Movie #25 of 2025: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) A fun little story about two California slackers who travel around in a time machine that looks like a phone booth — surprisingly not intended as a Doctor Who reference — collecting famous historical figures to include in their class project. The boys are dim …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)”
Movie #22 of 2025: The Ewok Adventure (1984) My daughters (aged 6 and 4) lost interest midway through both A New Hope and The Phantom Menace, so I decided to see if this TV movie from the 1980s — later retitled to Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, though I’ve never called it by that …
Movie #21 of 2025: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) After nearly two decades, the Indiana Jones trilogy of the 1980s got another big-screen outing, although the brand had survived in the meantime with a succession of video game projects, a TV show about the character’s childhood adventures, and the like. …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)”
Movie #20 of 2025: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) Neither Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) nor Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) ever mentioned that the titular archaeologist’s father was a fellow antiquities scholar, but he fits seamlessly into the plot of this third film in a way that, for …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)”
Movie #19 of 2025: V for Vendetta (2005) Seemingly more timely now than it was two decades ago upon release, this movie offers a thrilling tale of a terrorist antihero inspiring people in dystopian England to rise up against their oppressive government. (Things in the U.S. are obviously nowhere near as bad as they are …
Movie #18 of 2025: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) I’ve long held that this second Indiana Jones feature is the worst of its series (or of the original trilogy, at least), which in consequence has meant that I’ve probably seen it the least often. And though I tried to approach this rewatch …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)”
Movie #17 of 2025: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) There are some movies that I think, if you see them when you’re young enough, you can never hope to be truly objective about their qualities. Such is the case with Raiders of the Lost Ark (retroactively retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the …
Continue reading “Movie Review: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)”
TV #51 of 2025: Classic Doctor Who, season 21 Another bifurcated season of Doctor Who that I wish I could separate into its weaker and stronger parts — although here it’s particularly unfortunate that the former installments bookend the latter. The middle of this run delivers a fine span from RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS through …
Movie #13 of 2025: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) Although still an amnesiac, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has by this point in the franchise firmly established himself as a skilled super-spy, seemingly able to infiltrate any security setup and evade detection in any crowded metropolitan area. He’s also continuing to hunt for answers about his past, …
Continue reading “Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)”
Movie #12 of 2025: The Bourne Supremacy (2004) The problem with giving your hero a happy ending is that when a sequel gets greenlit — presumably over studio desire to keep monetizing a successful IP, rather than anyone’s feeling that the Jason Bourne story as presented in the first movie was at all unfinished — …
Continue reading “Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more