Aliens in the Attic

We’re all familiar with the genre of kid movies where the kids repel some threat in spite of the cluelessness of their parents. I find I tolerate them less and less as I grow older. As I turn into a grumpy old man. Here, it actually makes a sort of sense, as the invading aliens have a gizmo that enables them to animate a person like a remote control puppet … but it only works on grown-ups. ... Read more »

Alien vs. Predator

One of the worst movies we’ve ever seen. What a crapulous, brain-dead, festering hemorrhoid of a movie. If Hollywood had a great big pimple on its face, and you squeezed it, this is the movie that would come out. I’d hate to have to pay the Vaseline budget for this atrocity. Slime city!

Thirty or forty people (who’s counting? not even the SFX and stunt people who ... Read more »

Alien Trespass

The idea here is that this is a movie made in 1957 and lost for over 50 years. And that’s exactly what it looks like. Every detail is right, from the lovely, saturated Technicolor, to the deliberately bad back projection shots when people are driving around in cars. (It’s supposed to be happening in the Mojave ... Read more »

Alien Nation

What a promising idea, and what a mess. What if the first aliens we meet are interstellar Okies, sort of trash that nobody else wants (Morons From Outer Space handles the same basic idea comically) … and it is utterly destroyed by the sheer stupidity of the idea that they can’t stand contact with ... Read more »

Alfie

This movie just makes me want to … break into song, like a movie musical! Pretend I’m Howard Keel. First a song to the writer/director, Charles Shyer, and then to the star, Read more »

Alfie

Anticipating that Alfie, The Remake might leave something to be desired, we rented both of them and watched the new one first. This review will refer to both of them, as after watching the new one I was inspired only to a jape, below.

I’d forgotten just how good this movie is. Alfie Elkins is one of the most fully-realized and complex ... Read more »

Alexander

It had to happen, after Gladiator (the most overrated film since that piece of crap Braveheart, in my opinion) won the Best Picture Oscar. The lemmings of Hollywood immediately put a series of sword, sandal, ... Read more »

Albert Nobbs

I’m going to start out with a minor SPOILER WARNING . Minor, because I suspect most moviegoers knew this going in. But Lee didn’t, so I’ll be careful. If you want to be surprised, stop here, and come back when you’ve seen the movie.

Albert Nobbs is a woman who has passed for a man for many years, in order to be able to get jobs. ... Read more »

The Alamo

In Texas, when I went to school, the entire 7th grade history class was devoted to The Great and Glorious Lone Star State. It was taught from a silly little comic book that, for all I know, is still in use in the 7th grade, because when I visited the Read more »

Akeelah and the Bee

Yes, it’s the classic underdog story so beloved of Hollywood, and yes, you can tell just about everywhere it’s going to go after the first ten minutes … and yet, sometimes that just works. It could have been about football, or chess, or swimming, or just about any competitive human activity (or horse racing), but it’s about spelling, and it manages to pull a rabbit ... Read more »