Shameless Self Expression

A new family experience unsettling and possibly paranormal things as they take care of a neighbour’s kid named Robbie (Brady Allen). Teen daughter Kathryn Newton is convinced that Robbie is a little bit creepy and ropes her douchy boyfriend into helping her investigate. Meanwhile, Robbie and the family’s similarly aged boy Wyatt seem to be bonding, and that’s when things get even weirder. Real-life couple Alexondra Lee and the late Stephen Dunham (who died after filming, tragically) play Newton’s parents, typical Doubting Thomas’s.       It’s not supposed to be like this. Oh sure, I could say that  “Friday the 13 th  Part 3”  and  “Friday the 13 th : The Final Chapter”  are the best films in a crap series, but for the most part, sequels are supposed to get progressively worse, not better. The first  “Paranormal Activity”  was a pretty effective ‘found footage’ horror film that even managed to make me a little uneasy during the mi...

Set in the town of New Holland (no, not Australia), this film concerns a young social misfit named Victor (voiced by Charlie Tahan), and his beloved dog Sparky. He’s into science, but his dad (voiced by a possibly miscast Martin Short) urges him towards the sporting field. One baseball-cum-vehicular mishap later, and poor Sparky is dead. So what is a young, scientifically-minded social misfit to do? Well, let’s just say young Victor was very much paying attention to science teacher Mr Rzykurski’s (voiced by Martin Landau) experiments involving electricity and dead frogs. Other characters include a creepy fellow social outcast named Edgar (voiced by Atticus Shaffer), whose interest in the scientific arts come from a more unseemly place than Victor’s, and Elsa Van Helsing (voiced by Winona Ryder), the sweet girl next door. Catherine O’Hara provides the voice of Victor’s mother.   Not all of Tim Burton’s films have appealed to me, but I feel like we have a lot in common ...

Kenneth Branagh plays a tabloid writer, would-be novelist and wannabe screenwriter, who is desperately trying to gather interest in his screenplay, approaching actors played by Melanie Griffith, and a troubled, hotel-trashing Leonardo DiCaprio. This results in a lot of parties, drinking, and women. Chief among these women are a hot model (Charlize Theron), his book editor (Famke Janssen), and a struggling actress (Winona Ryder). Judy Davis stars as Branagh’s repressed ex-wife who seeks ‘professional’ help from veteran hooker Bebe Neuwirth on pleasing a man, before being charmed by producer Joe Mantegna. Gretchen Mol plays DiCaprio’s abused girlfriend, with Sam Rockwell and an amusingly (retroactively, at least) cast Adrian Grenier as his entourage. You probably know by now that I don’t much like Woody Allen movies, with the exception of a few ( “Deconstructing Harry” , “Annie Hall” , “Hollywood Ending” , and maybe “Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex” ). This 1998...