Praise be to the gods of cinema, the curse of the threequel has been broken. Iron Man 3 not only sticks with everything that made its predecessors great and starts Marvel Phase Two off with the necessary bang, but also constantly aims to dick arou...

I will defend Live Free or Die Hard to my last breath as a fun old-school-hero-against-new-school-odds action movie worthy of the Die Hard title. A Good Day to Die Hard is worth no such effort. This scarcely feels like a Die Hard movie, it's so re...

As much as Quentin Tarantino openly idolizes Sergio Leone, Quentin himself is something of an anti-Leone. While Leone's trademark was building almost unbearable tension through prolonged silences ending in violent bursts of action, Tarantino's app...

The zombie genre is, let's face it, a little played out, and fresh perspectives and approaches are needed big time to keep it alive and kicking (pun intended). Such a thought gave us the likes of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, which left the ba...

After fifty years and twenty-two missions, the burden was on the Bond franchise more than ever to keep things fresh and interesting. 2006's Casino Royale made a startling jump on its own with the casting of a very against-type James Bond in Daniel...

As interested as Christopher Nolan has been in building the world of Batman in a real-world setting, he's even more interested in the deconstruction of Batman as a "superhero" - in breaking down the mystique to the point of crushing it to bits and...

With a mere five years separating Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man and the last outing with Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi, a lot of hurdles had to be leapt to differentiate this new chapter in the Spidey cinema universe from the old. The opening t...

Walking out of Prometheus, I couldn't help but be reminded of the opening chapter of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Adams briefly recounts the story of a human who experienced an epiphany on the meaning of life, then immedia...

Further proof positive that if Hayao Miyazaki's name is attached, you've got an instant recipe for magic. While Miyazaki acts as screenwriter rather than director, it's clear his guiding hand was at work, as The Secret World of Arrietty lives up t...

Ignoring for a moment the enduring faith of countless Buffyheads and Browncoats, one cannot deny the odds were firmly against Joss Whedon. He had to live up to a weighty promise made over the course of no less than five feature films, and it could...

If you're walking into War Horse expecting something the likes of Saving Private Ryan, viewer beware. This is a very different kind of war film, bloodless yet not without plentiful casualties, and sweeping while very intimate, ignoring the larger ...

If a Connery-era Bond film existed in which 007 took on SPECTRE with the aid of a spy team with superpowers, the result would not be unlike X-Men First Class. In turning back the clock on the mythos and rewriting a bit of history, Matthew Vaughn o...

Ideally, a remake should carry over what works the most from the material on which it's based, while diving into new and interesting territory not covered by the original, thereby making it as much its own film as it is a retelling of another. Let...

Back when I first heard this was getting fast-tracked in 2001, I had my own idea of what the movie would be like, down to the obligatory fantasy cast. Eight years, two studios, three directors, and one frivolous lawsuit later, Zack Snyder has brou...

District 9 strikes one of those great balances of brains and spectacle that we don't get nearly as often as we should. D9 not only presents a startlingly bleak "what if" scenario of first contact, but provides enough slam-bang visuals to put many ...

I've been a fan of the books since 2003. I own the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide hardcover, the original radio series, and even the comic book adaptations of the first three books. I know this stuff. And I was just as worried as anybody that they'd ...

Once upon a time, I was bit skeptical about the whole "actors against CGI" technique, which at the time of Sky Captain's release was just starting to become the new favored style in Hollywood. That came to a stop the day Kerry Conran steamrolled o...

Remember when family films were dark, violent, twisted and kinda badass? Zack Snyder certainly does. For all its bright shiny CGI, Legend of the Guardians is an often thrilling throwback to the likes of The Secret of NIMH and The Dark Crystal, wit...

Making a sequel to Tron almost 30 years after the fact was bound to be tricky. The fanbase isn't exactly built-in, and with such a long span of time between films, you run the double risk of alienating those who have seen the first movie and those...

Faster desperately wanted to be a Sergio Leone film. The action is slow to build and fires off in merciless, rapid bursts; the scenery is mostly desert that makes your mouth dry just looking at it; and the three lead characters boast single-word t...

Devil is one of the best original horror films that I can recall seeing in some time. Its premise is deceptively simple, its characters stay with us just long enough to make an impression, and even for bearing a dreaded PG-13 rating, it cleverly s...

Christopher Nolan is a strange breed of director. For his relatively brief career, he has managed to make a string of films that with each release get bigger and better than the one before, without ever losing sight of compelling storytelling or i...

While far from perfect, Predators is truly a return to form for the franchise. As in, returning to the form of 1987's original Predator in so many ways, you might as well call this a remake rather than a sequel. That said, it's a better sequel tha...

If M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender really is an "early contender for worst film of the decade", we must have one brilliant goddamned decade ahead of us. I'm not sure why the critics decided to gang up on this film, flawed though it may be,...

Liked it, didn't love it. For me, the pulse of the movie didn't pick up until Talbot's first transformation; until that point, the movie tries to gives us a slow burn lead-in, but because nearly everyone's acting is so dry, it just never works ...

Since J.J. Abrams has officially passed on adapting The Dark Tower series, I nominate the Hughes Brothers for the job based on The Book of Eli. Denzel Washington's Eli, a new-age amalgam of characters like Eastwood's Man With No Name, his Kuros...

Daybreakers is slickly-shot, well-realized, and at times hilariously violent vampire badassery. The gore factor at times borders on self-parody, particularly in a sequence toward the very end of the film, but manages to stay just outside that bord...

Welcome back, Mr. Cameron. We missed ya. All right, go ahead and make your jokes. "Dances With Wolves in space", right? "Ooh, it's Pocahontas with dinosaurs. Whoopee." Yeah, it's a story you've heard before; the outsider familiarizes himself wi...