There is a saying that I think could apply to the current trend for reboots, remakes and long-delayed sequels as well as to good eating habits: “The feast is in the first bite.” While watching Independence Day: Resurgence and trying to practice . . .
Saying the book is better than the movie is a tired, if true, response to a film adaptation of a novel. That said, when the screenplay is written by the author of the novel I hold out more hope for the movie. Unfortunately, in adapting her book, Me . . .
Imagine dropping Nancy Drew into a neo-noir film from the 1970s, but Miss Drew has taken on some of the characteristics of Tatum O’Neal in The Bad News Bears. This contrast and the chemistry between stars Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling provide most . . .
Money Monster focuses on one particularly tense day on the set of the eponymous financial advice show. In the wake of Ibis, a large financial company, losing $800 million dollars of investors’ money, Money Monster host Lee Gates (George Clooney) . . .
The Huntsman: Winter’s War is so bad it breezes past the potential for “so bad it’s good” enjoyment and straight into boring, incoherent territory. Whereas the film seems to aspire to an anti-Frozen narrative by focusing on two sisters who . . .
My Big Fat Greek Wedding was the second movie I ever reviewed for this paper, back when I didn’t even have a driver’s license yet, and my parents had to drive me to the theater. It was a charming sleeper hit that became the highest grossing romantic . . .
You know what I’m afraid of more than aliens? Car accidents and strangers. 10 Cloverfield Lane takes a step back from the sci-fi scares of the first film in the franchise and instead presents audiences with an emotionally complex nail-biter about . . .
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the latest film starring Tina Fey, is most interesting as a war film that doesn’t engage with either patriotism or the discourse of brotherhood that is so paradigmatic of the genre. Instead, the story is told through the critical, . . .
The subtitle for Race, the new biopic about Olympic medalist Jesse Owens, should have been, “See What We Did There?”. Like the obvious double meaning of the title, the film itself continually uses easy conventions and sentimental shortcuts. Although . . .
Hail, Caesar!, the latest film from the Coen brothers, playfully represents Hollywood during the Golden studio system, with a tongue-in-cheek humor about the machinations of star making without steering into full-blown spoof.
The film centers on Eddie . . .
I think it is rare for filmmakers to really portray children playing authentically, capturing the randomness and abandon in their fun. Mustang, the French film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, captures moments of make-believe . . .
The Revenant, which means “one who has returned, as if from the dead”, is our semi-annual reminder that the frontier was violent, dangerous, and bleak. The film also features a performance from Leonardo DiCaprio that is so committed it seems like . . .
It has been a frustrating few months for me when it comes to the movies. Repeatedly, I went to a movie that seemed sure to impress and walked away underwhelmed. I thought maybe it was me, that I had become hard to please, but the box office reports . . .
This fall, I’ve reviewed a string of movies that have good working parts that do not quite come together to make a good movie. For various reasons, they have fallen short of their intended tone, or simply fallen flat. Secret in Their Eyes continues . . .
The fear of being buried alive is a primal terror that has spawned its share of scary stories and legends. Yet, for miners, that fear is connected to a very real danger. In the event of a mine collapse, being buried alive is a real possibility. In . . .
With our own elections dragging on for longer each cycle, audiences might wonder why they would want to see a movie about a presidential campaign in a Central American country, run by American strategists. Our Brand Is Crisis offers many of the frustrating . . .
Every year, a new version of Malala Yousafzai’s story has come out. Two consecutive summers featured the release of an autobiography by the iconic activist. This year’s offering is the documentary He Named Me Malala.
He Named Me Malala takes a non-linear . . .
As we headed into the theater on Friday, my fiance turned to me and asked, “So, is The Martian just Castaway on Mars?” Although the connection seems obvious, I think the emphasis on community in the film gives it a lighter tone and many fun characters . . .
In 2011, after 12 years on the run, James Bulger, one of the most notorious Irish mobsters in Boston, was captured and faced 32 counts of racketeering, including 19 murder charges. Black Mass, a movie controversial among those who lived through the . . .
Amid the genuinely terrible movies that come out at the end of summer, came a film starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, and Emma Thompson. With that formidable cast, and a plot that seemed hard to mess up, I was sure that A Walk in the Woods was better . . .
In The Man from U.N.C.L.E., director Guy Ritche seeks to blend Mad Men style nostalgia for Cold War period pieces with the winking style of current genre films. The result is a stylish, fun, but ultimately unremarkable spy movie that is enjoyable to . . .
Have you ever run into someone at the store and not been able to place where you know them from, so you just played along? Now, imagine if that awkward moment did not end there, but instead spiraled into unwanted visits, confrontations, and drudging . . .
A paper town is a fictional town that is invented by cartographers to make it obvious if someone violates their copyright. This fact is perhaps the most interesting part of Paper Towns, the novel, and now film, by John Green. Even still, Paper Towns . . .
I am as big a fan of the Minions as any adult really has the right to be. There’s something wrong, however, when I take my eleven year-old sister to see Minions and the hardest she laughs is at the title characters singing the fanfare for the Universal . . .