The new movie “The Teachers Lounge” is not for any young person on the fence about becoming a school teacher. The entire world knows that being a teacher is one of the most noble and important professions any person can aspire to. The world also knows that teachers are grossly underpaid and disrespected even though a good teacher can change lives and a great teacher can save lives. The Teachers Lounge is a foreign film from Germany with subtitles, but despite this I did not mind reading the dialogue.

The screenplay for this movie seems to hit all the important points about being an employee/teacher of a high school. Arguably a school teacher must endure all of the backstabbing and bad people that any typical employee has to live within any company. Schoolteachers, also have to deal with the same company politics, and injustice expected of an employee and additionally must also deal with difficult students, some who can be violent, bullying, and trying to help other students with learning disabilities.

The story of The Teachers Lounge starts with some students stealing, and then a member of the faculty is accused of stealing money from the wallet of teacher Carla Nowak, played very well by Leonie Benesch. What follows is an investigation and the forced temporary suspension of the teacher accused of stealing, Friederike Kuhn played by Eva Löbau. Kuhn’s son, who is a student at the school and in Nowak’s class, takes his mother’s suspension and accusations of stealing very hard. Worse is the young boy’s learning problems and bullying in the school from other students about his mother.

All of this human conflict is both written and performed extremely well, with an ultimate final resolution that nobody would ever expect for me was not strong enough given the quality of this story and was too abrupt.

Most interesting about this movie is the Rotten Tomatoes rating at an extremely high 97% from the critics with the moviegoing audience ranking this film a low 55%, with my rating about 80%. With a better ending, I would have ranked this film 90% due to the strong story and acting. However, I do recommend this movie.

The new movie “Madame Web” has achieved a new high as far as an idea, story, and screenplay that are so bad, there should be a documentary created just to try and figure out why garbage this horrendous was ever created and then greenlighted into a motion picture that costs millions of dollars to produce.

Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, in a role that could represent some level of complete career suicide. Anyone who would read this terrible screenplay, written by no less than 4 screenwriters and take this role anyway, has to wonder about either their decision-making ability or reading comprehension. There is no contiguous, or understandable story anywhere within this mess of two hours. This very bad movie just jumps from one scene to the next scene, without any rhyme or reason. 

The entire premise about a woman in 1973 bitten by a spider while pregnant giving her unborn child the ability to see a few minutes into the future – steals from Spiderman and the series of Final Destination movies – that were about cheating death and later death getting its revenge. Within the first 30 minutes, any viewer of this disaster no longer cares about what is going on or even why, and are all just waiting for this nightmare of bad movie-making to be over. The only reason to see this amazingly bad film is to be stunned at just how bad it all is.

This film also stars rising young actresses, Isabela Merced, Sydney Sweeney and Celeste O’Connor – in three roles that imply future female super-hero-spider movies that given this movie accident will never happen.

One of the best reviews I have seen so far about this amazingly bad film is from critic Kevin Maher: “In its sheer mind-boggling awfulness, it represents the death of the superhero genre, the burning of the superhero genre to the ground and then the returning in the middle of the night to piss on the superhero genre’s ashes.“

The IMDB rating for this mess is 3.8 and the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 13% is not low enough, with my rating a 0% because there is absolutely nothing worth seeing within these two hours. One of the worst movies I have ever seen. 

The new movie “Argylle” could be an example of a screenwriter, writing himself into a corner that did not work, and then the new movie “Argylle” could be an example of a screenwriter, writing himself into a corner that did not work, and then trying to create an insane ending and explanation to rescue the screenplay that mutated into ridiculous and illogical. There are reasons why screenwriting has always been considered the world’s most difficult art form.

The premise of this new film, starring Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway, who is a famous author of a series of related spy novels that happen to have way too much in common with real life. From this idea, there is a 2-hour film attempting to explain how something like this could ever happen, and unfortunately the whole premise never works. Most especially the ending, which is very poorly done and is both stupid and way too crazy.

This film stars Sam Rockwell as Aidan Wilde, who is a spy who tries to help Elly Conway. Other characters who are introduced as fantasies of Elly Conway (another idea that did not work) are Henry Cavill as Argylle and John Cena as Wyatt who appear mostly at the beginning of this film. There are some pretty decent CGI special effects throughout this film, but they that also include Elly’s GGI cat – which does not look that much like a real cat. Considering the action scenes that include the cat in this movie, the director correctly thought that it would be too dangerous to use a real cat – one of the few correct decisions in this movie.

Bryan Cranston as an CIA director and Catherine O’Hara, also appear in this movie, and their respective roles are another part of what is wrong with this entire story and ultimately their parts in this production also do not work.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Argylle are a correct and very low 35% mainly because this is not a good movie on any level. I agree with the low ratings and do not recommend this film. This one is a very big miss.