Director Scott Cooper has a knack for casting up unremarkable films with great performers and turning them loose, depending on them to transcend otherwise unremarkable material. Crazy Heart had…
M. Night Shyamalan might be on the ropes both in terms of his critical perception and industry clout. His last four films were widely (it could…
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. doesn’t have much to do with its 50-year-old TV source material beyond the basic skeleton of its premise: two secret agents, one…
The Comic book iterations of the Fantastic Four are often called Marvel’s First Family. Their stories take place in a bright four-color world where the…
Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the fifth installment in this franchise, finds hero superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, but you knew that) battling a sinister organization of…
Like a lot of the best, or at least most well-regarded films for children, Pixar’s Inside Out is more for grown-ups than for kids. It’s got an…
After menacing the world with inter-dimensional aliens, robots bent on mankind’s extermination, and cities plummeting from the sky, maybe it’s time Marvel did something a…
Slick, loud, violent, merchandized to death, politically retrograde, largely scrubbed of idiosyncrasy, and also pretty exciting, Jurassic World is, like the original 1993 Jurassic Park, simultaneously we-tampered-in-God’s-domain overreacher…
Terminator Genisys (don’t ask about the spelling) is, by most counts, the third attempt to kickstart a new trilogy of movies in this franchise. Let’s hope…
2012’s Magic Mike got a lot of folks into the theater on the promise of a fun romp about male strippers, then, along with all that hunky…
It seems that Aloha, Cameron Crowe’s newest drama, is just him taking a mulligan on 2005’s widely (and somewhat unfairly) derided Elizabethtown. Both films feature a disgraced wunderkind returning…
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is little more than an excuse for elaborate CG destruction and cliched narrative bullet points. Dwayne “The Rock”…
At one point in Tomorrowland, an exasperated George Clooney complains to a young woman (Britt Robertson) who keeps asking him to explain all the awesome future…
By the time of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third entry in George Miller’s original scorched-Earth trilogy, society had begun to rebuild itself, but the post-apocalypse capitalism…
There are a lot of superhero movies these days, evidently the subject of much critical handwringing. Maybe they’re poisoning popular cinema — bloated advertisements for themselves draining…
Partway through Ex Machina, Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a mousy coder at a giant tech company, and Nathan, his supergenius employer (Oscar Isaac), discuss whether or not…
Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg opened with Greta Gerwig’s character, a young woman working as a wealthy man’s personal assistant, trying to merge into traffic, saying “Are you gonna…
You can claim to be invested in the Fast and/or Furious series for fancy cars, or for the characters and the laid-back diversity of the cast, or…
Hey look, another movie about a former black-bag operator whose past moral lapses catch up to him when some former colleagues attempt to have him…
Jaume Collet-Serra’s last two films, Unknown and Non-Stop, were both now-patented Liam Neeson thrillers and Hitchcock-ian wrong man transmissions. In the former, Collet-Serra’s patient, often static camera infused…