A disillusioned psychiatrist travels the world looking to unravel the mystery behind true happiness in Hector and the Search for Happiness. Day after mundane day, Hector (Simon Pegg) doles out fairly useless advice to his cadre of miserable psychiatric patients with no sense of ever bringing them any real escape from their problems. The stress […]

A nefarious villain plans to gain entry into elite society by exterminating the creatures dwelling underground in the town in The Boxtrolls. The town of Cheesebridge lives in fear of flesh-eating monsters called Boxtrolls who, as their name suggests, wear discarded boxes over their ghastly figures to more easily hide among the town’s refuse. Each night, […]

A loud, crude, obnoxious woman heads on a road trip with her ballsy, whisky-loving grandmother in Tammy. Tammy (Melissa McCarthy) is a brash, overweight, overbearing, loser. Her demeanor costs her both her job and her husband in a single day. With nowhere else to turn, she heads to her mother’s house, but Mom (Allison Janney) has […]

I was 14 years old in the summer of 1981 following my freshman year in high school. I had started to discover who I am and had already established my interest in computers and programming courtesy of the terminals we used to connect to a university’s mainframe computer via a telephone line. I went to […]

A struggling 14 year-old finds solace and support at a local water park in the coming-of-age film The Way, Way Back. In the 1979 film Meatballs, Bill Murray‘s character (a camp counselor) says to a new arrival, “You must be the short depressed kid we ordered.” That film was another coming-of-age story involving another disconnected […]

For several weeks (months?) I’ve been acutely aware of the new Hitchcock film starring Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock. Anyone who’s seen a movie lately will know why it’s so easily brought to mind. Hopkins, in full character, has been greeting movie-goers to a funny parody asking people not to text during the movie as […]