has some wonderful moments — but there’s just not enough meat in the middle.

I managed to catch the highly-anticipated Prometheus from Ridley Scott. This is, essentially, the prequel to his smash hit Alien. Scott has been a challenge for me. Much of his biggest films I’ve found lacking heavily—most often with regard to entirely silly plot points that flat-out make no sense. Thus, I tend to wait to see his films. Friends […]

It’s been a long time since we’ve last encountered the team from the Men in Black series. For the record, I marginally enjoyed the first entry and thought the second one was just awful. Obviously that doesn’t exactly set me up as a huge fan for the third offering in the franchise. That’s how I […]

This past weekend I owed a friend a favor after having drug him to several independent films that he found a bit challenging to sit through. He’s very much a more mainstream type of movie guy. He wanted to see Marvel‘s The Avengers and given its stellar reviews I figured I didn’t have much choice but […]

Liam Neeson‘s latest film is The Grey. Neeson has been one of my favorite actors over the years but frequent readers of my reviews will no doubt recall that I’ve had major problems with his latest films. The guy is a long way from Shindler’s List. It’s also been 8 years since 2004’s Kinsey, which is the last […]

As 2011 came to a close I found myself seriously behind on my yearly movie count (that is first-run movies I see each year at a theater). In a bid to get the number up to a respectable level I talked my friends into a movie marathon day on Sunday where we managed to stuff […]

The next film on my viewing list was The Adventures of Tintin. This is a film I really didn’t have much interest in as I knew nothing of the history of the character (it was a hugely popular European comic book during much of the 20th century). Much to my complete surprise the film grabbed hold […]

This weekend I managed to see two Steven Spielberg movies and that usually is a recipe for a great movie-going weekend. Sadly, that wasn’t the reality. First up was War Horse. This is a bit of a strange film in that the star of the film is the horse and in a way that’s unlike […]

Way back in China’s history judges were the investigators of the day and during the Tang Dynasty there lived a noteworthy magistrate by the name of Di Renji. In the 1940’s an international author wrote a series of mystery novels loosely based on the judge now re-christened Judge Dee. Today we have a new film based on […]

Rango is the very first animated film from the magicians at Industrial Light & Magic who’ve raised the technology bar in Hollywood so many times over the years that they’ve made it seem commonplace to do so. This first effort has first effort written all over it. The look is typical ILM. In other words […]

Disney‘s 50th animated movie, as the pre-show credits point out, is their latest film Tangled. This is essentially a Disneyfied re-imagining of the Rapunzel fairy tale most popularized by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Disney has a long tradition of taking the basic elements of these stories and recreating them as more interesting family fare as most […]

While traveling for business I managed to catch the new animated sensation, Despicable Me. I saw it last week and just never got around to writing it up which, pretty much, foretells how that’s going to go. Despicable Me is another in a growing list of major animated films in 2010. This one focuses on an aging […]