Great fairy tales, even the darker ones, completely take you out of the theater to a place where you’ve never been before and reward you with a fable and unique, fantastic characters. I think back to the experiences that I had when I first saw Shrek, Labyrinth, Beauty and the Beast and any number of […]

Time travel movies and others that play with temporal realities are successful or not based on the strength of the plot. You could have the best cast in the world, and it will all end up lost to time if the story doesn’t make sense or, even worse, is too complicated. Some of the best […]

Godzilla movies were regular entries in the monster movie marathons that they’d put on the air late at night or on lazy Saturdays spent in front of the TV. I loved these movies because Godzilla would inevitably destroy everything in sight and often fight other creatures in those plots where he was actually saving humanity […]

Marvel‘s venerable web-slinger returns to protect the city from Electro, the Green Goblin and OsCorp in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. I grew up with what’s called “Retro Spider-Man” — an animated series that originally ran from 1967 to 1970. Even with its occasionally outrageous plots and rather low-quality animation, every kid in the neighborhood was a huge […]

It’s no secret that I’m underwhelmed by origin stories when it comes to superhero movies. I understand why they exist, and I tolerate them with every reboot of the Spider-Man and Batman franchises. I prefer the films where they assume that you already know something about the characters and just plop them in the middle […]

It’s a testament to the involvement that I felt in a movie about fast cars and racing that I left the theater and found myself pushing a little harder on the gas pedal. I’ll admit that Need for Speed had that effect on me, and so did some of the better movies in this genre, […]

A ragtag group of Russian soldiers defend a key position against an onslaught of determined German invaders during the battle for Stalingrad. One of the most chilling statistics of World War II is the sheer number of casualties suffered by Soviet forces. A classic case in point is the epic struggle that took place in the […]

Liam Neeson has had some incredible success with action films in the Taken movies, so it’s no surprise that he would want to keep this ball rolling as long as he can. I think that my fellow reviewer, Rich Heimlich, assured that Non-Stop would be an in-flight disaster when he remarked in The Year in […]

Each year brings minor trends in movies, whether it’s a cluster of films with the same actor — like Benedict Cumberbatch in the last months of 2013 — or a series of flicks based on young adult novels. The spring and summer of 2014 may just include a trend of disaster movies. First up is Pompeii, with […]

I first encountered LEGO bricks in the late ‘70s. I was torn between sinking all of my meager savings from chores, birthdays and holidays into LEGO sets or my new Atari 2600, and the video games prevailed. Were it not for a greater addiction to video games, I could have gone down that path of […]

A tactical mission in Afghanistan to eliminate a top Taliban target goes awry in Lone Survivor. On June 11, 1963, a Vietnamese monk sat down at a busy Saigon intersection and chose to be burned alive as a protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. The monk sat motionless while he […]

Victors of the previous year’s games find anything but the peace they were promised in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I need to point out right up front that I never read any of the incredibly successful books behind the films. As such, I can’t really speak to the faithfulness of the story from book […]