ReelViews for PG-13 movies

Venom represents the final result of a long-standing attempt by Sony Pictures to give the popular Spider-Man nemesis his own film. Influenced equally by the comic books and the Deadpool movies, Venom falls considerably short of the high bar s...

If 2018’s Venom felt like an afterthought, then the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, feels like an afterthought to an afterthought. With its short running length, this drunk-on-CGI production is less a movie and more the outline of somet...

In 2018, an argument could have been made that a Venom-centric movie was sensible, preferably as a lead-in to the expected big-screen clash between the inky symbiont and his web-crawling nemesis, Spider-Man. (The previous motion picture throwdown ...

Veronica Mars is a delightful piece of fan service - a supersized TV reunion episode expanded for viewing in movie theaters. Warner Brothers, unsure of the film’s box office potential, has chosen an unusual distribution model. Simultaneous with t...

There was hope in 2005 that Woody Allen had re-discovered his groove with the release of Match Point. Since then, however, he has slipped back into the sinkhole of mediocrity that kept him from greatness throughout most of the '90s and '00s. Unfo...

It’s amazing that, two years in a row, a movie with the name “Frankenstein” in the title will claim a spot of dishonor on my “Turkeys of the Year” list. In many ways, 2015’s Victor Frankenstein is an even worse mov...

Victoria and Abdul, based on (mostly) true events as related in Shrabani Basu’s historical chronicle of the same name, is effectively a sequel to the 1997 film, Mrs. Brown. That movie, directed by John Madden, detailed Queen Victoria’s fri...

Two distinct problems of execution keep The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's "comeback" from being anything more than another disappointing title on an increasingly uneven filmography. Despite a promising premise and effective "Shyamala...

It's a pleasant thing to encounter occasionally a movie in which people are portrayed as decent (if flawed) individuals. In The Visitor, there are no human villains. No one wears a black hat. The antagonist is The System - the nameless, faceless...

Volcano is one of those films (like last year's Twister and Independence Day) for which it doesn't matter what I (or any other critic) have to say. Disaster movie junkies will go to get their fix; those who can't tell the difference between Th...