The Star Trek franchise has never been about wondering how the intrepid crew of the Starship Enterprise would save the day against impossible odds. Rather, the suspense has always come from the struggle between hope and despair as they have battled aliens, space viruses, and their own inner conflicts to snatch victory from certain doom.… Read More »
JASON BOURNE
I’m put in mind of tea leaves. Good quality tea leaves that have rendered such a wonderful cup of tea that you wonder if maybe, just maybe, there’s enough of their essential, unique quality left to take one more infusion to make a cup as good as that first one. And so it is with… Read More »
ICE AGE: COLLISON COURSE
The Ice Age series has always gone more for the heart that the funny bone, though there is no denying that Scrat’s eternal and Sisyphean struggle both to acquire and to retain the acorn he’s been chasing through the four previous films has, in equal parts, both hilarity and a keen commentary on the noble struggle of humankind against a basically unfeeling universe.
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE
INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE was released here in San Francisco without a press screening. And for good reason. I’m putting The Golden Raspberry Awards Foundation on notice that we might have a new frontrunner for next year’s Razzies. We begin on the eponymous holiday. Twenty years have passed since Steve Hiller (Will Smith, appearing in this… Read More »
FINDING DORY
FINDING DORY, the eminently worthy sequel to 2003’s FINDING NEMO, is essentially one long chase. In this it shares much with last year’s blockbuster MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, including the sense that nothing is impossible, including testing the laws of physics to their limits, and a strong message of feminine empowerment, as exemplified by that… Read More »
NOW YOU SEE ME 2
The best caper films keep us guessing even while we’re watching the caper in progress. In that way, NOW YOU SEE ME 2 succeeds admirably. The return of the The Horsemen, a band of underground magicians dedicated to truth, justice, and outsmarting everyone around them, including each other, provides several set pieces that are fine… Read More »
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
There could be many reasons to eschew the story that Lewis Carroll himself wrote about Alice and her adventures through the looking glass. Alas, Disney’s ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS does not find any of them. There is a perfect madness in that book that the script by Linda Woolverton fails to capture. Instead we… Read More »
X-MEN: APOCALYPSE
X-MEN APOCALYPSE is as big and bold as a special effect-laden action-adventure flick should be. It’s also audacious enough to make the story about more than leveling the planet or finding new ways to decapitate people. As with the best in this series from the Marvel Comics universe, the real enemy is the lethal combination… Read More »
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR asks the cinematic question “What would happen if we took a whole passel of superheroes from the Marvel Comic universe and tossed them together into one film?” But wait, what if we pitted them against one another over a fundamental difference of opinion about ethics, and then added a dash (or… Read More »
THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT
As is the wont with these franchises based on young adult novels, THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT, the third in the series, begins where the last one left off. No flashback montage, no character narration bringing us up to date. Instead, there’s just a quick reminder that Jeanine is dead, and that everyone on screen is… Read More »