Zack Snyder

[6] [SPOILER WARNING] Part-way through production on 2017’s theatrical version of Justice League, director Zack Snyder suffered a tragic loss in his family and had to step away from the production. Joss Whedon (The Avengers) was then called in to finish the film and oversee re-shoots (Snyder retained sole directing credit). I suspect the studio also wanted Whedon to tighten up the pacing and bring …

[7] SPOILER REVIEW: Technically, there are spoilers in this review. But if you look at the movie’s credits, you shouldn’t be surprised by them. Although we’ll probably never really know for sure, it looks to me like Joss Whedon saved Justice League from Zack Snyder. The movie has character and heart and it’s paced like a real movie, whereas Snyder’s movies lack character and heart, and, …

[8] When it comes to graphic novels brought faithfully to cinematic life, 300 is one to beat. It’s the simple story of how three hundred proud Greek soliders stood valiantly against overwhelming Persian forces in the Battle of Thermopylae. More than anything, 300 is an exercise in style, and with its equal doses of bloodshed and ripped male torsos, it’s probably one of the most …

[6] Too mature for children, but too immature for adults, Legend of the Guardians may never find an audience beyond those thirteen years of age or thirteen at heart (guilty as charged.) It’s a dark, computer-animated fantasy based on a series of books by Kathryn Lasky. The story is a bit muddled, but it pulls together for the most part. Our hero is a young …

[6] Zack Snyder (300, Man of Steel) made his feature directorial debut with this remake of George Romero’s 1978 classic zombie sequel. This time around the rag-tag team of survivors holed up in a mall during the zombie apocalypse includes Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter) and Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction), but you don’t get to know either of them nearly as well as you got …

[5] Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice feels like a movie with an identity crisis, tasked with performing two disparate, thankless tasks. The first is to set up a big fight between two iconic superheroes. You know, the kind of thing that makes comic book nerds leave sticky puddles in their Underoos. Thing is, for all the wonder you might have about this climactic showdown, …

[2] I haven’t wanted to walk out of a movie I paid for in a long, long time, but I damn near walked out of this one. “Man of Steel” is ridiculously awful. At best (if I weren’t a Superman fan), it’d be “Transformers 4”, another busily boring, loud, emotionally bankrupt piece of nauseating, over-indulgent, digital miasma. But if you are a Superman fan, this …