The big story for the movie “The Lion King” is that the critics, despite the spectacular special effects and simple but solid story are only giving this high quality production a low rating of 55%.

The most impressive thing about this film is that the computer generated animation is the best I have ever seen, and all the animals look 100% real. The story is simple and is about jealousy, power, friendship and greed. I thought the story was told extremely well, despite what the critics have said. It is definitely not the best animated film ever made, but it is at least, very good. So much for the critics who are in this case, once again, very wrong. Considering the enormous amount of hard work that went into making this movie for several years, to receive low ratings, is probably the most unexpected review of a movie I have seen for quite some time.

The Lion King is a very good movie for kids and adults and I give it a solid 85% rating and do recommend it.

The movie “The Art of Self-Defense” starring Jessie Eisenberg is one of those films that tries extremely hard to be different than anything ever done before. Unfortunately, sometimes when a story tries too hard to be different, the result is illogical and in the case of this movie, too off the wall and weird. The strange story of this film, that involves a man who is mugged and almost killed, deciding to take Karate lessons, degrades into something that is not believable.

The story started out pretty well, showing the reasons why Casey, played by Eisenberg considers buying a gun after being mugged and almost killed by several motorcycle attackers and then changes his mind to wanting to learn Karate. From this point on, the story goes from run of the mill, to unexpected and then into a strange direction, that for me, did not make any sense. Its OK to be different and unusual but illogical and strange should not be what follows.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for The Art of Self-Defense is a high 83% but my rating is only 60% because of the strange story and ending. For those reasons, I do not recommend this movie.

The thinking in Hollywood California about the idea of pairing actor Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista was probably that they are such an unlikely pair and so different culturally that this would lead to a new buddy-cop-comedy team. Nanjiani was so funny in the movie “The Big Sick”, that he will be funny again in this movie. Unfortunately the movie The Big Sick had a great script and Nanjiani was funny, because the dialogue and situation was funny. This is not the case with Stuber. Everything starts with a great idea, then a great story and screenplay and there are never any shortcuts.

The story of Stuber starts out impressively with some very good action scenes that were very effective, but not believable given that two characters fall from heights of over two stories, which is supposed to kill any human being. The Karate expert Iko Uwais is in these scenes, and he is arguably one of the best movie Karate experts of all time. Once the movie is past the opening scenes, what follows are some boring chases and a story-line involving corrupt police officers that we have all seen thousands of times before. Some attempts at comedy with Uber driver Stu, played by Nanjiani and a police officer Vic, played by Bautista mostly all falls very flat. The actress Mira Sorvino also appears in this film in a small role and it was nice to see her in a movie again, but its too bad that her white hot career of some 15 years ago is at least for right now, a distant memory. The comedy movie test that I always use also failed, because there were almost no laughs during the almost 2 hours of this film.

I agree with the low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for Stuber that are a low 46% and I do not recommend this movie.