Feels like a stand-alone story with little connection to the franchise other than some of the actors/characters and a country that still doesn’t trust mutants.

mother! is a two-hour allegory with a deeper meaning that we couldn’t care less about.

Inconsistencies and ridiculous situations make mother! more heartless than nurturing.

Passengers is the perfect film for people disinterested in plot challenges of any type.

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 […]

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 […]

Time travel movies and others that play with temporal realities are successful or not based on the strength of the plot. You could have the best cast in the world, and it will all end up lost to time if the story doesn’t make sense or, even worse, is too complicated. Some of the best […]

I really like journeys to the past in movies, especially when they stop somewhere in the ‘70s or ‘80s. I’m sure that’s because of my age and my formative years taking place in those decades. (I still can’t imagine life back then or even college without some of the major conveniences like cell phones that […]

Two small-time con artists are forced to work for an egocentric FBI agent out to make his mark in American Hustle. It was October of 1972. I was eight years old when a man walked up to me on River Road in Camden, New Jersey. The man asked if I’d like to go to work […]

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 […]

Oscar-nominated director David O’Russell gives us a romantic comedy starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Jacki Weaver and more. Each of the four stars have also been nominated in their respective categories and the movie’s been nominated for best picture. This is, without question, a quirky film that happens to have been shot locally […]