User Reviews

When I first saw J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot/make in 2009, I was unlike many of my 14 year old peers in that I had seen a fairly sizable amount of The Original Series beforehand. I knew who each of the Enterprise crewmembers were, and I remember being quite excited ...

I avoided watching this film for a long time because it got terrible reviews, and because I heard it was a comedic take on the material, and while not exactly a fan of the original Dark Shadows, I was an admirer of it - and the 1991 revival of the ...

O Something Falls All RightStar Trek, with its long running franchise and cultural capital will always be viewed through a lens of prior Trek works and other contempory pieces. Star Trek Into Darkness nearly goes through with an all around entertaining space adventure, that is audibly called out as distictly ...

Baz Luhrman does the near-impossible task of taking a tragedy for the modern age and elevating it into a big-budget, continuously engrossing spectacle that retains all of its source material’s depth and craftsmanship.Nick Carraway, the protagonist of both the film and the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic novel it is based ...

Tropic Thunder might not actually be what you'd call a particularly good movie, but by the low standards of genre parodies (The ZAZ films, the National Lampoon films, and worst of all the Scary/Epic/Disaster/Date Movie films), Tropic Thunder is a masterpiece; especially given that its written, directed and starring Ben ...

I have to admit that I was a trifle bit disappointed with this film in which is supposed to showcase Superman and Captain Marvel (Shazam). The pair of superheroes have been rivals since back to the late 1930s when they both debuted.Superman may have been the first on the scene, ...

In the wake of Reservoir Dogs and El Mariachi, there were scores of takes on the crime drama: The Boondock Saints, Bottle Rocket, Croupier, 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Fargo, Get Shorty, Killing Zoe, Leon: The Professional, A Life Less Ordinary, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Love and ...

If a studio were to make a big budget adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I’d have wanted it to be Baz Luhrmann. For all his faults he manages to do glitz and glamour in beautiful and stylish ways. This holds true for Gatsby. What is surprising is how doggishly faithful ...

I have absolutely no idea what the Hell M. Night Shyamalan was thinking when he put this movie together. How to best butcher and ruin a genuinely spectacular series? Because that’s what it felt like.Before anyone claims that I am biased by the original series though, I have to say ...

Was Scream 4 jumping the gun?I guess not, I mean there have been as many years between this 'reboot' of the Scream franchise as there was between the original Scream and most of the films it was an homage to.So was it jumping the shark?Well, if we go by the ...

Before there was the Power Rangers … there was The Guyver. Made before CGI was viable, this live action adaptation of the Japanese manga was actually a fairly accurate on the basic story where an ordinary young man is thrust into the extraordinary when he runs across a strange alien ...

In 1966 Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek as a TV series and coincidentally this was the same year that director J.J. Abrams was born. The show was pitched as a space Western in the vein of Wagon Train, which was a Western mystery show set on the Frontier. Star Trek ...

The first of Marvel’s attempt to expand certain scenes in their cinematic movie-verse. I have to say that I admire that they decided to do this and did in a manner that didn’t focus entirely on the superheroes who populate this world and instead on some of the supporting characters ...

How To Train Your Dragon has received so many accolades that there really isn't much more for me to say. It's an animated adventure about a Viking boy who befriends a dragon - the natural enemies of the Vikings - and together they save both their societies by bringing them ...

In 1995 Harmony Korine wrote the screenplay for the Larry Clark film Kids, an unflinching drama about kids engaging in underage sex and drug use. Two years later, Korine made his directional debut with the bleak, apocalyptic Gummo, which charted more absurdist waters in a post-apocalyptic world of boredom and ...

The unrelenting bleakness and dour nature of The Place Beyond the Pines pitches a question about the difference between empathy and sympathy for troubled characters. Each of the film's conflicted male characters makes poor decisions but only because they are trapped in impossible situations, where action seems necessary.Two out of ...

Director Fede Alvarez smashes onto the scene with a wildly entertaining picture that has pretty much everything you would want from a modern day horror film. He knows when the picture should be scary, when it should be funny, and--most importantly--he knows the importance of telling an actual story.David, Eric, ...

In 2008 Iron Man kicked off what would be known as Marvel Phase One., 6 films over four years ending in the Marvel’s Avengers. After all of that Tony Stark is back to his solo gig trying to figure out how to function after the world knows not only is ...

Unlike the big budget, live action monstrosity which let me down immensely, DC Showcase: Jonah Hex is an example of what a really good gritty Western flick is all about, even if it is a 12-minute animation short.Hex is the bad@$$ bounty hunter who is hunting down a criminal and ...

It is the secret dream of every comic book geek to suddenly gain superpowers. Of course, in all probability, us geeks would not go and fight crime and save lives as our favorite comic book heroes; but Jerry O’Connell did as Andrew Clements in this short-lived television series in the ...

Push contains a pretty good concept of superhumans existing in the real world. Had it been drawn out and used as a television series, it might have worked but it fails in this hugely compacted format that we barely understand what it going on.The utter complexity of the whole situation ...

Dragon is, if nothing else, ambitious. It attempts to be a mystery-crime-thriller-martial-arts-period-piece with digital effects. And, stylistically it achieves its goal. There is a mystery, set in the world of organized crime at the dawn of the 20th Century, with outstanding fight choreography and beautiful scenery and period sets. It ...

I first read The Hobbit about 35 years ago, and ever since it has been one of my favorite books. But when I heard Peter Jackson was turning it into a live action feature film, I was a little conflicted. On the one hand, Jackson is a fantastic director who ...

AboutDeaf and mute teenager, Dot (Camilla Belle) moves in with her godparents, the Deer's, in their idyllic suburban home after her father's sudden death. However, despite their 'perfect' reputation, Dot soon discovers the sick secret that plagues the household and becomes an unsuspecting witness to the crumbling family of mother, ...

Apparently Marvel has been making these bonus feature movies for a while that I suspect is intended to build up SHIELD as a viable series. They don’t actually focus on the lives of the superheroes of the Marvel Movie-verse but rather how their actions affect the lives of others and ...

Let's get this out of the way at the start: I have been a fan of the Warhammer 40K universe for years. A friend talking about it lead to an afternoon on Wikipedia digging through the lore followed by years of reading books based in the 40K universe. As such, ...

Let me start by saying that I liked Oblivion a lot. By the time the credits ran I felt satisfied. There was no bad taste in my mouth, no gaping plot holes I could find, and no aspect of the film I could really single out as being blatantly bad. ...

Catwoman is one of those few comic book characters who falls into a puuur-fectly grey area. She’s a thief but not a killer, and she’s not a hero either but she can be pretty damn heroic when she needs to be. All and all, Catwoman is the one individual who ...

You knew Tarantino was going to get around to this sooner or later. Having already given us modern pastiches of the 70s crime film, the blaxsploitation film, the chop-socky film, the grindhouse film, and the spaghetti war film, he had to get to the spaghetti western. In fact, it's kind ...

Modern cinema revels so frequently in destruction and chaos that it is extraordinary that a film as unambitious and appalling as Olympus Has Fallen can surprise you in the way that it fetishises big guns, explosions, high body counts and the demolition of various American monuments. Mindless blockbusters like this ...

Imagine a film like Sin City or 300 that is almost entirely made up of epic digital environments. Now imagine a film like Cast Away or Moon that relies on the acting talents of a single actor for the majority of the film. Finally, imagine an epic fantasy film that's ...

Is Hollywood still capable of writing interesting characters? It's distressing how rapidly mainstream films are losing touch with the opening thirty minutes of a story, failing to engage us with detailed characterisation, interesting backstories and personal motives to drive the character's personal reasons for their journey. Character development is reduced ...

Trance is an extremely convoluted film by director Danny Boyle, not necessarily because of the narrative structure but how the film is stylistically pronounced. There are audio-visual red herrings used to mask over the absurdity of a plot that switches from a heist movie to an internal psychodrama. However, once ...

One of the best Spaghetti Westerns not directed by Sergio Leone is Django. The title character, Django, is in all other ways practically interchangeable with the Clint Eastwood 'Man with No Name' character. In this, the first of what was to become a long-running series of 'Django' films, Django walks ...

This is one of the dumbest films I’ve seen. There is no logic, sense, or coherency to anything the characters do, both morally and practically. That also applies to the filmmakers.In the near future, the Earth has been conquered by aliens that take control of people’s minds. Melanie Stryder was ...

Remakes in general tend to be underwhelming, and whenever you take a classic well-loved film and try to remake it, you're almost certainly doomed to fail. The best you can hope for is to make something 'as good' as the original - but you will more than likely fall short.This ...

How to Train Your Dragon is not a surprising film. There is no plot twist that makes you think 'woah! I never saw this coming!' - we already know, from the title of the film (if we don't know about the books or the trailers already) that somebody (probably the ...

This Corman quickie is what you expect it to be - bad. Corman even hedged his bets on this one by having the cast and crew make another film, Ski Troop Attack at the same time. While it fails to hit the same level of awesomeness that other so-bad-they're good ...

Of all the films Milos Foreman has directed, aside from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the three biographies he's done have been the best: Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Man on the Moon. Part of the reason is because of his style - Foreman works with such ...

I grew up on 'Detective Comics', you know, the comic from which DC Comics gets its name.That company practically invented the superhero as we know it, and has been making quality stories almost twice as long as their biggest competitor (Marvel Comics Group). Today DC Comics is owned by one ...

So we have G.I. Joe Retaliation from director Jon Chu, creator of such fabulous works of art such as Step up 2: the streets, Step up 3d and Justin Bieber Never say never. While watching this film, something felt off, its like the movie was very cheaply made, not monetarily, ...

I love this movie, Un-remorsefully and un-apolegetically. Having just been very underwhelmed by Retaliation, I decided to go back and see what went down in the first film. All I heard from everyone about Rise of Cobra was that it was the worst piece of shit every created and that ...

Antoine Fuqua brings his fantastic skills as a director of gritty crime dramas to make a high-profile action blockbuster that retains the intense, R-rated, realistic, and believable vibe of his earlier movies. The result is a film that is tremendously entertaining while not being so far-fetched as to prevent audiences ...

Coming into this one I was very skeptical but I still wanted to give it a chance to surprise me. The first hour of this movie is actually alright if you don't mind Colin Farrell's terrible fake american accent. The locations look very futuristic and very cool. Although this movie ...

Far surpassing Ang Lee’s overly complicated Hulk movie, this film truly lives up to it’s name as incredible. By tying it into a failed US Army Super-Soldier Experiment, this reboot successfully intertwined the Hulk into the new Marvel Movie-verse yet remaining distinct and separate. The plot is complex yet not ...

Ever since James Cagney got behind the wheel in The Crowd Roars, the car film has become a genre unto itself. By the 60s and 70s the genre hit an all-time high with films like Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry, Thunder Road, Vanishing Point, Bullit, Two Lane Blacktop, White Lightning, ...

In a galaxy far, far away, Earth was one of many inhabited planets made by Christ to bring about immortality. This was part of a pre-mortal world where people belonged to spirit parents. These spirit children were sent to Earth in human form, a physical body, so they could gain ...

Before he was a Mighty Avenger; he was a spoiled brat of a Prince. Before he was a bitter enemy; he was a loving brother. And that is the real key to this movie and what I truly liked best about it. Thor: Tales of Asgard shows the audience, a ...

First a bit of context. When the first trailer of G.I. Joe Retaliation was released dubstep was still actively being used in marketing. The film was originally set to be release in June of 2012 and now finds itself opening up the spring early summer gamut of blockbuster franchise films. ...

Spring Breakers is my favorite project that Harmony Korine has taken on in his career so far. While I’ve loved his work thus far idealistically, or of what I’ve already seen, this film seems like an incredibly well executed experiment with an actual sort of point to its mindlessness, or ...