One of my most vivid childhood moviegoing memories is when my dad took me to see “The Waterboy” starring Adam Sandler. I was nine, and I laughed and laughed and laughed, probably harder than I ever had before. Critics panned the movie, but they weren’t part of the ideal audience. I was — old enough to “get” […]
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“X-Men: Days of Future Past” is, pardon the pun, a marvel of comic book franchise filmmaking. It’s not only a strong (possibly the best) entry into the “X-Men” line, but one that carries all of the emotional and thematic weight of the series with it, turning the previous installments into the cars of a freight
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One of the worst things a superhero movie can do is gobble up its running time with multiple under-realized plots, included to cram in as many odds and ends of the source material as possible, that scramble to amount to something substantial in the final minutes. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”—or “We Already Remade One Sam
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Marvel Studios, under the direction of Kevin Feige, has discovered the ideal mold with which to make a superhero movie. Sure, things were rough in the beginning: While “Iron Man” was a rousing success, “The Incredible Hulk” and “Thor” were ambitious messes at best, and “Iron Man 2” was a very high-profile black mark on
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Last year, writing about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s then-latest film, I wrote, “‘The Last Stand’ isn’t an action movie, a comedy, a crime thriller, or a Western. It’s an Arnold, the smallest genre in cinema. Arnold Schwarzenegger is arguably the only post-silent era actor whose participation mandates that a film be thought of as something other than
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Would you like to see a sequel to a film that concluded with the vast majority of its principal cast ending up, rather unquestionably, as nourishment for fowl? Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures sure think so! The fact that there is a follow-up to “300,” the film that cemented Zack Snyder as the premiere director
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Liam Neeson’s late-career transformation into the ass-kicking headliner of big-budget B-movies, jump-started by 2008’s smash-hit “Taken,” has been as welcome as it was unexpected. Who, a decade ago, would have guessed that the then-52-year-old actor, having just shaken off the image-tarnishing “Star Wars: Episode I” with an Academy Award nomination for his dignified portrayal of
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Can an advertisement be entertainment, or even classified as art? Consumers are likely to find ads of any form or length to be somewhere between innocuous and deserving of extreme cynicism, save for those precious television commercials that are interrupted by some dumb championship football game. It is widely believed that in an ideal world,
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It should go without saying by now that when you enter a film by Godfrey Reggio, you should not expect any semblance of a traditional narrative. Like his noted “Qatsi” trilogy—that’s 1982’s “Koyaanisqatsi,” 1988’s “Powaqqatsi,” and 2002’s “Naquoyqatsi”—Reggio’s latest effort, “Visitors,” is but a collection of 74 shots manipulated by various effects, set to an
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Peter Berg’s “Lone Survivor” is an interesting war film in that it celebrates America’s elite warriors while also demythologizing them. As much as some critics have questioned the film’s often jingoistic tone, they also often neglect to recognize that with its celebration of its heroes comes a depiction of their frailties. After Berg takes the
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