Edwards has done the unthinkable, crafting a modern Godzilla that not only pays deft homage to the creature’s glorious past but also makes many of its closest impersonators feel hollow and misguided when stood up next to it.

That’s what The Amazing Spider-Man 2 does best, waste inherent potential. It’s got a great actor as the main character; does almost nothing with him. Has a wonderful actress as the female lead; gives her embarrassingly little to do. Casts two great stars – one up and coming, the other a bona fide Oscar-winner – as the bad guys; gives them precious little of substance to do.

If it had been 20 minutes shorter, had the filmmakers not been so encumbered by the need to maintain fidelity to the MCU, I think it is safe to say Captain America: The Winter Soldier would be the best Marvel movie thus far.

If Sabotage (2014) doesn’t quite get there, it’s not for lack of trying on [Schwarzengger’s] part, and I like the decision to tackle something so profoundly dark, close to off-putting. The movie is a pulpy piece of revenge noir that’s in the end as bleak and as riddled with despair as these enterprises can get (think Man on Fire), that in and of itself almost enough to warrant a recommendation on my part right there alone.

The world Divergent depicts is hardly special or new, and while I am slightly curious to see what happens next I can’t say I’m enough so to proclaim I’d be all that bummed if the studio decided to forgo making the sequels and let things end with this.

Is it any surprise that Need for Speed is dumb movie?

Ambitious Empire Almost Rises to the Occasion 300: Rise of an Empire is, for the most part, set concurrently to the events depicted in Zack Snyder’s audacious, hugely successful (and somewhat influential) adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300. Instead of focusing on one key event, however, this movie, also based on a Miller graphic […]

Absurd Non-Stop Somehow Still Flies High Federal Air Marshall Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) is having a bad day. He’s an alcoholic. He smokes too much. He doesn’t particularly care for his job anymore. For that matter, he doesn’t believe he’s still any good at it. The flight to London is one he doesn’t want to […]

Reimagined RoboCop Back Laying Down the Law There’s no doubt that a big budget remake of director Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 satirical, hyper-violent 1987 sci-fi classic RoboCop always felt like a bad idea. There was no way a Hollywood studio, in this case Sony Pictures and MGM, would allow any of the deep, dark, unsentimentally brutal […]