Based in part on the true story of an 18th 19th Century American trapper left for dead by his fellow traders, director/co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” is both a satisfying genre film and a legitimate piece of cinematic art. As
Because I am lucky enough to live in the sticks of North Carolina, unlike my Los Angeles days, I don’t see everything because most of the smaller Oscar-bait movies fail — with good reason — to make their way out
Disney has done an amazing job keeping the plot under wraps. This review will honor that. The strokes will be broad. Biases upfront. I am no “Star Wars” fanboy. The original trilogy is terrific, at least until the Ewoks show
Director Ron Howard certainly knows where to place a camera. Naturally, most of the Big Scenes involving the killer whale are cartoonish CGI, but you cannot argue with the beauty of the composition. The problem is the story. Believe it
This review is unforgivably late because I’m a bit of an agoraphobic. Showing the kind of maturity and self-confidence we don’t see too often in Hollywood, or anyplace else these days, even after his 2006 triumph “Rocky Balboa,” Sylvester Stallone
Throughout much of your holiday tomorrow, the National Geographic Channel is running its two-part, four hour miniseries “Saints and Strangers,” a gritty docudrama that claims to tell the “real story” of the first Thanksgiving. After seeing the first two hours,
Other than his early, simpler genre entries like 1997’s “Mimic” and 2002’s “Blade II,” director Guillermo del Toto leaves me cold. As good as his films always manage to look, there is always something missing. On many levels, del Toro’s
For the last couple of years, and for no particular reason, I have been studying the former Soviet Union: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Stalin era, the Gulags and Terror Campaigns. This has resulted in a growing frustration over Hollywood’s refusal
Confession: The 2011 film Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, is one of my favorite films of the last 5 years. In fact, I became a little obsessed with it to the point that I bought the script to see how it differed from the finished film.
Director Baltasar Kormákur’s docudrama is competently produced and tense enough to hold your interest, but so is a forced death march, which is what the “Everest” experience feels like at the end. The story is a true one. The year
“Apollo 13” meets “Interstellar” in director Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” and the result is a blockbuster piece of entertainment that matches both. Matt Damon has never been more likable as Mark Watney, an American astronaut and botanist who, in a
Watching the most recent presidential debates might have given Emily Blunt second thoughts about becoming an American citizen, but her latest movie, “Sicario,” a compelling, disturbing, and harrowing story about the Drug War set along our southern border, plays like
“Furious 7,” the latest chapter in the blockbuster “Fast & Furious” franchise, is now available on Bluray, and I’m here to tell you that the third time is the charm. After seeing the latest adventures of Don, Letty, Brian, Mia
Johnny Depp is back in form as notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger in director Scott Cooper’s “Black Mass.” The meat of the story is absurdly promising, primarily because it’s true. Thanks primarily to the F.B.I. looking the other way,
The opening sequence of director Guy Ritchie’s “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is promising — a clever, action-filled chase through East Berlin as American agent Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) attempts to get his cool and quippy self and Alicia Vikander (Gaby Teller)
Before the movie begins, over the opening Universal Pictures logo, director F. Gary Gray’s “Straight Outta Compton” opens with the sound that came to define South Central Los Angeles in the late 80’s and early 90’s — the sound of
The best thing about “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” is that we now have final confirmation that Academy Award-winner Mel Gibson has been blackballed by Hollywood, not for the vile statements he made about Jews, but for producing “The Passion
Rusty Griswold is all growed up. Oddly enough, though, he’s no longer the cool, self-assured Anthony Michael Hall we met in 1983. He is now Ed Helms, a sweet-natured bumbler just like his dad Clark, the iconic character portrayed by
The first trailer for Michael Bay’s movie 13 Hours, based on a first-person account of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, was released Tuesday. Many sites—including Breitbart News—posted the trailer, but Vox went well beyond that, offering a 1,500-word review of the two-minute clip.
From my count, “Ant-Man” is now the 12th entry in the ongoing Marvel Universe franchise that began with 2008’s “Iron Man,” and after the pounding CGI-fury that was “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” the story of the biggest little hero in
Like every overrated Judd Apatow comedy, “Trainwreck” is overlong, uneven, indulgent, loaded with countless unnecessary scenes, and filled with sleazy sexual situations so uncomfortable you just want them to end. There are also a few hearty laughs mixed with real
The best news is that after being pummeled for more than two hours by young, shirtless hunks with hairless chests and chiseled abs, I can report that my heterosexuality remains firmly intact. Nothing moved. Nothing wanted to move. As someone
Since the childhood wish of his best friend John (Mark Wahlberg) brought him to glorious life decades ago, Ted (a three-foot tall stuffed teddy bear voiced by Seth MacFarlane) has gone about the business of living the life of a
The ignorance of the political left never fails to amaze. By complaining about the supposed “sexism” of Jurassic World, joyless feminists everywhere — from Avengers director Joss Whedon to the left-wing The Daily Beast — only prove that they failed
In a movie-world before superheroes and comic books and franchises and universes, Concept was King, and in 1990 author Michael Crichton came up with a doozy. Imagine, Crichton fantasized, that a mosquito drew blood from a dinosaur and then got
“The Further” is a place where the tortured souls of the dead wait for an opportunity to return to our world. This makes for some spooky stuff: Hauntings. Possessions. Exorcisms. Trips to The Further to retrieve endangered loved ones. This
Rising comedic superstar Melissa McCarthy is the main attraction in “Spy,” a hit-and-miss comedy that entertains even as it treads where dozens of James Bond spoofs have gone before. In a nice change of pace, McCarthy lays her aggressive, foul
The premiere of “Entourage” on HBO in the summer of 2004 arrived just a few months after my own arrival in Hollywood. My goals were much less ambitious than Vinnie and the gang, and I wouldn’t even achieve those, but
This review is late because I was on vacation. Every prediction made by the Global Cooling Global Warming Climate Change hoaxers has proven to be a hoax. The planet is not warming. Hurricanes have not gotten worse. The Arctic ice
For three decades, writer/director Cameron Crowe has been waging a one-auteur war against cynicism. God bless him, this is a filmmaker who believes in sincerity, the healing power of rock ‘n’ roll, true love, redemption, and the ultimate triumph of
It kind of takes your breath away to look back on just how much the world has changed since director Michael Wadleigh’s procedural-horror film “Wolfen” arrived in the summer of 1981. There was no streaming, no home computers, no mainstream
Interestingly enough, the biggest problem with the tender, old-fashioned, and surprisingly engaging “Age of Adaline” is not a preposterous concept. The idea of a woman who stopped aging at age 29 some 75 years ago is handled quite beautifully. What
“Unfriended” takes place in real time over 82 minutes, and all of that time is filled using one continuous shot. The camera never moves. There is not a single edit. I’ve read this was all done with a budget of
Six years after 2009’s “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” shocked everyone by grossing $146 million, star and co-writer Kevin James returns as the bumbling title character in a tired sequel that has fewer laughs than most horror films. Bless his heart,
Pop culture matters … a lot. In fact, pop culture is everything. Movies, of course, are the ultimate in pop culture — a combination of almost every known art form turned into a powerful fury of sound and image that
One of the four-thousand trailers that ran prior to my “Furious 7” screening Thursday night was for the upcoming James Bond entry “Spectre.” And what a bummer those 96 seconds are. In Daniel Craig’s fourth go-round, the world is still
Will Ferrell has never been my cup of tea. This has nothing to do with his noxious left-wing politics. It’s that his screen presence is one of the most unlikable I’ve ever come across. Vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity,
Walt Disney’s live-action Cinderella is everything fans of the beloved fairy tale want and more. It’s magical, colorful, beautiful, exciting, and leaves the audience with an encouraging and important message of kindness and courage.
Last night’s reaction to “Fifty Shades of Grey” from the female, college-aged crowd I sat through this preordained S&M blockbuster with, makes for a better review than anything a middle-aged male fuddy-duddy like myself could conjure. This particular packed house loved the first 40 minutes (which are pretty good). They giggled and “hell yessss’d” the wish fulfillment that comes with a “Pretty Woman-style romance that sees a mousey nobody whisked into the fairytale world of the super rich by an impossibly-handsome Prince Charming.
It is obvious director Matthew Vaughn’s “Kingsman: The Secret Service” is going to be different when things open with a flashback involving the necessarily rough interrogation of a barbaric Islamic terrorist. The scene sets the rest of the plot in
