Best Make-Up

[8] Director Tim Burton (Batman, Ed Wood) followed his debut feature, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, with this stylish fantasy-comedy about a young deceased couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) trying to haunt an annoying new family out of their quaint countryside home. When the new family ends up more amused than alarmed by their ghostly antics, they’re left with no choice but to summon the …

[5] Benicio Del Toro plays the cursed title character in this remake of Universal Pictures’ famous 1941 monster movie. After his brother is discovered mutilated, Del Toro returns home to his father’s estate to find out who killed him. Anthony Hopkins brings gravitas as the father, and Emily Blunt pours her heart out in the role of the dead brother’s fiancée. In searching for the …

[7] Director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Bear, The Name of the Rose) takes us on a prehistoric adventure about three cave-dwelling early humans who embark on a search for fire after an attack by animalistic Neanderthals extinguishes the flame their tribe maintained for generations. Along the way, the three men encounter cannibals, sabre-tooth tigers, and wooly mammoths. They also meet a woman from another tribe who …

[7] Eddie Murphy plays an overweight professor who invents a potion that sheds the pounds in a dramatic fashion. Problem is, the transformation also comes with a personality change of Jekyll and Hyde proportions. Murphy thinks he needs the potion to court a young teacher played by the beautiful Jada Pinkett, not realizing that the new alter ego plans to vanquish the professor’s fatter, friendlier …

[8] Christian Bale once again transforms himself completely to become former vice-president Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s (The Big Short) new film, Vice. The film is a pastiche of Cheney’s political career, driven in large part by his relationship with wife Lynne (Amy Adams) and daughters Liz and Mary. McKay is careful to keep Vice a pitch-black comedy at all times, but he also does …

[8] It may be tempting to dismiss Planet of the Apes as high camp, but there’s provocative science-fiction under those monkey masks. Charlton Heston plays an American astronaut who’s on his way back to Earth when he crashlands on a strange, desolate planet where apes rule and humans are primitive beasts of burden. Heston is captured, tortured, and humiliated by the apes. He finds sympathy …

[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] Matthew McConaughey stars as Ron Woodruff in this true story about a womanizing electrician whose given thirty days to live after doctors discover he carries HIV. The year was 1985 and the American government was loathe to take HIV/AIDS very seriously at the time, with most people believing it was only a ‘gay disease.’ Indeed, Woodruff loses many of his old buddies when they …

[8] George Miller has stopped making talking pig and dancing penguin movies (Babe, Happy Feet) long enough to give us another installment in his seminal apocalyptic Mad Max series. The result is probably one of the greatest non-stop action movies ever made. Tom Hardy takes the reigns from Mel Gibson as the title character, but gets to sink his teeth into the role quite a …

[6] Just as Robert Zemeckis had to make Forrest Gump and Tim Burton had to make Big Fish, so did David Fincher have to make The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. All three directors are known for their visual and/or technical prowess, and all three felt the need to wring a tear-jerker out of their filmographies, maybe just to prove they could? Benjamin Button is …

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