BEAUTIFUL CREATURES – Reviewed by David
Set Twilight in the South and substitute witches for vampires and werewolves and you get Beautiful Creatures, a silly but somewhat tolerable piece of young-adult fantasy fluff in which we watch, yet...
View ArticleHANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS – Reviewed by David
We all know Hansel and Gretel were abandoned in the forest by their parents and subsequently burned a witch alive in her own oven after it trapped them in her gingerbread house. Now, with director...
View ArticleUPSIDE DOWN – Reviewed by David
You know the story. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl gets amnesia. Boy and girl must literally defy gravity to be with each other. At least, that’s how young love goes for Jim Sturgess...
View ArticleTHE HOST – Reviewed by David
Stephenie Meyer, she who authored the Twilight book series, moved on to sci-fi with The Host, and knock me sideways, actually came up with an intriguing premise, which Gattaca and In Time director...
View ArticleOBLIVION – Reviewed by David
When it comes to sci-fi, Tom Cruise sure knows how to pick good material. Minority Report and War of the Worlds, both of which he made with Steven Spielberg, are superior examples of the genre, and...
View ArticleSTAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS – Reviewed by David
Into Darkness continues the conversion of Star Trek into a whiz-bang, sci-fi-action film franchise, and while the Trekker in me mourns the passing of the more character-driven flicks featuring the...
View ArticleIRON MAN 3 – Reviewed by David
Iron Man 3 improves so significantly on Iron Man 2 you might wonder why no one thought to involve writer/director Shane Black in the franchise sooner. Just as he and Robert Downey, Jr. proved the...
View ArticleEUROPA REPORT – Reviewed by Bruce
Europa Report is a terrific sci-fi movie about a group of astronauts on a trip to one of Jupiter’s moons, after scientific reports of life. This follows in a recent trend of smaller, more realistic,...
View ArticlePACIFIC RIM – Reviewed by David
Back during the twilight of my teen years in 1990, there came out a wonderful little bit of sci-fi schlock called Robot Jox, set in a future where rival superpowers settled disputes via giant robots...
View ArticleMAN OF STEEL – Reviewed by Noah
Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder and starring Henry Cavill as Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El, is a massively overblown sensory experience. The last 40 minutes or so is basically just super-beings...
View ArticleMR. NOBODY – Reviewed by David
Remember the last third of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when astronaut Dave Bowman was a really old man? That’s who Jared Leto, wearing some very convincing makeup, resembles in parts of Mr. Nobody, an...
View ArticleTHOR: THE DARK WORLD – Reviewed by David
Just when it seems the absence of Thor director Kenneth Branagh could spell doom for Thor: The Dark World, the film manages to rally itself into a mighty fine slab of entertainment and notch yet...
View ArticleTHE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG – Reviewed by David
One doesn’t really need to know the minute details of Middle Earth, aside from it containing dwarves and elves and wizards and orcs and magic and, well, hobbits, to enjoy director Peter Jackson’s...
View ArticleI, FRANKENSTEIN – Reviewed by David
The people behind the Underworld flicks have taken the irresistible hook of Frankenstein’s-Creature-as-action-hero and built a surprisingly entertaining movie around it. Yes, I, Frankenstein does take...
View ArticleHER – Reviewed by Joyce
First of all, thank you Joaquin Phoenix for reconsidering your 2008 threat to quit making movies altogether. Maybe you had second thoughts, or maybe the brilliant filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson showed...
View ArticleWINTER’S TALE – Reviewed by David
Just so we’re clear, Winter’s Tale bears no relation to the Shakespeare play A Winter’s Tale. That is, aside from being a romance, and even then it’s only sort of one, which probably explains why I...
View ArticleUNDER THE SKIN – Reviewed by Stanislaw (now in burned out electric motor...
An imprecise non-objective use of the word “good”. That and personal agendas drive our taste in film. “______ was a good film”. We made a subjective examination. We enjoyed the film. We put some...
View ArticleDIVERGENT – Reviewed by Noah
Divergent, the first film of what I can only assume is a quadrilogy, is based upon the young adult book series of the same name by Veronica Roth. It tells the story of Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), a...
View ArticleCAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER – Reviewed by David
So just how does one go about following up Captain America: The First Avenger, perhaps the best of the mostly marvelous lot of Marvel superhero flicks? Make the sequel a Cold-War thriller, of course,...
View ArticleGODZILLA – Reviewed by Noah
The first time you see Godzilla, it’s like a revelation. It’s a guy in a rubber suit, destroying balsa wood buildings, but still it’s fantastic. Realizing this, I assume, the filmmaker behind the new...
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