Happy Place — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

The Box-Office Bomb Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken Is a LOT Like Turning Red, But Not as Good

This is a nice movie for nice people.

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinDecember 6, 2023Jane Fonda, Annie Murphy

With "Haunted Houses" True Detective Got Incongruously Quiet But Remained Powerful

Rust and Marty split and someone has sex with someone else’s wife as my journey through the first season of True Detective.

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinDecember 4, 2023Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Monaghan

The Christmas Shoes Sequel The Christmas Blessing is Irresistibly Maudlin in that Deeply Imitable Christmas Movie Kind of Way

My patron-funded exploration of the films of disgraced Noxzema girl Rebecca Gayheart continues with a maudlin 2005 Christmas tear-jerker that’s a sequel to a TV movie based on the famously treacly Christmas song “The Christmas Shoes.”

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinNovember 28, 2023Neil Patrick Harris, Rob Lowe, Rebecca Gayheart, Christmas, TV movies

2017's The Christmas Train is Nuclear-Grade Yuletide Schmaltz

Danny Glover is MAX POWERS (seriously), a hotshot filmmaker who plays matchmaker to some corny-ass white writers in this shamelessly entertaining and just plain shameless Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas movie.

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinNovember 28, 2023Danny Glover, Joan Cusack, Dermot Mulroney, Christmas, TV Movie, Film

Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is Southern Gothic Done Wrong

Kevin Spacey’s real-life fall from grace only makes Clint Eastwood’s cartoonishly Southern 1997 literary adaptation Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil even more of a fascinating, problematic mess.

With “The Secret Fate of All Life”, the Fifth Episode of its First Season, True Detective Continues to Fucking Rule

You know what show was great True Detective? Why didn’t anyone talk about how great it is?

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinNovember 2, 2023Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey

The Japanese Zombie Comedy One Cut of the Dead Has a Lot More to Offer Than Some Dazzlingly Audacious Gimmicks

Zombies run amok in the clever cult show business comedy One Cut of the Dead.

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinOctober 31, 2023

Larry Cohen's 1990 Thriller The Ambulance Is a Lot of Fun For a Movie that Asks You to Root for Eric Roberts as a Mulleted Cat-caller

In the second and final ambulance-themed movie in Ambulance Week here at the Happy Place I take a fond look back at Larry Cohen’s 1990 adventure, which casts as a mulleted Eric Roberts as a Marvel employee who gets caught up in a mystery. This also features Stan Lee’s VERY FIRST CAMEO IN A MOVIE! #Historic

Control Nathan Rabin 4.0Nathan RabinOctober 26, 2023Eric Roberts, Janine Turner, Stan Lee, James Earl Jones, Red Buttons

Virginia AND Michael Madsen Are Among the Many Actors Wasted in the Inexplicably Star-Studded 1999 Snoozer The Florentine

Virginia Madsen, Michael Madsen, James Belushi, the late Burt Young and a fuck ton of other famous people are in the excruciatingly dull 1999 working class drama The Florentine. For the love of God, why?

David Mamet and Stuart Gordon Teamed Up for 2005's Blisteringly Dark Edmond

It doesn’t get much darker than Stuart Gordon and David Mamet’s evisceratingly bleak 2005 drama Edmond.