Once upon a time, back in the Light Ages of Hollywood genre filmmaking (aka the 80s), the ancient fantasy picture was a thing of popular beauty. They weren’t all classics, but the memorable likes of “Conan the Barbarian,” “The Beastmaster,” “Willow,” “The Princess Bride,” “Legend,” “The Neverending Story,” “Dragonslayer,” “The Last Unicorn,” and “The Dark…
When a pug is named after Jack Bauer, Colin Firth shoots stun rays through an umbrella and Samuel L. Jackson talks with an ear-piercing lisp while trying to wipe out the human race with disruptive waves sent from cellphones . . . well, it’s rather obvious you are dealing with a different kind of movie….
With each successive movie, Andy and Lana Wachowski prove that their imagination is practically unrivalled in Hollywood and that their awesome ability to bring that imagination to lush, limitless life puts them in the company of cinema’s greatest modern magicians. So it seems only fair that when the sibling team takes on the space opera…
It’s just mean to dangle an actor like Rutger Hauer in front of a fan of dark movies only to snatch him away mere minutes after the play button is pressed. With top billing and a front and center picture on the movie poster, Hauer tempts you into Real Playing Game as ailing elderly millionaire…
By their nature, submarine movies lend themselves to easy criticism — in terms of wordplay that is. Analogies such as “the performances were so painfully lacking that they ‘sunk’ the entire film” or “why watch this film when it should be isolated and submerged beneath two miles of ocean?” could easily take form. Luckily enough…
A good comic book property can’t sit idle for long, nor should it. Having waited an eternity (eight years) 20th Century Fox is finally poised to forget about 2007’s “Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer” and reboot their family of superheroes with The Fantastic Four. Unfortunately, much of it appears to be an origin…
Fairy tale revisionism has run rampant across screens of late, so with the marketplace heavily saturated, there’s no better time to revive Stephen Sondheim’s subversive musical “Into the Woods,” about a convergence of fairy tale characters discovering what lies on either side of happily ever after. Sondheim’s playful lyrics and rich humor ensure that his…
