“Original” would seem the last word one should use to describe a current kids’ movie about the friendship between a boy and his dragon that is both a remake and a sort of “E.T.” clone, but it is what it is. As Disney is knee-deep in pillaging their catalog of classics for profits, they’ve managed…
Every once in a while, there are films that reaffirm their genres. That’s not to say that they’ve suffered without them, but true gems are few and far between. I consider “Let the Right One In” to be one of these gems among the horror sub-genres. I’d consider Spike Jonze’s “Her” a contender for romance,…
The opening shots of Nine Lives are composed of actual cat videos ripped straight from the internet. It’s incredibly fitting, because Nine Lives feels about as funny as a cat video, but runs almost 86 minutes longer than most of those. When a premise is this tired, the final product is only as good as…
I was only nine years old when the first “Ice Age” came out in 2002, but my memories of it are very fond. While it hasn’t aged as gracefully as I’d hoped in recent years, I still regard it as one of my favorite childhood movies because of its great character dynamics and clever Looney…
The dog days of the summer schlockbusters are upon us and soon we will be inundated with mediocre and below average films such as the new “Ghostbusters,” another “Ice Age” installment and the dismal “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” among others. Trying to fight this deluge, though, is the animated feature from Universal Pictures…
I normally do not hold much hope for sequels that appear more than five years after the first installment (“The Two Jakes” comes immediately to mind). And although they fared alright with “Monsters, Inc.” and “Monsters University” (a prequel technicality), the same feeling came over me when I heard Pixar/Disney was releasing Finding Dory, a…
I could not decide what was the worst thing to happen to Johnny Depp in 2016: Not getting a deserved Academy Award nomination for “Black Mass,” the ugly and public divorce proceedings he is going through with his wife, Amber Heard, or starring in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to 2010’s “Alice in…
