BLACK PANTHER is the standard by which all other superhero movies this year will be measured. Maybe this decade. Showcasing the expected show-stopping special effects, a rich mythology from the Marvel comic on which it is based, and plenty of rousing action that is both imaginative (weaponized rhinoceroses) and genuinely suspenseful, it gets the most… Read More »
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY
Leave us pass over in silence, for now, the more irksome plot devices in ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. Instead, let us focus on what a fine action/adventure film it is. This prequel to EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE takes a line from that film and builds an impressive feature-length story about the Star… Read More »
TAKEN 3
And so once again we are in the company of Bryan Mills and his very specific skill set as brought to life by the incomparable Liam Neeson. The one-man demolition squad, trained by the darkest of black ops, is once again called into action when his family is threatened. Fortunately, this is no irksome… Read More »
REPO MEN
REPO MEN, not by any stretch of the imagination to be confused with the similarly monikered Alex Cox masterpiece of a few decades back, is a bewilderingly awful concoction that seems to have been written by committee. A committee whose individual members were forbidden to contact one another and who seem, collectively, to be ignorant… Read More »
PHONE BOOTH
One of those wise old Greeks, perhaps it was Socrates, said that the unexamined life is not worth living. And in PHONE BOOTH, there’s a psycho with a gun who’s taken that bit of philosophy way too literally. This being a Joel Schumacher film, he of FLATLINERS and BATMAN and other flights of high-flown fancy,… Read More »
VANTAGE POINT
VANTAGE POINT takes a storyline that is a middling throwback to the Cold War paranoid fantasies of a half-century ago and tries to jazz it up with a multi-view narrative. The device makes the most of doing the requisite slow reveal of exactly what happened before, during, and after a terrorist attack in Spain, but… Read More »
LAST STAND, THE
And so Arnold Schwarzenegger has returned to the silver screen after his sojourn in the theater of politics. The action star of dozens of blockbusters has wisely chosen for his vehicle a flick that acknowledges that he will not again see 40, nor even 50. Sort of. While this is an Arnold who wears reading… Read More »