“The Hustle” is another one of those bad movies where you wonder if anyone read the script before signing on the dotted line. You wonder why a respected and bankable actress like Ann Hathaway would take this bad part, her second this year along with the horrible “Serenity”. This is a bad movie for someone like Rebel Wilson, who can probably afford to be in a film this bad, but one wonders what Hathaway is doing with her career lately. Unless you are spending money like water, less is more especially when it comes to making two bad movies in a row.

Everything about this movie was bad, it was supposed to be funny like the movie “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” was, starring Steve Martin and Micheal Cane, released in 1988. There was not a single laugh during the entire 2 hours. Many of the scams and the rip off’s in this story made no sense and had no logic to them. The entire movie was extremely boring and I for one had to fight just to stay awake. Through it all you wonder how millions of dollars could have been spent just because some producer thought making a female version of an above average movie from 30 years ago, would somehow draw an audience. The Hustle is easily one of the worst movies this year.

The good news is that this movie has such low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, 17% and is so bad that it will be out of the theaters in a few more days.

The movie “Tolkien” is about the famous writer J.R.R Tolkien who in 1937 wrote the book, “The Hobbit”, followed by “Lord of the Rings” that resulted in high grossing movies, directed by Peter Jackson many years after Tolkien’s death in 1973. Tolkien is played well by actor Nicholas Hoult.

This movie is about Tolkien’s childhood friendships with 3 other men, their horrendous experiences in World War I and Tolkien’s relationship with his eventual wife Edith Bratt, played very well by Lily Collins. The problem with this film is the story and how it is told with flashbacks, that for me created an experience that flowed more like a series of events than a well told story.

The overall quality of Tolkien is high, including the grim World War I scenes that were out of necessity very well done to honor the men who died. However because of how the story was told with the disjointed use of constant flashbacks, I can only give this movie a very mild recommendation.

Over the last 10 years there have been many movies released that have the same formula as “The Intruder”. Normally this formula involves a single black woman or a black couple who are stalked or attacked by a white woman or a white man. What happens is a big payoff at the end where the a person or persons have to fight off the stalker or this case an intruder. Clearly, this formula stalker movie makes money at the box office, otherwise so many stories with this exact same idea would not have been made. The problem is, what is the point of making what amounts to the same film, this many times? There has to be a new wrinkle or new idea somewhere within this genre.

This film stars Dennis Quaid as the intruder, a huge departure from most of his recent movies that have been family oriented and involve dogs. The couple in this story who buy a house in Napa Valley, and are stalked by the former owner are played by Meagan Good and Michael Ealy. Unfortunately there is nothing new here and this explains the low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes of only 28% and 5.3 on IMDB and I agree with these numbers and also agree that this movie is not worth seeing. Many will object to the ending, that has the same idea that was shown in the movie Breakdown with Kurt Russel, released in 1997. The ending was probably an attempt to generate more box office for a movie that is just not that good.