes a big hero. But how was this plain, quiet, mysterious diner-owner able to dispatch evil villains so easily? Is it possible he might have A History of Violence??  I can't necessarily fault the actors for the sins of this movie, because of course I could never fault the rightful King of Gondor, but I think they did their best with some truly terrible writing. Everything here is so lame. The high school bully has some of the most hilariously cliche lines, t...

⭐9/10 Take me back to 2009 when you could make a movie where Nazis were unabashedly the bad guys and it was funny to see them tortured! This is a movie about Brad Pitt leading a group of guerilla Jewish-Americans, hunting down Nazis during WWII and killing them in ways that will inspire fear in the rest of the Nazis. But Brad Pitt is a major hick that pronounces it Nat-zee and his group of fighters are clearly not the most sophisticated or well-mannered men.  But it doesn't matter! Because opposite them is Christopher Waltz as the "Jew Hunter," one of the most terrifying villains put to screen. He is a hyper-competent detective who is always one step ahead, and I absolutely love this brawn vs brains matchup, because how often is it where the good guys are the brawn? It makes for some explosive, absolutely hilarious interactions where the Americans have to brute-force their way out of delicate situations.  This movie is told in a super distinct manner, essentia...

⭐8.5/10 In this movie, Ethan Hawke is a reverend at a church who is confronted with a depressed parishioner who defeats him in a 1 on 1 counselling session as the counsellor becomes depressed rather than the parishioner getting better. It's a super bleak movie that kinda asks the question, how do we not despair when everything is going to shit and society could likely collapse during our lifetime?  This was a super relevant movie because I too deal with these thoughts, more now than ever with fascist dictators popping up everywhere and AI going unchecked and summer temperatures being broken every year and the income gap widening with a recession on the way. I'm also like, the person who is supposed to have some answers on how not to give in to despair? Well if I wanted to find some answers for myself, this movie was not providing them. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this is a pretty much all bleakness. Not only in its content but it's stylings,...

⭐8/10 My latest foray into the superhero slop fest! I know this genre has really died down, but it's funny to me how this isn't even the latest superhero movie to come out. They are still trying very hard to keep the slop flowing!  Honestly if it wasn't for my years of investment into this specific superhero, painful hours with my new girlfriend trying to show enthusiasm for the fourteenth episode of Lana and Clark switching bodies, I don't think this movie would have meant anything to me. But I thought this was a super faithful adaptation of the Superman IP. It's corny! It's campy! It is all very silly and lighthearted, but the central message is clear: Clark is a good person.  I loved the introduced premise in this movie, obviously one that has massive parallels to today. If there is a person with all the power in the world, how would you go about solving the various world conflicts? There are obviously complexities, and I don't exactly think t...