Chuck Koplinski

Turismo falters on the track Chalk up Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo as one of the biggest missed opportunities of the 2023 cinematic campaign. The film has an intriguing based-on-true-events backstory that’s compelling fodder for a sports movie – a nobody from England gets a chance to compete on an international stage in a highly dangerous […]

Mawkish Hill overplays its hand My wife cracks me up sometimes, often without meaning to. For instance, the other night we were watching Jeff Celentano’s The Hill, a faith-based sports biopic based on the life of hitting phenom Rickey Hill. She went to bed early before the end rolled around and asked me the next […]

Demeter quickly sinks Much like the titular vessel, Andre Ovredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter is doomed from the start. Overlong, tedious, and bearing the cross of a well-known conclusion – which the director errs in changing – the film is a vain attempt to approach the Dracula story from a different angle. Having […]

Gadot solid as Stone What with The Gray Man, Extraction and Red Notice franchises, Netflix is making a name for itself as the go-to source for solid action fare. Tom Harper’s Heart of Stone seems destined to be added to the streamer’s stable of series as the director delivers a solid, if not overly original, espionage thriller that’s […]

Beginners upends rom-com expectations The last thing I wanted to do was watch another rom-com but there was Vicky Wight’s Happiness for Beginners, sitting in front of me. Helen (Ellie Kemper) is our just-divorced battered heroine and to, in her own words, “rise like a phoenix from the ashes,” she decides to take a guided […]

Nolan goes for broke in compelling Oppenheimer It should come as no surprise that when faced with telling the complex story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, that writer/director Christopher Nolan would take a radical approach. Using dueling flashbacks from the memories of Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) as well as those of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), two […]

Cruise continues to thrill with Dead Reckoning I suppose there is an exception to every rule. The law of diminishing returns states that “benefits from something will grow proportionally smaller as more energy is invested in it.” Inexplicably, every sequential entry of the Mission: Impossible franchise disproves this notion, each a testament to the imagination […]

Ride juggles crudity with poignancy There are times during Adele Lim’s Joy Ride when it’s obvious all involved are trying a bit too hard to be included in the Gross Out Hall of Fame. Thankfully, there’s enough genuine humor and heart to offset the blatant crudity and ribald moments that are, at best, hit-and-miss. The […]

The Flash delivers action and heart Though at times it may seem like an inventory of the studios’ properties, at its core The Flash is a belated origin story as the circumstances revolving around how Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) became the Flash is finally told on screen. However, this comes after the first act is […]

Inventive staging makes for exceptional Extraction 2 Sporting a $70 million budget and a leaner script than its predecessor, Sam Hargrave’s Extraction 2 delivers its fair share of thrills, including an extended action sequence for the ages. After inexplicably surviving his previous mission, covert ops specialist Tyler Rake (Chris Hemsworth) accepts an uneasy retirement. Of […]