MoviesMillers

Encanto - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 2021 was a nice year for seeing Hispanic representation up on the big screen, not saying mission accomplished or that more can’t be done. But West Side Story and In The Heights both had wonderful casts, Oscar Issac had some great roles including a nice role in Dune and there was some other big roles in premiere films that took an interest to include this underrepresented community. Encanto is the latest animated film from Disney Animation to bring us a slice of some Hispanic culture and heritage into our living rooms as it’s currently available on Disney+. This is certainly one of the better animated films of the year, although the musical numbers feel a bit forced and none of the songs are quite as catchy as other offerings from Disney lately. But the beautiful animation and diverse colorful palette used helps to overcome a lot. The film was amusing although it could’ve used a bit more humor, and the heart...

Don’t Look Up - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 of 10 General Audience Score - 7 of 10 We've all seen the asteroid headed towards earth movies, from The Day The Sky Exploded from back in the 1950's, through the Armageddon and Deep Impact films from the 90's to Greenland that came out a year ago. The more humorous Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is the a film that took the meteor hitting apocalypse premise with a lighter tone. But the new film from writer and director Adam McKay not only takes on the end of the world themes with humor, the satire present in the film is pervasive. Don't Look Up is very self-aware, it knows what it is and lays it on thick, like a steamroller that's lost it's brakes cruising down a street full of kittens, it's got the satire pedal pushed to the floor and not concerned with who or what's in the way. What McKay thinks about the economy, what his political allegiances are, his thoughts on the news, media, technology or...

Licorice Pizza - Movie Review Critics Score - 9 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 If you lived in Southern California in the late 1960’s and wanted to go get yourself the latest Motown record or the new Rolling Stone album, Let It Bleed, you’d probably go to a local record shop. One of your options if you’d lived in that place and time would’ve been Licorice Pizza, a record shop that’s long since went out of business. A new film of the same name from writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson is an impressive time capsule of a movie that takes us back into the early 1970’s in Los Angeles. P.T. Anderson has created many great films but this is among some of his best work. This film is an easy watch, the actors extremely well cast, the characters are delightful and the humor flows through the duration of the over two hour and ten minute runtime. The situational humor is top notch although not all the scenes add a ton to the story and many are used simply for laughs, but this was easily th...

Being The Ricardos - Movie Review Critics Score - 8 of 10 General Audience Score - 7 of 10 The 1950’s were a fascinating period in the history of the United States. With World War Two and the Great Depression in the books, America was moving forward and falling in love with a new medium for entertainment, the Television set. One of the biggest shows of the decade was a little program featuring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz called I Love Lucy. The new movie Being The Ricardos from Writer/Director Aaron Sorkin, the man who brought us The Trial Of The Chicago 7, just debuted on Amazon Prime Video this week. Mr. Sorkin throws us headfirst into a pivotal point in the shows history and through his excellent storytelling, he’s able to effectively weave the plot points together and build momentum up with the best of them. Even with a two plus hour run, the film doesn’t slog much but despite the excellent pacing there’s some problems that really keep this film from being great. Anytime an actor i...

The Matrix Resurrections - Movie Review Critics Score - 4 of 10 General Audience Score - 6 of 10 Movie nostalgia is an interesting thing. We can recall a movie from our youth or another formative time, be it Jurassic Park, Star Wars or Snow White and it’s almost like a form of time travel occurs. Our minds make connections to the past, how we felt, the things we experienced, the joys and sorrows, they come back and we experience something again but in a different and new way. The Matrix Resurrections just dropped on HBO Max, just in time for Christmas 2021, and it doesn’t decide to reinvent the wheel, like Star Wars The Force Awakens did with that franchise, which can be a good thing. But Resurrections steers so hard into our love for the originals, it creates more problems for itself than it can solve. While it’s admittedly fun to watch Reeves and Moss back in the saddle doing Matrixy things, the film gets extremely meta. There are discussions of Warner Brothers making the Matrix 4, c...

C’Mon C’Mon - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 of 10 General Audience Score - 6 of 10 Joaquin Phoenix is an actor for this generation, if you were to have a debate of the greatest actor currently working, his name may not be the first one mentioned, but he’d definitely surface in the discussion. Although he started making films in the 80’s & 90’s, he found some supporting parts with serious meat in Gladiator (2000) and then a couple films from M. Night Shyamalan before finally showing us all his Best Actor chops in Walk The Line (2005). His latest film from director Mike Mills is the black and white C’Mon C’Mon, a story of an uncle that takes care of his curious nephew for an extended period of time. While the film doesn’t take Phoenix to his extremes in range like his Joker performance from the other year, it’s excellent work but more subtle and inward. The film as a whole, however, suffers from pacing issues, struggles to keep the audience engaged and the black and white artistic t...

The Fellowship Of The Ring - Movie Review Critics Score - 10 of 10 General Audience Score - 10 of 10 If you were to take all the written literature from the 20th century and pick out the best, the cream of the crop, you’d have some of the greatest writings of all time. You’d probably include amazing pieces like To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher In The Rye, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and probably at least one piece of work from George Orwell, Faulkner and Hemingway. But among these masterpieces of writing, you’d probably be forced to include work from J.R.R. Tolkien, who penned The Hobbit and subsequently the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Back in the late 90’s, relatively unknown director Peter Jackson decided to undertake the monumental task of directing three movies at the same time, the trilogy of The Lord Of The Rings or LOTR. New Line Cinema bankrolled the massive $281 million dollar production of what was to become a box office behemoth. Money aside, the films garnered unanimous cri...

The Matrix Revolutions- Movie Review Critics Score - 4 of 10 General Audience Score - 6 of 10 Movie trilogies are a terribly difficult thing to get right. With beloved stories, historic villains, heroes deserving of epic send-offs and grand finales that make people wait in lines for days and send so much traffic through ticket selling websites that servers crash. The hype for any great trilogy or movie saga can reach unbelievably high levels and the opening day at the theatres is a event for the ages, and the conclusion to The Matrix trilogy, The Matrix Revolutions, was no exception. But despite it’s efforts to create interesting and new ideas, which resulted in an ending that nobody could see coming, it was also so wild and non-sensical that all it’s originality was wasted and undone. Instead of being regularly drawn back like many are to the original film, the third part of the trilogy has fallen by the wayside in the sands of cinematic time and is easily forgotten even with such cre...

West Side Story - Movie Review Critics Score - 8 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 Remaking a play or a film, when a director takes a property and creates his own take or spin on already existing cinematic source material, is a fascinating endeavor. Many artists are able to modernize older material for a new generation or breathe new life into something older but many remakes just can’t compare to some originals, we know those as the classics. But Steven Spielberg wasn’t daunted by the challenge of remaking a Best Picture winning classic piece of cinematic history, West Side Story. Best Picture winners have been remade before, Mutiny On The Bounty (1935), Rebecca (1940), Hamlet (1948), and even Ben-Hur (1959) a few years ago have had different directors that took cracks at the same source material. But West Side Story (1961) is a beloved musical that won 10 Oscars, not that the others aren’t beloved, but many wondered why Spielberg would try and remake a “perfect” piece of art. Li...

The Matrix Reloaded - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 The first time a full length feature film was successful enough to warrant a sequel was back in 1916 when The Fall Of A Nation was made during the infancy of cinema. Since then, countless films have spawned sequels, prequels, spin-offs and trilogies of all kinds, some of them expanding the original film in new, exciting and fantastic ways, some being among the greatest films of all time. Others could be considered atrocities of cinema. Nevertheless, with the success of the original Matrix film, Warner Brothers handed a blank check to the Wachowski’s and asked for more. And more they gave us, four years after the original, we got The Matrix Reloaded. While at its heart this is an action film, there’s a lot of really good world expanding material that took the remarkable first film and showed us it was just a small part of the story. Critics weren’t blown away, but after Neo, Trinity and Morpheus ...

The Power Of The Dog - Movie Review Critics Score - 10 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 Montana is an absolutely beautiful state in the northwest part of these United States that’s as rural as it is stunning with the Rocky Mountains slicing up out of the western part of the state. Many a film has been set with the hills and mountainous terrain of the Rockies as the backdrop for some panoramic shots that can steal the breath from your lungs. Brokeback Mountain, A River Runs Through It and many more pieces of cinema are now joined by The Power Of The Dog in showcasing the fantastic beauty of that part of the world. The latest film by Jane Campion is a flawlessly executed cinematic delight that will garner rightful and deserved attention from critics and Academy Awards members. Not only should this film get a Best Picture nomination, in my mind, it is the clear winner of the films I’ve watched so far this year. I had yet to review a new film and give a critics score 10 of 10, but Th...