My wife wants to make a supercut of me crying at movies. This would be incredibly bad for my pro wrestling tough guy image, seeing me sobbing like a baby at the absolute dumbest things in movies while she asks me why and I reply, “Because it’s nice.” I also cry at things like coffin scene in City of the Living Dead, when Suzy leaves the crumbling dance school in Suspiria, when the Mighty Ducks or any sports team rises against the odds in a movie and whenever an older man starts crying and tells his son that he loves him. I’m a weepy, blubbery mess of a man.

Christopher Robin set out to make me cry. But worse — it tipped the scales and went from inducing tears and then relieving them with happiness to outright depressing me to a level where I was sure that everyone in my life was sick of me. Such is its horrifying Lovecraftian power.

Director Marc Foster was behind films like Stranger than Fiction, a movie that may make you reexamine everything in your life. I wasn’t expecting that same kind of emotional punch to the testicles in a movie about Winnie the Pooh.

Christopher Robin leaves for boarding school, leaving his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood behind. The movie fast forwards through his life, taking him from school to his marriage to Evelyn, the birth of his daughter Madeline and his harrowing adventures in World War II. It was at this point that I wondered, “This is still Winnie the Pooh, right?”

After the war, he works as an efficiency expert at Winslow Luggage, where he works all night and neglects his family, something that didn’t hit close to home at all with my sixty to eighty hour work weeks. His entire team is about to be fired unless he pulls off a miracle. That’s when his wife basically leaves him.

Surely, Pooh is gonna make this all better, right? Well, Hundred Acre Wood has been reduced to a near post-apocalyptic landscape and all of his friends are gone. If I was a child, this is when I would have either turned off the movie or gotten sad. As it was, every time Pooh appeared my eyes welled up because I really didn’t like to see him looking and acting so pathetic. Him coming to grips with his childhood friend leaving him behind tore me up.

Of course, everything works out fine. People learn lessons. But it takes forever and a day. Pooh has always had such a warm, gentle touch and this movie just seems too dark, too cynical and too rough for what I want it to be. You surely may feel differently. I mean, you may also think that this is the exact same story as Hook, but what do I know?

I don’t mind gothic horror. I do mind when a movie meanders all about the place with no idea what kind of film it wants to be and limps along the way to a conclusion that offers no resolution. I really liked Lenny Abrahamson’s Room and was excited what the follow up would be. If you can’t already guess, I was pretty disappointed.

Based on the novel by Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger concerns Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson, who was Bill in the Harry Potter films and has also appeared in Peter Rabbit and as General Hux in the new Star Wars movies). As a child, would visit Hundreds Hall, but now the house has fallen into ruin under the care of Roderick Ayres (Will Poulter, We’re the Millers), a scarred Royal Air Force vet, and his sister Caroline (Ruth Wilson, who was in another slow-moving supernatural film in 2016,  I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House). 

Faraday’s mother had once been a maid to the Ayres and his memories of the house have been with him ever since. But now, beyond the house going to pieces, strange noises can be heard in every room. And the 19th-century tube communication device and bell system that connects the house have both been wreaking havoc with everyone’s nerves.

Once the elderly Mrs. Ayers (Charlotte Rampling!) has an encounter with something in the house — leading to her slashing her wrists — and Roderick attempts to set it all on fire, only the maid and Caroline are left in the house. Is there supernatural afoot? Or is the real danger Faraday’s drive to escape his caste and join the upper crust (nevermind that post World War 2, the Labor Party changed their position in the food chain)?

I knew from the beginning of this film that it would be a long and slow meandering story. I just didn’t know how slow and meandering it would get. It’s yet another non-ending ending having film, one where people will say things to me like, “It just makes more sense if you read the book and know the class struggle and the way England was changing.” Of course, it does. But that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.

“Just because someone is famous doesn’t mean they’re a good person.” This statement, from Tanja Walker in her interview, sums up so much of the issues that Hollywood has dealt with in the #MeToo era. This movie goes into depth explaining the casting couch, how it got started and why it has existed for decades.

Writer/director Minh Collins has put together interviews with Lauren Anastasi-Peter, Ikon Barenbolm, Alana Crow, Jennifer Durst, Andrea Evans, Tiffani Fest, Sadie Katz and more, all to tell the story of what women in the entertainment industry have been silently enduring for decades.

A large part of the film revolves around the case against talent agent Wallace Kaye, who was brought to court by twelve actresses who stepped forward, despite the advice of their union, and brought the case to the police. They won and still no one listened. There’s an incredibly shocking section here where the film goes into the female police officer who was involved in a sting operation against Kaye and the emotions she had to deal with.

The only drawback of this film is that it doesn’t have faith in its interviews to tell the whole story. The reenactments and b-roll stock footage used to add color distracted me from the very powerful interviews that were captured by the filmmakers. The graphics used look like something straight out of iMovie, taking me away from the words I was hearing and making me wonder why more care wasn’t given to the presentation.

That said, there’s a story worth hearing here. Rocking the Couch is available On Demand this February from Avail Films. You can watch it on Amazon Prime.

NOTE: We were sent this movie by its PR team and that has no impact on our review.

Directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein and written by Mark Perez, Game Night is pretty much The Game, but instead of Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, we have a group of friends whose murder mystery night turns real when one of them is kidnapped. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

Max and Annie (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) met at trivia and have stayed competitive ever since. They’re trying to have a kid and Max’s inadequacies may all come from his brother Brooks constantly showing him up. Now, his brother has come back to ruin his weekly game night.

I have to say, I loved the look of this film. The tilt-shift lens in the shots above the suburbs makes real life look like a board game. And I really loved how the car racing scenes kept the car locked up in center frame like a video game.

My favorite character in the film? Gary, the awkward cop. Jesse Plemons is so great in this role and I absolutely fell in love with his dog Bastian, who is played by a dog named Olivia. This is one busy dog — she’s also appeared in Widows and the Netflix series Insatiable.

This comedy moves fast, has fun even with a bullet removal scene and doesn’t overstay its welcome. That’s all you can really ask for these days with movies.

Aneesh Chaganty created a movie called Seeds with Google Glass that hit a million views in under one day. Following its success, he was part of the Google Creative Lab, where he spent two years developing, writing and directing Google commercials. This film was originally intended as a short, but got the funding to be a full movie. That meany that Aneesh had to make the leap from a dream job to another dream job, but one that had no guarantees. Luckily, Searching is a great first effort. And it doesn’t hurt that it grossed $75 million dollars on a $1 million dollar budget.

The entire film is viewed via different screens, starting with David Kim (John Cho) looking back on the last two years. The pre-movie sequence effortlessly uses the tools we experience every day to tell the story of how his wife died and he became distant from his daughter, Margot.

Over the next few days, he’ll learn just how little he knows about her as she goes missing. He’ll have plenty of help from the public and Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing). But even time he thinks he’s close to finding her, she slips further and further away. In fact, she may be gone for good.

Unlike traditional narratives that only show one side of the story, the film uses YouTube comments, hashtags and social posts to show every facet of its characters, even the tiniest of background roles. I loved how much information got packed into every frame.

As someone who works in marketing, I also adored how stock photography ended up playing such a major role in the mystery. I really don’t want to say any more than that — this is a ride that you should take without knowing all that much.

The crazy thing is that Aneesh filmed the entire movie playing every single role, with the real actors being fit in after the film had a rough edit. I’d love to see more of this, which is only hinted on the disk’s extras. In fact, if you’re someone that bemoans the loss of extras on recent films, this movie is packed with features that explain how the film was created and its many easter eggs.

Speaking of that, this movie is bursting at the seams with hidden messages. In a shout out to the first movie made in this style, Unfriended, one of that film’s characters named Laura Barns appears as a trending topic throughout the movie. There are multiple news articles about one of M. Night Shyamalan’s biggest fans getting to meet the director (this would be Aneesh, angling to meet his real-life hero). And throughout the film, there are multiple stories about an alien invasion, whether they run as trending topics or on crawls during news shows. I love the idea that life keeps going despite this world-changing event.

Perhaps most amazingly, when this movie was edited for foreign countries, every screen was recreated in its respective language, as well as every typing sequence, keystroke by keystroke.

I know that this movie is based on a gimmick, but I was shocked how much I ended up enjoying it. Check it out — perhaps you’ll feel the same way.

Malcolm D. Lee has directed some pretty decent films — Undercover Brother, The Best Man, Roll Bounce, Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins, Soul Men and Girls Trip. Now, he’s sending Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish — and some pretty great supporting actors — to Night School.

Also — don’t get this one confused with 1981 Americanized giallo Night School, which has a woman’s head cut off and put in a pot of stew that people eat out of.

Teddy Walker (Hart) dropped out of school when he couldn’t concentrate on his college prep tests. But it all seemed to work out — he’s going to inherit the grill store he’s worked at since his teens, a fancy lifestyle (that he can’t afford) and a wealthy girlfriend named Lisa.

Things blow up — literally — when he accidentally blows up the shop while proposing. That leads to a financial and personal tailspin that finds him going back to get his GED so that he can work with his friend Marvin (Ben Schwartz from Parks and Recreation).

He goes back to his old high school for classes, only to learn that the person he bullied the most, Stewart (Taran Killam), is now the principal. Luckily, he’s able to get into Carrie’s (Haddish) night school class. And when he’s not studying, he’s working in a religious fried chicken restaurant (to deflect potential piracy, this movie was shipped to theaters as “Christian Chickens”).

The rest is pretty much comedy by the numbers, but it is livened up by the cast. Rob Riggle is always great in everything that he does. Many only know Mary Lynn Rajskub from 24, but I remember her from Mr. Show and she’s always hilarious when given a chance to shine. I saw Al Madrigal do standup a few years back and am always excited to see him get the chance to be a success. Fat Joe is, well, Fat Joe, but still pretty fun. And any movie that has Keith David in the cast is going to make me happy.

This is pretty much as mainstream as the movies I watch can get, but there were still some fun moments. It’s not the greatest back to school movie (I mean, when a movie is called Back to School it should own that title), but it’ll cause a few laughs.

There can only be one Best Cat in Canada. It’s either going to be Oh La La the Red Persian or Bobby the Turkish Angora. As Kim, Bobby’s owner says, “If you’re not number one, you’re the first loser.” Get ready for the battle of the century, which will be fought in curling facilities and high school gyms. Other cats will get close, but at the end of the day, the real fur is about to fly between these two.

Kim Langille’s cats have won nearly everything there is to win. He’s in first place right now, but then Bob and Elaine Gleason’s cat Mr. Oh La La comes out of retirement to re-enter the world of the Canadian Cat Association.

Soon, the greatest cat judge in the history of cat judges will decide who will reign supreme. Along the way, we meet the owners, their many cats and learn what it takes to get someone to spend the money to fly all over Canada to do something like this.

I loved this movie. It’s 75 minutes of pure fun. It could totally make fun of its subjects and while it makes light, it is never mean. Seriously, the scene where the judge almost loses his mind judging Mr. Oh La La might be one of the best moments I’ll see in any movie this year.

This is streaming on Netflix right now. Watch it with a cat you love.

Jon Chu has really turned his fortunes around with this movie. Originally the director of musical theme films like Step Up 2: The Streets, Step Up 3D and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, he moved on to two Hasbro properties, G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Jem and the Holograms, which was out of theaters in about a week. Lucky for him, this film has been a success, with a sequel being announced a week into its run. Strangely enough, Chu is mentioned in the book as a distant cousin of main character Rachel Chu!

Based on the book by Kevin Kwan, the movie faced early controversy. Despite being the first major American release with Asian stars since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club, it received criticisms for casting biracial actors over fully ethnically Chinese ones in certain roles, as well as failing to include non-Chinese Singaporean ethnic groups, such as Malay or Indian actors.

This played out in its international release, as Singaporeans didn’t really enjoy it, criticizing it for its lack of diversity and authenticity. But domestically, its success — it’s the highest grossing romantic comedy in a decade — should hopefully lead to plenty of work for Asian actors from every country.

Nick Young (Henry Golding, A Simple Favor) and his girlfriend, Rachel Chu (Constance Wu, TV’s Fresh Off the Boat) are going to Singapore for the wedding of his best friend Colin to Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno, Annihilation), a fashion icon. Rachel hasn’t learned much about Nick’s family, but once she sees their flight accommodations, she’s shocked to learn just how rich they are. Meanwhile, thanks to someone named Radio One Asia, everyone in Singapore knows all about her.

Just how rich Nick’s family is gets cemented by a visit to her old college roommate, Goh Peik Lin (Awkwafina) and her family, which includes Ken Jeong. Despite a giant bachelor and bachelorette party, Nick feels out of place and Rachel gets a dead fish — and lots of blood — all over her bed.

If that reception seems bad, it gets worse when she meets Nick’s mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh, whose stunts in movies like Police Story 3: Supercop put her on the same level as Jackie Chan even before more dramatic films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha), who wants nothing to do with a foreign girl coming into her family. And that’s before she even gets to know his grandmother Su Yi (Lisa Lu, who was in The Joy Luck Club and Demon Seed).

I loved both Jimmy O. Yang (who is also in HBO’s Silicon Valley) and Nico Santos (from Superstore) as Oliver T’sien, who gets the Young family anything they need.

If you love fashion, you’ll really love this, as clothes from Ralph Lauren, Elie Saab, Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino and Dior all appear. Yet for all these designers, Michelle Yeoh was dissatisfied with the ring that she was to wear. The emerald and diamond ring that she does wear is her personal ring, as are many pieces of jewelry in the movie.

Interestingly enough, Netflix wanted to produce the film and offered a much bigger budget, but Kevin Kwan turned down the offer in favor of a smaller $30-million budget from Warner Brothers. Why? Simple. He wanted to prove to studios that Adian-Americans would come to see this film and others like it.

There’s all manner of family drama, revelations, lavish parties, insanely expensive weddings, fireworks both personal and in the sky, love lost and love found. And the film looks gorgeous, with so many lavish sets. I may be Italian/Polish/American, but there’s still plenty of truth that I found even in my family.

When asked what makes Queen different from any other band, Freddie Mercury is quick with an answer. “We’re four misfits who don’t belong together, we’re playing for the other misfits. They’re the outcasts, right at the back of the room. We’re pretty sure they don’t belong either. We belong to them.”

In 1980, when Queen’s “The Game” came out, I was that eight-year-old misfit. Too chubby, too weird, too loud, too nice. I hated school because it meant getting beat up every single day. And even on a day when I’d get the opportunity to bring in a record for music class, the other kids would all make fun of me. I didn’t listen to popular music, but brought in the band’s “News of the World” album, with a Frank Kelly Freas cover of a robot killing people, including Queen itself. No one liked it. In fact, they hated it. But when “Another One Bites the Dust” came out that year, more than a few of them learned about the power of Queen.

Queen was always too much in the best of ways. They’ve continued to be there for the best and worst moments of my life. In fact, the solo on “We Will Rock You” is probably my favorite of all time, as you can hear the hum of Brian May’s guitar even before the first note is played. When this movie was announced, I worried, as how could any movie, no matter how huge, capture the spirit of Queen?

Originally announced in 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen cast as Mercury before leaving in 2013 because of creative differences, the film sat unmade until Rami Malek (TV’s Mr. Robot) was cast in November 2016.

Directed by Bryan Singer (the X-Men films, Apt Pupil and The Usual Suspects), the film concentrates on Freddie Mercury while also touching on the rest of the band.

It starts when young Farrokh Bulsara is just a college student and airport baggage handler who has been following a band named Smile. After one of their shows, he meets Brian May (Gwilym Lee, guitarist in the band Male Friends and a near identical twin for the man he’s playing) and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy, who played Archangel in Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse). With their lead singer quitting, he joins the band along with bassist John Deacon (Joe Mazzello, the kid from the original Jurassic Park).

After selling their van to finance their first album, the band quickly signs to EMI, travels to America and Freddie adopts his stage name as his real name. He also gets engaged to Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton, who is great in this) while beginning to question his sexuality, including a scene where he stares at a truck driver played by Adam Lambert, who has performed with Queen.

That’s the crux of people’s worries with the film — that the movie plays hard and fast with the facts of Mercury’s sexuality and AIDS-related death. Many believe Mercury learned he had HIV between 1986 and 1987, but not before Live Aid in 1985 as depicted in the film. He didn’t tell the band until 1989.

But back to the movie — when Queen record their fourth album “A Night at the Opera” they end up leaving EMI when Ray Foster (a made-up person loosely based on EMI chief Roy Featherstone, who was actually a fan of the song) refuses to release a six-minute long single. There’s an interesting meta moment here, as Foster is played by Mike Myers, whose use of the song in Wayne’s World led to it being loved by a whole new generation. The best part of this scene is the triumph of the song being released, only for horrible reviews to emerge. Such is Queen — they didn’t belong to critics.

Freddie falls for Paul, the band’s manager, and comes out as bisexual to his fiancee. They live next to one another for years, but Freddie is hurt when she finally moves on. The band has ups and downs, but Freddie decides to leave in 1982, recording an album for CBS for more money than he could make with Queen.

This is another fallacy, as doing a solo record is seen as Freddie sinning against the band. The trust is that Taylor released “Fun in Space” and “Strange Frontier” while May released “Star Fleet Project” years before Mercury’s “Mr. Bad Guy” was recorded.

Also, remember that when the band breaks up before Live Aid, that never happened. Queen released “The Works” in 1984 and toured all over the world to support it, with the final date just two weeks before they played that massive charity event.

That said, the end of the movie is amazing. The performance at Live Aid is captured perfectly, featuring the songs “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Radio Ga Ga”, “Hammer to Fall” and “We Are the Champions.” I also thought that they used archival footage of Bob Geldof, but it’s really Dermot Murphy. In a nice bit of caemo work, look for Brian May and Roger Taylor in this scene as they watch from the rafters.

Interestingly enough, Singer didn’t even finish the film. He often showed up late to set or disappeared for long stretches, including three straight days after the Thanksgiving break, at which point cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel took over. Singer was fired and 20th Century Fox terminated his production deal before finishing the movie with new director Dexter Fletcher, who is also directing the Elton John bio Rocketman. However, the Director’s Guild assigned sole directed credit to Singer.

If you’re seeking an examination of Mercury’s refusal to come out and how he dealt with AIDS, as well as his identity as Indian-British Parsi man, this isn’t that movie. This is Queen’s greatest hits, an exploration of their music less than one of the truth. It’s packed with plenty of audience-pleasing moments instead of personal revelations. Maybe we’ll get that movie someday. This isn’t it. And that’s fine — I never expected it to be.

Remember when movies used to be a tight, compact 90 minutes or less? There was a moment during this one — this has happened more than a few times lately — where I paused the movie and figured there could only be twenty minutes left. Nope. There were still 51 intolerable minutes of bonecrunching, screaming into the microphone pain, drunk fighting in the tub ennui left to go.

You know how you can tell this movie is a bloated mess? Even the trailer is more than three minutes long.

The first time A Star Is Born was made was way back in 1937, when Janet Gaynor played a young actress and Fredric March the star who introduced her to the industry. It was remade in 1954 with Judy Garland and James Mason, then most famously in 1976 with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, perhaps less famously in 2013 as Aashiqui 2 with Aditya Roy Kapur and Shraddha Kapoor and now, we have Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.

Let’s get the nice parts out of the way: Lady Gaga is amazingly talented as a singer and is a pretty decent actress, too. I’m all for anything she wants to do with her career, as she’s been really solid in just about everything I’ve seen her try her hand at. But man, this movie…I was about an hour into it and looked over at my wife, who was overly enthused about watching it due to how attractive she finds Bradley Cooper. Throw in a beard and a cowboy look and I had been told numerous times just how attractive Mr. Cooper was to the point of near absurdity. Surely she would be enjoying this film. Nope. She shot me a look and then said, “There’s no way you can be enjoying this horrible movie.”

Proof of just how much Becca liked A Star Is Born.

Jackson “Jack” Maine (Cooper, who also directed and co-wrote this film) is a country music star battling addictions and tinnitus who we first meet on stage. He’s in California and just looking for a bar when he ends up at a drag bar that of course features a real woman singing as the lead performer, which is how I assume all these things work out. Ally (Gaga) and he fall quickly in love, despite the fact that she punches a guy in a cop bar for reasons that are never really disclosed. Pretty much everyone’s behavior in this movie is like the bars in my hometown around 1:55 AM. If they can’t get some action, they’re gonna punch you right in the puss.

Jack invites Ally to his next show, where she plays hard to get for all of seven seconds. He brings her on stage with him, then passes out right when they’re about to make love. She’s upset, because after all, she took the special time to go into the bathroom and dry her lady business and underarms down with a hotel towel for this.

Somewhere in all of this, they visit the ranch where Jack and Bobby — his older half-brother tour manager played by Sam Elliot, who really deserves better — grew up. Turns out that Bobby sold the land, so the brothers get in a fist fight. Then, Ally meets Rez, a combination music producer and manager who takes over Ally’s career, taking her from country to pop.

This is where the film shows how out of touch it is with culture, as these days, pop and country are pretty much the same thing. After all, just ask Hootie, who did more than just fine becoming a country artist. Jack starts getting drunker and angrier and drunker and saltier and angrier and passes out after doing drugs at a pharmacy trade show he plays for money. I mean, first off, if you’re gonna do a pharmacy trade show, that’s the best place to smash up some Somas with your boot and do rails of them. Also: if your entire character arc is that you want your girl to have artistic integrity, have some yourself. But let me get to that in a bit.

This is where Dave Chapelle shows up for no real reason at all as an old bandmate named Noodles. Jack proposes to Ally with a ring made out of guitar string and they get married by Eddie Griffin. You might think that I made up most of the previous sentences, but no. I didn’t. Other films non sequiters are the plot of this rambling mess.

As Ally’s star goes up — she’s on SNL with Alec Baldwin! — Jack goes down. They get in a fight about one of her songs being about a guy’s ass and he calls her ugly while she’s in the tub. If it can get any worse, he gets wasted before his tribute to Roy Orbison — who again, deserves better — and then pisses himself on stage while Ally wins the Best New Artist Grammy. I literally yelled from the kitchen, “I predict he pees on himself at the Grammys,” because most of my humor is of the grade school variety. Imagine my glee when I was shown that I was correct.

Ally’s dad — Andrew “Dice” Clay! — yells at Jack and our hero, such as he is, goes to rehab where we learn that he’s tried to kill himself since he was thirteen. Look, I know alcoholism is a disease and all that, but throughout the entire film, Jack has been nothing but selfish. There are no moments where you see goodness in him, only someone who becomes an ogre to his wife when she achieves her dreams. Even after he gets out, she puts her entire career on hold for him. After all, the mean music producer/agent doesn’t want her husband on tour so she just cancels everything.

Jack responds to the love of a good woman by hanging himself while she plays the biggest concert of her life, again proving that he’s nothing but a complete waste of humanity. The dog he adopts is the only good thing about him.

Ally then takes his name and sings the love song he wrote to her at a tribute, which is some redemption, one would think. But really, after way more than two hours of a drunk treating her horribly, it all just makes her seem pretty weak. I mean, at no point did Ally realize that her career success was all due to her hard work and talent. Somehow, all of Jack’s behavior is worthy of cannonization.

Did you get the idea that I didn’t like this one? Oh man — you’d be right. Brevity is the soul of wit and this bloated mess just went on and on, pretty much like this review. Lots of people loved this, it’s going to win plenty of awards and I honestly don’t get it. It’s not for me. It may be for you, if you want to suffer through a clueless woman dealing with a manipulative man child on her way to fame that may ultimately be soulless.

No one speaks — everyone either mumble whispers or screams loudly directly into your ear, which rings with the sound of deafness. This movie is as subtle and interesting as a drunk warbling an Alan Jackson song at supersonic volume, then crying about what a loser her man is before peeing into a garbage can in the bar’s bathroom.