It’s not new to describe Steven Spielberg as a sort of father figure in Hollywood filmmaking. A film like War of the Worlds, just to take a…
In addition to the spectacle of characters struggling to outlast the elements, survival-specific adventure films typically involve some sort of additional antagonist. Some guy’s…
After a raid gone bad, FBI Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt, on a hell of a winning streak) is detailed by a “consultant” (Josh…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…