In any remake or updated take on a previously told, well-known story, one of the questions tossed about is what does this new version have to say that has not been said before? What will we learn about the world and the characters who inhabit it that we do not already know about? In other […]
It is the end of another journey in Middle-Earth and it will probably the last time we get to see J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world. As promised we get the massive Battle of the Five Armies, but the final entry of The Hobbit series suffers from being the most overblown installment with its numerous […]
Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings presents a host of conflicting ideas on a grand scale achieved through CGI shortcuts and green screen. A patchwork of thematic and theistic elements overpower the exceedingly familiar biblical story; crushing Scott’s narrative under its own weight. The film opens with “brothers” Moses (Christian Bale) and Ramses (Joel Edgerton) […]
Is she single-handedly responsible for bringing the Cheryl Strayed memoir to life on the big-screen? You could say that, since her production company Pacific Standard did option the rights for it. Frustrated with the lack of substantial character-driven works for females, Witherspoon made it her business to jump on getting Strayed’s story of personal tragedy […]
After the mistake that was the teen-romance How I Live Now, director Kevin Macdonald moves back to safe territory with the maritime thriller Black Sea, working with Utopia writer Dennis Kelly to make a fast pace thriller. Robinson (Jude Law) is a submarine captain who loses his job at a private marine salvage company. Bitter […]
“Hey, why don’t we make fun of the Arab Spring? It’ll make the perfect movie.” While something very similar to this line of reasoning is certainly the basis for Grégory Levasseur’s The Pyramid, the film’s complete ignorance to the political and social connotations of the Egyptian uprising in 2013 is embarrassing. The Pyramid‘s mockery of […]
Following the success of the Harry Potter film series, producer David Heyman has been spreading his wings, producing movies like Gravity and Testament of Youth. Now he has found another series of British children books, Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear, to adapt and with director/co-writer Paul King, gives us a delightful treat for the whole family. […]
Chris Miller and Phil Lord team up once again, with the same dynamism of their two undercover characters, to bring us the most entertaining sequel to a rebooted 80’s television show ever conceived. In what is perhaps the most self-referential film of 2014, 22 Jump Street recognizes the absurdity of its predecessor’s success, and seems […]
What do an ice-cream truck, a trailer park magician, pan-dimensional witches, and Mexican skeletons have in common? If you guessed, V/H/S: Viral, congratulations (other acceptable answers include, an abomination of a movie, the worst movie of the year, and an inexplicable piece of videotaped garbage). Don’t get me wrong, I love horror, and I enjoyed […]
I was late to The Hunger Games book series when the first novel came out back in 2008. I bought it, never read it, had it passed around my circle of friends, and finally got to it a year or so out from the first film being made. It was read in a weekend. The […]
