In the history of movies, one could easily argue that the best ending for any film ever made was “The Sixth Sense”, released in 1999. The Sixth Sense was both written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and this one movie that he created 20 years ago has been both a curse and a blessing for his career. Its a blessing because of the greatness of the storytelling and screenwriting and a curse because The Sixth Sense was so well made that following it for Shyamalan has been close to impossible. In fact Shyamalan after hitting such a huge home run in 1999 has made some bad movies over the years, in an ongoing attempt to reach the heights of the Sixth Sense. Shyamalan has never been able to make a movie as great as The Sixth Sense, but in my opinion, in terms of a great story and incredible ending, “Unbreakable” released in 2000 was close. Despite all of this, you cannot help but be extremely impressed with Shyamalan’s dedication to both screenwriting and directing his own movies considering all the trial and error, failed ideas, failed scripts and hard work it takes to create any movie. Shyamalan even mortgaged his entire house to make one movie several years ago and could have lost everything if the movie failed. Making movies is a gamble for everybody involved and then add the critics who can be both cruel and extremely wrong a great deal of the time.

The new movie “Glass” is Shyamalan’s attempt to bring Unbreakable and the good movie Split, released in 2016 together in a final trilogy, that according to Shyamalan he planned from the beginning. Unfortunately, Glass is a bad movie, with an ending that was muddled and made very little logical sense. Perhaps Shyamalan was trying too hard to end the trilogy with a huge ending and following two good movies and wanted a surprise ending that based on the crazy story idea was just not feasible. This story unites the star of Split played extremely well by James McAvoy – who is great at split personality acting, and the two actors of Unbreakable, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis inside of an insane asylum.

Their doctor is played by Sarah Paulson who tries to convince all of them that they are not super hero’s although it seems that Bruce Willis character has no business being considered the same as the other two, who are clearly insane. There are several scenes with Anya Taylor-Joy who was one of the victims in the movie Split, where she is in close contact in front hospital personal with the dangerously insane character played by McAvoy, even hugging and holding hands with him. What was Shyamalan thinking there, big mistake in my opinion because no young woman would go anywhere near this guy. She could have been killed instantly and this is just one of many things that make no sense in this film.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is a pretty low 35% and I agree with this rating, because Glass misses the mark in so many areas – starting with any of it make enough sense to recommend.

The problem with all science fiction movies like “Replicas” is that you have to forgo any level of common sense to buy into the plot. For instance, there is technology that might be doable 500 or 1000 years from now, but people are driving around in cars that are from today. There is software and AI with a user interface that uses holograms – extremely far fetched and unnecessary for this story. At first the idea is to transfer the contents of a human brain from someone who has just died into a the computer brain of a robot, only to change all of this later in the movie to transfer the contents of one human brain into another human brain – a completely new and much higher level of technology. This idea seemed like it came out of the 30th re-write when they realized that having robots that were the cloned children and wife of the scientist Will Foster, played by Keanu Reeves would not make any sense. For the sake of the audience, you cannot change the technology of a science fiction movie on the fly to make up for mistakes in the screenplay. There is a level of far-fetched for this film that gets idiotic very quickly and it has happened many times before with other movies like this one. Like most Hollywood Science fiction movies, Replicas degrades into a formulaic series of chase scenes and an ending that was even more outlandish than the rest of the story.

The actress Alice Eve plays Keanu Reeves wife and I thought that the acting was overall good in this movie. The car accident that caused the death of Will Foster’s entire family was rather intense and hard to watch and you cannot help to think how anyone would survive losing their entire family in a car accident.

It is no surprise that this movie has a very low 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the reasons are all the same – its just too ridiculous and does not make enough sense to be a viable and intelligent science fiction movie. For these reasons I cannot recommend Replicas.

Someday, someone will do a study on how many dogs or cats are rescued from shelters or adopted after a movie like “A Dog’s Way Home” comes out. Over the years we have all heard about dogs that have gone through a miracle journey of hundreds or even thousands of miles to find their way back to their owner. Despite this, this story is not a true one and I thought that a better movie could have been made with a true story. This is a good movie about a Dog who gets separated from its owner and finds its way home and along the way goes through several hellish and depressing experiences. The worst part of this journey was when he wound up with a homeless man played by the actor Edward James Olmos – a part I would have left out of this movie. The dog also befriends a mountain lion and I thought that a flaw in this movie was the poorly rendered CGI for the mountain lion that looked very fake.

Several good things stand out about this film, starting with the incredible loyalty of dogs, who will go through anything to be with their owners. Where this level of loyalty and love comes from with mans best friend is one of the best things about owning a dog. As with most movies about pets, the downside of shelters and the realities of laws about controlling animal population comes up. The law in this movie is that Pit Bulls are outlawed in the Denver Colorado area, the reasons for this rather obvious due to the extremely severe damage a dog like this can cause with the strength of its bite.

This movie stars the actress Ashley Judd, who for several years after her extremely hot career in the 1990’s has been making movies like this one, forgoing a return to the big movie star status she had about 15 years ago. This movie is not for the younger children as some of the scenes would probably be too intense, but for any child over 13 I would say its an acceptable family movie.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie is only 60%, I would give this an average 70% rating due to some of the flaws, but overally I do recommend A Dog’s Way Home.