Weekly Movie Review: Alita: Battle Angel
By Ben Pivoz Photos courtesy of Ben Pivoz Alita: Battle Angel is filled with spectacle and action. Yet it is generally enjoyable because it takes its time in establishing its world, never completely abandoning character in favor of visual effects. It looks good, but it has a little more to offer than that. It…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
By Ben Pivoz Photos courtesy of Ben Pivoz In 2014, The Lego Movie burst onto the scene with a mix of creative animation and a witty screenplay. It blew people away with its cleverness and became a critical/commercial smash. Lego followed that up with an equally good superhero parody (The Lego Batman Movie) and a…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: They Shall Not Grow Old
By Ben Pivoz Photos courtesy of Ben Pivoz World War I ended over one-hundred years ago. Footage was shot during the war, but a lot of it is now damaged in some way. It is available to be viewed by the public yet, unless you are a historian, the generally poor quality of the material…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: Stan & Ollie
By Ben Pivoz The onscreen duo of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were one of the most popular comedy acts from the 1920s until the 1940s. In 1953, the pair did a tour of the United Kingdom in an effort to possibly reignite their faded star. The biopic Stan & Ollie takes place during the…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: Glass
By Ben Pivoz The sci-fi thriller Glass is the third part of a trilogy writer/director M. Night Shyamalan started nearly two decades ago, when he was seen as a promising up-and-coming filmmaker. The first movie in the series was 2000’s Unbreakable, a drama about the relationship between a man who had never been hurt and…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: On The Basis of Sex
It always amazes me how multiple movies with the same topics get made around the same time. Last May there was the documentary RBG, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It jumped through her life with an amazing lack of depth. Now comes On the Basis of Sex, a biopic focusing on the beginnings of her legal…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: Escape Room
A group of people are locked in a room together and must solve intricate puzzles in order to find a way out. That is the idea of an escape room, and I guess it was just a matter of time before the concept was applied to a horror movie. That would be Escape Room, the…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review: Vice
Dick Cheney, a man who rose up through American politics to become the most powerful Vice President we have ever had, is a ripe target for a biopic. The filmmaker that chose to tell his story is director/writer/producer Adam McKay, who made a bunch of Will Ferrell comedies before directing/co-writing The Big Short, a satirical…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review – Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
After the total mess that was Venom, I certainly would not have said I was confident in Sony’s ability to do anything worthwhile with their rights to Spider-Man and other Marvel characters. Thankfully, they have proven me wrong with the wonderful new animated outing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This is not only one of the…
Read MoreWeekly Movie Review – At Eternity’s Gate
Most biographies of artists try to provide insight into their work by exploring their life. That can be effective with a singer or actor, someone whose creative process can be easily visualized. That is difficult with a writer or painter. It is hard to make something internal exciting on-screen. The result is usually an effort…
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