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Of the new box office releases this week that I’ve screened, I’ve The other is “Joshua.”
OY. Avoid it at all costs. It’s not only awful, it’s one of the worst movies of the year.
Billed as a thriller about a 9-year-old prodigy (Joshua) who apparently causes strange things to happen to his parents, once his newborn baby sister arrives, It’s just plain bizarre. The John Ritter look-alike playing Joshua’s gay composer uncle doesn’t help. Joshua–who at first seems like the model son–becomes jealous of the attention his sister gets from everyone involved. Then, his already self-absorbed, neurotic yuppie mother gets more so and goes crazy (relative to the crazy she already is).

I’m not sure how it can be a thriller, when it’s anything but thrilling, and it’s not scary. I’ll give it two other titles: Creepiest Movie of the Year, and Weirdest Movie of the Year. (Joshua embalms his teddy bear.) It does start to pick up in the last 20 minutes or so. But trust me when I say that you really don’t want to pay for this overwrought melodrama with so many screams, cries, and shrieks by Joshua’s 30-something mother, that even Lifetime would reject it as a Movie of the Week.
Do you really want to sit through a slow melodrama that seems as if it was written by the gay characters on “Sex & the City”? Oh, and by the way, of course the crazy mother is not just a crazy woman who makes sure you know she’s a liberal Jew, she’s also an anti-Christian bigot. And the grandmother is an evangelical Christian “nut.” An unscary, unexciting “thriller” that takes digs at Jews and evangelicals. Just the way Hollywood likes it.
Painful to watch. Extremely skipworthy.