An astronaut stranded on Mars tries to survive its hostile environment in the spellbinding sci-fi thriller The Martian. Botanist/scientist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is living out an incredible dream. He and his fellow shipmates are astronauts conducting a mission on the surface of Mars. An unexpected calamity forces the entire crew to rush back to […]

In a summer that already debuted Avengers: Age of Ultron, we didn’t really need more superhero movies. If you look over the upcoming schedule of Marvel films, they are almost all designed and scheduled to be blockbusters. Imagine my surprise when I saw Ant-Man on a similar list a couple of years ago. Ant-Man?! I […]

A war-weary tank crew takes on desperate Nazi soldiers in the final months of World War II in Fury. George C. Scott played the indomitable and eccentric General George S. Patton in the 1970 film Patton and said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb […]

I really like journeys to the past in movies, especially when they stop somewhere in the ‘70s or ‘80s. I’m sure that’s because of my age and my formative years taking place in those decades. (I still can’t imagine life back then or even college without some of the major conveniences like cell phones that […]

Two small-time con artists are forced to work for an egocentric FBI agent out to make his mark in American Hustle. It was October of 1972. I was eight years old when a man walked up to me on River Road in Camden, New Jersey. The man asked if I’d like to go to work […]

There should be some sort of rule that movies with a cast like this have to be great. Sadly, there’s no such rule and no such luck. Tower Heist is a curious film with a few interesting moments, fewer laughs and a lot of misfires. Ben Stiller plays the lead and he’s terribly miscast here […]