Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars — Once upon a time, the year was 2011 and four Shrek movies had finally run their course. The last salvo was fired when Dreamworks Animation released a Shrek spinoff featuring Puss in Boots, the beloved feline originally appearing in Shrek 2. …

Rating: 3 Stars I’m not sure how director Angus MacLane got through the Disney pitch room with, “It’s a kid-friendly Ad Astra starring Buzz Lightyear,” but here we are. Beneath vibrant colors and stunning animation, there are well-fleshed-out characters and dialogue packed into Lightyear’s hour and 40-minute run time. Indubitably…

Rating: 4 Stars — This may be a strange statement but as I was watching Full Metal Jacket, I did not feel like I was watching a war movie. There were all the elements of a war movie in Kubrick’s 1987 classic, but I genuinely felt I was being presented with an unfiltered view…

Rating 2 and 1/2 Stars — As the credits came to a close and Thor: Love and Thunder finished with a final post-credits scene, there was a perturbed atmosphere of indifference among my fellow movie-goers. The fourth installment of the Thor series wasn’t lacking in dazzling special effects or beautifully conceptualized environments. In other words, director…

Rating: 3 Stars — In my heavily biased opinion, the best scene of Top Gun Maverick is the opening scene. The beautiful riffs of Kenny Loggins’ biggest hit serenade a screen full of quick hard cuts where indistinguishable workers prepare fighter jets to sail into the sky off of an aircraft carrier. Tom Cruise…

Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars — There are three sides to every dispute: Two rivaling accounts and the truth. The Last Duel explores this notion that each person experiences a story through their own biased narrative, and it does so with careful nuance. …

Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars — Fresh off of watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, I popped in the disc for the middle film of the Marvel Spider-Man trilogy. There’s a mystique about Spider-Man: Homecoming that weighs on me while I’ve watched these two sequels. All the films have been inspired to a degree but there was…

Rating: 2 and 1/2 Stars — Here we go, another blockbuster smash from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Scorcese doth protest. While I disagree with Scorcese’s interpretation of the definition of cinema, I do understand the value of his sentiment. Scorcese said it himself, this style of filmmaking and storytelling isn’t for him. Some people don’t like…