Author: Bill Watters

Bill Watters is a child of the late 70s- he walked into a theater to watch Star Wars, and emerged to become a lifelong fan of cinema and television. Spending nearly a decade as a projectionist, he fell into the Silicon Valley dot-com boom and became a codemonkey for a range of game companies. These days he's a frequent speaker, moderator, and panelist at pop-culture events and conventions, as well as a prolific film and television critic and genre news writer. He is also a member critic of both the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. In addition to his writing, he is also a photojournalist and can be found on Getty Images.

“Marry Me” is probably one of the most honest showcases of Jennifer Lopez’s wide range of performance skills. While it’s the time of year that often finds romantic comedies (right before Valentine’s Day, which is oddly second place to the scores that come out over the Thanksgiving to Christmas – generally courtesy of the Hallmark Channel), over the past decade they tend to be more vapid and repetitive than interesting. Pleasant surprise “Marry Me” tries to keep it simple, heartfelt, and mixing in some sincere performances (and some of Lopez’s songs), with the result being an enjoyable success. A mix…

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When Agatha Christy first published “Death on the Nile” in 1937, it was another of her successful and popular whodunits. Nine decades later, the film’s overall effect feels behind the times with pacing, and fails with attempts at crafting mystery. Directed by Kenneth Branagh from a screenplay by longtime Ridley Scott collaborator Michael Green, the film weaves an unearthly level of a beautiful sets and production design. Unfortunately for all of the eye candy and echos of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the story winds up guilty of being overly simplistic to be captivating. When watching earlier eras of similar films, it’s…

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“Moonfall” is one of those epic disaster films that knows exactly how serious it’s trying to take itself. Which, to be clear, is not at all. When films think they’re being high-concept and really profound, yet as dumb as a brick, they’re painful to sit through. But then the whole premise is less goofy than most Q-Anon conspiracy theories- and it wear’s its heart on its sleeve- it’s hard not to find something charming about the whole effort. For this particular Roland Emmerich disaster scenario, The Moon is a massive artificial megastructure. Something has gone terribly wrong with it’s power…

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Marvin Lee Aday, known by the stage name of Meat Loaf, has passed away according to his family via a statement from his longtime lawyer, Michael Greene. He is most famous for his “Bat Out of Hell” album, which still stands at the #4 position of highest selling albums of all time (with over 44 million albums sold worldwide). He is also recognizable from his role as Eddie in the 1974 midnight cult-classic of all cult-classics “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”Sources indicate his death was Covid-19 related. He had previously been quoted as saying “If I die, I die, but…

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It’s wise that auteur director Joel Coen chose to lean into the stunning visuals of his adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” rather than having much dialogue. His past works such as “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “Fargo”, “Raising Arizona,” and “TheLadykillers” set him as having a distinct world building style and artistic eye. His black and white, ultra-high definition, tight close-ups, and minimalist environments are breathtaking. And then the cast begins to speak, and it runs jarringly off the rails. Shakespeare’s language takes a great deal of very specific experience and guidance to pull off. Now granted,…

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One of the great things about the streaming services these days is that every so often I’ll come across something that I haven’t heard anything about, and the newly released Netflix disaster-thriller-dark satirical comedy, “Don’t Look Up,” is one of those gems. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, it’s a fabulous introspective spin on just how messed up the world, and in particular, America, has become. Lawrence plays astronomer PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky, and DiCaprio is her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy. While taking observations, Dibiasky discovers a new comet, and as she and Mindy run the orbital calculations they discover…

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When “The Matrix” first released back in the Spring of 1999, it was helped along by a marketing campaign that really held nothing more than the tagline of “What is The Matrix?” Part of the captivating spell of that first outing was not knowing about the rabbit hole audiences were about to go down, combined with new special effects visuals. Cut to 2021, and “The Matrix Resurrections” is hitting theaters more than 18 years since the intervening three films (two live-action and one animated). The result is a disappointing mixture of self-referential potential, and a storyline that doesn’t lift the…

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“Nightmare Alley” has Guillermo del Toro’s signature elements of impeccable production design and immersive feeling of a time and place. This time he’s aiming for a noir-laced world straddling a carnival sideshow mystery, and a con-man noir thriller. Unfortunately, neither side really winds up sticking the landing. Set in the post-dust bowl world of the 1930s, Stanton Carlisle (played by Bradley Cooper) comes across a traveling carnival where he manages to land a job doing odd jobs. Befrending the troupe’s mentalist, Pete (David Strathairn), and his wife, Madame Zeena (Toni Collette) he starts learning the tricks of the trade. Pete…

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“Spider-Man: No Way Home” has managed to pull off an amazing feat. Not only does it wind up being another solid entry into Marvel Studios’ Cinematic Universe pantheon, it winds up giving the existing films more depth. “No Way Home” will be best enjoyed by going into it knowing as little as possible about it (meaning keep away from Twitter as best you can until you have a chance to see the film). As we go through this review, we will not go any deeper into details of the film beyond what might be surmised from the trailer. So before…

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Dean Stockwell, the Golden Globe-winning actor and nominee of nearly every other kind of award that exists in television and cinema, has passed away. Known the widest for his role as Admiral Al Calavicci in the long-running science fiction series, “Quantum Leap,” his career spanned more than 70 years and more than 200 acting credits and was also renowned for his roles from “Battlestar Galactica,” “Blue Velvet,” “Dune” (David Lynch’s version), and “Married to the Mob.” Sources reporting to Variety said that Stockwell passed away peacefully in his sleep at home on Sunday morning from natural causes. He was 85.…

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