The Blu Spot

The Film: Five years ago, Warner Bros. attempted to reboot the "Mortal Kombat" film series with a new cast & creative team, the result of which was a rather misguided take on the material that got bogged down in training montages and seemed to forget that there was supposed to be a tournament involved. However, that only ended up being part of the film's problems as its release was delayed a few months due to COVID, eventually getting released when theaters were still struggl

The Film: Earlier this year, a little film with the bizarre title of "Is God Is," based on the acclaimed 2008 Off-Broadway play of the same name by Aleshea Harris, landed in theaters to a rather fascinating split reaction between critics and audiences. The former praised it for the most part, while the latter had a far more mixed reaction, that is, from the very few that went to see it. Despite being in a decent amount of theaters, the film was only able to garner about $5 mi

The Film: Over the course of nearly 80 years, there have been several dozen films dedicated to the popular adventurer Sinbad the Sailor, as originally featured in "One Thousand and One Nights," but it's probably more than fair to say that none have been quite as popular as the trilogy of pictures from Columbia that featured the incredible stop motion animation ("Dynamation") of the great Ray Harryhausen. The first of these films, "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad," is considered one

The Film: It really is quite amazing that it took this long for there to finally be a biopic about one of the most legendary music icons who ever lived. Sure, there had been a few TV documentaries about Michael Jackson over the years, but somehow we had never gotten a big budget, theatrical film about the King of Pop until now. It's hard to imagine the intense pressure of trying to get something like that right, knowing full-well that millions of fans around the world are cla

The Film: Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who has brought us such classics as "Sex, Lies, and Videotape," "Erin Brockovich," and "Traffic," has been going through a bit of a dry spell lately. His last three outings have included the poorly-received "Magic Mike's Last Dance," the bland haunted house drama "Presence," and "Black Bag," a spy thriller that was more interested in being clever than it was in telling a compelling story. It's been unfortunate to see him st

The Film: It's been quite a while since we've heard from acclaimed filmmaker Gus Van Sant, whose past works include great films like "Good Will Hunting" and "Milk." His last project, "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot," came out all the way back in 2018, receiving mixed reviews and coming & going without making much of a splash, but at long last he's returned with his latest feature, the real-life crime thriller "Dead Man's Wire." Will this rendition of an actual hostage

The Film: It seems like every year or two, a horror film comes along that gets everyone really riled up, causing critics to shower it with praise and act like it's one of the greatest things to come along in the genre for quite some time. The problem is, at least within the last several years, these films typically don't live up to the insane hype heaped upon them, making it seem like those doing the raving were simply too easily impressed by what they saw. This year, the fil

The Film: Like most of the classic monsters of the '30s, "The Mummy" is one that's been done to death over the subsequent decades, with highlights including the original Boris Karloff classic (which is more of a melodrama than a horror film), the 1959 Hammer film with Sir Christopher Lee, the action-filled 1999 rendition with Brendan Fraser, and the 2017 outing with Tom Cruise, which was such a disaster that it killed an entire planned universe of films before it could even g

The Film: Last we saw of writer/director Kristoffer Borgli, he delivered the rather intriguing "Dream Scenario," a film with a fascinating premise in which everyone is inexplicably dreaming about the same ordinary person. Unfortunately, it ended up being another classic example of a filmmaker having a really neat idea, but not really knowing where to take it or how to use it effectively, ultimately leading to a film that basically meanders for its brief 90-minute runtime. Now

The Film: Hot on the heels of "Crime 101," here we have another crime caper of a completely different sort with "The Mastermind." Coming to us from writer/director Kelly Reichardt, whose name you may remember from such films as "First Cow," "Night Moves," and "Wendy and Lucy," it attempts to approach the sub-genre from a slightly different angle in order to give us a single-focus, character-driven outing, while toning the excitement factor down considerably. Having been aroun