If assassins ever come to my house to kill me, I hope that they do it quickly and without me knowing about it in advance. I’d rather be surprised and moving on to the next world — where I hopefully have plenty of time to watch movies and play games — than stuck here dealing with an […]

Will Smith costars with his son Jaden Smith as a father and son trapped on a hostile world in the futuristic sci-fi adventure After Earth. A thousands years have passed since humans were forced to leave Earth and establish a new colony on another planet. The problem is that the planet they’ve chosen, called Nova Prime, is […]

Car chases and other stunts have always been one of the most exciting elements of motion pictures. From the moment that cars were available, filmmakers included them in their plots. This led to memorable scenes in films as varied as The French Connection, Back to the Future and Thelma & Louise. The series that began […]

Animated films seem to have fallen into a rut lately where they introduce characters only for the merchandise or otherwise forget that the film’s quality should come first. That’s not to say that they’re bad, but I expect more wonder and excitement from animated films because filmmakers can do so much in them that they […]

There’s a reason that fan fiction is so enjoyable. When someone who loves an entertainment property creates his own story to add to the canon, it’s likely that it’s as good as if not better than other entries. As a fan of Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams rebooted the series in 2009 and still managed […]

Robert Downey Jr. returns in Iron Man 3, taking on a new villain in the latest installment of Marvel‘s heaviest of heavy hitters. I’m not a comic book guy, and frankly, before I saw the first Iron Man movie, I’d never even heard of the character. However, I loved both the concept and the film. Then came […]

I usually dread sequels of any popular film and superhero sequels in particular. They mostly dilute the original instead of expanding upon it, but there are many notable exceptions like Aliens and The Godfather: Part II. Superhero sequels are another creature entirely. In many such movies, the villains set the tone for the experience — sometimes […]

Tom Cruise stars as a futuristic maintenance man helping to clean up Earth after a devastating war in Oblivion. The year’s 2077 and Earth is a vast wasteland of destruction after an alien race attempted to take it over but ultimately failed. The final battle involved the fateful decision to nuke virtually every square inch […]

There’s action galore in this movie, but that’s all at the expense of plot.

I’m a big fan of police dramas. Movies like Heat and The Departed work well if the characters are developed and the plot is deep enough to draw you in but not so complicated that you need a scorecard. I was taken by surprise by the recent import from England called The Sweeney. It’s a film adaptation […]

Lightning does sometimes strike twice in the movie business. Think of the Indiana Jones movies and at least the first two movies in the Alien franchise. I have to admit that I’m an optimistic moviegoer, which means that I don’t go into a movie as most major reviewers do with an agenda, an unfounded bias […]

The epic Dinosaurs of 1993 are back from extinction, yet again saved by technology, and this time it’s 3D to the rescue. Jurassic Park first dawned on movie screens exactly 20 years ago in 1993. Then, it was a stunning example of what technology could do for storytelling in a motion picture format. The effects were  at the […]