[7] Christopher Nolan wraps up his Batman reboot trilogy by pitting the vigilante superhero against the villain Bane and introducing Catwoman into the mix. Coming in with low expectations (how could they top the last one?), I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie. The first half is rather cumbersome to get through, but never boring. The last half ratchets up both …
[4] The first Independence Day is one of those films that strikes just the right tone, something between earnest and goofy-as-hell, genuinely terrifying and gloriously indulgent. It was like the best possible kind of Irwin Allen disaster movie, where the spectacle was off-set by a charming ensemble of personalities and attitude was an acceptable replacement for character development. In all these regards, the sequel fails to …
[8] Bryan Singer returns to helm his fourth film in the X-Men series, and he hits another home run. This one picks up some number of years after the events of Days of Future Past, as an ancient all-powerful baddie named Apocalypse (played by Oscar Isaac, Poe from Star Wars: The Force Awakens) is accidentally resurrected in Egypt. To be honest, I don’t care for …
[7] It’s the third Captain America movie, but since most of the Avengers cast is reunited, it feels more like Avengers 3. Not that it matters — these movies all start to feel the same anyway. I like how this one starts, dealing with the aftermath of all the cataclysmic damage the Avengers team has accidentally caused in various countries while battling all their supernatural …
[8] Looper is a mash-up of mobster movie and sci-fi time travel flick, but rather than getting caught up in its own clever twists on a (let’s face it) hackneyed sci-fi sub-genre, the movie is wisely more concerned with creating an emotionally gripping story. It moves and builds perfectly, dividing your empathy for its fully-fleshed characters in a story that shuns black and white to …
[8] It’s so refreshing to watch heroes and villains who are over the age of 40. Skyfall repeatedly suggests that sometimes older is better, and I couldn’t agree more. Daniel Craig’s third turn as James Bond is at least as good as his first, Casino Royale. Javier Bardem makes an excellent villain and we also get to enjoy Judi Dench in a full co-starring role …
[5] Working from a stale script that comes too late in the Tarantino wake, this dark, violent ‘who’s conning who’ comedy is made tolerable by its flavor-of-the-week casting. If you like Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride, and Aziz Ansari (like I do), you’ll find it worth your while. If you don’t, you won’t.
[5] Visually striking but emotionally hollow, Warren Beatty’s film version of Chester Gould’s comic creation is an underwhelming would-be blockbuster. The only character you can get invested in is Madonna’s Breathless Mahoney. Everyone else, including our strong-jawed hero, is as two-dimensional as the comic strip they came from. It’s kinda fun to spot well-known actors in cameos throughout the movie — keep your eyes peeled …
[7] Mel Gibson returns as the iconic Mad Max, joined by Tina Turner in a fun, villainous role. But the third film in the series is also the weakest, first signaled by the PG-13 rating, a ridiculous attempt to make a hard-edged action franchise more family-friendly. The script splits the story into two distinct parts that then converge on each other in the third act. …
[7] An unmanned train is going to crash in a highly populated area unless a conductor and an engineer can stop it. It may be Speed on a train, but as action flicks go, it’s still pretty entertaining. Scenes with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine ‘bonding’ while hurdling toward disaster reek of cliche (so does the subplot involving Pine’s marriage) — but the forced character …
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