With his trademark bombast, Michael Bay addresses the tragedy of Benghazi with great attention to the details of battle, and only the most superficial of attitudes towards everything else. Based on the book by Mitchell Zuckoff that recounted the 2012 attack by local insurgents on the temporary American embassy and the CIA station in that… Read More »
STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS
What you really want to know is whether or not J. J. Abrams has worked his magic and saved the Star Wars franchise. The answer is not just yes. But, rather, YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is perfection. That is all you really need to know and, while I will not do this film the disservice of lessening… Read More »
IN THE HEART OF THE SEA
No one knows why a whale of unusual coloration destroyed the whaling ship Essex in 1820. Certainly, nothing of the sort had been reported before, though whaling ships had been aggressively hunting the largest animal to ever live on earth ever since the discovery that whale oil could be used to light lamps and heat… Read More »
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY — Part 2
THE HUNGER GAMES may be based on a wildly popular young adult series of novels, but the film adaptations have always tackled issues that are powerfully adult and presented as such. Set in an unspecified future, the class system has run so wild that the life and death of the proletariat class has become institutionalized… Read More »
SPECTRE
There are very specific things we want in a James Bond film. Great action, dastardly villains who are larger than life and twice as buggy, and Bond girls who have evolved over the years to be a bit more than merely a pulchritudinous interlude. In Bond, as incarnated by Daniel Craig, we want a steely… Read More »
THE LAST WITCH HUNTER
THE LAST WITCH HUNTER is a long slog. There are few genuine scares. There are few remarkable special effects. There is, instead, a pervasive and persistent lassitude to this tale of an immortal witch hunter, Kaulder (Vin Diesel), and the complicated relationship he has tracking down the eponymous practitioners of magic. Kaulder is very good… Read More »
SICARIO
There are many iconic moments in SICARIO, but the one that sticks in my mind is the one where dedicated and upright FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is being given the lowdown from glib and slippery DOJ agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) about what winning the war on drugs will really entail. The camera… Read More »
MAZE RUNNER: THE SCORCH TRIALS
THE MAZE RUNNER: SCORCH TRIALS is a fast-paced, involving adventure tale that is better than the original. Where that installment, though entertaining enough, had the usual quota of young adult novel clichés, this one is a lean, mean look at a dystopian future run by an evil entity with noble intentions. Those are, of course,… Read More »
THE TRANSPORTER: (not) REFUELED
A few years ago I interview Patton Oswalt for YOUNG ADULT, and during the chat I asked him to expand on something that he had said with which I totally agreed: Jason Statham makes any movie better. (Click here for the interview and my mini-rant about how unfair it was that Oswalt didn’t get an… Read More »
HITMAN: AGENT 47 A Swing and A Miss
This is not the first time that someone has attempted to bring the video game upon which HITMAN: AGENT 47 is based to the big screen. The last one, HITMAN starring a pre-Justified Timothy Olyphant went down in flames, and this one joins its still-smoldering carcass. It’s not that making a film out of a video… Read More »
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