In Chronicle we get one of the year’s best films, a fun and cool and awesome piece of lower-budget sci-fi that uses the found footage format, a simple but neat premise and seamless special effects to deftly detail in larger-than-life fashion what I imagine are the horrors of being a bullied teenager today. Dreamed up [...]
Read More Chronicle, Dane DeHaan, David, drama, Josh Trank, Max Landis, Sci-Fi, thriller
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, UnderworldIt’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 MoreWhat will we do? If it happens? The end of the world? Close our eyes then open them quickly because if we can’t see catastrophe then it can’t see us, so it sidles by? Decamp to a personal, illusory safe haven? Take cold comfort in I-told-you-so’s to whoever is left? We know we’ll pull out [...]
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 MoreIt’s a bit surprising to consider that nearly as many years have elapsed since John Carpenter‘s 1982 sci-fi thriller The Thing as between it and its own predecessor, 1951′s The Thing From Another World, directed by Howard Hawks. Both are widely considered to be classics in the sci-fi horror genres, so a third version has [...]
Read MoreImagine the young people in Logan’s Run dropping dead when they hit thirty instead of being executed and you have the basic idea for In Time, writer/director Andrew Niccol‘s sleek sci-fi effort starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried that manages to overcome lackluster acting and poor plot development thanks to its intriguing premise and striking [...]
Read MoreIf you want to get technical about it, director Shawn Levy‘s Real Steel is not an official adaptation of the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots game, but it may as well be, because I can’t imagine any other film employing the admittedly silly idea of boxing robots being as wholly enjoyable as this slick, family-friendly [...]
Read MoreJust so we’re clear, Guillermo del Toro didn’t direct this big screen version of a 1973 TV movie. He co-wrote and, as with 2007′s The Orphanage, produced it. I mention this so you don’t think him responsible for what turns out to be an unscary little horror flick.
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