Taking a toddler to the movie theater is always a bit of a gamble. You buy the tickets, pay the extortionate popcorn tax, and cross your fingers that the sensory spectacle will buy you roughly ninety minutes of uninterrupted peace.
On September 5, we rolled the dice on Tom and Jerry: The Forbidden Compass. We didn’t make it to the credits.
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Journey rolled into Philadelphia last night on their Final Frontier farewell tour. While my cousin and his family were packed inside the arena soaking in the stadium anthems, I decided to sit this one out. Instead, I revisited one of my all-time favorite concert films: Journey 2001.
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Yesterday afternoon, I walked into the AMC to catch Clayface in Dolby Cinema, hoping for a decent comic-book-adjacent thriller. What I got instead completely shattered every expectation I had going in.
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Every once in a while, a movie comes along that feels like a minor miracle simply because it exists—and Coyote vs. Acme is that miracle wrapped in an Acme-brand stick of dynamite.
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I have a small confession to make: until late August, I had never actually watched the original The Fast and the Furious from beginning to end.
Sure, I knew the mythology. I’ve caught twenty-minute chunks on cable on lazy Sunday afternoons, I know all the “family” memes, and I know that Dom Toretto lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. But somehow, across two and a half decades, I just never sat down in the dark and let the whole story play out.
So when our local theater announced a 25th-anniversary re-release, I figured it was finally time to fix that blind spot. I grabbed a ticket for a late-August evening showing, expecting maybe a dozen nostalgic millennials scattered across empty rows.
Instead, the place was completely sold out.
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On August 21, I walked into my local AMC theater not entirely sure what to expect, but I walked out completely mesmerized. I finally saw Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and let me tell you right out of the gate: I absolutely adored it.
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Opening night at the Walnut Street Theatre was an absolute thrill, kicking off their 218th season in true, spooktacular fashion. I have never been disappointed by a Walnut Street Theatre production, and their run of The Addams Family: The Musical triumphantly continues that streak.
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When a horror franchise reaches its sixth installment, expectations naturally shift. You generally aren’t expecting a reinvention of the wheel; you’re hoping for an effective spooky ride that respects the mythology and delivers a few memorable jolts. That was precisely my mindset heading into Insidious: Out of the Further.
The verdict? It was an enjoyable enough movie that didn’t blow my mind, but was merely satisfactory.
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If you know me, you know my complicated, obsessive love affair with the SAW franchise. I’ve seen every single movie multiple times. I rewatch them, analyze them, and unabashedly adore them—even though they remain the only horror movies on the planet that genuinely make me want to cover my eyes because of how stomach-churningly grotesque some of the traps and deaths are (a fact I reflected on when revisiting the original film).
Naturally, when I heard about SAW The Musical: The Unauthorized Parody of Saw at the Walnut Street Theatre, I had to go. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was to walk out of the theater with a gigantic smile on my face, covered in stage blood, and completely blown away by this incredible show.
It is, without exaggeration, one of the best musicals I have ever seen.
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I walked into the AMC on August 18 with genuinely low expectations.
If you’ve seen the marketing for The End of Oak Street, you probably know why. The trailers made the whole setup look downright goofy—almost like a bargain-bin Jurassic Park knockoff trading on nostalgia and cheap creature tropes. I fully expected to spend two hours chuckling at cheesy dialogue, predictable set pieces, and an overworked CGI budget.
Instead, I walked out completely surprised. It’s actually a really good movie.
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