Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast

Oscar-winning joker Jared Leto sinks his teeth into another comic book villain role as Morbius, a hematologist who turns into a “living vampire” after tinkering with bat DNA.  Can blood brother Matt Smith (Dr. Who) convince the superpowered physician to turn his back on humanity, and join him on a New York bender biting babes and breaking things?  Or will the good doctor accept Michael Keaton’s of...

Dolph Lungren trains young gamers to become masters of a zombie universe in Dead Trigger, the 2017 film adaptation of a popular first-person shooter made for smartphones.  Can a Disney star, an MMA fighter, and the no-longer-little rapper Lil’ Romeo blast their way to Terminal City, and rescue the scientist who can cure the outbreak? Or will Cyglobe CEO (and soap star) Tamara Braun whack them for...

Michael Fassbender learns the homicidal impulses that landed him on Death Row in 2016 can be traced back to the Assassin’s Creed he pledged to free-will-loving vigilantes in 1492. Can Oscar-winning scientist Marion Cotillard (Inception) cure the convict of his violent ways simply by plugging him into holographic re-enactments of his past life hit jobs? Or does Jeremy Irons have nefarious reasons f...

  Yakuza director Takashi Miike tries his hand at a different type of video game adaptation by bringing Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright to the big screen. Can the rookie lawyer find the guilty parties in three interlocking murder trials simply by cross-examining parrots and debunking photographic evidence of lake monsters?  And will the fashion police level charges against all those gravity-defying ha...

Robert Pattinson spent the last two years suiting up as The Batman so that he might score a hit movie for DC, and rescue a Gotham City drowning in drugs, violent crime, and political corruption. Will his plans for urban renewal be thwarted by unhinged assassin The Riddler (Paul Dano), or mob henchman Oz “The Penguin” Cobblepot (Colin Farrell)? Or will Zoe Kravitz steal the show as a limber cat bur...

Nearly 50 years after she left Leatherface dancing in the street, final girl Sally Hardesty returns to face another Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2022.  Can she save a bus full of social media influencers who dared to unlawfully displace the serial killer from his retirement in small town Harlow?  And will Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade) use the survival skills she honed during a school shooting to fight...

Tom Holland leaves Spider-Man and the MCU behind to head into the Uncharted waters of a popular Playstation video game.  Will his Nathan Drake solve a series of puzzles that lead to the legendary treasure of world explorer Ferdinand Magellan?  Or will he be conned out of the gold by greedy partner Mark Wahlberg, billionaire rival Antonio Banderas, or a host of femme fatales and modern day pirates?...

Sharon Stone could have screwed like a mink, raised rugrats, and lived happily ever after with Michael Douglas. Instead, her icy crime novelist chances implication in new murders and wardrobe malfunctions 14 years later in Basic Instinct 2. Is pasty psychologist David Morrissey right to claim the femme fatale suffers from risk addiction, and will endanger all of London if she’s allowed to write a...

Michael Douglas has survived many big screen fatal attractions with dangerous blondes, but the slick yuppie courts a date with the sharp end of an ice pick after he beds Sharon Stone in the steamy 1992 thriller Basic Instinct.  Does this femme fatale write novels as a way of planning the future murders of unsatisfying lovers? Or is there a psychotic reader turning bloody acts from her books into S...

With “horror holidays” like Halloween, April Fool’s Day, and Friday the 13th routinely being celebrated with 21st Century remakes, it makes sense that someone would dig up My Bloody Valentine in 2009,. Can the censors stop the carnage now that it’s flying into audiences’ faces via 3-D?  And what kills a small town faster - a homicidal maniac stuffing residents’ hearts into boxes of candy, or prodi...

Twenty years after a cave-in turned a coal miner into a cannibal, legendary psychopath Harry Warden returns to paint his hometown red in the 1981 original My Bloody Valentine. So why don’t moviegoers associate headlamps and pickaxes with February 14th in the same way hockey masks and machetes signify Friday The 13th? And were the cruelest cuts made by the MPAA, who edited out literal showers of bl...

Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox are ready to Scream for the fifth and possibly final time as a serial killer in a Ghostface mask terrorizes a new generation of self-aware Woodsboro horror enthusists. Is the 25-year-old franchise still capable of pulling off big surprises like that initial, infamous phone call to Drew Barrymore? And will the new directors enrage or bore Wes Craven p...

Tabloid journalist Miguel Ferrer (Robocop) is on the trail of The Night Flier, a serial killer who drains victims of blood during sunset stops at tiny East Coast airports. Is there any truth to the rumor that this phantom aviator is a vampire?  And if so, is his sleek black jet just a way of impressing those blue haired groupies waiting for him on the tarmac?  Find out if this latest installment i...

100 years before Eggsy joined Colin Firth as a member of the Kingsmen, Ralph Fiennes (Schindler’s List) and his servants founded the secret spy organization inside a Savile Row tailor’s shop in the prequel The King’s Man. Can director Matthew Vaughn retain his signature mix of balls-out action and irreverent humor while exploring the root causes of World War I?  And who is the mastermind of an ima...

Mobster Christian Slater has spent a lifetime outfitting his enemies with cement shoes, so it’s poetic justice that vengeful construction worker Wes Bentley (American Beauty) rigs a newly paved road so it swallows Dolan’s Cadillac and buries the human trafficker alive. Can a standout entry in Stephen King’s Nightmares & Dreamscapes short story collection be successfully stretched into feature...

Peter Parker fears there’s No Way Home to his happy life with MJ (Zendaya) after Dr. Strange casts a magic spell that brings all the previous Spider-Man heroes and villains into the MCU.  Is it Tom Holland’s responsibility to fix the messes made by Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Dr. Octopus (Alfred Molina), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Lizard (Rhys Ifans), and Electro (Jamie Foxx)? And were the sp...

It can be a bumpy ride trying to follow Stephen King works on their journey from page to screen. What happens when the macabre Maine author has a head-on collision with British horror scribe Clive Barker (Hellraiser) in a two story pile-up called Quicksilver Highway?  Can carnival showman Christopher “Doc Brown'' Lloyd make sense of this roadside carnage, as hands willingly sever themselves from t...

Award-winning acting talent (and Steven Weber) try to wake up the Stephen King retrospective with 8 tales of horror taken from the short story collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes. What happens when assassin William Hurt (A History of Violence) goes to war with a box full of toys, detective William H Macy (Fargo) meets his maker, author Tom Berenger (Platoon) runs from a phantom in a cursed pai...

The Umbrella Corporation may have left town (and taken original star Milla Jovovich with them), but there’s still a horde of bloodthirsty zombies ready to welcome audiences back to Raccoon City in the seventh Resident Evil installment. Can estranged siblings Chris and Claire Redfield bring the foster father who poisoned their childhood to justice before he escapes with the infamous T-virus?  And c...

Astronaut Matt Damon proves he has the “right stuff” to survive an extended stay on the Red Planet in Ridley Scott’s acclaimed 2015 blockbuster The Martian.  Justin, Jakob, and Stuart continue their look at outer space exploration with an ultra-realistic trip to the nearest colonizable planet. How many scientists does it take to cypher out a solution to getting a marooned botanist back home safe? ...

These days they’ll let any 90-year-old who ever pretended to fly a starship go up in a rocket. But you had to have The Right Stuff if you hoped to survive the first messy attempts to put a man in orbit back at the dawn of the Space Race.  Join Jakob, Justin, and Stuart as they witness the amazing early successes and blunders of NASA, as well as the career launch of some major acting talent -  incl...

Eons before the assembly of the Avengers, ten celestial caretakers known as Eternals came together to protect and guide human development on Earth. Did Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao (Nomadland) deviate too much from the Marvel formula in telling the secret history of the planet’s first superheroes?  And should Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek get credit for bestowing culture on mankind with Hack...

Stuart, Arnie, and Jakob played a nasty trick on listeners when they pulled Loki from the Summer 2021 schedule at the last minute.  Now they make up for lost time by diving into the first six episodes of Tom Hiddleston’s quest to conquer all of existence (or at least Disney Plus). Can the Norse God dethrone the three space lizards who currently police the future and promote the popularity of his n...

Timothee Chalamet may look scrawny to Jason “Aquaman” Mamoa, but prophecy foretells the Call Me By Your Name star to be the savior of Dune in 2021. Can director Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049) hope to pass the test of coherently adapting Frank Herbert’s complex novel of life on a desert planet, given that David Lynch and SyFy Channel already experienced great pain putting their hands in this...

It’s easy to blame Haddonfield’s high body count on local boogeyman Michael Myers, but many of the latest Halloween Kills are being committed by a violent mob of formerly decent citizens. Did babysitter Jamie Lee Curtis, terrified kids Anthony Michael Hall and Kyle Richards, and shaky cop Will Patton grow up to become the real monsters of the community?  And will Michael approve of the changes mad...