Josh Board

Josh Board is a member of the San Diego Film Critics Society and has been reviewing movies since 1990.

Recent Articles

  • The Equalizer 2

    I’m not a fan of director Antoine Fuqua. He’s given us garbage like Olympus Has Fallen, The Magnificent Seven, Shooter, Southpaw (which I only tolerated because I’m a boxing fan), and the most overrated movie ever — Training Day. Sure, it got Denzel Washington an Oscar, but it’s not very good. Well, Fuqua has now made a movie that’s given Washington his first sequel ever — Equalizer 2. Washington is the type of actor where I would say “I would […]

  • The King

    Peabody Award winning filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, The House I Live In) starts things off wonderfully. He takes a 1963 Rolls Royce Phantom that Elvis Presley owned, and tours the U.S., and many of Presley’s old stompin’ grounds. There’s a lot of talk about the King. He also wants to make a commentary on America, which could’ve worked, but he ends up straining to make certain connections on race, wealth, drugs, poverty, and politics. It made me wish […]

  • Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot

    In the mid-90s, Robin Williams purchased the rights to artist John Callahan’s story (based on his memoir Will the Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?). At the time Williams was working on Good Will Hunting (this movie reminds me of it in certain ways). Director Gus Van Sant was directing that film, and he and Williams tinkered around with various screenplays. In 2010, Callahan died, and Williams was saddened and put the film on the shelf. When Williams took his […]

  • Mama Mia! Here We Go Again

    Everyone complains about sequels, and yet they keep making them. This weekend we get this, and a sequel to Equalizer (and I don’t even remember the original, which wasn’t that long ago). The first Mama Mia! was 10 years ago, and they decided to kill off Meryl Streep in the interim (spoiler alert), and cover some of the ABBA songs they didn’t get to the first time around. That means a lot of b-sides that weren’t hits, but hey…the first […]

  • Should Scarlett Johansson play transgender?

    I was ticked off with this story regarding Scarlett Johansson dropping out of a movie. I’m going to be talking about this Saturday on KOGO 600 am, but wanted to rant about it here. She was set to play Dante “Tex” Gill, who ran some illegal massage parlors and made millions. She dressed as a man and was heavily involved in the underworld in Pittsburgh in the ‘70s and ‘80s. One of the many things she did was supply the […]

  • Sorry to Bother You

    I remember being excited to interview writer, director, actor Robert Townsend after he made his debut film Hollywood Shuffle. Well, here’s another African-American writer, director, doing his first film. And I wouldn’t compare it to fellow African-American Townsend, despite it having a few similar themes. This is some Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) sh** going on here, mixed with a touch of Mike Judge (Idiocracy, Office Space), a bit of Spike Lee and Jordan Peele. Bootsy Collins is one […]

  • Leave No Trace

    Writer/director Debra Granik needs to make more movies. This is one talented filmmaker. Her debut was the powerful Winter’s Bone, a small picture that got four Oscar nominations and gave Jennifer Lawrence a career (and John Hawkes wasn’t chopped liver in it). In this (with co-writer Anne Rosellini), Granik went with a more minimalistic approach when adapting a Peter Rock book about a father and daughter that lived four years in a park in the Northwest.   The father is […]

  • Skyscraper

    If you took The Towering Inferno and combined it with Die Hard, took out all the interesting characters, and…had a bunch of Chinese people watching from the ground as if Godzilla were attacking…that’s this movie. My wife thought the crowds on the ground looked ridiculous, with their iphone cameras and cheering. I just wondered why, when the buildings collapsed on 9/11 and the debris went so far and injured many, how is it the police aren’t evacuating everyone around the […]

  • The House of Tomorrow

    Remember in The Space Between Us how a young teen (Asa Butterfield) came to Earth from the space station he was born on, and was a fish out of water, with the deer in headlights look that never left his face? Well, as Sebastian, he’s playing that character again. He lives with his grandmother architect Josephine Prendergast (Ellen Burstyn), and live in an interesting geodesic dome/house she designed. (This is based on the book by Peter Bognanni). Sebastian’s parents died […]