Harry Tabb – Google

I never read any Kraven comic books, and had utterly no idea what this movie was going to be. It was great!! It's a Marvel movie, so expect some amazing visual effects. The action is fantastic. Some of the acting isn't so good, or IS IT? This is a character who had led a strange life, often in seclusion, so his rough interactions with people might be the result of that. It's hard to tell. It's overall a perfectly acceptable performance. I didn't get all of the Easter eggs and other references sprinkled throughout the film, but you might. They aren't important to the story anyway. It's a bad guy does bad things to worse people for good reasons kind of movie, and it rocks!

Okay, first the good. A stunning visual masterpiece. The sets and costumes and musical scores are all simply amazing. The story is thrilling, too. Now the bad. It's a musical, of course, but not a really great one. I looked forward to this for over a year like everyone else, and with Ariana Grande starring, the singing should have been superb. Sadly, it wasn't superb. It was okay. It was good. It just wasn't as good as it should have been for a movie this epic. I oftentimes couldn't quite even understand what she was singing. I will say that it is clever and witty and funny, and very enjoyable. I'll allow for the possibility that my hearing just isn't good. The worst thing? It's a TWO-PARTER!!!! That's right. We have to wait a year to see how the story ends. I did say it was epic, didn't I? They couldn't cram it all into one movie. I was able to figure out some cool stuff that I suppose they'll show us next year, and I can hardly wait. . The movie starts at the end of the original Wizard of Oz movie, with everyone celebrating the end of the Wicked Witch of the West with a huge musical song & dance number called "no one mourns the wicked." It's bright, cherry, and DARK. Yikes. Glinda the Good mourns her, though, and then we flash back to the beginning of the whole story to find out why.

I was looking very forward to this movie, but it was pretty disappointing. First of all, it's way too long. There's nothing wrong with a movie being long, of course, but the problem is that it was obviously heavily padded with content to make it long. That wouldn't have been so bad if the padded content was meaningful to the story. The beginning was cool, and so was the end, but try as I might to resist it, I kept nodding off in the middle. It's just boring. There. I said it. This movie should have been an epic "caper" type of film with lots of action and suspense about some guys who tried to assassinate Hitler. Instead it was...not. Instead it was about an angry pastor who sat around praying and complaining most of the time except for the maybe ten minutes of this two-and-a-half movie spent on the thing that made this guy famous. I get it. This is an Angel Studios movie, so of course it's supposed to have a heavy Christian message, but that message was just lost in the shuffle. . All that said, it's still a good movie as movies go, on a technical level. Topnotch movie making! . This movie is clearly trying to compare Trump to Hitler. That annoys me greatly. That's just a cheap shot.

It's a fun movie. It's pretty standard fare, not bad at all but no grand masterpiece, either. It's what you might expect from a movie about Santa getting kidnapped by a villain and rescued by heroes. The plot is good, the visuals are great, the pacing is fine. It's funny, it's full of action, and it is a feel-good film. However.... It's not a kids movie. It has a surprising amount of violence and mild profanity in it, and is full of scary monsters that could frighten little kids. Happy ending! It doesn't leave any obvious breadcrumbs to use for a possible sequel, but it leaves me wanting one.

Hmmm... Okay, I see that other reviewers either loved it or hated it. I did neither. I give it 3 stars. . Is it funny? It has its moments. It's also dramatic. It does have a pretty good storyline, and one that demands attention all the way through, but it's no great masterpiece. . The characters are annoying. These aren't good people. None of them. The entire cast is rotten. It's hard to decide who to root for. That's not really a bad thing, though; rotten people have interesting things happen to them. . This is a boy meets girl movie with a few twists. The boy is the snotnosed wastoid punk son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. The girl is a stripper & prostitute he met while out partying one night. They both seem very nice. Then they have sex. They have a lot of sex. They have a ton of sex. Heads-up for you, there is a crazy amount of sex in this movie. It's not graphic, though, and only shown for a few seconds at a time, just enough to let us know that they're doing it pretty much all the time. They get married in Vegas. He wants a green card so he doesn't have to go home to Russia, and she wants tons of money. She really digs him, though. . Everything is going great...until the boy's parents find out, that is, and they are NOT happy. Will our star crossed lovers live happily ever after?

A five star movie! Did you ever wonder what would happen if a couple of church missionaries paid a visit to the devil himself? Well, this isn't quite that situation, but it comes mighty close. Hugh Grant plays a guy who lets some Mormon missionary girls into his home. It's a trap. He already knows far more about the church than the missionaries do, and from then on it just gets creepier and creepier. It turns out that he knows everything about all religions, and has some theories of his own, which he is happy to share with his captive audience. I honestly expected him to turn out to be the Devil, but he wasn't. That doesn't mean that some sinister stuff doesn't happen, followed by a miracle. The performances are top notch and the story is gripping. This is a good one!

Who would have guessed that movie about such an odd thing would be THIS good? The Pope has died, and now it's time to elect a new one. There are good guys, bad guys, mysterious guys, and a lot of intrigue and backstabbing. Here we meet Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of Cardinals, and it's his job to have to run the Conclave, the meeting of the Cardinals which elects the next Pope. It's a headache. We have good guys who don't want to be Pope for any reason, but that very fact keeps making people vote for them. We have ambitious bad guys who very much want to be Pope, and people are voting for them, too. Our hero is trying his best to keep things running smoothly, but he is also stuck with having to conduct a bunch of investigations into the candidates as crazy things happen and new evidence arises. Small problem --- they're all sequestered, so it takes awhile to get any useful information. Oh, by the way, terrorists keep setting off bombs in the Vatican, which is causing some complications. That's pretty good news for one candidate, though. . There are two surprise endings. The winner is the first surprise, and that leads to a SHOCKER of a follow-up!! . This is a good one.