For the hundreds of people who years ago signed up for a trip to Mars, where they will never return to Earth, “High Life” is the recruiting film for all of you. After seeing this depressing, bleak, nightmare of a film that shows that any group of people in space for a long period of time will never survive without going insane, anyone would change their mind about wanting to go to Mars, or anywhere else in space. Something like this might sound exciting and scientific at first, but 2 years after making a decision this stupid and reality will set in big time.

While sitting through this horrific two hours of tedious depression, I wondered why two bankable actors at the level of Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche would ever take on this movie after reading a script that is all over the place with backwards story telling and very limited dialogue.

Within the first 10 minutes of this mess, everybody already knows that space travel for many years would be a nightmare for anyone, due to the tedium, boredom and lack of contact with any level of a normal environment. Given that obvious fact, why drag on the story for two hours?

The premise here is that the entire crew are prisoners who committed violent crimes and some of them were on death row. This part makes some sense because showing where they are living and dying on this run down spaceship would be a just punishment for a capital crime.

I found this movie very long, depressing and boring and I cannot believe it was even made in the first place. This is one art house type movie that is all just that bad.

The new movie “Breakthrough” is one of those films that would never have a chance to be a good idea for a movie, unless it really happened. The story of a young 14 year old boy who fell through the ice near St. Louis Missouri in 2015 with his 2 friends and then survived after being dead for 45 minutes is nothing short of a miracle. This miracle is the reason this movie was made, with very religious undertones that in recent years appear in about 2 movies; all released around this time of year. As this type of religious movie goes, this was was one of the better I have seen since this new trend has started.

Breakthrough stars Chrissy Metz as Joyce Smith, the adopted mother of the boy who almost died. Metz has had a remarkable career resurgence in the last few years when she was hired for one of the starring roles in “This is Us”, arguably the best drama on television. Josh Lucas stars as the boy’s father and given Metz very obese status, the casting of Lucas did not seem to make much sense. Topher Grace plays the pastor of the local church and the conflicts between him and Joyce Smith were very well acted.

Most surprising was the fact that basketball player, Stephen Curry produced this movie, following Lebron James into movies and television production. I give a solid recommendation to Breakthrough for its acting and positive message.

The new movie “Pet Sematary” is a remake of the 1989 version and once again one of those “why was this average movie remade” mysteries? I thought this new version was very predictably disturbing and what I found annoying is, there were too many scenes where the characters would never do what they do in the story. This is about a family, where the father is a doctor and the family moves into a rundown barn-like house. Why would any doctor move into a dump like the one in this movie? In the road outside the house, there are huge tractor trailers that speed by. Any normal parents would never buy that house or at the very least, surround the house with a huge fence to protect their two children and pets. Once again, screenwriting is such a difficult art form because not only does the story have to be good, but it also has to make sense and people have to act logically or at least have half a brain.

The book “Pet Sematary” was written by the prolific author Steven King, and he wrote this book many years ago to be a scary story about the un-dead, but unfortunately this movie is much more disgusting and disturbing than scary and for that reason, I cannot recommend it.

This film stars Jason Clarke as the father, and John Lithgow as the neighbor and I was surprised to see Lithgow in this below average horror movie. Pet Sematary should be skipped by all in favor of seeing any other horror movie.