This latest Disney picture, Beauty and the Beast, joins a growing list of live-action movies which traces its origins to animated films, including “The Jungle Book,” “Pete’s Dragon,” “Cinderella” and “Maleficent,” among others. The bar here, however, is just a bit higher, considering the 1991 edition became the first animated feature to earn a Best…
Vampyres is based on a 1974 cult classic. I haven’t seen the original, but it looks perfectly sleazy, decadent, and nasty, so I’m sure it’s right up my alley. Unfortunately, its successor is charmless and devoid of such luxuries as acting and a decent script. Which kind of means it fails at being a bad…
The new-look Spider-Man (Tom Holland) made a big splash in “Captain America: Civil War” and he is sure to do so in his latest rebooted effort, Spider-Man: Homecoming. I say this because Marvel is involved in the production to rub off some of the bad mojo Sony has dripped upon the franchise over the past…
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…
“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…
Anyone who has read my reviews with any sense of regularity will know that when confronted with a remake or a reboot (which seems to be the norm and not the exception in Hollywood today), I always return to the source film for guidance. These projects usually fall into two categories, a) an improvement upon…
With The Legend of Tarzan, Tarzan meets the cast of “Planet of the Apes” and no one comes out looking good. To this reporter’s count, there have been more than 30 screen adaptations of the semi-classic Edgar Rice Burroughs tale of “Tarzan, King of the Apes,” from the first appearance in 1918 (with silent star…
