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 […]

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.