There is a stigma associated with foreign films, especially ones that are shot in black and white and set in a historical period that most Americans are unfamiliar with: That they are long and boring and nothing ever happens. I’ll be the first to admit it: It’s hard to get ...
The new documentary **“Life Itself”** opens with a quote from beloved late film critic **Roger Ebert:** “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are ...
When a new technological breakthrough happens in the realm of motion-picture visual effects, it’s often the best thing about the movie. Sometimes it’s the only thing worth remembering. How many times have you walked away from a mediocre film and said, “Well, the special effects were good”? So it is ...
The really great action movies are all about urgency — that life-and-death situation where the stakes couldn’t be any higher and the main character doesn’t have any other choice but to forge ahead. The new multinational co-production **“Snowpiercer”** has urgency in spades, but it also accomplishes something that’s even more ...
**“Transformers: Age of Extinction”** isn’t so much a movie as it is a 165-minute propaganda film made to appeal to the widest demographic possible (it's full of gorgeous people running from gorgeous explosions set to the new single by Imagine Dragons) — but mainly for China. And when Michael Bay ...
If the 2007 action comedy “Hot Fuzz,” starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, poked light fun at the homoerotic subtext of “Point Break,” starring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, then the new action comedy **“22 Jump Street”** is its doltish, punch-drunk cousin. With ludicrously funny action scenes that rely on ...
**“Edge of Tomorrow”** is a sci-fi actioner with the mechanics of a video game, where the protagonist gets another life and another chance every time he dies, but retains the knowledge and skill of all past lives. What helps the movie rise above a superficial level, however, is that it ...
There’s a telling scene toward the beginning of **“Maleficent,”** a revisionist retelling of “Sleeping Beauty,” from Disney, the same studio that made the classic fairy tale famous again with its animated version in 1959. For a brief moment, outside the contrived conflict that surrounds this revenge-turned-sweet story, the young faery ...
Since Bryan Singer's "X-Men" debuted in 2000, Hollywood has given us three different Incredible Hulks, two Spider-Men, two more Supermen, and has started rebooting the Fantastic Four and Daredevil. The filmic legacy of the X-Men before now spanned six uneven movies and covers confusing timelines that date back to the ...
What kind of a movie would waste the talents of Oscar nominees **Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Ken Watanabe** and **Juliette Binoche**? A “Godzilla” movie, that’s what kind. Another way to look at it is that **“Godzilla,”** the newest reboot of a franchise that started in Japan in 1954, didn’t waste ...
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