Dolittle (2020) - Movie Review

When you’re someone who’s railed against the cinematic plague that is family films about talking animals for as long as I have, reviews like this are inevitable. A look at what can be considered the initial harbinger for the favourite kid-pleasing gimmick of hacks around the world: Doctor Dolittle.

Big-budget adaptations of the original series of books are… basically cursed, from what I can tell. From the hype disaster of the 1967 version with Rex Harrison, to the admittedly decent Eddie Murphy version (that would end up spawning a league of straight-to-video sequels, making whatever merit its beginning had pretty much moot), this isn’t a story known for doing well at the box office. And fresh off of his linchpin performance in what is now the highest-grossing film of all time, Robert Downey Jr. is the latest to try his hand at this infamous character. And it seems like we have somehow reached a new low for this property.

Pain And Glory (2019) - Movie Review

In an effort to keep my writing from getting too stale, which during this time of year is especially on my mind, I try and look at different films through different lenses. Sometimes, it’s as a fan of the film’s pre-existing franchise; sometimes, it’s by latching onto a single detail in the production that I feel explains everything else around it; and sometimes, it’s just me working through my own lack of interest and squeezing my brain for anything to write about. But more than anything else, the main thing I go into every single film I review on here, and hell, pretty much every film I’ve ever watched, is through the perspective of therapy. A form of art that has the potential to help me, and other audiences, deal with some kind of personal shit. Enter this film, where that perspective comes screaming into the forefront.

The Laundromat (2019) - Movie Review

It’s Steven Soderbergh time again! Yep, not content with gracing NetFlix with merely a single feature this year, he’s made another one already. Soderbergh’s workhorse work ethic is one in the growing list of reasons why I bloody love this man’s work, as this isn’t even the first time he’s pulled a double-feature like this. In 2012, he released both the stripping economic dramedy Magic Mike and the action thriller Haywire. In 2013, he made the medical thriller Side Effects and the Liberace biopic Behind The Candelabra, which were supposed to be his last films before retiring but… yeah, like a man with this much creative drive has it in him to just step away from a medium he clearly adores.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water (2015) - Movie Review

Ah, SpongeBob SquarePants, that irritatingly cute, yellow and porous friend of children, stoners and meme creators worldwide. While I freely admit to having watched The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie a lot as a kid and played the hell out of its video game tie-in on PS2, I’ve only watched a handful of episodes of the show proper and none of them are all that recent. Chalk it up to mostly sticking to the classic Cartoon Cartoons when I was a kid, but I never really got into them as much as I probably should have. That said, the show has its appeal… through being completely bonkers, even for a kid’s show, and having a more adult edge to its sense of humour on occasion much like the other show creator Stephen Hillenburg worked on: Rocko’s Modern Life. So, a little over a decade after the first film hit cinemas, the promotional campaign behind this latest offering reached our ears and even with my pretty surface interest in the show, I was hyped to see this thing.