Rather than one of them writing an individual review for Star Trek Into Darkness, Tim and Bob thought it might be fun to team up Kirk-and-Spock style to discuss J.J. Abrams’ second Trek film. Major spoilers to follow … Tim: I’m going to break a cardinal rule in film analysis and admit I’m of two [...]
Let’s talk numbers. Three: The number of Iron Man films that Disney outfit Marvel has produced. Seven: The number of films Marvel has released in theatres. Five: The number of films Marvel currently has in production. Two: the number of films that Shane Black has now directed. 1,000+: Movies about robots. This is where context [...]
There’s a sort of kneejerk reaction to Pain & Gain that makes you want to cast Michael Bay in a different, better light. His latest film, a longtime passion project masquerading as a true crime opus, is a prime example of the right director marrying into the right material. But Bay’s always been capable of [...]
Attempting to sum up director Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion after walking out of the screening this past Tuesday, I came up with the following equation: Wall-E + Tron: Legacy + The Matrix = Oblivion Looking around online since, I’ve seen people make similar comparisons, so I know my formula is sound. And though it wears its [...]
Evil Dead, the reboot of Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror classic, isn’t the abomination you might have feared. It’s respectful and technically solid, and there are stretches where director Fede Alvarez shows he possesses some of the raw skills Raimi himself was putting to good use more than 30 years ago. But none of this makes [...]
In our podcast we recently released as part of Die Hard Week, I remarked that, to me, the Die Hard franchise was still creatively viable as it had yet to put forward an installment as creative bankrupt at, say, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Well, that was then … A Good [...]
During the pre-release hype for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the film itself nearly became buried under talk of high frame rates and Hollywood’s continued 3D push and the questionable decision to turn a two-film book adaptation into a three-movie job — all conversations that director Peter Jackson himself put into play but that ultimately [...]
Skyfall, the 23rd and newest James Bond film, ties to accomplish many different things during its 143-minute run time. It attempts to refit the Daniel Craig-era Bond films to allow for the return of some of the series’ better-known components (Q branch, for example), while at the same time taking Craig’s Bond on a more [...]
There’s a moment in Sinister, maybe about halfway through, where the ending is clearly telegraphed to any viewer paying even the base level of attention. In fact, much of the movie is predictable due to the heavy use of typical misdirection tactics and other familiar horror movie staples. Yet the moments that do work allow [...]
There’s a sequence near the two-third mark of Seven Psychopaths that perfectly captures the kind of meta, bloody delirium I think writer/director Martin McDonagh was aiming for in his follow-up to In Bruges. It consists of an epic graveyard shootout, one that doesn’t even occur in the reality of the film itself but rather in [...]
Somewhere along the way — perhaps immediately after Boogie Nights — Paul Thomas Anderson became less interested in telling stories than he did in just suggesting them, using the tricks the medium of film offers along with a series of brilliant, intense performances to make up for the fact that his movies no longer bothered [...]
I was not bored while watching The Dark Knight Rises. How could I be? It’s nearly three hours of actors I love playing iconic roles that they’ve defined for seven years now in one big, loud, frenzied Batman movie. And it’s all guided by director Christopher Nolan, who can probably pull off this kind of [...]
