Last year I reviewed the original Purge movie on my own blog and my chief complaints were that the movie was intellectually lazy for not exploring more of the complexities of the setting and for being so short that there was no time for any kind of real narrative. The Purge: Anarchy leaves practically no…
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes could have easily fallen in to the trap that many genre movies fall into of simply being competent. They scarcely have particularly original or surprising stories (and Dawn is no exception on this front) but they usually get by through skillful execution. Dawn of the Planet of the…
If my eight year-old self had seen Earth to Echo this weekend he would have loved it. It’s vaguely science-fiction-y and soft sci-fi was my jam back then. It features clever resourceful kids and clueless adults and what kid doesn’t like to think themselves cleverer than their oppressors? Earth to Echo also has a good…
Transformers: Age of Extinction is 165 minutes long. This should really be the entire review. Either you want to watch nearly three hours of Michael Bay throwing robots at the screen or you don’t. If you’ve seen any of his movies you’ve basically seen this one, there isn’t anything new just the older stuff louder,…
The original [[[Think Like a Man]]] was one of the worst movies I saw in 2012. It was an overplotted mess of a comedy that tried to even the scales on gender relations and succeeded only in as far as it made every character seem like an atrocious human being. The biggest sin that Think…
I came late to the first How To Train Your Dragon film. I caught it on HBO well over a year after release and while I thought the “better than Toy Story 3” hype was a touch overblown it was a revelation for DreamWorks Animation, which had previously churned out franchises like Shrek and Madagascar…
Mark Harris at Grantland points out that we might be hitting the mass media equivalent of the 90’s comic glut: Even as they dominate the box office, comic-book movies are approaching a moment fraught with peril. If one definition of a bubble is that everybody with an investment to protect insists that it isn’t a…
Bryan Singer was making watchable superhero movies when no one else was and because of that I want to give him a lot of slack. I’ve even mostly forgotten Superman Returns ever happened. I liked more about X-Men: Days of Future Past than I didn’t but there’s a nagging doubt in the back of my…
Criminy. Devin Faraci sitsus down for “the talk”. http://badassdigest.com/2014/05/18/we-need-to-talk-about-spider-man As AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 underperforms Sony must be considering how to fix their flailing franchise. Is this simple sequel fatigue and diminishing returns, or is it possible that we might be seeing the first superhero movie domino fall? Suddenly, a lot more seems to be riding…
I needed Godzilla to give me more monster fights. Not monsters destroying cities or people running from monsters but monsters fighting monsters. They knew that’s what I wanted too because sequences would build to those moments where two kaiju would look at each other, screech, and charge at each other only for the camera to…
Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return is simply irredeemable. I’ve been sitting in front of a blank Word document for over an hour trying to figure out where to start and have experienced new waves of outrage every time I think of another part of the movie. The characters are bad, the story is basically nonsense,…
Movies based on comic books have had to fight a practically never-ending battle for respectability but, for now at least, it seems that they’ve won. Superheroes are hot commodities at the box office and studios have embraced the idea that making them more like their source material is preferable to making movies that anger the…
