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The movie starts out with one of the most cringe-worthy opening monologues ever. But things quickly pick up from there. With shades of The Matrix, the Lego Movie, action movies, and sci-fi films, Free Guy is a lighthearted romp that nevertheless flirts with the odd philosophical question here and there.

It's a fun ride with genuinely funny and surprising moments. The plot even mostly makes sense, something that can't be be taken for granted!

What if the port union boss could turn your brain to mush? EYEROLL.

The dialog is bad as ever.

I realize this is fiction, but ugh, the incorrect usage of technical terms continues to grate.

This show is absolutely terrible, and I watch it when I want to see something that requires only 2 brain cells. However, even those two cells know that a virus is not a cell, a mistake the show makes over and over in this episode, one which is even more egregious than a "scientist" calling hypotheses "theories."

Having watched NeverEnding Story (I) some months earlier, I started watching this sequel with my daughter. She is generally in favor of any movie aimed at children, but even she could tell this was a bad movie after just a view minutes. So we bailed and watched a better movie instead.

I typically do not review movies without watching the whole thing, but unless somehow the rest of the movie is 10x better than the first 5 minutes, I am confident that my overall recommendation will still be a "pass."

This documentary ought to be shown in schools. It is a must-see for anyone who doesn't already understand how fake Instagram culture can be.

The film has a simple concept: pick three random people who would love to be famous, and then fake it till they make it. The moral of the story is that, in the world of Instagram influencers, faking it and making it are actually the same thing.

It's a high budget movie, so the shots generally look nice, and Gal Gadot is obviously hot enough to make even a Nazi stare lustfully... but that doesn't make this a good movie. It's corny, it's cringey, it's got an awful score, and it's far too long... ugh

I would expect much better acting from at least some of the people in this cast! This is the least inspired festival of self congratulation for lefties I can possibly imagine

I'm fully hate-watching at this point, and to discuss it with someone else who thought she'd like the show due to the actors involved.

Let's be clear. It's basically a network-quality show that they sprinkled a metric ton of f-bombs into, as if that's a substitute for actual impact, so golly gee I guess it's gotta go on HBO.

I could get into details, but why bother? The end result is still that the show has no redeeming qualities.

Amazing characters? Check. Snappy dialogue? Check. A reality-based sense of cynicism? Check. Accidentally predicting real life? Check. Callbacks and in-jokes for viewers? Check. The most inventive foul-mouthing on TV? Check. Is this the greatest show of all time? Debatable. Could it be any better than it is? ABSOLUTELY NOT. This is the perfect show!

Virtually everything about this movie is straight-up stupid, starting with water: How does water work? The answer changes scene to scene. I realize it doesn't work to shoot this underwater for real, but come on. Nothing about this movie is remotely good or compelling or original. I wish I hadn't seen it.

I watched with pleasure as the San Francisco City Hall was lit up in a pride rainbow to celebrate a court decision legalizing gay marriage again. That was quite a few years ago already and with the exception of a few backwards folks in rural america, nobody wants to take anything away from gay people.

So why is there a need for a heavy-handed "morality play" when everyone already agrees with the moral?

Still, I take no stars off for the choice of subject matter.

Instead, I take stars off:

1) Because this episode was not funny at all. Other episodes this seasons had me laughing out loud at multiple turns.

2) Everything was so obvious and the characters were acting stupidly. "He's not dead and the genius hacker guy hacked the holodeck," I was telling the officers as they struggled to piece it together.

3) The whole Kelly-Cassius thing was boring. There was a tease of insane stalker/rejection complex but it didn't go anywhere. And don't act like that stupid animated talking flower was good TV!

4) I didn't really want to go back to Moclan court, but the arc felt kind of unresolved at the end, didn't it?

5) Some of the technical mumbo jumbo was pretty bad, like first-draft bad, super stupid bad.

Still, it was nice to see Jeffries tubes.

Hoping to see the Orville back in top form next week.

As best I can tell, Star Trek: Discovery is a show about what life would look like if Starfleet couldn't afford indoor lighting. It may double as an experiment to see just how bad the fake science can get before fans give up trying to understand plots at all.

Does the slender man take you to another world? Does he just make you disappear? Does he make you a lifeless zombie? Does he, uh, wrap around you and turn you into part of a tree? Does he just get inside your head and make you go crazy?

Would it blow your mind to know that the answer is... YES to all of the above?

Absurd little movie. Not bad enough to be ironically enjoyable. The stakes never feel very high. And I kept thinking, 'this must be a low-budget cash grab' while watching it. Because it is, yes, but the movie itself should not be reminding you of this fact constantly.

Worse than my already low expectations.

A bold experiment in children's shows, LBA asks, "What if story arcs were largely replaced with grab bags of almost-funny bits that don't add up to any point at all?"

The show owes a large debt to Adventure Time, but doesn't keep the focused plots and sense of heart (or that made AT great.

"Shut your garbage mouth," a protagonist says to other protagonists in this show. Ugh. Not great for kids. And this show certainly doesn't work for adults like AT can.

Fun moments in this movie, but overall things happen without much of a reason for us to care.

It's a fine movie. Just fine.

Somehow the plot of a video game version of a board game works better than most movies The Rock shows up in, and its a fun ride watching actors we know and love (Jack Black, Karen Gillian, and Kevin Hart) portray teens stuck in their bodies. Is it groundbreaking stuff? No, but who cares, it's fun. Well worth a ticket. And the sound has to be heard in surround for the full experience, so somehow I ended up quite happy seeing this in the theater. Who knew?

I grew up loving the book. I saw Disney's previous attempt at adapting this book long ago and detested it, but I was open to giving it a new shot (even if I should have been worried that all the promotion of the movie seemed to ignore L'Engle and the story in favor of celebrating DuVernay and Oprah, in hindsight).

I knew audiences weren't loving this movie, and it was already disappearing from theaters, but... oof.

Some of the most memorable and meaningful bits of the book were chopped.

Mrs Who was cheapened with the updated and uninspired quotes she says.

And the themes of the book were dramatically cheapened by focusing on the "believe in urself gurl!!!" theme so obnoxiously. (Did hear the song for the end credits?) There was a selfless love that was a theme of the book that here is largely replaced with prideful self-love.

I was also sad to see Mr Murray didn't get to work with and encourage his daughter on Camazotz in this adaptation. That's so key. It's a strong indication DuVernay was exploiting the source to make the cheap points she wanted to make instead of really understanding and honoring the source.

Same for dropping the blind & kind creatures that the book had us meet so memorably.

Calvin... ugh. Why did they make him so creepy in the movie?

Casting major celebs as the Mrss was a dumb move. Their essential quality was a strangeness. By making them the most familiar faces on screen, that dynamic was inverted. So dumb! And their acting was not so hot. I mean, Oprah did okay. Not Reese or Mindy.

The 3D was very unenjoyable. Duh. I only saw it in 3D because that showing fit my schedule.

There were a few good moments but overall I am very disappointed indeed.

That's the universe this show transports us to. A universe where people simply don't know how to express anger without their possessions and/or windows shattering around them.

The bad writing and ho-hum acting (Smith exempted) plaguing this series show no signs of abetting in the second season.

For example, people who have dedicated their lives to following the Man in the High Castle's demands decide to contradict his orders. Why? Who knows. Plot, I guess? Tension? It makes little sense.

The episode definitely advances the plot and our understanding of the world, however. And if you are still watching, you are probably OK with that being all you get.

Do you want to see inexplicable creatures floating around and destroying New York City, but you aren't into superhero films like THE AVENGERS? Would you like to see the collective memory of that same city wiped clean of said incident, and were you born so late that you have no idea what MEN IN BLACK is about? Are you curious what a teen with an evil mother figure might do if bestowed with dangerous powers, but CARRIE and all the POLTERGEIST movies seem icky to you? Have you ever wanted to tame a dragon but decided that a movie called HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON was a little "on the nose"? Have you ever wanted to travel back in time to see a Carey Mulligan-type actress in a bob, but your parents told you that any adaptation of THE GREAT GATSBY with rap music must be of the devil? Have you yearned to watch an evil swarm of swarmy bee-like things swarm, but you decided STAR TREK BEYOND was too nerdy for you? Or quite simply did you ever wish that there were an incarnation of The Doctor from DOCTOR WHO that managed to never, ever look anyone (snakeypuffs and planticrawls excepted) in the eyes?

YES? To all of that? Then do we ever have the movie for you!

⁂

Fantastical Beasts is a meaningless amalgamation of clichés, borrowed scenes, ineffective attempts to tug at heartstrings, and shockingly bad (for 2016!) special effects. While the female lead was endearingly and masterfully played by Katherine Watterston, it wasn't close to enough to make this film worthwhile. Yes, this is even true if one knows enough of the Potterverse to know who Grindlewald is, although apparently if a Potterhead is desperate enough, this film will taste like manna: Heavenly to the starved, and like generic, flavorless carbohydrates to the rest of us.

Sherlock is is an enjoyable show, owing largely to the source material and general structure of Conan Doyle's stories.

But there is *so much* that is annoying about this show:

• The extremely repetitive, annoying, blatantly manipulative score. It's impressive to have created a musical score that is more aggravating than a laugh track, as has been achieved here.

• The extreme caricature of Sherlock's personality, which is wholly out of proportion from the original character of Sherlock Holmes. The result is a sort of lack of empathy for the character, like the look-at-these-dorks "humor" of the American show Big Bang Theory.

• Absolutely gratuitous special effects. Many shots look like cheesy Instagram photos, with completely unbelievable (post-production, illogical) blurring. A scene at a celebration involving confetti gets Matrix-style Bullet Time 3D pans — why? No reason. No reason at all.

Despite each episode being the length of a feature film, no episode, if considered independently as a movie, would ever make a list of 100 or even 1,000 best movies. If Sherlock is going to ask so much of our time, it should use it effectively, to explore interesting ideas and challenges. I believe it declines to do so.

At its core, the show is very cheap entertainment — *not* art. It lacks ambition and it lacks taste.