Conclave is a brilliant example of slow-burn, understated storytelling that works.

Transformers: The Last Knight means well even as the plot points fly apart like an exploding Autobot.

Beauty and the Beast is a faithful, often beautiful reproduction of the original.

There has been an annoying trend in recent years to split up the adaptations of the final books in popular series into two or more movies. Whereas it made perfect sense for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows because there was just too much content for one movie, it was just milking it to have […]

Spotlight is every bit as gripping and dramatic as All the President’s Men.

I’ve never been a fan of splitting movies. In recent years, when the last Harry Potter book was split into two movies, it opened the floodgates for other series like Twilight, The Hunger Games and The Hobbit to do the same. If I thought like a movie producer or company, I would see the brilliance […]

A variation of a popular saying is “nothing exceeds like excess.” In the case of summer blockbusters, it almost seems like a game for directors to see how much they can cram into the running time to please the eyes and ears if not the mind as well. When I saw the trailer for Transformers: […]

An erudite beagle and his adopted son meet history’s most famous figures as they travel through time in the animation redux Mr. Peabody & Sherman. In this new, slightly reimagined update of a classic cartoon spin-off, Mr. Peabody (voiced by Ty Burrell) grows up as an outcast. He’s not at all interested in conventional canine cavorting. […]

Victors of the previous year’s games find anything but the peace they were promised in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I need to point out right up front that I never read any of the incredibly successful books behind the films. As such, I can’t really speak to the faithfulness of the story from book […]

In recent months, Benedict Cumberbatch has taken on two iconic characters. In one movie, he plays an arrogant, creepy, powerful man with superhuman abilities, a deliberate way of speaking and an unusual look who wants to expose the lies of leaders in order to benefit his people and ultimately ends up confined to minimal living quarters […]

An outcast rogue hacker turns his skills to exposing the world’s biggest corporate and political secrets, ushering in a new era of information freedom in The Fifth Estate. This is the true-life story detailing the origins of one of the most powerful grassroots organizations the world has ever seen — WikiLeaks — and its founder, the quirky, […]

Enough years have passed since the ‘60s and ‘70s that many of the radicals, war protesters and antiestablishment groups have mellowed out, grown up or simply lost their drive. The members of the Weather Underground were more extreme in their actions and motivations in that they committed acts of violence and vandalism that would be […]