The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B- Marlowe marks the return of classic pulp detective character Philip Marlowe to the big screen. First introduced by author Raymond Chandler in the 1939 novel The Big Sleep, Marlowe has since appeared in dozens and dozens of novels, short stories, radio plays and films, with the most famous portrayal of […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D For better or worse, M. Night Shyamalan’s filmography is largely comprised of movies that would conceptually sound amazing as two-sentence summaries of proposed Twilight Zone episodes. He is a master of coming of with “what if?” scenarios and twist endings. Unfortunately, extending those concepts to feature-length movies has often been […]
The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C- Infinity Pool is the new film from director Brandon Cronenberg, son of the great David Cronenberg (probably best known for The Fly, Scanners, and A History of Violence). I moderately enjoyed Brandon’s previous film Possessor, even though its similarities to Inception were often distracting. Infinity Pool is, unfortunately, a bit […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]