17 May
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BOOK CLUB Director: Bill Holderman Starring: Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, Candice Bergen, Andy Garcia, Don Johnson, Craig T. Nelson, Richard Dreyfuss, Wallace Shawn I’m presently in a book club with a few of my gal pals. It started off with us reading young adult fiction, but we’ve progressed into slightly heavier fare. I hope that in forty years we’re still reading and drinking champagne much like the characters in Book Club. The opening montage calls us back to the younger days of Diane (Keaton), Vivian (Fonda), Sharon (Bergen), and Carol (Steenburgen) as college friends. It’s a reminder of how iconic and legendary theseRead More →

10 May
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LIFE OF THE PARTY Director: Ben Falcone Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Molly Gordon, Maya Rudolph, Gillian Jacobs, Luke Benward, Julie Bowen, Heidi Gardner, Debby Ryan, Jacki Weaver, Stephen Root Melissa McCarthy and her husband Ben Falcone frequently collaborate on a variety of projects. They’ll write the script together while he directs it and she stars as the lead. Life of the Party is their third movie together following 2014’s Tammy and 2016’s The Boss. I’d rank this film as the best of the three. In it McCarthy plays Deanna who is heartbroken after waiving goodbye to her daughter, Maddie (Gordon), who’s entering her freshman year ofRead More →

30 April
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AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt, Mark Ruffalo, Josh Brolin, Chris Evans, Tom Holland, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chadwick Boseman, Letitia Wright, Danai Gurira, Zoe Saldana, Paul Bettany Marvel fans have spent the last ten years and eighteen movies engrossed in a variety of superheroes and villains duking it in order to save Earth and other galactic empires. Some have proven more successful than others, yet Marvel fatigue never seems to set in even after all these years. They’re coming off one of my favorites and their biggest hit to date, Black Panther,Read More →

19 April
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I FEEL PRETTY Writers/Directors: Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein Starring: Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Busy Phillips, Aidy Bryant, Rory Scovel, Lauren Hutton, Emily Ratajkowski, Sasheer Zamata, Naomi Campbell In I Feel Pretty, Amy Schumer starts to feel pretty down on her luck. As Renee, she doesn’t look like any of the other pretty girls at soul cycle and oftentimes gets mistaken for a man. She works for Lily LeClaire, one of the most prestigious cosmetics in the world. That being said, her position is pretty low on the totem pole sequestering her office to a tiny basement space far removed from the fancy corporate office. AtRead More →

12 April
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RAMPAGE Director: Brad Peyton Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Ackerman, Jake Lacy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Joe Manganiello, P.J. Byrne Rampage is pure absurdity, but you already know that going in. You don’t go into a movie like this for high art. In the world of Rampage, advanced science has gotten to the point where genetic editing has officially become a weapon of mass destruction. Maybe that’s why it’s sequestered to outer space as the film opens. Pure lunacy, of course, so just go along with it. A space station carrying samples of genetic coding suffers a freak accident and explodes scattering the canisters containingRead More →

05 April
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A QUIET PLACE Director: John Krasinski Starring: John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds Funnyman John Krasinski is shaking things up by turning his focus to the horror genre by directing, co-writing, and starring in A Quiet Place. Krasinski and real-life wife Emily Blunt play married couple Lee and Evelyn. Along with their three children, they are some of the only remaining survivors after a mysterious force has wiped out their small town. The movie picks up on Day 89, and we first see their family rummaging around in an abandoned pharmacy that’s been ransacked for the last remaining goods. They leave to findRead More →

26 March
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READY PLAYER ONE Director: Steven Spielberg Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Mark Rylance, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, Hannah John-Kramer, Win Morisaki, Philip Zhao, Simon Pegg One of this year’s most highly anticipated movies is Ready Player One, the latest from Steven Spielberg. It’s the big screen adaptation of Ernest Cline’s beloved novel. There’s as much riding on this film due to its fan base as there is with a new Star Wars or Marvel movie. In Columbus, Ohio in 2045, reality is a real bummer. The need to escape to a different world is paramount for so many people. The OASIS is a virtual realityRead More →

23 March
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MIDNIGHT SUN Director: Scott Speer Starring: Bella Thorne, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Rob Riggle, Quinn Shephard, Nicholas Coombe It seems like most YA movies fall into one of two genres –dystopian anti-government or romance. Midnight Sun falls in the second genre and is a remake of a Japanese movie from 2006. Bella Thorne, best known for The DUFF or her Disney Channel show Shake It Up, stars as Katie who suffers from a rare condition called xeroderma pigmentosum (XP). Yes, it’s a real condition. She leads a vampire-style life, staying indoors asleep in the daytime and awakens at night. She has an extreme sensitivity to sunlight toRead More →

22 March
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TOMB RAIDER Director: Roar Uthaug Starring: Alicia Vikander, Dominic West, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Kristin Scott Thomas, Derek Jacobi, Hannah John-Kamen I should preface this review by stating that I am not a gamer. I’ve never played the “Tomb Raider” video games, but like many, I’m familiar with the character of Lara Croft given the two previous movies. The video game got a reboot in 2013, which apparently means that a movie reboot was the natural next step. This iteration finds Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl) as Croft. We learn that at a young age, her father (West) left his family toRead More →

16 March
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LOVE, SIMON Director: Greg Berlanti Starring: Nick Robinson, Katherine Langford, Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel, Alexandra Shipp, Logan Miller, Keiynan Lonsdale, Miles Heizer, Joey Pollari, Clark Moore, Tony Hale, Natasha Rothwell It’s a little shocking to think that it took until 2018 to finally have a teen movie whose lead character is gay. We have seen plenty of gay characters on television and in movies before, but they’re usually the sassy sidekicks offering moral support to the female protagonist. Love, Simon finally breaks that convention in telling Simon’s story. Nick Robinson (Jurassic World) plays the titular character who explains to the audience in his opening narrationRead More →