Reviews

This is a film about a 13-year-old girl who has been watching the TV series "Friends," but just before she watched the series finale, a cyber-attack war begins and her internet is knocked out. Fortunately for her, she is staying in a luxury vacation rental that has electricity. The girl, her big brother, their parents, spend the rest of the film wandering around aimlessly with the man who owns the vacation house and his daughter. The mood is like one of M. Night Shyamalan's bad movies (not "Sixth Sense). It can't decide whether it's a war movie about an attack on our tech infrastructure or a supernatural movie. It's too boring. The dialogue is unrealistic and Julia Roberts struggles with it because it's so awkward. Kevin Bacon is good, but he only speaks in one scene. The whole thing seems like a giant missed opportunity for what could have been a good story.

I'm a cat lover. I really wanted to like this, but it was horrible. The main problem is that children's animated films should be comedies, and this one was written like a drama. If the writers were trying to be funny, they failed miserably. I would not show this movie to any child. The mood is creepy and somber. Most of the film looks depressing. The characters are all too serious. Some of the scenes are too scary for children. There was one which had the kitten in danger of drowning and another which showed the kitten trapped in a plastic trash bag and loaded into a fiery incinerator. - I found these very disturbing to watch, even though I'm an adult who understands the formula and knew the kitten would be fine. The story is bad. The kitten longs to find "peachtopia," which has nothing to do with peaches when they find it, although we do see some tomatoes or cherries. No idea why cats would even care about that.

The title is "Cats," but too much time is spent on animals that aren't cats. There's a macaw, a gibbon, raccoons, deer, goat, etc. There should have been lots of moments of cat behavior that cat lovers could relate to and chuckle at.

This film has no charm at all. It should never have been made.

This movie was free, so I didn't bother reading any reviews before watching. I almost gave up on it because the two main characters were arguing for a long time and the story didn't move forward. But I decided to fast forward a bit. The characters were still arguing, still saying the same things over and over. I fast forwarded again, no change. When I stopped after my third fast forward, there was a plot again and it was enough to keep me watching until the end. A big chunk of this film should have been edited out. I can't help but wonder if the filmmakers found themselves with a script that was too long to be a short and too short to be a feature, so the actors were allowed to improvise a lot just to make it the required length.

Since it was obviously a very low budget film, my expectations weren't high and I was forgiving once the story moved forward. I don't think the actors were bad; the two leads were cute together, and the male lead did a nice job of playing that guy who has such a massive crush on a girl that he'll do anything for her.

The big problem here is that for the main characters to save the child, the police need to be ineffectual to a point that's hard to believe. The cops are no-shows after getting a call from people who spot the car on the freeway; so what was the point in putting out an amber alert in the first place? Later, they even "call off" the amber alert, and we never find out why.

"You People" gave me a slight chuckle here and there, but much of it fell flat. There were a bunch a weirdly unrealistic moments that I think were supposed to make me laugh, but instead had me shaking my head and saying, "That makes no sense." The girl has a navigator and yet she needs a guy to help her because she's lost. The guy quits his job in finance (that allows him to have Gucci everything,) so he can try to turn his podcast into a career, and he buys a new house right away, before he knows if the career change will be successful. The guy is rich enough to own status objects, but he buys his fiancée an engagement ring with a tiny diamond. He tries to make up for the cheap ring by lying to her and telling her it was a Holocaust era heirloom, yet he gives it to her in a brand new Tiffany's box. He is supposed to be in love with her, but he lies to her. The parents plan a wedding for their kids, although they are broken up.

I feel like this only got a green light because it checked formula boxes and race-obsession boxes.

Maybe a wacky rom com is just the wrong genre for this topic, because it felt very shallow and there was potential for heartfelt moments. There were stereotypes everywhere, but neither of the lovers learns to adopt the other's culture in a meaningful way.

This film is 14 years old; I had never heard of it before; I just came across it while scrolling through documentaries on Amazon Prime.

I grew up on Staten Island in the 1970's, and lived in the Willowbrook area. I don't remember the urban legend of "Cropsey," but perhaps my brother would, since he was a Boy Scout and went to Camp Pouch, which is mentioned in the movie. I think they also mentioned the JCC camp, which I attended. We spent a lot of time in the woods when I was growing up on Staten Island. The JCC camp had a swimming pool and bathrooms, but we spent most of the day in the forest where we made our own camp site with a fire pit and rocks to sit on. There were patches of Greenbelt here and there that I explored with my friends. I didn't know about the old Sea View tuberculosis hospital until I took a walk in the woods as a teenager in the 1980's and came across it. I went inside and found a ledger book with browning paper. It had information about the patients and it was decades old. I wanted to take the book home with me, since it was a historic record, but it was too big and heavy to walk around with. I had a long walk home.

I was about 4 when Geraldo Rivera broke the story about the terrible conditions in the Willowbrook hospital. I remember hearing grownups referring to it and I remember kids insulting other kids by saying, "You belong in Willowbrook." Calling someone "retarded" was a common insult back then. I remember that in the 1970's, people began using the euphemism "slow" because there was a stigma to "retarded." I never set foot on the grounds of the old Willowbrook hospital.

I have fond memories of playing in Willowbrook Park, but I remember my friends saying you should never go there at night, because people were practicing devil worship there at night, and killings were part of it. My 6th grade teacher from I. S. 72 told our class that he had taken another class on a field trip and one child refused to go inside a church they were visiting, because of her religion. The teacher assumed the kid was Jewish and said that you don't have to believe Jesus is the messiah to walk into the church. The girl responded with, "You don't understand; I'm a devil worshipper." I remember how startled my teacher seemed, as he told us this story.

In retrospect, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were satanic cults on Staten Island. Many practicing Catholics lived on the island; I even remember walking past a convent and seeing nuns in habits on my way to school. I can imagine some disaffected Catholics rebelling against their upbringing and participating in satanic rituals, because they were taught it was evil and they wanted to be bad. However, despite the prevalent rumors, I don't remember any actual proof being presented anywhere.

What I remember most clearly was when Holly Ann Hughes went missing, because my mother was friends with someone in Holly's family, her aunt, I think. I remember my mother had a stack of the Missing Person fliers with Holly's picture on them, and bumper stickers that said, "Please find Holly Ann." I remember reading a story about the search for Holly in the Staten Island Advance, and it said that the police had used psychics, who came up with some vague words like "woods." When I read that, my first thought was that Holly was somewhere in Camp Pouch, and my mother let me call the police to ask if they had searched there. (They must have, and I don't know why my mother let me bother the cops when I had no information and just a guess.)

I moved away from Staten Island, and my mother lost touch with Holly's family. I was surprised to find out about the trial this film circles around. I hope Holly's body will be recovered someday and her family will have some peace.

So now that you read all of my little memories, what is my critique of the film? Obviously, it provoked a lot for me personally, as I know the locations discussed, down to being familiar with street names, like Forest Avenue. I think the filmmakers did a good job editing; the way information is revealed, building up to possible motives for the crime, kept the film interesting and well-paced. They captured the spookiness of Staten Island's abandoned buildings.

Although I don't remember the "Cropsey" myth, I do remember some other big rumors flying around in the 1970's. New York kids nearly put the Bubble Yum chewing gum company out of business with a rumor that the gum contained spider eggs. (Google it.) We played spooky games at slumber parties about an apparition that was supposed to appear at midnight, but never did. I guess believing rumors and urban legends were part of our culture; maybe Staten Islanders were a superstitious bunch back then. And some of the boogeymen were certainly real; I remember everyone being freaked out about the Son of Sam.

An important topic like this deserved a better film. A lot of these reviews bashed the actors. The acting wasn't stellar, but there was a lot wrong with this film that made the actors look bad. The dialogue was poorly written and came off unnatural. The characters were bland. There are scenes that last forever and do nothing to move the story forward. There are strange situations, like a cop questioning one teen character in his high school hallway after others were questioned at the police station.

There's a group of worried parents who decide they have to do something to find Amber after she is kidnapped, but all they do is pray. Likewise, after her rescue, Amber becomes an activist, and makes a speech saying "We have to do more than talk!" Yet all she does is talk. There's a lot of babble about "raising awareness" but no practical advice for preventing this crime.

The sound quality was poor. I heard a slight echo in some scenes. The score was nonexistent.

The editing was bad. There were some scenes that went nowhere and could have been cut.

The story of the two other trafficking victims who Amber encounters is not wrapped up well.

I was a Whitney fan, although not a fanatical one. I heard all my favorite songs in this film, which is why I went to see it, but some were incomplete, so I wish this would have been done like a Broadway musical, with the songs sung completely from start to finish, with choreography and dancing. It's called "I Want To Dance With Somebody," and Whitney had lots of songs that I remember dancing to. I wish the film would have recreated the party atmosphere Whitney Houston created for her fans. The ballads were mostly done well; some nearly brought me to tears. But "Saving All My Love For You" was not sung in its entirety, which was disappointing. My personal favorite, "The Greatest Love of All, " was sung early in this film as an audition piece for Whitney before she was famous, so this powerful song completely lacked context. I wish it would have been performed when Whitney was trying to beat her drug addiction, when she was a mother, a wife in a volatile marriage, and when she was facing a declining career, bad press, and family who spent huge chunks of her hard earned money. That would have given contextual power to the lyric, "No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity." Her death was not dramatized, and was dealt with in a vague way. That was a let down, I wanted more detail about what happened to her.

This film was written by the writer of "Bohemian Rhapsody," and they tried to structure it the same way as "Bohemian Rhapsody," ending with a most memorable performance. I never saw the award show that served as the climax of this film, so it was missing the nostalgia factor for me, and the songs she sang at that performance were not my favorites, so the climax was a let down for me, but it may be on point for other Whitney fans. I felt it didn't "capture the magic" as well as the Live Aid scenes in "Bohemian Rhapsody." I never saw "Live Aid," but I left the theater telling my husband that I wanted to see "Bohemian Rhapsody" again, because that final concert scene was so phenomenal. As amazing as Whitney's voice was, this film did not leave me wanting to see it again.

It seems like the topic of race has to be inserted into every film now, and that is annoying. The 1980's and 1990's were great because people weren't obsessed with race like they are now, and music united us all. It was mentioned several times in this movie that Whitney was the first "white-friendly" black performer. This was kind of insulting to whites, and it was also just weird, considering that the movie acknowledges that Michael and Janet Jackson were stars at the same time as Whitney. Michael Jackson had tons of white fans long before Whitney came on the scene. What about Donna Summer and Diana Ross? Lena Horne had the hit "Stormy Weather" which she performed in a musical in 1942, fifty years before Whitney Houston acted in "The Bodyguard" and made "I Will Always Love You" a hit.

I loved the actress who played Whitney, she was very charming and conveyed the power Whitney put into her music.

I'm not a Jane Austen fan, and I hadn't read the book. I didn't even know that this was supposed to be an adaptation when I started watching it. I just chose the movie because I thought a historical romance would be fun to watch.

The sets and locations were beautiful, but there isn't much to compliment other than that.

The first distraction was in the beginning when Lady Russell appeared and spoke with Anne. The whole thing seemed odd and I realized that I was watching a black actress play a role that was written for a white character. It just didn't work, and the confused casting just kept coming and coming. There are interracial marriages in my own family, and even though I'm used to seeing this in real-life, I was very confused when watching this film. It was hard to keep track of the relationships, of who was related to whom. I kept expecting some explanation for how all of these black and mulatto people became wealthy, titled Englishmen in the 1800's, which was historically inaccurate, but no explanation was offered. And just when you think it can't get any worse, a new love interest is introduced and he's Asian, and he appears to be related to the white leading lady somehow, and is also supposed to be related to a couple of elderly white women. Then suddenly a bunch of Asian extras appear out of nowhere, and I'm wondering if they are new characters that will have some kind of relationship to the Asian guy, but that never happens.

It is incredibly distracting to miscast actors in a way that is historically inaccurate. If this had been a "Clueless" style retelling set in the present, it may have worked, but what I watched was too much of a mish-mash.

OK, we get it. Everyone can fall in love with whomever they want and there's nothing wrong with dating someone of another race if you're attracted to each other. But I'm tired of filmmakers forcing interracial romances into every film, TV show and commercial just because. It's not creative or edgy; it's overdone and tiresome. In a historic drama, it's ridiculous and it makes your film look like a community theater production that couldn't get enough people to audition. And it's not as "reflective of real life" as these filmmakers think. They rarely show the most common types of interracial couples: white men married to Latina or Asian women. I would have been interested to watch a well-researched period piece about one of those rare mixed marriages from a couple of hundred years ago, but there's no need to stick this concept into an adaptation of a book that was not about that topic.

The casting diminished the film in other ways. The romantic leads didn't seem right for each other and there was no electricity on screen when they were together. I didn't want Anne to end up with Wentworth, and found it annoying that she was pining for him. I wanted Wentworth to get together with a character who I think was supposed to be Anne's niece, the incredibly stupid character who jumps from a great height and nearly kills herself.

I never saw anyone in this story who would be a good match for Anne. So, given that the genre is romance, the film fell flatter than the stupid girl who jumped. The audience has to enjoy watching the two leads fall in love or it doesn't work.

Cosmo Jarvis always looked askew and cross-eyed, so either the director failed by filming him in an unflattering way or perhaps he's best as a character actor.

Mia McKenna Bruce was pretty, but she mumbled every line and I couldn't understand what she was saying most of the time. Turning the volume up didn't help.

The whole movie had a monotone quality; it felt like every actor was speaking in the same way.

Lastly, Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow did a terrible job with their screenplay, including many modern words (i.e "playlist") in the dialogue that took us out of the time period.

One of the people I watched this with fell asleep, another got bored and wandered off. I watched to the end and I regret it.

Unlike the other person who wrote a review, I actually watched the entire film. I was looking for something patriotic to watch while I was home with a cold on July 4th. I knew from the trailer that it would be a sappy movie, but since I lean conservative, I thought it would be refreshing to see a movie that was obviously from a conservative point of view. I also like time travel stories.

Unfortunately, the film was no fun. It felt too preachy and contrived, and was not as whimsical as I was expecting. Too much time was spent in dead-serious soapbox mode, and not enough time was spent in comedic mode. This film won't convince any leftists to change their thinking. I'm the choir the movie is preaching to, and even I didn't find it convincing.

The main character was told at one point that she needed to translate the Constitution to a simple message for young adults. This set up a goal for her, but we never see how she accomplishes the goal. We are only told that she went on a bus tour (yawn) that was very successful. Screenwriting 101: Show, don't tell.

Her big speech at the end was not climactic; it was a bore.

I'm sure the filmmakers had good intentions, but it takes more than that to tell a good story and be entertaining. This film missed the mark. I gave it three stars because the concept of a music-based time machine invented by Benjamin Franklin is original. Unfortunately, the whole movie was not a good as that one idea.

I read "Call of the Wild" in elementary school and saw this for the nostalgia. It was a very cute film and I enjoyed the comedic tone of the film. I may have even liked this film better than the book. It's perfect for a rainy day with the kids. Harrison Ford seemed very at home as John Thornton.

I was disappointed with a fault in the storytelling. Buck has a rivalry with the lead sled dog, a Siberian Husky, an alpha dog that chases rabbits to kill them, while Buck just chases rabbits for fun, then let's them go. There is a climactic fight between Buck and the lead dog, as the vie for alpha dog status. Buck wins the fight, but it is not shown that he kills the Husky, he just gets the better of him in the fight. In the next scene, the Husky dog is mysteriously gone, although we never saw him die, run from Buck in fear, slink away in shame or get chased away. He is gone with no explanation, and the two humans who own the sled dog team- a team they depend on for their livelihood- never once ask where the missing dog is, or attempt to search for him. I feel that whole in the story was unforgivable; it's the kind of thing that keeps a family film from becoming a "classic."

And WHEN will these people in Hollywood stop thinking that they are geniuses for throwing a bunch of black actors into period films, in roles that are extremely unlikely for blacks? Omar Sy is a fine actor, and he had his charms as Perrault, but he looked hopelessly out of place in 1890's Alaska, as did all of the black extras. I don't want to hear any excuses about "representation." Some of us movie-goers appreciate authenticity in period films, even whimsical ones with dogs who show human emotion. I looked up the State of Alaska's population statistics from 1890, and guess what? There were so few black people there that there was no "Black" category; they would have been counted as "other," if they were there at all, and we don't know if they were. Native Americans (listed as "Indians") were the overwhelming majority in Alaska; whites were the largest minority group, followed by "Mongolians" (Asians), and "Mixed." If any group was "underrepresented" in this film, it was Native Americans. The Native American woman who ran the sled dog team was a Kim Kadashian version of an Alaskan native. She spoke like a modern Californian, not someone whose first language was an indigenous one. There was certainly a missed opportunity here for giving us a glimpse of native Alaskan culture. Instead, all we got was over-representation of black people. Omar Sy would have been better cast if the film had taken place in 1890's New Orleans. There's nothing wrong with having a white actor play a French Canadian, especially in a story that takes place during the Gold Rush. I wish the casting directors and producers would grow some balls and start casting properly. The folks who did extra casting for this film failed to do their homework as well.

I was excited to see this movie. I'm white & some of my closest relatives are Chinese and Eurasian, so I loved the idea of an Asian cast. But the very first scene made my heart drop. (Spoiler alert) The film opens with a wealthy Singapore family checking into their London hotel room in 1995, and being turned away because they're Asian. I just didn't find this plausible at all. Heck, Asians were able to stay at fine hotels in Berlin when they traveled to see the Olympics in 1936. If the Nazis weren't turning them away in the 30's, I find it hard to believe that the Brits were turning them away in the 90's! The scene seemed like nothing more than a gratuitous dig at whites, yet *another* Hollywood film putting out the message that whites are racist. I wanted to give the screenwriter the benefit of the doubt. I thought, maybe this scene is a set-up and something about this hotel in London will be important later in the film, but the hotel was never mentioned again. It's entirely possible to make a film that celebrates Eastern culture without taking a potshot at Western culture in Scene 1. The film starts out accusing Brits (or whites in general) of racism, but then throughout the rest of the film, all of the Asian characters speak English with British accents. They appropriate Western culture throughout - Wearing Italian fashion, decorating their homes like the French, having an American-format wedding ceremony, and practicing Christianity (Buddhism is actually the most popular religion in Singapore; less than a quarter of the population is Christian), etc. I'm not really against cultural appropriation, but you look stupid if you put down a culture right before you emulate it, and that's essentially what this movie did. I expected the film to defy stereotypes and break molds, but was disappointed that it was just another predictable, formulaic rom-com filled with stock characters that we have seen a million times before: the lovers who come from different social classes, the mother who thinks no girl is good enough for her son, the kooky female sidekick; the nerd, the flamboyant gay guy, etc. The stock characters don't seem any less old and tired because Asian actors are playing them. In fact, this may have been why the movie felt so phony. It was a typical comedy that could take place in Beverly Hills , but it was masquerading as something new and exotic.

On the plus side, the production values were excellent. There were plenty of beautiful location shots; the whole film was a visual delight. Constance Wu is adorable, and the cast as a whole were good; I just felt that they needed better material. The mood was light and fun, yet there were few laughs - a prerequisite for a comedy.