Tag Archives: Julia Roberts

Movie Review: After the Hunt

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Some months from now, some insomniac will be streaming the new movie “After the Hunt” and will be sound asleep within minutes, and then worry that the coma this movie puts you in might never end.

After the Hunt is entirely about PHD candidates and professors at Yale University in the year 2019. Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a professor of philosophy, who is married to Frederik Imhoff who is a psychiatrist played by Michael Stuhlbarg but is also having an affair with Hank, another philosophy professor who later in this story is accused of raping a PHD student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri).

Given that the main part of this story is a he-said-she-said conflict, amazingly, all these well-named successful actors agreed to act in this long and boring movie, but stunningly, this simple storyline dragged on for a nightmare 2 hours and 18 minutes. There are attempts at filler side stories, including Dr. Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny), who is friends with Alma Imhoff and is a student/faculty liaison at the university, but her presence in this film has almost no significance. The worst part of this bad movie is the too many scenes of chain smoking, once again, a decision the producer made to fund this movie, probably because the script was so bad, they could not get money anywhere else.

The merciful ending includes a scene with Alma, who is in the hospital for an ulcer condition, and provides a major revelation about an event in her childhood that tries to tie together with the story, which also mostly fails, along with this movie, which, despite some scenes of good acting, is a big miss.

The very low 38 and falling ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for this extremely long and boring movie are correct this time around. This one should be missed by everybody, except for the most die-hard insomniacs.

Netflix Movie Review: Leave the World Behind

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The new Netflix movie “Leave the World Behind” has several very impressive visual effects. At the start, there is a huge oil tanker slowly running aground while many people on the beach watch. This looked like they really commissioned a huge tanker and ran it into a beach for real – not computer-generated effects. There is another scene where there is a log jam of driverless Tesla cars all crashing into each other on a highway, due to some kind of ongoing electrical attack from a source that was never fully defined in this story. There is a scene where many deer outside of a log cabin seem to be insane. They are standing in front of a young woman who looks like she is in a trance, and does not move. This is one scene that did look like it was computer generated. This is one of those films where all of the loose ends are never fully resolved and I have never been a fan of a movie like this.

Leave the World Behind stars Julia Roberts as Amanda Sandford and Ethan Hawke as Clay Sandford who are a husband and wife with two children who decide to rent a house for a week. Very shortly after moving in, several strange things start happening, starting with electrical problems in the house, a big New York City blackout and then news of commercial airplanes dropping out of the sky. Very soon after moving in the owner of the house G. H. Scott played by Mahershala Ali and his daughter Ruth, played by Myha’la show up and want to move back into their house because of a blackout in New York City. Understandable conflicts arise from their request to move into the house, mostly between Amanda and G.H.’s very hostile daughter Ruth. Ruth’s rude hostility I thought was way too much considering the extreme circumstances.

Later in the story, Rose, the daughter of Amanda and Clay runs off and cannot be found. Considering the insane circumstances of imminent worldwide doom, this 10 year old girl running off on her own makes very little sense – as does the ending that involves this 10 year old girl and the final episode of the TV series “Friends”. The problem with this movie is that there are way too many loose ends that ruin what started out as an interesting idea for an end of the world story.

I do not understand why the Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this movie are as high as 75%, with my rating about 65% and a pass on this movie – mainly because of the weirdness throughout.

Movie Review: Ticket to Paradise

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With all the scripts that are written within any given year and with so many hard-working producers looking for the best screenplays, especially when it comes to coming up with a great movie idea that would pair George Clooney and Julia Roberts – it’s very hard to believe that “Ticket to Paradise” was the one chosen.

Fundamentally this entire idea about a young woman Lily, played by Kaitlyn Dever “traveling in Bali and is about to marry a young man who lives there”, is not strong enough to support a two-hour movie. Lily’s parents Georgia and David are divorced for many years and then plot (using subtle ideas) to try and sabotage her wedding. The reason for this is – they were married far too young and they want to stop their only child from making the same mistake.

These are a very boring 1 hour and 44 minutes of tedium, dead and dry dialogue, culminating in disbelief that a movie this lame was ever made. It was hard enough to stay awake during this film and even harder to understand why Roberts and Clooney were able to stay awake when they read this script.

The only real bright spot is the continuing emergence of actress Kaitlyn Dever, a rapidly rising new star, starting with her appearance for years on the “Last Man Standing” sitcom and most recently her outstanding performance in the Hulu series “Dopesick”, about the opioid crisis in this country – a great series reviewed within this website.

Unfortunately, this movie is so slow and boring it is impossible to recommend and I do agree with the Rotten Tomatoes critics who are giving this movie a mostly correct 56% rating.