THE FILM:

No, we sure as hell did not need another film based on the legendary outlaw, but here comes the 2018 actioner Robin Hood anyway. An early voiceover claims this is the story you may not have heard, yet, despite some flashy visual effects and a good-looking cast, viewers have, in fact, heard this story many times before. Otto Bathurst directs, Leonardo DiCaprio inexplicably produces and Taron Egerton stars as the title character alongside Jamie Foxx as Little John, Ben Mendelsohn as the Sheriff of Nottingham and Eve Hewson as Maid Marian. There is nothing especially offensive about Robin Hood, but there is little to remember in these 116 minutes. Flashy, devoid of substance and wholly unnecessary, this story did not need to be retold.

Lord Robin of Loxley has a great life in his sick, period-appropriate mansion alongside his hot wife Marian. The c...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Basically picking up where the first film left off, John Wick Chapter 2 beings with our titular assassin (once again played by Keanu Reeves) in a quest to get his car back from the Russian mob that made his life so difficult in the first place. With that taken care of, he intends to go back into retirement once and for all after handing his damaged Mustang over to Aurelio (John Leguizamo) and burying his gear in the basement of his New Jersey home. That all changes when a man named Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) shows up at his door. See, sometime in the past Santino helped Wick retire the first time around. In return, he gave him a marker (essentially a blood marked talisman) that he could turn in for a favor. According to the rules, this favor must be granted. John doesn't see it that way, and without even hearing what Santino wants, he sends him on his way. Or ...Read the entire review

John Wick was such a mini-phenomenon simply because it was incredible, and in a very literal sense. It was hard to credit, this out-of-nowhere action flick that felt a little like a first-person shooter, featured a hundred exploding heads, and starred one of the worst actors in all of Hollywood. Basically, it shouldn't have worked on any level, with its lead male sucking, its genre tired, and its body count enormously high. That it did speaks to the fact that there are still ways to make action movies original and to make them work. Just ask George Miller I guess, though ...Read the entire review

With John Wick: Chapter 2, the series officially becomes the Harry Potter of ultraviolent hit man action franchises. You know all those countless Young Adult book and movie series where a secret underground society of wizards, vampires, werewolves, (insert public domain magical being or monster), operates beneath our real world, complete with its own set of cultures, rules, and infrastructure? Replace the wizards with stoic, impeccably dressed, and superhumanly precise and focused hired killers, the wands with guns, the spells with copious amounts of blood and brain matter spraying across the floor after making an unscheduled exit from many, many skulls, and you get the gist of what makes this series so appealing to hardcore action fans.

Mel Gibson makes his directorial return with the war epic Hacksaw Ridge, his first film since Apocalypto ten years ago. Despite his oddities, troubles, and stigma, I actually enjoy Gibson as a director, though his sample size is quite small. Apocalypto was cool, Braveheart is my 2nd favorite movie of all-time, and both A Man Without a Face and The Passion of the Christ were at least well-made. Combining We Were Soldiers with Saving Private Ryan, Gibson as ...Read the entire review

Until 2013, Peter Berg was just a d-list actor, an episodic TV director, and a fledgling filmmaker whose movies were Hancock and Battleship. Not much to write home about, but I guess he's working, many in the industry can't claim the same. But in the last few years that has all changed. If Lone Survivor was good, Deepwater Horizon is great, and Patriot's Day has the chance to be award-worthy. He's trending in the right direction and working hard to improve a craft that he seems to have some skill at. It doesn't hurt that all three of his past,...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Child 44 takes an excellent premise for a prestige serial killer procedural and runs it into a muddled mess of mediocrity by adding enough unnecessary sub-plots to fill two miniseries. It's a shame, because if the finished film focused more on gracefully fitting its own IMDB logline ("A disgraced member of the military police investigates a series of nasty child murders during the Stalin-era Soviet Union"), it could have ended up as a lean 100-minute thriller with a dynamite cast and a wholly original setting for the genre.

Unfortunately, the cast and the setting are wasted on a bloated screenplay made up entirely of sub-plots and an uneven direction that can't settle on a satisfactory tone. Adapted by Richard Price fr...Read the entire review

The Film:

Note: Although screencaps should only be considered an idea of what the disc looks like, click any capture in this review to expand the image to a full size .png.

When Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 was released on video, it arrived with a new extended cut adding seven more minutes of footage. The implication was that more extended cuts would follow, but the Twilight Forever: Complete Saga Blu-ray set only contained the theatrical versions of the other four films. Now...Read the entire review

"Who is John Wick?" is a question you likely found yourself asking when you saw the ads for the new Keanu Reeves movie. If you're like me, you fired up IMDB to see what the film was based on. A series of books like Jack Reacher? An older action franchise like The Equalizer? Or maybe Keanu had found some obscure comic book? After all, he was the first on-film Constantine.

The answer is none of the above. John Wick is a wholly new creation, that rare beast of Hollywood that is neither a remake nor a reboot nor an adaptation. It's the simplest and most ingenious marketing. The filmmakers, most of them stepping into their spe...Read the entire review

The Film:

The Film:

Normally I avoid high-concept, CGI-driven spectacles like The Legend of Hercules (2014) and anything directed by Renny Harlin (Cutthroat Island) especially, but in this case I made an exception. For starters the bar is set very low on a picture like this. A movie about Hercules immediately brings to mind the peplum/sword-and-sandal genre of roughly 1957-1965 when, following the international success of Hercules (1957), Italian filmmakers went to town, producing literally hundreds of similar films over the space of less than ten years, including at least 19 more official Hercules movies.

Most of these pictures were cut-rate and uninspired, but the best ones, like the later Spaghetti Western genre that overnight supplanted it, occasionally remain quite enjoyable. (Goliath and the Dragon, Hercules in the Haunted World, Hercules Against the Moon Men, and ...Read the entire review

The first time I saw the trailer I was iffy about Transcendence. The second time I saw the trailer I was pretty sure it would be bad. It's not that the parts that make up the film are awful. I love sci-fi, and the A.I. storyline is very interesting. Johnny Depp is an amazing actor, as is Morgan Freeman. Paul Bettany is always strong, and I was curious to watch Rebecca Hall. No, the problem wasn't the actors or the plot or even the director, who would be making his debut. The thing that concerned me was the flow of the film. I know it's just a trailer, but I could already see signs of a disjointed story, of an overworked idea,...Read the entire review

Let me start out by saying that I love football. I was born a Broncos fan, my dad having grown up in Colorado, and my first year of life was John Elway's rookie year in the league. So of course he was my hero, I followed him through his ups & downs, eventually winning two Super Bowls right alongside him, or so it seemed to me. But it isn't just Denver that I follow; I love the game. As a kid I had a Franco Harris jersey, later a Brett Favre, of course a Tebow & a Manning. I watch every game I can, any team, doesn't matter, study the depth charts, play fantasy football, decorate my basement blue & orange. And as an Ohioan, a lot ...Read the entire review

If it's possible to make the All the President's Men of football, Draft Day is somehow it. It's more "follow the money" than "show me the money," building a surprisingly vivacious narrative out of phone calls, back-room deals, and studying video tape. The filmmakers are chasing the success of Moneyball here, and are somewhat successful. If nothing else, it makes for an apt comparison. Yet, unlike Bennett Miller's film, Draft Day doesn't ever move out on the field, and though it's not necessarily the better flick for that decision, it is more fun.

Kevin Costner stars as Sonny Weaver, Jr., the General Manager of th...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel "Ender's Game" is the favorite book of many an adolescent boy who longs to lead an army of futuristic warships into battle against a faceless nemesis. It took nearly three decades for the most famous entry in Scott's thirteen-novel series to make it to theaters, and the audience response was surprisingly tepid. That may have had something to do with Card's anti-gay statements that whipped up a PR nightmare for Lionsgate on the eve of the film's release last October. Card's political and social views do not creep into the film, which reveals itself as a quality if somewh...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

A film about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone escaping a maximum-security prison together is either going to be something you want to see or it isn't. Escape Plan slid under the radar last fall and seemed like the icing on a particularly bad year for the indestructible duo following their individual bombs The Last Stand and Bullet to ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Not having seen the first Red film yet having a relatively good idea of what it was about, I was surprised to see that there was a sequel in the works for it. There was that big of a demand for older actors reprising some of their former glory (along with newer ones looking to impress) did not seem like a recipe for success. Then I saw what the box office receipts for the film and understood why a sequel was ordered. So hey, more Red, more often, bring on the second film!

Jon and Erich Hoeber (Whiteout) continued their work adapting the comic book published under the DC banner and Dean Parisot (Read the entire review

TheTwilight Sagaconsists of five feature films (Twilight, NewMoon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn: Part 1,and Breaking Dawn: Part 2) based upon thebestselling book series written by author Stephenie Meyer. There islittledoubt that this has been one of the largest pop-culture series releasedincinemas in the past decade: after all, the first film in the seriessurprised withan outstanding opening to the tune of al...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I had only seen bits and pieces of Kevin Hart's standup work on YouTube before viewing Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain, which presents his complete 2012 performance at Madison Square Garden. Hart uses the venue to riff on his recent divorce, worldwide tour, romantic relationships and everyday challenges as a newly single parent. The comedian commands the stage and has the audience in stitches during the roughly hour-long performance. The camera focuses almost exclusively on Hart, who triggers exag...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A magical heist comes up a bit short of greatness

The Movie
Magic is awesome. For as odd and geeky as it can be, and when you take a look at Doug Henning, those are both fitting descriptors, at its core, magic is pretty great. Being able to make people believe in the bending of reality is an amazing talent, and being able to give yourself over to the idea that magic could exist is a great way to make life amazing. Great magic is unlike pretty much any other performing art, because instead of showing something to the audience, you're hiding something, and tha...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Dwayne Johnson's tough-guy swagger and imposing physical presence do not faze the agents of the international drug cartel to which Johnson's construction-company owner John Matthews finds himself suddenly tied. Johnson plays against type as a desperate suburban father who agrees to help the Feds make a high-profile drug arrest in exchange for releasing his eighteen-year-old son from prison. Snitch is based on true events and directed by Ric Roman Waugh, who gained a minor cult following with h...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
The tough decision between a meal and a relationship

The Movie
Warm Bodies is as pandering as a film concept can get while still being original and entertaining. Take the fantasy love story of Twilight (complete with a cute, young, blood-thirsty monster) and add in the over-exposed crowd-pleasing genre of zombie movies, give it a PG-13 rating and you've got a flick programmed to sell tickets to proto-goth tweens. The thing is, along the way, writer/director Jonathan Levine (50/50, T...Read the entire review

The Movie:

So much of what occurred during the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean and the subsequent tsunami that followed was both breathtaking and staggering to witness for those of us who saw the news footage. To see those that survived the disaster, one cannot begin to comprehend the type of ordeal that they had to go through, and those who managed to reunite with loved ones are even luckier still. One of those stories is retold in The Impossible, which garnered critical acclaim for some of its performers.

The film is based on the story of María Belón and her family, who relayed their experiences to Sergio Sánchez and Juan Antonio Bayona (both of whom created the 2008 film (The Orphanage). Sánchez wrote the screenplay and Bayona directed María (Naomi Watts, Read the entire review