Toy Story 4 (2019)

Andy's toys are now firmly part of Bonnie's room, but Woody's more often left in the closet than part of the fun these days. When a lonely Bonnie crafts a "Forky" out of trash at school, Woody makes it his mission to make sure her new friend learns how to be a proper toy. But a road trip with the family makes this job extremely difficult, especially when Woody and Forky enter the weird world of a small town antique shop.

There's no dip in quality with this installment. We learn more about the life of toys: "lost" ones eager for play, those languishing on shelves, and prizes hanging on pegboards at carnival games. I don't know if there need to be any sequels added to the franchise, but it hasn't worn out its welcome yet.

B+

The Dinner (2017)

Steve Coogan is a passive-aggressive, difficult-to-be-around former history teacher with an almost debilitating beef against his brother for being their mother's favorite. That, alone, would make for a difficult watch. But throw in a bunch of other stuff -- revealed piecemeal via flashback -- and we've got a melange of trauma: nervous breakdown in front of a classroom, his wife's near death from cancer and his subsequent inability to care for himself and his son, his intense immediate dislike of his brother's adopted black son, his resentment of the close bond his wife and son share, and something about a basketball through the window of a smoke shop.

So, when the brothers and their wives get together for a nice dinner, we're braced for ugliness. But that's not even the BIG secret. The big secret is that their sons harassed and assaulted a homeless woman, accidentally burning her to death. So, the dinner (such as it is with Coogan assaulting the waitstaff and family throughout) is really just an excuse to figure out what to do.

It's a pretty terrible movie full of the worst that humanity has to offer. Tedious.

F

Kidnapping Stella (2019)

This is an unnecessary, not-quite-as-good remake of The Disappearance of Alice Creed. It'd rate a letter grade higher if Alice Creed didn't exist, but it does so...

C

Strange Weather (2017)

Darcy has a small life in a small town and is still grieving the loss of her son to suicide seven years earlier. When she finds out that one of his friends is experiencing great success off of her son's idea for a restaurant, she decides to road trip down there, with her best friend in tow, to confront him.

Holly Hunter is perfect as Darcy, but the film has too many problems to overlook. There's a lot of unnatural exposition and far too many quirky details -- at least half of which should've been edited out. It's like a simple shift dress being "fancied up" with a big chunky necklace, statement earrings, handcrafted belt complete with big ol' buckle, a floppy hat, a couple of enamel pins, and funky footwear. Most of the time, simple sticks with you while extraneous additions bury beauty. That's what happened here: so much crap that the feeling got lost.

C-

The Kindergarten Teacher (2018)

Up until the last few minutes, this story was a curiosity about a longtime teacher desperate to take credit for seeing meaning where there probably wasn't any. So hungry for validation, she was willing to throw away her credibility, profession, and even her family to foster glimpsed genius. But in the very last moments, I could finally see what she saw. I could finally understand the drive and the tragedy of the situation.

It's a brilliant film marred only by the non-organic feel of the child actor.

A-

Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much (2017)

Theodore Slauson has loved The Price Is Right ever since he was a kid gathered around the family's one TV set with his siblings. He watched it enough to learn the prices of recurring prizes, keep track of new prizes and their prices, and to eventually program a rudimentary computer game. He attended enough tapings to become well-known by the Price Is Right staff for helping other contestants to success before he finally got called up to participate himself. But the real drama didn't happen until 10 years later, when he helped a contestant to an exact-dollar bid during the Showcase Showdown.

What a charming film. I was smiling and enjoying every minute of this sweetheart of a math teacher's story.

Also: Bob Barker comes off as a gentleman. Drew Carey comes off as an ass.

B+

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

Comes at the Ted Bundy story from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the horror of his crimes, we see instead the way his domestic partner copes with his arrests and her growing belief that he could be responsible even as she wants to cling to the image she has of him. It becomes more a courtroom drama in the back half, but it's a pretty good one.

Altogether it feels like a competent "true crime" movie that refuses to get sensational. That's a credit to restraint but a bit of a debit so far as absorbing films go.

B

Isn't It Romantic (2019)

Wilson is a career woman who cannot bear the ridiculous lies pushed by rom-coms. But, after she bonks her head in the course of being mugged, she literally wakes up in one and becomes desperate to find her way out.

This is a great idea with fun takedowns of the crutches employed by so many films in this genre. But, at almost every turn, I thought they could have gone BIGGER. Rebel Wilson, especially, felt like she was holding back. I only experienced one big laugh and it was over the ferocity of a background player's dance moves during the karaoke scene. Every single bit should have been played with the ferocity of that bartender.



B-

Predestination (2015)

Time-traveler who's getting a little punch-drunk from all of his jumps has one important mission to finish in order to stop the "fizzle bomber" from carrying out a big loss-of-life event. He travels back to the '70s as a bartender and listens to the hard-luck story of one of the customers.

Gary and I were able to figure out what was going on fairly early, which didn't wreck the story, exactly. It just exposed sooner, rather than later, that it wasn't that great of or original a story. It's one of those ideas that should've dissipated once the high wore off for the originator -- it kind of falls apart if you look too closely.

Also, one of the main plot points is an intersex person who is told she MUST live as a man because she's got both sets of reproductive organs and a hysterectomy was necessary. This is patently ridiculous. You don't cease being a woman because your uterus is gone -- in what universe does a forced sex change make ANY sense? Certainly not in the USA of the 1960s.

C

Hold the Dark (2018)

A young mother in the Alaskan wilderness asks wolf expert Core to come up to track and kill the wolves who snatched her son. He goes, but soon finds that things are not as he was led to believe. At the same time, the boy's father is wounded in Fallujah and sent back home to face his grief.

I have guesses as to what was going on, but they're never confirmed so I have no idea if I'm way off-base, which makes this film a complete failure. In short, this couple is blonde and "Nordic" and stick out like sore thumbs in a predominantly Inuit community. Both don wolf masks and behave weirdly. The wolf expert explains, at one point, that packs often kill their pups when times are hard. Are they possessed by wolves? Are they a pack? Wtf is happening? And why in the world did a local guy mow down an entire police force with a machine gun? What was that FOR?

Bizarre and infuriating.

C-

Apostle (2018)

The most apt description for this movie is "batshit crazy," but calling it that almost makes it sound fun.  It's not.

Man infiltrates a religious nature cult who've fallen on hard enough times to have kidnapped his sister to hold her for ransom. The cult's "god" is a chained nature lady who is force fed the blood of the faithful. Like I said: batshit crazy with none of the enjoyment that would generally imply.

F