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2023 Mystery Thriller

Missing

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C+                Missing harkens back to a (thankfully) short-lived trend from 2014-2018. The thought process at the time was simple: If members of Gen Z find it so difficult to look away from their phones for two hours, let’s make movies that simulate the riveting experience of staring at a phone. So, […]

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2023 Action

Plane

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-                Rarely does a film’s title so succinctly summarize the scope of its ambition. For the sake of puns, I was hoping that this movie would be just plain bad. Or just plain good, but I wasn’t really banking on that one. It turns out that Plane is on the better […]

Categories
2023 Horror

Megan

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-                Megan (or M3gan, because “3” and “e” are totally the same thing) has been heralded as Child’s Play for Gen Z. In a sense, that is an accurate description. Megan is a boring, bloodless, goreless, neutered chore of a film that couldn’t possibly offend or frighten anyone. So, yeah, its […]

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2023 Drama

A Man Called Otto

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+                A Man Called Otto is a remake of the 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, which was an adaptation of the novel by Swedish writer Fredrik Backman. I am not a particularly big fan of the original film, which I find too dry and boring, but it is a […]

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2023 Drama

The Whale

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-                The latest effort from director Darren Aronofsky, The Whale is a great performance in search of a better film. While Brendan Fraser deserves all of the praise that he is getting for his lead performance, the film itself is a fairly underwhelming drama that never develops the emotional resonance worthy […]

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2023 Best of Comedy Drama

Babylon

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: A-                Babylon is the movie that I wanted Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to be. The Tarantino flick was loved by critics and it bored me to tears. Babylon is hated by critics and I loved it. Go figure.                The film is about the silent era of Hollywood as […]

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2023 Action Science Fiction

Avatar: The Way of Water

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-                I couldn’t care less about the first Avatar. I don’t want to belabor this point, as it’s a point that’s been made in every critical analysis of it, but it’s just a mega-budget borderline remake of Dances with Wolves, replacing the Native Americans with blue aliens. If you can enjoy […]

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2022 Best of Worst of

Best and Worst Films of 2022

2022 has drawn to a close and it was quite a mixed bag for cinema. On the plus side, we had some really great films this. On the downside, we had far more mediocre-to-terrible movies. Top Gun: Maverick is the year’s top-grossing film and was unexpectedly bounced from my top five in the last week […]

Categories
2022 Animation Worst of

Strange World

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F                This is the first time that I’ve ever discussed Disney animation on this site, so I need to go off on a bit of a rant before I really get into this dumpster fire. So let me summarize my thoughts on this movie before going off on a tangent: Strange […]

Categories
2022 Drama

The Fabelmans

The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B                This being the least-advertised Steven Spielberg movie of all time, I had no idea what it was about going into it. I never saw a trailer, a commercial, even a poster, nothing. I only knew the title and that it’s a Spielberg movie. So, I didn’t know if this was […]