For the most part, the critics are trashing “21 Bridges” starring Chadwick Boseman. The main reason for the low ratings for this solid movie is because all or most of this story has been done before in one form or another in other movies or TV shows. The problem is, police stories in movies or TV dramas have dominated the industry for many years and because of that, every idea, surprise ending, gun fight, police corruption, or massive injustice has already been seen. What remains is judging the quality of the production, the acting and how believable the story is. In my opinion, 21 Bridges, along with the recent “Black and Blue” – also trashed by the critics, connects on all counts and should be considered a very solid and entertaining police drama. My rating for this movie is a solid 80%, not the wrong and very low 45% on Rotten Tomatoes.

All of the acting 21 Bridges is outstanding, with Chadwick Boseman as the lead detective trying to find 2 criminals who killed 8 cops during a drug shootout.  Sienna Miller is unrecognizable as one of the police offers helping to find the 2 killers and J.K. Simmons as the police captain. 

Some would argue that closing all 21 Bridges out of New York City in the middle of the night, is something that could never happen. For a seasoned movie goer, some of the surprises were easy to figure out within the first hour, but the story was so well told, none of this mattered.   Once again, the critics are very wrong and I recommend 21 Bridges.

The popularity of the documentary “Won’t you be my neighbor”, released in June 2018 about the children’s television show Mr Rogers, is most likely the reason “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, was made. Very surprisingly, this film is not really about the life story of Fred Rogers or Mr Rogers, it is really a about a true story about a broken man, Tom Junod who just happened to write a now famous article for Esquire about Mr Rogers in November 1998 called “Can you say … Hero?”. This article was so well written it made the cover of Esquire for November 1998.

What is most impressive about this movie, was the decision to not make this story into a biopic about Mr Rogers, but rather to show what a great man Fred Rogers was by using this one small chapter in his life, when he went out of his way to show empathy towards a reporter, who was a total stranger and who was having a very hard time in his life. Many of us know first hand what a rare commodity empathy is in today’s world. People have their own problems and few have the time, energy or desire to step out of themselves and imagine and ultimately understand what someone else is suffering through. What this very good movie showed more than anything else is that Fred Rogers was 100% genuine and there was nothing fake about this man who hosted a children’s TV show from 1968-2001. Fred Rogers cared very deeply about other people and as this movie stated several times, people like “Tom Junod” are his favorites; because they are broken and they need help.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood stars Tom Hanks and based on his great performance in this movie, I expect he will receive another Oscar nomination. Other actors in this film include Chris Cooper , who plays Tom Junod’s father, Matthew Rhys as Tom Junod and Susan Kelechi Watson who is one of the very good actors who appears on the great TV series “This is Us”. The acting in this movie is outstanding throughout.

The ratings for this film are an extremely high 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and due to the acting and the great message about empathy and the difficulties in dealing with life, I agree with this very high rating and recommend this movie.

Producing any motion picture requires the risk of millions of dollars. Even for the lowest budget movies that are only released to a smaller subset of art houses around the United States, there is still the risk of a very significant amount of money.

Managing risk producing a movie is where the Movie industry is more like the Insurance industry. When there is an idea for any new movie idea, if there is a guaranteed “built in” audience because of name recognition, some of the risk of spending millions of dollars can be reduced. Even if the TV show, in this case the “Charlies Angels” of the 1970, was bad or even stupid, does not matter, because it is believed that there will still be enough of an audience, to mitigate the risk of spending so much money. This same idea happened two years with the release of the horrendous Baywatch movie. Name recognition with no thought of a story idea, or any kind of a screenplay turned out to be one of the worst movies of 2017.

In this case of the new “Charlies Angels” movie, the hope is that there will also be a sequel, as there was in 2003, for the last time a Charlies Angels movie was released in the year 2000. However this movie is so bad, with critical ratings so low, I doubt that there will be a sequel. The problem with this film is not enough time was put into the screenplay, written by the director who also acted in this film, Elizabeth Banks. The story is ridiculous, disjointed and for the most part made no sense. This entire movie is an excuse to pass one action scene onto the next one, mostly made up of explosions, gunfire and karate.

This movie starts with two Charlies Angels played by Kristen Stewart and newcomer Ella Balinska totally dominating about 8 other armed men in a Karate fight, which is another problem with a movie like this one, believability. There is nothing wrong with Karate in any action movie, but there will always be a problem with preposterous Karate action showing 2 people out fighting 8 others, especially when the other 8 people are also armed.

For those old enough to remember the original Charlies Angels TV series, this movie is better than the TV show, but not enough to make any viewer not feel embarrassed for anyone who is acting in something this ridiculous. The 1970’s TV series was exploitative of the women involved, and just about ruined the career of all the actresses who appeared in the show. Only the late Farrah Fawcett who appeared in TV movies after she left the series after the first year had some kind of a career after Charlies Angels.

I was surprised to see an actor of the caliber of Patrick Stewart in this bad movie, along with Elizabeth Banks and Naomi Scott. There is nothing worth seeing here, no new ideas and a bad story. I agree with all the bad ratings, 57% on Rotten Tomatoes and a very low 4 out of 10 on IMDB. This film should be skipped by everyone, including the few die hard fans of the TV show and the even fewer fans of the last Charlies Angels movie released in 2000.