Film critic for Salt Lake City Weekly since 2000.
Favorite films
Recent activity
AllRecent reviews
More-
Rubikon 2022
Good science-fiction has always wrestled with moral and ethical questions; this one keeps getting more surprisingly complex as it goes along. In a near future ruled by corporation-states, the inhabitants of the space station Rubikon—soldier/commander Hannah Wagner (Julia Franz Richter) and scientists Gavin Abbott (George Blagden) and Dmitri Krylow (Mark Ivanir)—find themselves potentially marooned in space when a toxic fog sweeps across the majority of the earth. Initially, it seems like director Magdelena Lauritsch and her co-writer Jessica Lind have…
-
The Princess 2022
The Princess **
The premise of this swords-and-fists yarn is expected to do a lot of heavy lifting, but what it’s trying to carry feels far too bland far too much of the time. In a long-ago kingdom, a would-be usurper to the crown (Dominic Cooper) plans to gain legitimacy through a forced marriage to the king’s daughter (Joey King)—but his plans don’t include the fact that the princess has trained as a badass warrior, and has plenty of tricks…
Popular reviews
More-
The Lion King 2019
What if this Lion King had come first? It’s an interesting thought experiment, sort of a second-cousin to the idea that drives the current theatrical feature Yesterday: What if we woke up in a world where Disney had never released a hand-drawn animated film called The Lion King in 1994, and this story were appearing now for the first time, in the age of photorealistic CGI recreations of real-world animals? If there’s anything wrong with it—and by extension, with Disney’s…
-
Phineas and Ferb: The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension 2011
How was it not insanely over-talked-about that Marvel's The Avengers had pretty much the identical climax as a Disney Channel movie?
