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First of all, anyone worried about this film staying true to the art of the original should know that author Maurice Sendak gave his full approval to director Spike Jonze, writer Dave Eggers, and their conceptual interpretation of his classic of childrens’ literature Where the Wild Things Are. This is not the Sendak book I [...]

Anybody reading this who knows the name Hayao Miyazaki probably won’t need any convincing from me to check out his latest film Ponyo. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Japanese master animator, he is widely and ever-increasingly recognized as one of the greatest filmmakers working today, and you owe it to yourself [...]

I would never accuse disaster master Roland Emmerich of possessing nuance, or even style, for that matter, but he who gave us Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow sure knows how to put on a show. I mean, in 2012, his latest end-of-the-world extravaganza, he destroys the White House with nothing less than an [...]

The film 9 was originally presented as a graduating student short film by Shane Acker. The story of 9 follows a group of nine animatronic, tweed-covered puppets that have been brought to life by a “brilliant” scientist at the brink of humanity’s extinction. Why this is done or what is the bringer of such chaotic [...]

Even before I took my three younger nephews (ages 4, 6, and 7) to see this somewhat frantic, effects-filled kid flick about super spy guinea pigs, they were quoting one-liners from its trailers. Especially funny to them was the sight and sound of one of the rodents farting inside a tricked-out, super-fast hamster ball.

When the eminent Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron was brought on to direct the third (and still best) Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban, he proved that the franchise would be strongest when it  departed from a rote retelling of J.K. Rowling’s books and charted its own identity and style. As the books progressed, each [...]

This has been a pretty bad year for the American studio system. It seems like everyone from Paramount to Fox is billions of dollars in debt, and churning out countless re-makes of more popular foreign films or sequels to vapid franchises. My top ten list this year has been devoid of American films… until now.
Terminator [...]

While this second entry in Ben Stiller’s family-friendly, Mannequin-inspired franchise is certainly calmer and more entertaining than its hyperactive predecessor, it earns points alone for featuring Darth Vader and Oscar the Grouch in the same scene.
It sees Stiller infiltrating the Smithsonian Institute to help his wax figure friends, who have been shipped there, along with [...]

Since its genesis in the mid-1960’s, Star Trek has in one respect been something of a rarity in science fiction: it depicts a positive future in which humanity has come together to resolve Earth’s problems and has taken its place as part of an interplanetary Federation. Most of the future worlds we’ve seen in sci-fi [...]

Once while I was in the 5th Grade, I wrote a story about a pair of kleptomaniacal chimpanzees who escape from the San Diego zoo and, after a series of adventures, end up flying around in a raft kept aloft by two parachutes filled with wind. When Pixar made Up, a tale of an old [...]