The plot is unremittingly predictable. After being made by 9-year-old Sophie (Chloe Coleman), CIA operative JJ (Dave Bautista) is blackmailed into becoming her magic genie of sorts. When she’s not manipulating his hulkiness to her advantage, Sophie, a mini-reconnaissance expert in her own right, spends much of the running time …
When his ex-boss offers a chance to make “some real money,” fast-talking commodities broker Rory (Jude Law) thinks for about a second — America isn’t working out for him — before telling wife Allison (Carrie Coon) and their kids Samantha (Oona Roche) and Ben (Charlie Shotwell) that it’s time to …
It’s the kind of high end suburban subdivision where if you came home drunk, the cookie-cutter design having you turning a dozen doorknobs before finding home. But who is this mystery man traipsing through this community of unity at all hours with a collapsible bed in tow? A prostitute offering …
The year is 1870. Civil War veteran Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) is a news-reader, a nascent member of the broadcast news media, traveling from town to town with a stack of newspapers in his valise, looking to keep American abreast of current events at a dime a head. …
Harvard grad Lucy Neal (Lucy Hale) lives in a beautiful home willed to her by her grandmother, which may explain how she can make a living as a member of a classical music quartet that performs at swanky weddings. Shocked to discover that her boyfriend of four years (Stephen Friedrich) …
Who ordered the Shining-lite? Riding home after an evening of party games with friends set their marital skiff reeling towards the rocks, wife Neda (Niousha Jafarian) insists that for the sake of their infant daughter sleeping in the back seat, her just-drunk-enough-not-to-drive husband Babak (Shahab Hosseini) find a nearby hotel. …
The notion of people eavesdropping on others via television was first planted in my nascent noodle by George Burns, who would inexplicably tune his bedroom set to the living room so he could spy on Gracie Allen’s antics. In Edson Oda’s low tech depiction of limbo, Will (Winston Duke) sits …
In flashback, young Christina looks on at an exorcism being performed on her mother. Years later, American citizen Christina’s (Brigitte Kali Canales) career as a crusading newshawk lands her in Veracruz to investigate numerous reports of hocus-pocus-dominocus. It’s here in her hometown that she is kidnapped and held hostage by …
The poster art for On the Rocks bears more than a passing resemblance to a moment from Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray’s hit from yesteryear, Lost in Translation. Surely they weren’t trying for a repeat May/December romance this time between Murray and Rashida Jones? Initial relief (the two play father …
Two teenage elf brothers are magically granted the opportunity to spend 24 hours with the dead father they barely knew. How do you blow a premise like this, right?
A magical staff that once belonged to the deceased father they never knew is left in the care of geeky elf Ian’s bothersome older brother Barley. But it comes with instructions that it be given to the younger brother on the occasion of his 16th birthday, and what’s more, it …