Given that marvel movies are about guys in costumes fighting crime, it’s incredible how realistic and believable the stories are. But not only that, you have to add in Marvel’s ability to cross pollinate so many different characters stories. And they always balance out the action with a good amount of character-building dialogue. We come to love these characters and genuinely care about what they go through. Too many action movies don’t spend enough time making us interested in what happens to the people, and instead get lost in explosions and dudes punching other dudes. Read... Read More

“You’re in my place,” says a man to Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) on the train. There are plenty of other places to sit, but the nondescript man wants Simon’s seat. Simon, being the meek man he is, gives up the seat. So opens The Double, based on the novel by Dostoyevsky. It’s a drab, mustard-colored look at identity. The setting is some kind of surrealist 1970s industrial steampunk land, and the entirety of the movie takes place in an office building, an apartment complex, and a diner. Claustrophobia galore. Read More  Read More

In Clint Eastwood’s new video game, Call of Duty: American Sniper, Bradley Cooper affects a convincing Texas accent to portray Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in US military history. The film follows Kyle through four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, one marriage and two kids. Cooper’s been receiving a ton of praise for his performance, and I can promise that he does deliver the goods. While it’s not the best performance of the year (that would be Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler, and boo to the Academy for snubbing him), he did make me misty-eyed once or twice. Read More  Read More

As a Movie, Ender’s Game Missed The Point This last weekend, the wife and I watched the movie adaptation of the beloved book by Orson Scott Card, the author who seems to have developed a habit of espousing some not-so-popular opinions over the last few years. As a pure movie (ignoring the existence of the book), it was pretty good. The special effects were great, Asa Butterfield was convincing as conflicted, complicated young hero Ender, Harrison Ford was chilling as the manipulative leader Graff, Ben Kingsley was effective as the weird guy with a crazy accent and crap tattooed all over... Read More

Maths! Benedict Cumberbatch finally gets his chance to star in a prestige biopic, in the 2014 update of A Beautiful Mind a totally new movie based on the life and times of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped end the war and invent the machines that became computers. Read More  Read More

It’s rare to say that a movie is better than a book. And usually, if you do, the literati will leave a nasty note on your door. But Wild the book–the memoir by Cheryl Strayed–was a story filled with more sulking than hiking. I gave up halfway through. I didn’t find the protagonist likable or compelling in any way. Read More  Read More

Just as J.R.R.R. Tolkien intended, the third film based on his 250-page children’s book just came out in theaters, drawing the prequel to the Lord of the Rings to a close. Recently, I railed against Hunger Games for this same tactic of stretching a single book across multiple movies. In that movie, it didn’t work. But Peter Jackson makes it work, because he uses a wide range of other obscure Tolkien material to flesh out the story. Read More  Read More

Even though these movies came out before I was born, I have fond memories of watching biblical epics like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments as a little kid. Charlton Heston and his big white beard daring Ramses to pry the staff of God from his cold, dead hands. Such spectacle! Such plagues! Since Noah last year, the biblical epic is making a bit of a comeback. But times have changed. In the 1950s, it probably seemed perfectly fine to have caucasian Charlton Heston playing the Hebrew Moses. Today, with Batman himself in that same role, it just doesn’t cut it. Read More  Read More

Bill Murray and Melissa McCarthy star in St. Vincent, which walks like a movie and talks like a movie, but it’s not actually a movie. What it is, instead, is an endless string of cinematic clichés that simulate a movie-going experience, sort of like Oculus Rift or that Al Pacino movie a few years back about the virtual woman. Simone, I think it was called? I’m not going to look it up. Never mind, that’s not important. Anyway, instead of going over the premise of St. Vincent, I thought I’d just list all of the clichés I found, which should give you a pretty good idea of... Read More

When Sandra Bullock won the Oscar for the The Blind Side, everyone just shrugged and said, “meh, it was a thin year”. So the idea that Sandra Bullock is a talented actress has gotten way out of hand. Her performance in this movie wasn’t enough to ruin it, but it could have been better. Not as good as one of your Chastains, Lawrences, Hathaways (see: Interstellar and Mockingjay), etc. But decent enough. Gravity is a visually stunning movie. For reals. If you’ve got a big fat 4K LCD with 37.1 Surround sound, you’re in for a treat. It will possibly melt your eyeballs,... Read More