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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

When the producers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows announced they would split the final chapter of Harry’s saga into two movies, we all knew it was a blatant attempt to wring a little more money out of the franchise. For the most part, the last two Harry Potter movies worked… the book provided enough material […]

Birdman is a rare beast. The new film by Alejandro González Iñárritu skirts the line between fantasy and reality with just the right touch of mysticism and grit. This might push Nightcrawler out of the way as the best movie of 2014. Iñárritu, director of such movies as 21 Grams and Biutiful, knows how to find the […]

The new film by Christopher Nolan, director of Inception and the Batman movies (no, not the Michael Keaton movies, if that’s what you were hoping) has just released his new film, Interstellar. I’ve been waiting for this movie for months, gobbling up trailers, anticipating, hoping it would be everything I wanted it to be. I […]

No, not the comic book character. Nightcrawler is a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal (and thank you, spellcheck, for the assist on that one. I would never get that right on my own) about the ambitious Louis Bloom, who stumbles into working as a freelance videographer. He then sells his footage to a news organization, and […]

On principle, I’m against Tom Cruise. The couch-jumping, Xenu-praising freak gets way too much attention as is. But sort of like Kanye West, Tom Cruise offstage and Tom Cruise offstage are different beasts. I thought this was going to be a dumb action movie, but the pre-release reviews were glowing. So I gave it a […]

When I was a little kid and saw The Karate Kid for the first time (obviously, the Ralph Macchio version, not the Jaden Smith version), the movie immediately made me want to learn karate. same with Top Gun. After that, I wanted to fly airplanes, wear Aviator sunglasses, and have a cool nickname like Ace […]