In REBIRTH (2016), Kyle (Fran Kranz) lives a life of routine as a white-collar suburban husband and father holding down a meaningless bank job. When he’s visited by his freewheeling college pal Zack (Adam Goldberg), he is invited to let loose for a weekend at REBIRTH, a self-discovery weekend.

Kyle is immediately singled out as not belonging. When he tries to leave, every door he opens leads to new rooms involving seduction, violence and/or being singled out. By the end, Kyle realizes Rebirth does want him to fit in. In fact, it wants to own his life.

This movie has some good execution, excellent acting, terrific premise and plenty of promise. There’s an interesting message here that we’re all yearning for something to help us become free, but even if we find that something, it winds up controlling us. Despite its promise, however, REBIRTH fell flat for me. In some ways, it feels like a bad remake of THE GAME (starring Michael Douglas), while the Rebirthers are presented as part free-spirited anarchists straight from FIGHT CLUB (with Zack playing Tyler Durden), and part ominous cult.

I could have loved this movie if the experiences Kyle had in the Rebirth rooms were in fact cathartic and meaningful, were in fact a rebirth of sorts. That he learned something about himself and became willing to change, perhaps thinking it was for the better but actually for the worse. In fact, that could have been an amazing movie. Instead, it’s just one poorly staged ritual of humiliation or attempted seduction, pointless in the end.

In the end, the film raises interesting questions and could have been truly mind bending, the way it’s being described in some reviews, but for me widely missed its potential.



Wow. LOGAN is a great superhero movie, a great movie period. It’s the year 2029, and the X-Men are all gone except for Charles Xavier (their founder and mentor), Caliban and Logan (Wolverine). They live off the grid in a remote site on the Mexican border, saving their money for a final escape from the civilized world. No new mutants have been born in 25 years. A woman finds them who claims her daughter Laura is a mutant who needs their protection. A road trip ensues in which Logan must get the girl to a safe haven before the violent authorities who created her catch them.

This dark film breaks so many conventions I can’t believe anybody had the stones to actually make it. It elevates the superhero genre into something that far transcends its roots, something approaching literature, and in my view is one of the best superhero films of all time, if not the best.

LOGAN is R-rated, bloody violent and filled with cursing. The action scenes are amazing. Wolverine is finally unleashed to use his claws with gory abandon. No costumed figures throwing CGI effects at each other while exchanging witty quips. No character deaths that evoke yawns. LOGAN delivers great action but has a leisurely pace and focuses on character, making me care when somebody tries to win, when somebody gets hurt, when somebody dies. It’s a movie about people with superheroes, not the other way around, and that makes it a film you can invest in. There are numerous instances where something realistic or surprising happens, keeping you engaged.

LOGAN is not a happy movie, it’s filled with pathos. The X-Men reference a glorious past that is now gone, with the survivors suffering in old age. Charles Xavier has Alzheimers, which causes him to periodically lose control of his powerful psionic abilities. Logan’s metallic skeleton is slowly killing him, degrading his self-healing abilities and making him age. He drinks to self-medicate against the pain and also the memories of his troubled past. They’re still alive, but they’re hardly living, broken down and weary. They reference their past, but these are powerful moments, never cutesy or winking at the viewer. (The viewer can enjoy the film while having only a basic knowledge of the X-Men franchise.) When they are given the task of saving Laura, they get to experience life to the fullest again and once again use their abilities to achieve a higher purpose.

Speaking of cutesy, the film also includes kids, normally a no-go for me. I have kids, I love kids, but they often ruin adult movies–Terminator 2, Aliens, Indiana Jones 2. Not in LOGAN. Laura is a fantastic character, a mini Wolverine, moody and savage. The actress who plays Laura, Dafne Keen, is amazing. She and the rest of the excellent cast led by Hugh Jackman, the terrific script, the gritty realism, the exciting action, all combine to create a movie that made me care and wowed me.

Highly recommended.



EVOLUTION (2016) is a French film about Nicholas, a boy growing up in a seaside community consisting solely of boys his age and their mothers. Immediately, we know something is off about this place. The rundown, bare appearance of everything. The strange food the mothers make entirely from what they find in the sea. The medicine his mother gives him each night.

Slowly, we learn more about Nicholas’s world as he does. That nothing is as it seems. That he remembers living in another place. Then his mother puts him in the hospital with the other boys, where the nurses claim they’re treating them for an illness.

This is a tough film to write a review about without spoilers. It’s a highly intriguing film. The beautiful cinematography, the strange women, the sense of isolation the boys feel even from each other. There is little dialogue, with the plot moving forward in some places largely by implication and viewer inference than by anything being spelled out. The viewer pieces it together with something like triumph as the mystery becomes revealed.

But not the entire story, and that’s where things felt a little hollow for me. The story of the women and the boys is revealed in glimpses until largely bared, but much is left unexplained. And Nicholas’s taciturn view of everything, and unwillingness to ask even simple questions about what’s going on, is occasionally frustrating.

Overall, EVOLUTION is an interesting and intriguing film that I enjoyed, but for me it could have been a little more rounded out, and the protagonist could have engaged his environment in a much less stoic way.