You’d think a movie about Liam Neeson duking it out with wolves in the wild would be exciting. You’d be wrong. Turns out The Grey, a macho but mushy existential survival tale directed by Joe Carnahan, is actually quite a slog — dreary, overly talky and capped by one of those maddeningly ambiguous endings that [...]
Read More action, adventure, Dallas Roberts, David, Dermot Mulroney, drama, Frank Grillo, Joe Carnahan, Liam Neeson, The Grey
Having skipped the prequel Rise of the Lycans, Kate Beckinsale returns to rock skintight leather and kick quite a bit more butt as beautiful bloodsucker Selene in Underworld: Awakening, the slick but strangely spiritless fourth entry in the nearly decade-old vampires-vs-werewolves franchise.
Read More action, blu-ray, David, DVD, Fantasy, horror, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Ealy, Stephen Rea, Theo James, Underworld
Haywire, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Gina Carano is the story of a private sector security agent who is double crossed and sets forth on a mission of revenge. First question: Who is Gina Carano? Gina is a mixed martial arts fighter and, I’m totally serious, a former “American Gladiator.” While this is not [...]
Read More action, adventure, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Gina Carano, Haywire, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Noah, Steven Soderbergh, thriller
Mark Wahlberg’s new action thriller, the New Orleans-set Contraband, is the cinematic equivalent of settling, a movie that’s not bad nor especially good, but has just enough going for it that you won’t necessarily regret spending two hours watching it.
Read MoreLight the fuse… Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (note the official title uses a dash to avoid the awkwardness of two colons) is, arguably, the best of the four Tom Cruise-led films based on the classic 1966-1973 TV series. This has a lot to do with the hiring of director Brad Bird, who heretofore had [...]
Read MoreIt’s bad enough we fight each other over our finite natural resources. Now hostile extraterrestrials want in on the action, too. At least, that’s been their m.o. in the recent rash of alien invasion flicks, including Skyline, Battle: Los Angeles and now the lackluster The Darkest Hour, which will probably best be remembered as “that [...]
Read MoreTintin may not, heretofore at least, have been a common household name here in the States (maybe due to frequent confusion with his similarly-named American canine contemporary). Even Steven Spielberg (who directed this film) only discovered Hergé’s Belgian comic strip series after someone compared it to Raiders of the Lost Ark. But though Indiana Jones [...]
Read MoreTo the surprise of no one and the chagrin of book lovers everywhere, Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson opts for style over substance in his version of the Alexandre Dumas classic The Three Musketeers, crafting a handsomely produced adventure that basically bides its time between dazzling action sequences.
Read MoreTarsem Singh, the India-born director who made the visually breathtaking but criminally little seen The Fall a few years ago with his own funds, returns to studio filmmaking in a hugely successful way with the big budget Immortals, a gorgeous, bloody, fantastically thunderous fantasy epic drawn from Greek myths.
Read MoreMartin Scorsese hasn’t heretofore been famous for making family-friendly movies with positive life-affirming messages, but there was never any reason to think he couldn’t do it well if the subject suited his tastes. I can’t think of a fairy tale that could dovetail with Scorsese’s passions much more closely than Hugo, an atmospheric kid-flick that [...]
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