Shameless Self Expression

Set in a Catholic School in the 60s, with a battle of wills between humourless, iron-fisted disciplinarian principal Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep, nearly stepping into Bette Davis/ Dame Judith Anderson territory), and the younger, popular Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who offers a kinder, friendlier, and more progressive teaching. This earns him the ire of Sister Aloysius, even questioning his ‘pagan’ choice of Frosty the Snowman to be performed at the school’s Christmas pageant. The relationship reaches boiling point when well-meaning, naive young Sister James (Amy Adams) approaches Sister Aloysius with the faintest suspicions of an inappropriate relationship between Father Flynn and a young, African-American altar boy (the school’s first and only African-American student). Whilst Sister James starts to regret making such an unsubstantiated accusation, Sister Aloysius nevertheless doggedly and single-mindedly pursues what she has already made up in her mind as the truth,...

Jennifer Rubin plays the only survivor of a suicide cult incident where cult leader Richard Lynch inspired his followers to join him in a kerosene-fuelled (see what I did there?) mass suicide. Rubin, who chickened out on Lynch’s fantastic voyage to the afterlife, awakens from a coma 13 years later to go under the watch of psychiatrists Bruce Abbott and Harris Yulin, who run group therapy for damaged and scarred misfits like herself. Unfortunately, it appears Lynch is tormenting Rubin from the grave, whilst also killing her fellow patients one by one. No one will listen to her, chalking up the deaths as suicides, and her rantings as that of a disturbed mind. E.G. Daily, Dean Cameron, and Louis Giambalvo play a few of the mental patients, and Sy Richardson is a perplexed cop. Some pretty well-known names are attached to this 1988 stinker, even director Andrew Fleming has a few semi-prominent and varied credits to his name like “Dick” , “Threesome” , and “The Craft” . This was h...

Set in 1888 London, England, Johnny Depp stars as Fred Abberline, the opium-addicted Scotland Yard detective working on the famed series of murders of Whitechapel prostitutes by the fiend known only as Jack the Ripper. Heather Graham plays prostitute Mary Kelly, whom Abberline develops a fondness for, whist Robbie Coltrane is his partner on the job. Ian Richardson is the snooty, somewhat antagonistic police commissioner worried about scandal, and Ian Holm plays a well-connected doctor who assists Abberline in the investigation. One day, someone is going to make the definitive Jack the Ripper film. This 2001 Hughes Brothers (yeah, the “Menace II Society” guys making a film about an entirely different ‘ghetto’) flick isn’t it, though, I’m afraid. Personally, I think Hitchcock came closest when he made the silent film “The Lodger” , an unofficial Ripper story that didn’t get bogged down in heavy plotting and uninteresting periphery characters (Me? I’d do a silent, German Exp...

Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is on the last two days of court-mandated home detention for what went down during “Captain America: Civil War” , whilst scientist Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his daughter Hope (Evangelina Lilly) aren’t currently thrilled with him either for the aforementioned Avengers exploits. However, when Scott appears to be getting   visions/contact from Pym’s wife Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer). Getting in touch with Pym and Hope, they suggest Janet may be trapped in the quantum realm, with Scott somehow linked to the quantum realm. Hank and Hope manage to get around Scott’s home detention so that he can assist them in rescuing Janet. Complicating matters are an oily arms dealer (Walton Goggins), the FBI (represented by the far too ubiquitous Randall Park), and the troubled Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), whose character is a bit fuzzy. Laurence Fishburne plays a disgruntled former associate of Pym’s, and Michael Pena is back as Scott’s idiot friend. Although a t...

Poisonous high school bitch Evan Rachel Wood, her compliant best friend Elisabeth Harnois, and new Arabic student Adi Schnall accuse their teacher Ron Livingston of sexual harassment. The guy is probably not guilty (we don’t really see the incident), but certainly harbours impure thoughts, and gets turned on when his wife (a wasted Selma Blair) sports a new skirt he bought her which is alarmingly similar to the school uniform. Although thoroughly rotten and a master manipulator, Wood’s home-life is not especially ideal either, with a drug-snorting, anti-Semitic father (James Woods, enjoying himself) and her young stepmother Jaime King is the clueless butt of every one of Wood’s venomous gags (she accuses her of improper relations with the family dog. Actually, I laughed at that recurring gag, sick as it might have been). Jane Krakowski is a lesbian tabloid reporter sucked in by the manipulative Wood. One-note, thoroughly unoriginal 2005 Marcos Siega black comedy apes “Heather...