I had attempted to watch this before, but did not make it too far in before I bounced right off the concept of "Nick Kroll: Serious Actor". So I gave it a few years and, eventually, it ended up in a stack of assorted World War II Blu-ray discs from the library. Thus, I powered through my trepidation of "Nick Kroll: Serious Actor" and, honestly, I'm not sure it was worth the struggle. It's not like I dislike the guy;…

Well, it only took Rowan Atkinson three films over 15 years to finally do what I thought was impossible: be mildly amusing as Johnny English. That said, it's still not very good, but there are actual jokes here and Atkinson's portrayal of English is finally allowed at least a small measure of dimension so that he's no longer purely unlikeable. Everything else is very rote, but, thankfully, literal angel-on-Earth Olga Kurylenko is around for most of the proceedings to make…

Doesn't have quite the same intrigue as the first, but it's not terrible for a sequel that follows-up almost a decade later. With lots of avenues to follow, the film does feel a bit unfocused and it never quite commits to one single tone. It seems blindingly obvious that the film should have leaned further into the relationship between Affleck and Bernthal's brother characters, which it does a little bit, but it comes across as a half-committal, as a lot…

Relentless and pervasive "film school" vibes radiating off this. Hol up, you mean to tell me two young filmmakers who met in film school made a low-budget horror film in the woods of Southern California? Say it ain't so.

The attempt to off the film-within-the-film as a piece of lost media from the 1970s is laughable at best. It hits every mark: obvious digital cinematography, bad lighting, bad sound, obvious filters to emulate grain or scratches (but no cigarette…

Sure, it's contrived and ugly and it makes very little sense relative to its predecessor and it's full of horrible fake American accents and it's a movie about the orcs that live in the Mines of Moria with worse make-up, BUT consider this: the first one isn't very good either.

Minus half a star for some of the laziest sound editing I've ever heard in my life. Using straight-up unfiltered, unprocessed animal noises from a stock library as SFX vocalizations…

It's fine enough as an introduction to retro game collecting for someone completely unaware, but, aside from there being way too much stock footage in use and not nearly enough variety of interviewees, it offers little novelty for anyone remotely aware of the subject or anyone who isn't particularly interested in the NES, SNES, or SEGA Genesis libraries.

I'm tired of retro gaming being relegated to cartridges and bleepy-bloopy pixels. I appreciate that there was some inclusion of PlayStation 2…