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The Kitchen is based on a DC Vertigo comic-book miniseries that was published in 2015. Kathy, Ruby, and Claire are forced into a world of crime being their husbands are sent to jail after they get arrested by the FBI, at a liquor-store holdup gone wrong.

Its the type of story where you kinda half-expect what is going to happen and… the phrase “girl power” gets yelled out by the end of every scene.

There’s no doubt the gals of The Kitchen can deliver a perfect girl-power line but is that enough to carry a movie? The strong work by the three leads isn’t nearly enough to overcome the very complicated storyline that entails way too many half-baked characters, which make it too difficult, to connect with what’s happening in the movie.

Although this flick has some solid moments, the end result is a bit of a mess, and you gotta believe that when the very busy McCarthy, Haddish and Moss signed on for the project they didn’t expect it to end up looking like it did, and most likely it took an even extra effort of on their part to promote the movie the way that they did, as well.

The ingredients are all there, I am sure the efforts too but somehow the end product wasn’t enough, that’s a Thumbs Down.

In a year where so many franchises are winding down, from The Avengers to Star Wars to X-Men. here comes one that is trying to actually expand, fan favorites Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham collaborate on saving the world in this very over-the-top spin-off to Fast & Furious.

For the record, 18 years have past since this franchise began as a Los Angeles street racing movie, sadly in this, its ninth flick, there is no trace of the original cast or the storyline that made it famous.

Deadpool 2 director, David Leitch, is venturing back to his days as stuntman, creating a testosterone-driven action flick so ridiculously over-the-top, it sometimes feels like the comic-book logic of a Marvel movie all of a sudden feel very reasonable. The visual effects created in this movie use all the latest chops in film making, allowing the director to create scenes that would have previously only been possible as hand-drawn cartoons.

However, when are is said and done, what I was left off at the end of the screening was… a headache… this is a Thumbs Down from me.

It’s hard to believe that 25 years passed since director Quentin Tarantino erupted into all our lives with Pulp Fiction, which like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

This 161 minutes long movie is a fantastical tale set in 1969 of a Hollywood struggling actor and his stunt double/best bud, and how their lives somehow intertwine with the Manson Family. The Manson connection is a bizarre and unnatural one in the storyline, which turns out to be an attempt by Tarantino to manipulate or even re-write historical events. The movie also features a new and very compelling type of Tarantino hero, the real men do cry character.

Tarantino creates with an almost fantastically detailed and time-machine precision Hollywood of 50 years ago, which is indeed fascinating to watch. Yet at the end of the day, this is definitely not one of those Tarantino flicks that stays with you, although it still carries most of the directors’ trademark antics like bloody vendettas, girls with guns, drive-ins, donuts, muscle cars, foot fetishism, and even Spaghetti Westerns.

Jon Favreau’s remake of the 1994 animated classic, The Lion King, is nothing less than stunning. From the ecstatic Zulu chant that opens the film to the thundering drumbeat that ends it, it sometimes gets a bit distracting (for those of us who saw the original) to be constantly comparing between the two versions, the remake feels by far closer to the original, compared to any of the recent remakes Disney has released so far.

Favreau was smart not to fall into the pitfall of the original director by casting Caucasian voice actors to portray the main (“African”) characters. The lead voice actors in this version are: Donald Glover (as Simba), Alfre Woodard (as Simba’s mom, Sarabi) and Beyoncé (as Nala). The only actor that made it from the original cast is the phenomenal, James Earl Jones, as Mufasa.

By focusing his attention mostly on upgrading the look of the earlier film, Favreau reinforces the strength of the 1994 classic. One of the biggest strengths of the remake is the remastered music, it’s beats mesmerizes every part of your body. The CGI is truly gravitating, a real feast for the eyes and so thrilling moments become even more tense thanks to the animatronics technology.