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 […]

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, clunky title aside, does a nice job of making Clancy’s hero relevant again. It brings him into the post-9/11 world with invigorating and suspenseful aplomb, and while Branagh’s effort doesn’t rise to the same heights as the two Phillip Noyce directed efforts with Ford, and is certainly light years away from the near-perfection of John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October, it’s still a solidly entertaining thriller that’s easy to enjoy.

Thing is, Lawrence doesn’t allow herself to go over the top into cartoonish histrionics, holding her own in every scene no matter what’s going on or who it is she’s sharing the frame with. The last image is all about her, the film closing on a fantastic transformative sight that showcases all who Katniss has been with all she is about to be become.

[The] only reason Thor: The Dark World exists is to start putting in place the building blocks leading to both Guardians of the Galaxy and 2015’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron. It’s the teaser leading to the epic conclusion, little things like character development and honest human emotions unimportant just as long as the seeds for coming chapters are cunningly sown.

Ender’s Game looks incredible, and the cast does their collective best, but the bad taste left in my mouth after it came to an end was unavoidably loathsome.

While the messaging is on the heavy-handed side, those who agree with Blomkamp’s statements are going to eat up his commentary on class warfare and our collective descent into a dehumanized society by the bucket loads, the filmmaker constructing arguably the most anti one-percent motion picture financed by a major Hollywood studio in recent memory.

They keep things intimate, personal and close to the vest, events revolving around Logan’s battles with his inner demons above all else. The Wolverine isn’t interested in the big or the audacious, instead choosing to turn inward whenever it can, in essence making it one of the more anachronistic Marvel superhero epics to grace the multiplex up to now.

I didn’t dislike Man of Steel, not at all, but I just as readily didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I wanted to, either. Nothing about this latest Superman iteration captivated me, none of it connected on an emotional level, and while the action theatrics fly considerably higher than any previous adaptation the shortcomings found in the human department frustratingly kept the project as a whole from soaring.