Sports movies have always been preoccupied with what’s happening on the field, the court, the ring or what have you. They tell stories of underdogs defying the odds and champion values of honor, courage and determination. “Moneyball” peels back that obvious first layer yet achieves all those very same ends. The sport of baseball is [...]

Welcome to “Drive,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s exercise in the tried and true lesson that less is more, and more when it follows less is pulse-pounding mayhem. Maybe somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of “Drive” could be considered “action” or “violence,” but Refn makes every second of it count. When each slowly mounting scene finally [...]

The best spies usually work alone. There’s a reason James Bond and Jason Bourne fly solo, which is generally assumed to be that it lessens the margin for error and prevents emotional attachments. Perhaps it’s really because the we like to uncover the dark secrets that make a ruthless assassins tick, which isn’t too much [...]

Late-summer Civil Rights dramas don’t come around much. In fact, late-summer dramas don’t come around much period, but “The Help” has just the right pinches of humor and bright colors to keep it from becoming a weighty affair more suited for the winter awards contenders. Don’t assume, however, that come the turn of seasons that [...]

Director Ruben Fleischer should call the “making of” documentary of this film “86 Minutes or Less.” The filmmaker who landed squarely on the Hollywood directing hot list with 2009′s rollicking sleeper hit “Zombieland” has crammed the action and laughs into another unusually short runtime. Distinct advantages exist to the “all business”  attitude toward filmmaking, but [...]

The one thing that always made the “Planet of the Apes” a bit campy was actors in make up and monkey suits. So in one instance, here’s where technology, specifically the use motion-capture technology as seen in “Avatar,” can almost single-handedly justify revisiting an old franchise. But the apes of “Rise of the Planet of [...]

Oh, the body-swap comedy. You know how it starts, you know how it ends and frankly, you know most of what’s in between. To name an R-rated buddy version of this formula “The Change-Up” is essentially serving up a thick slice of irony, yet somehow “The Hangover” writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore and “Wedding [...]

A story of average guys who become small-time crooks always has comedic value; add to that the blue-collar motivation of wanting to kill your boss because he/she makes your life miserable? Golden. Documentary director Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong”) ropes up an impressive ensemble to make “Horrible Bosses,” a vaguely dark comedy with a [...]

The answer to the obvious question hovering around Jon Favreau’s latest action blockbuster is yes, “Cowboys & Aliens” is as ridiculous as the title sounds. Yet blame doesn’t quite belong on Favreau’s shoulders or that of star Daniel Craig or the rest of the cast; rather, the failure of this alien-infested Western results from the [...]

If I had the ability to time travel (and who’s to say I don’t, because I’d never tell you if I did) and felt inclined to show a movie to the citizens of the ’20s or ’30s that would fully capture for them life in the 21st Century because I wouldn’t be able to take them there [...]

As far as superheroes go, they don’t get much campier than the “Star-Spangled Man.” A super soldier dressed in red, white and blue who bashes in Nazi skulls with his all-American shield? Undoubtedly, Captain America served a very specific purpose when he debuted in 1940, but 70 years later, Marvel Studio has found a way [...]

Eight films in just about 10 years and no rusty wands in the bunch — or however you wish to phrase it. The success of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series theatrically has been unprecedented in both box-office receipts and critical success. Perhaps Warner Bros. and producer David Heyman are to thank for their careful supervision, [...]

I called “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” a 2.5-hour exhibition of a hurricane in a hardware store. There should have been nothing exciting, therefore, about the prospect of a second 2.5-hour exhibition — this time of hunks of scrap metal perpetually raining over Chicago — filmed entirely in 3D. Yet with the added assurance of [...]

The challenge of making a “Green Lantern” film was always going to be bringing it down to Earth. Not necessarily in a planetary sense, but sifting through and boiling down all the intergalactic mythology. Everything from the planet Oa to bird-fish aliens named Tomar-Re to a far-fetched concept of harnessing “will” to defend the universe [...]

Nostalgia. Now that’s a word not uncommon around a Woody Allen picture. His films have always oozed of it, and now that his filmmaking legacy spans more than 40 years, to some people, an Allen film equates to it. “Midnight in Paris” falls under both categories. Remarkably, only Woody has been able to riff on [...]