SPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER: I am Groot. Much like our guest reviewer, I was delighted with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. It balances action, humor, character dynamics and stunning effects both visual and practical with multiple plot strands and explorations of family, regret and reconciliation. It is all the more impressive considering what it has…
Passengers, the newest Sony Pictures (Village Roadshow) release, directed by Morten Tyldum (“The Imitation Game”), is a visually stunning outer space adventure with a very good cast (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia and Laurence Fishburne) that fails to lift off due to an earth-bound, cliché-ridden script. That last item can be blamed…
Well, in case you were wondering, Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) is still a big buffoon who doesn’t understand nuance. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) still has the hots for Gamora (Zoe Saldana) who may finally be enjoying the attention. Rocket (Bradley Cooper) still has a hard-on for blowing things up, but mostly on display in…
Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven is set in a world where even having a drink requires vigilance. The film opens with Bartholomew Bogue’s (Peter Sarsgaard, “Black Mass”) hostile takeover of Rose Creek, a small mining community. This results in the deaths of countless settlers — most notably Matthew Cullen (Matt Bomer, “The Nice Guys”), whose…
It has been 22 years since the incident at Isla Nublar, but the earlier devastation is now just a footnote in the logbook of the InGen financiers, for they have forgotten the tumult and the ethical barriers they tore down and commercialized. They now operate a seemingly infallible amusement park with monorails, an aviary, a…
You muck with nature and nature mucks you back. And as seen in this latest trailer for Jurassic World, it does so by eating you and everything else within range of its fanged mouth. Causing all the initial problems is a hybrid dinosaur, known as Indominus Rex, conceived in the lab to be bigger than…
Isla Nublar is in business! And if you thought T-Rex or the Velociraptors were bad news, you haven’t seen the dinosaur mutation dreamed up by the scientists of the park (led by Bryce Dallas Howard). Patrons weren’t supposed to see it either, but nature has a way of breaking containment (didn’t something similar happen in…
